Finding Hope Through Fashion

If what we wear on the outside reflects how we feel on the inside, these are challenging times indeed. Will you fight or choose to take flight, asks MARY LIM

- Mary Lim

“FOR THE ECONOMIC climate, the present situation is…mid-term scary. I don’t think we will be able to globally avoid a crisis when I see the interest rates so low, when I see the amounts of money flowing into the world, when I see the stock prices which are much too high, I think a bubble is building and this bubble, one day, will explode.”

These words have been repeated in many different ways over several years past. But when uttered by Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive officer of global luxury conglomerate LVMH, they sound even more alarming. His company owns the world’s leading designer brands such as Dior, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and Tag Heuer.

In his interview with CNBC in June, the French tycoon stopped short of saying that the global financial crisis is at the doorstep. “There has not been a big crisis for almost 10 years now, and since I’ve had a business, I have seen crises more than every 10 years, so be careful.”

American investor Jim Rogers, now based in Singapore, is of the same opinion. In the next few years, a market crash will occur, and it goes downhill from there, he predicts. “Always happens where we’re not looking,” the 74-year-old said in an interview with Business Insider. By “not looking”, he refers to 2007, when the bankruptcy of Ireland snowballed into the collapse of Lehman Brothers and worldwide financial turmoil.

The threat of war, set in motion by the Isis in Syria and Iraq, looms even more dangerously. Our senses are starting to numb as the battle against terror is extended throughout the globe. Heightening the potential for conflict is North Korea, which reportedly successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile believed to be able to hit as far as Alaska from its capital Pyongyang.