Many British investors are buying property – sorry, real estate – in America. Houses and apartments in the Land of the Free are generally extremely appealing and offer the potential for decent rental incomes and capital gains. But America is not for the low-budget buy-to-let investor. Today I’ll share four US Property hot spots where…
As Hallowe’en approaches, Americans are tricking and treating. But what is the US stock market doing? The smiling economists of 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue At its AGM in Washington last week the IMF reported that the global economy was humming along nicely with every region of the global economy set to record GDP rises for the…
So people are going to live longer. And old age will not necessarily mean infirmity. The demographics are already changing rapidly: by 2045 over 65s will make up one quarter of the population in the UK – that will be nearly 19 million citizens. This trend is even more pronounced in Japan and Germany. Companies…
As a hard or crash Brexit edges closer, it now seems there is no binary option between the EU Customs Union and WTO rules. The Americans are not making things any easier for the UK. Why would they? The truth behind the Bombardier dispute revealed In 2007 the Canadian aerospace company Bombardier (TSE:BBD.A) announced plans…
The Brexit talks will run into the sand soon. That may be a problem for Britain. But, for Europe, Brexit is only one of many problems. Dangerous October Beware: all the major stock market crashes of the last century have occurred in October. The 1929 crash occurred on Tuesday, the 29th. The 1987 crash was…
What happens in Catalonia this Sunday could, even more than Brexit, cause massive headaches in Brussels… 2014 reimagined… Imagine, if you would, an alternative history of the events in the UK in 2014. The Scottish Parliament votes to hold a referendum on Scotland’s independence from the UK. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, condemns such…
Last weekend, in his 4,000 word essay on Brexit in the Daily Telegraph, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson resurrected the claim, much touted during the Brexit referendum, that the UK pays Brussels £350 million every week. This prompted howls of protest from the mainstream media and even from the head of the Office of National Statistics.…
Hurricane Harvey brought biblical floods to Houston. Ten days later, Hurricane Irma devastated the Caribbean. Were these freak storms the direct consequence of man-made climate change? What lessons can we learn to prepare for extreme weather events in the future? Who will be the key players in a world of freak weather? And can the insurers cope with this…
Last week I argued that the main issue with Tesla (NADAQ:TSLA) is that its product – the electric car – is inherently flawed. A number of readers got in contact. What about hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles? It turns out that these technologies are also to be found wanting. “Green” technology is not…
Total military expenditure as a percentage of global GDP has been in steady decline over the last 60 years or so. It fell from just over 6 percent in 1960 to 2.225 percent in 2016. That could be about to change. The absolute amount of money spent on soldiers, sailors, airmen and their increasingly technologically…
