Host: Martin Soong


Host: For now let’s talk again to Todd Everts. He’s standing by from our studio up in Hong Kong. We’ve also had a numbers out of China this morning, Todd, or actually yesterday inflation looks like it’s taking care of itself I guess the big question is post the Olympics whether this economy is going to get back on the run now that all the factors are turned back or the cars are flooding the roads again or whether we’re going to have a post-Olympic. What do you figure?

Todd G. Everts: I think there are a few issues to be discussed. First is probably too many companies in China went public because of the flood of capital through the Hong Kong markets and the different exchanges in China where there are certain companies that probably shouldn’t have gone public that are, that are not going to continue to draw investor attention and we’re going to continue to see in a broad base those stocks not performing. The larger companies, the companies that have market share inside of China and outside of China should start to recover in some time in the near future. The key is, as it always is, is that consumer demand from the United States and now today from Europe and Europe is having its own problems from a consumer perspective, the US as we talked about earlier is certainly having problems. If we look back the credit crisis that started in June 2007 from the start of the collapse of Bear Stearns wasn’t felt in the Christmas season last year. Definitely this year the US consumer..we’re going to see the follow-on effect in China because the US consumer…I don’t think is going to be there this Christmas because they have to pay their mortgage and they have to pay their other obligations before they go crazy at Christmas.

Host: Indeed. If we could just sort of change here. I want to get back to a point you made just before we went to the break, and that is that you know credit conditions are tight, it’s hard to get..to raise money..it’s hard to leverage up if that’s what you want to do and just couple of days ago, Todd, I know you were down at the Hedge Fund Conference, I was there too…For hedge funds themselves I mean that’s exactly what they need..they need financing, they need to leverage up in order to deliver the kinds of returns that they’re promising – maybe not promising – but telling investors that they can give ‘em.. but I mean, times are a lot tougher now.