THE Year of the Monkey, Chinese soothsayers predict, will bring a stock market boom, a freer yuan currency — and a hefty dose of political chaos.

The year, that started on Thursday, like the temperamental animal from which the Lunar New Year borrows its sign, 2004 will keep everyone on their toes with revolution and change, say the soothsayers.

“It’s always a naughty year with the monkey around,” Xu Kun, a glamorous Beijing-based adviser to tycoons and politicians, said as she aimed an eight-pointed compass, the basic tool of her trade.

“With luck flowing to the northeast, stock markets, especially China’s stock market, will rally,” she said with a confidence backed by thousands of years of collective observation into relationships between the Earth and the heavens.

Practitioners like Master Ang Tian Cheong of Singapore say the Year of the Monkey would propel Chinese economic growth and may bring political chaos to Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

A DOG’S LIFE: World stock markets would boom by the second half of the year and Chinese officials would widen the trading band for the yuan currency by summer, he predicted.

Experts said US President George W. Bush, born in the Year of the Dog in 1946, faced a difficult re-election campaign in 2004 even after the capture of Saddam Hussein.

“Years ruled by the Monkey can bring the culmination of family disturbances, accusations and losing face. The Dog’s reputation may be on the line this year,” US-based astrologer Shelly Wu wrote.

Tension in the troubled Middle East would lower slightly owing to a mild dose of luck from the East, practitioners said, though the Monkey year was synonymous with hidden dangers.

While each animal sign repeats every 12 years, the combination of zodiac and element, wood in 2004, happens once every 60 years. In 1944, the last year of the wood monkey, the Allies reached a turning point in World War II and established the Bretton Woods agreement for post-war reconstruction. — Reuters