Perhaps it’s just a
change in attitude from the British media over the past week since
David Cameron pulled the UK out of the eurozone repair effort.
Perhaps it’s the fact that after going on for four years of nerves,
people are tired of worrying. Or maybe it’s just the general
optimism that pervades conversations over the holiday season.
Whatever the reason, there seems to be
a palpably less despairing tone to the way people are talking about
the European financial crisis.
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I should be clear before I continue:
there’s no air of complacency, and no sense from anyone that
Britain is significantly better off than its peers across the
channel – just a general ebbing of anxiety in favour of
level-headed discussion of the day-to-day work of writing asset
finance business.
This is not head in the sand stuff,
either – people I speak to are drawing up broad strategic plans for
2012, calmly factoring in the expected fallout of a year of
financial upheaval, and still expecting to come out having enjoyed
the same levels of success as they did in 2011.
Of course, anything could happen in
the
interval between me writing this and you reading it. By the time
this hits your desk,
it could be sitting alongside a newspaper blaring out the failure
of a major European bank, and then (as Robert Peston illustrates in
his typically succinct way here: tinyurl.com/chh6p7s), everything
could get very scary again in very short order.
But
then – as I feel many people are now saying – while that is yet to
happen, why waste energy on talking down the market? As the
now-ubiquitous Ministry of Information poster would have it,
business leaders are Keeping Calm and Carrying On.
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By GlobalDataFor a great example of this mentality
in practice, look no further than the manufacturing sector, which
we examine in detail this issue. One of the points we ran into time
and time again from lenders and vendors in this sector is that,
contrary to public fears over the decline of manufacturing,
producers of goods in Europe are quietly getting on with what they
do best.
Regardless of the fears of many
businesses concerning the year ahead, manufacturers are making
their investment
decisions with a view to the back half of the decade. What’s more,
their ability to make those investments is
relying more and more on
the asset finance sector – the statistics leave no room for doubt
on that front.
In fact, there’s good business out
there in every traditional asset market – you just have to get out
there and work hard to get it.
If it sounds like a cliché to you,
then for good reason – it’s what I get told by almost every single
person I meet in this industry, when I ask them how they are
finding the market.
Whatever is happening in the news on
the day you read this, have a happy new year, keep calm, and carry
on finding the best opportunities out there.
Fred Crawley
fred.crawley@vrlfinancialnews.com
