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…
The electrification of vehicular transport is coming. France, the UK and now India have set target dates for the demise of petrol engines. (Diesels will be banished even sooner). But are electric cars really all they are cracked up to be? Are they really that environmentally friendly? And will the economics of electrification really be…
In the September edition of the MI magazine I’m going to be analysing why military expenditure is going to rise in a multi-polar world. This will be good news for defence contractors. The world is a much more dangerous place than we thought it would be when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s…
Everyone understands what wind turbines are – and everyone knows what solar panels do (though few of us know exactly how photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electricity). Biofuels, however, remain the Cinderella of the renewables sector. Can you really grow bio-kerosene in a field to power a commercial aircraft? Yes, you can. Biofuels are emerging…
Is the Trump Bump over? President Trump’s Washington is paralysed. It has proven impossible to repeal Obamacare and to replace it with something more amenable to America’s skilled working class who resented paying more for medical insurance. These were the people who propelled Donald Trump to power. Top personnel are being hired and fired with…
Climate change is a reality. The glaciers are melting and the sea is getting hotter – with intractable consequences like rising sea-levels. But, that said, the climate models are inexact and we don’t know by how much temperatures are going to rise and how rapidly. This is largely a matter of reasoned conjecture. What we know for sure is…
An imminent stock market crash is more likely than investors might suppose. My recurrent nightmare this summer, partially informed by the modern Thucydides, (of whom more below) is that a stock market correction will begin in London when the Brexit negotiations collapse, possibly as soon as late October. But there is no longer such a…
How does a spendthrift state which consumes nearly 57 percent of its GDP change its ways? How does a regulated, highly unionised labour market become flexible? What can a modern economy do about an unemployment rate stuck stubbornly at over ten percent? And how do the French rate the Emperor Emmanuel’s first ten weeks in…
