Thanks to years of price wars between Indonesia's three major telecommunications companies, mobile contracts in the country are dirt-cheap.

He magnanimously excuses the Economist's poor record of predicting the price of oil: our suggestion in 1999 that oil would remain dirt cheap was conventional wisdom at the time, he says soothingly.

Another big plus: Stocks are dirt-cheap, whether you consider price-to-cash flow, price-to-book value, price-to-sales ratio or dividend yield.