Evil discusses Phosphorus Holdco Plc senior bonds, South African kleptocrats and the Miliband-Fink tax avoidance spat… I have bought Phosphorus Holdco Plc £205m Toggle PIK 10% 2018 at 3.8p. It comes in lots of 100,000. My reason to buy is that this is the senior bond outstanding on the liquidation of Phones4U and this debt…
Yet again I find myself wondering about what’s really happening in Europe. In a conventional world, the fact that European stock markets are hitting record highs while European bond markets are at record low yields suggests we are in the ultimate Goldilocks environment – where everything is just right, we’ve got no inflationary wage pressures…
By Zak Mir As most followers of leading UK stocks will be aware, they have woefully underperformed their US counterparts, weighed down by their coterie of mining and oil & gas plays. This state of affairs has been in place for 15 years, which was the last time that the FTSE 100 made a new…
By Robert Sutherland Smith British American Tobacco (BATS) – known familiarly as BATS – is a bit of a challenge. Basically, the share price lags that of Imperial Tobacco and it has found resistance to its further progress upwards at around 3,800p. Is it telling us something? There is a constant thought in the back…
Mark Carney has hinted that the Bank of England may increase interest rates sooner than markets expect, despite the current risks of deflation in the UK. The Governor said that in Britain, inflation falling below zero would not lead to the same kind of negative spiral feared in the Eurozone. Vicky Redwood, Chief UK Economist…
Economic analysis by Filipe R. Costa You can now read in the press that European quantitative easing is already working, as the equity markets are rising and bond yields are at record lows. But that is a very narrow view of what QE really does. While constituting a large-scale asset purchase programme, QE is not…
Evil discusses Dominic Strauss-Khan, Amira Nature Foods and Geiger counter… It is recorded that a long dead British prime minister, on learning that a 65 year old government servant had been caught in flagrante in St. James’s Park with a lady of the night in sub zero temperatures, declared that it made one proud to…
By Zak Mir Earlier in the week it was widely reported that those strange creatures allegedly responsible for many of the ills of the world – hedge funds – were positioning themselves to go short of London real estate. Since then I’ve been mulling over whether our friends in Mayfair have identified a slam dunk…
The Markets Rating agency Moody’s said that cheaper oil will not significantly accelerate global economic growth due to the negative effects of the ongoing sluggishness in the Eurozone, China, Russia and Japan. The organisation commented that the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme would offer a slight boost, but that “weak demand in the euro…
Economic analysis by Filipe R. Costa While investors became euphoric in 2008 with the launch of the first QE programme in the US, such emotion does not hold when comparing the event with the first QE announcement in the Eurozone. Investors reacted positively to Mario Draghi’s QE package announcement and the programme is, in fact,…
