Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Risk Topics Under the Surface of Financial Meltdown Radar

News Patterns has been creating News Radars for many years. A News Radar is an animated visual system for representing competitive patterns among market players. These market players can be competitors, suppliers, buyers, government actions, societal trends, etc. A very complex radar like Financial Meltdown can be composed of 30,000 news and blog articles per week.

Back in 2009, we were often asked if our radars saw interesting patterns that might have foretold of the pending financial meltdown initiated by unwise real estate lending. The short answer is no. We were not aiming our radars at financial markets at that time.

Now in 2013, we are aiming at our radars at world wide financial markets. We call this radar Financial Meltdown.


Beyond the obvious topics of Recession, Recovery, Debt, Deficits, Unemployment, etc, this radar is tracking some very interesting topics that will serve as an early warning of financial system risks:
  • Bank runs
  • Capital controls
  • Nationalization
  • Seizure of retirement accounts
  • Hyper-inflation
  • Hoarding
  • Bartering
  • Debt downgrading (especially US Treasuries... ouch!)
  • Gold and precious metal prices/accumulation
  • Transfer of sovereign gold from US depositories
  • Commodity prices
  • Rationing
  • Austerity
  • Unrest (rioting, protests, etc.)
These tracked topics will seldom be front page news or conversation topics in television talk shows.  Nevertheless, all of the above have emerged to some degree over the past year.  Seekers of financial risks now have a powerful tool in our Financial Meltdown radar to discover risk trends that might be lost in the "fog of news."




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