Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio

Chapter 11. Eye on Elasticity

Whether national economic polices affect a company depends, in large part, on the company’s supply-and-demand elasticities. In the previous chapter, I argued some companies are so large and located in so many places the impact of any one country’s fiscal, monetary, or regulatory policies is relatively unimportant. Thus, when national issues are less significant at the margin, only by global shifts (to a great extent) impact a company. Because larger companies are literally all over the map, a portfolio strategy based on policy actions and/or corporate locations at the national or regional level may not be fruitful, although a more advantageous strategy may be to focus on the global economic environment and attempt ...