"We are in a very dark time," Jawad Mian, senior portfolio of QInvest, told the audience of Commodities Week Middle East 2012.
In the US 47 million people receive food stamps, gun ownership is up, and large swathes of the population are poor, with no savings and high levels of debt, he said, opening the second day at the Shangri-La Hotel in Dubai.
Meanwhile Europe's southern states are being placed in "indentured slavery" effectively, to protect the face of the "political elite."
He predicted a "long period of sub-par economic growth ahead," with sustained inflation on the near horizon.
The next two decades will be marked by scarcity, he added, and this will lead to a rise in international tensions.
Lower income families will spend a higher proportion of their income on food as prices rise, fuelling a rising level of inequality. To tackle these dark times ahead governments, economists and asset managers need to step back from the tendency to take a short term view and develop a long-term consistent opinion on the global economy, he concluded.
© MENA Fund Review 2012
