Speculating without the facts

The holiday season has been far from the restful time we had been hoping for. The situation on the stock exchanges is making even the most hard-headed investors lose sleep. Everybody who looks at the plummeting indexes does so in terror, as analysts predict a second wave of economic crisis. At this point nobody is taking it upon themselves to forecast the extent of the damage. How will the current crash on the stock exchanges affect the property market? In the March issue of 'Eurobuild CEE' we were wondering whether the increasingly gloomy forecasts for the economies of the CEE region would have any effect on the real estate sector. Most specialists we spoke to were what you might term 'moderate optimists'. But how are they feeling today? The opinion can now increasingly be heard that the next year will be extremely difficult, the number of projects will slump and costs will need to be cut again. Listening to these opinions, it seems that all the different kinds of ratings and rankings are nothing but a curse for modern economies. Analyses published by large, international banks linger in the eyes of the media and the minds of the major stock exchange players. One comment is enough to push the bourses into the abyss. It seems to me that nobody is looking at the health of individual companies - it no longer matters what results a given developer is generating. It is the global speculation that counts. If we fall, then it is everybody together. And to the very bottom. "Opinions, recommendations and all kinds of evaluations are always speculation," claimed one analyst on the pages of our March magazine. And he is right. The problem lies in the fact that we have not learnt anything. The first wave of the global crisis was initiated by speculative lending. Now we still seem to be playing the same game again and I am afraid that it is one we might lose.

Radosław Górecki
Deputy Editor