The distressed asset buyer I was chatting with at the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington pretty well summed up the tone of the buyside 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 was how I imagine a post-nuclear environment might look. Many of the survivors, as we have learned to expect from science fiction movies, were cockroaches (bureaucrats) and mutants (compliance officers).