Mr. Gimbel: Carret Asset Management, which was formed in 1963 and which I joined in 2000 is an independent global investment management company offering investment services to high net worth individuals, institutions and charitable organizations. We're based in New York City with offices on Long Island and Livingston, Montana. We have a dozen portfolio managers and staff of another 25 in New York, who do the reconciliation and administration.
Our philosophy is basically GARP, growth at a reasonable price, balanced for those who want fixed income as well as equities and long-only equities, both domestic and international. Our philosophy is quality, quality and quality. Research-driven rather than momentum driven.
TWST: How have the global economies fared since the downturn earlier this past year?
Mr. Gimbel: We live in exciting times to state the obvious. The economic upheaval of the last 12 to 18 months started in the US. Looking back on it, of course we have 20/20 hindsight. There was excessive leverage used in the US in the banking area for probably the better part of the decade. This finally came home to roost as people realized that the sophistication of the products that were being sold was so confusing, that nobody understood what they were buying and finally, the world hit a wall when the financial community had to mark-to-market products that they didn't understand. That caused financial markets to freeze-up. Central banks around the world stepped in to ease some of the panic. We are still feeling the ramifications of those actions. The United States being the most leveraged and the most exposed to sophisticated derivative products was hardest hit. Housing was the hardest hit part of the economic puzzle. Housing may be in the early throes of bottoming out. Because there was less leverage employed in the Far East and Australia, those economies although they suffered from a slowdown in US activity, have not had to go through the contraction pains that the US did. As a result Asia and the Antipodes have avoided our serious recession. Europe did suffer from excessive leverage because the European banks had participated in the financial crisis in the United States. Their balance sheets were hit hard by what happened here unlike the Chinese and Australian banks who were under-exposed to the US. While there was a correction in many Asian and Australian markets, the recovery in 2009 was greater than the recovery in the U.S.
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