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Trend watcher says China well-positioned

By Andrew Moody (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-31 15:22

If you have built an international reputation as a major trend watcher, then you had perhaps better predict that the world was heading for a major financial crisis.

For Adjiedj Bakas, author of several books on the future and an increasingly well-known figure in China, that is exactly what he did live on television in 2007.

He was being interviewed on the Dutch television flagship current affairs program Nova when most economists were predicting the American economy was going to pick up again after a couple of years of stagnating.

At the time, there was little awareness there might be such a big black hole in the world's financial system.

"I could already sense that something was going on. The frantic dealing, the atmosphere of an end game, of more-more, of creating financial products more complicated every day, which no one, the designers included, could understand anymore," he said.

Bakas, 45, who perhaps appropriately has the slight air of a mystic, was speaking at his publishers' offices in western Beijing.

His new book, The Future of Finance, which he has co-authored with financial services expert Roger Peverelli, is about to be introduced to the Chinese public.

Commentators and economists in 2007 dismissed the views he expressed on television about the imminent vulnerability of the financial system, but Bakas was convinced he was right.

At the time, he was almost alone apart from US economist Nouriel Roubini, dubbed "Doctor Doom".

Bakas said the wild behavior of many senior figures in the global financial services industry was an obvious self-important bubble about to burst.

Bakas, whose grandparents emigrated from India to Latin America, was born in Surinam, a small country just north of Brazil.

He moved to the Netherlands when he was 18 years old to study communications science at Utrecht University. He is not an economist by training.

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After working for Dutch television for two years, he set up his own company, specializing in looking at future trends.

"I had met a professor, Wim de Ridder, a renowned futurologist in Holland, and he inspired me to do this. I also wondered at the time if Star Trek might become a reality, after all," he laughed.

He has since written a number of titles on the subject and said he got around 70 percent of his predictions right.

Better than chance

"That is better than chance. A good trend watcher should have good intuition and should be open minded, nosy, unbiased, independent and should be able to discern valuable information from nonsense. There is a lot of nonsense available, especially on the Internet," he said.

Bakas, who was immaculately dressed in an Indian-style pink shirt, is a regular visitor to China.

He lectures in Shanghai at the China Europe International Business School, one of the world's top 50 business schools.

His books are being rapidly translated into Chinese. The next one to appear here will be Beyond the Crisis, which is about how the world will emerge from the current downturn. Chinese economist Wang Jianmao wrote the foreward.

"I have a great affinity with China. I've been coming here often during the past 20 years, and I've been collecting Chinese antiques and art for the same amount of time," he said.

"My office and house are full of statues from the Han, Tang and Ming dynasties. Pieces from my own art collection are printed in my books," he said.

Not all of his books focus on finance and economics. To coincide with Valentine's Day next year, he is introducing a new book, The Future of Love, which focuses on trends in human relationships.

"One of the trends I am looking at is something that is becoming quite common in Europe -- that of people's parents and even grandparents divorcing after many years of marriage and getting a new love life," Bakas said.

"This didn't happen before. People now are living longer, to 80 or 90 years, and they don't think they should be deprived of a new love life," he said.

An obvious question to ask a trend watcher is when the world will start moving out of its current economic downturn.

"I think the recovery will come after 2011, but it will be a very slow and jobless recovery, with growth in Europe and the United States of not much more than 1 percent or 1.5 percent," Bakas said.

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