A week of wealth
The global financial crisis has created a window of opportunity for shrewd investors and canny wealth creators.
There is no doubt that the GFC hit people hard, with investors seeing share prices tumbling, corporations collapsing and redundancies rising.
But throughout the crisis, many have been restructuring their finances and their investment strategies to capitalise on the eventual recovery, using the logic that just as the bust had a certain degree of market-cycle inevitability to it, so too will it be followed by another boom.
The only question was when the recovery would actually begin.
Looking at the Australian stock market, the market bottomed out in March this year and since then has made up most of the ground it lost over the year. In fact, the S&P/ASX 200 has risen more than 50% since March, although it still has a long way to go to recover its glittering levels of 2007.
Still most mum and dad investors have been sitting on the sideline, waiting for something more concrete to signal the recovery is underway.
With the Reserve Bank's recent decision to raise interest rates, the cat is out of the bag. Well, at least its whiskers are.
While this decision puts Australia in a league of its own on the world stage, it does not guarantee that the recovery has actually begun or that this will not be a 'double dip' crash.
But it is yet another indicator in a steadily growing list that the time is right to capitalise on the recovery.
