Ignore the noise to beat the market

THE world is in an economic mess. I think most of us can pretty much agree on that. But where have we heard that before? We heard it in 2010 during the European sovereign debt crisis. We heard it in 2007 when the financial world imploded after the great financial crisis. We heard it again in 1992 when the UK government was forced to withdraw sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

There is, it would seem, never a bad time for hyperbole. What about the bursting of the Japanese asset-price bubble in 1992, or the US savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s when nearly a third of America's savings and loans associations collapsed? We heard commentators talking about the global economic mess then.

And how can we possibly forget the Asian contagion of 1997 or the oil-price shock of 1973. Pundits were beside themselves with talk that the world was in an economic mess.