He noticed that, just as China's boom started gathering steam earlier this decade, Australia's share of the market was falling, and those of India and Brazil were rising.
The euphoria of the dotcom boom, then gathering pace on Wall Street, kept it going for a couple of years until the bubble burst, but the damage to equity investment - and now, we see, to the whole pensions industry - had already been done.
Just as with the dot.com boom, the annual gathering at Davos and a hundred other conferences appeared to validate the optimism.
They flew above a plane that was spraying dispersants, and over skimming vessels, and shrimp boats that were dragging boom in U-shaped arcs, gathering oil to be burned.
Throughout New York City this week, there were small gatherings of people, holding candles, singing "America the Beautiful," or playing boom boxes with scratchy recordings of "We Shall Overcome".
As golf participation has fallen dramatically in Britain in recent years, cycling has boomed, fuelling the perception that where there were once sets of clubs gathering dust in millions of garages, there are now spanking sets of wheels.
By the 1970s, though traditional tourism was in steep decline here, Atlantic City's gay scene boomed at the gay beach in front of the Claridge Hotel and popular gay gathering spots like the Entertainer's Club, the Lark, and Grand Central Resort.
"Boom, boom, boom, boom".
