Suddenly, the idea that all citizens should be paid a basic income by the state is becoming topical across the world. While we associate this idea with the political left – the French Socialist Party candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections, Benoît Hamon, has made it the cornerstone of his programme – it also has…
The Year of the Fire Rooster My Chinese friends tell me that the auguries of the Chinese New Year are mixed. In Chinese astrology each zodiac year is associated with an animal plus one of the five elements. 2017 is the Year of the Rooster and its element is fire. This is the first such…
Amidst the furore over the prospects of a hard Brexit and President Trump’s immigration policies, the dry subject of our national finances has been overlooked. So may I have your attention please? Last year the United Kingdom’s national debt increased by £251 million every day. Sobering news The latest news on UK public finances is…
Suddenly everyone is talking trade deals – while TTP and probably TTIP bite the dust. Why does President Trump prefer bilateral trade deals to multilateral ones? What will the markets make of it all? And what happened when Theresa met Donald? Ciao TTP On 23 January President Trump signed an order to junk the Trans-Pacific…
On the day that the 45th President of the United States of America assumes office, during Davos week, I recall the observation of a great contemporary economist. Harvard’s Ken Rogoff (I have often mentioned his work in these pages, especially This Time it’s Different – Eight Centuries of Financial Folly) was at Davos last year.…
Try this thought experiment: Your small children are strapped into the child seats in the back of the car and you are driving down a country lane. Now you are approaching a bend in the lane, and a cat darts out into the road. If you swerve to avoid the cat you know that you…
Farming and food production, long-since a Cinderella business, has just become a cool investment space. This month we look at how to make decent returns from feeding the world. How a world of 9.6 billion people in 2050 is going to feed itself in an environmentally sustainable and humane way is one of the greatest…
If you had decided to double up your exposure to the London stock market at the beginning of last year then you would have done well in 2016. The FTSE-100 was up by 14.4 percent on the year, confounding the economic realists (like me) and the Brexit doomsayers (not like me). Though, if you were…
If you ever wondered what that Christmas song really means, look no further. It’s the moment to look back over the momentous year gone by and to prepare for the even more tumultuous one about to dawn. Some amuses bouches for hungry investors, accompanied by a glass of effervescent speculation. A partridge in a pear-shaped…
In the January edition of the MI magazine I’m going to be talking about food. Specifically: why global agribusiness is likely to step centre-stage in the next decade. Basically there are two main reasons. Firstly, the world’s population is growing faster than crop yields are rising. Secondly, we are running out of new agricultural land…
