G20 Meeting Indicates Global Financial Crisis May Be Around Corner

Today we’re putting the final touches to the September issue of Australian Small Cap Investigator.

Seeing as the month of September is nearly finished, we’ve got to get our skates on to make sure it’s in subscriber’s inboxes by Wednesday.

If everything goes according to plan, I’m hoping to have it all laid out by this afternoon so we can push the magic button tomorrow to get it sent out.

So today’s Money Morning will be on the brief side.

We did want to follow up on Paul Keating’s comments on the 7.30 Report last week, but seeing as we’re in somewhat of a rush this morning, there isn’t time to cover off everything we have to say.

So we’ll leave that possibly for tomorrow or Wednesday.

But for today’s brief Money Morning we couldn’t help but chuckle at the headlines from News Ltd over the weekend:

“Financial crisis will not happen again – G20“

“G20 sets course to avoid another global financial crisis“

Oh yeah!

They’ve got to be kidding surely. Based on everything we’ve seen from politicians and bureaucrats over the last twelve months, we’re more convinced than ever that another crisis is just around the corner.

And reading the statement from the G20 leaders and the comments made by the PMs and Presidents afterwards, it backed our conviction even more that the worst is yet to come.

Fortunately we’ve got the proverbial ‘calm’ before the ’storm.’ There’s still a better chance than even that stocks will continue to rise for the short to medium term. But take note of the volatility.

The market never goes up or down in a straight line, and the current bout of weakness in the market could – could, mind you – be a good point to top up on small caps and dividend payers.

And of course, if you’re a shorter term trader, the large cap blue-chips could have something to offer as well. Providing you pay close attention and use trailing stop orders.

But back to the G20. Look, even the promotion of the G20 to become the pre-eminent global forum for economic matters is a sure sign that things can only get worse.

It seems to us as though the world is heading firmly towards global government by committee.

I mean, seriously, if the individual nations are unable to micro-manage their own economies, what makes them think they can manipulate twenty-plus economies with any greater success?

You and I know it can’t be done. Eventually, the chumps sat around the G20 round table will work that out too… Maybe!

Anyway, we’ll have more to say on the G20 later this week.

For this morning I’ll cut this short and hand over to irregular columnist Mark Thompson. He’s got one or two things to say about the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). You can read it in the following article.

I’ll be back tomorrow.

Other Stuff on the Markets

The S&P/ASX200 gained 0.26% on Friday, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 42 points. In Europe the FTSE100 added 0.06% and the CAC40 lost 0.51%.

The price of gold in Australian dollars is trading at $1,143.33, while in US Dollars it is trading at $991.70. Silver in Australian dollars is $18.59 per ounce, and in US dollars is $16.09 per ounce.

The Aussie dollar remained steady versus the US dollar and Japanese Yen, trading at USD$0.8644, and JPY77.76.

Crude oil closed at USD$66.02.

For the biggest movers on the market yesterday click here…