The distressed asset buyer I was chatting with at the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington pretty well summed up the tone of the buy side people cruising the halls and coffee shops. Cross-border assets were cheap, but on their way to cheaper.

The super rich who had crowded the meetings in past years were almost entirely absent. The scene reminded me of a post-nuclear environment. Many of the survivors, as we expected from science fiction movies, were cockroaches (bureaucrats) and mutants (compliance officers).