Back in July I wrote a piece on Mr Osborne’s budget (Mr Osborne’s Brave New World) in which I praised him for his courage and vision in taking an axe to our out-of-control welfare state. He was a man with a plan. He was going to make structural reforms that would raise wages and reduce…
Wednesday’s headline in The Sun was a classic: SHOT DOWN…AND WORLD HOLDS BREATH. I love The Sun. For its honesty, its clarity, its steadfast solidarity with the old English working class; its directness and, very often, its sheer vulgarity. I had heard the BBC that morning and I’d read The Times. But the most detailed…
Since the Paris terror attacks of 13 November it is as if we have awoken from an all too peaceful sleep to find ourselves in the plot of a James Bond novel. Except that if this were offered by the James Bond franchise it would be dismissed as too improbable – and too violent. A…
The appalling attacks in Paris in the late evening of Friday, 13 November 2015 will linger in the annals of infamy for many years to come. About 130 innocent people lost their lives and many more were seriously injured. No doubt the number of fatalities will rise in the days to come. On 31 October…
The September edition of the Master Investor magazine was largely dedicated to an examination of how likely interest rates were to rise, and what would be the consequences of a rate hike for your portfolio. I argued in my contribution that waiting for interest rates to rise was like Waiting for Godot. We might wait…
Barely a week goes by in the USA, the UK and elsewhere, without news of job layoffs in the manufacturing sector. Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE:CAT), one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of construction and mining equipment, recently announced 5,000 job cuts by the end of 2016. In mid-October Tata Steel (BOM:500470) announced that it was axing…
When Swen asked me to get down to Cyprus to cover the olive harvest I thought this would be a dull assignment. But since arriving on Aphrodite’s enchanted island, I now understand that this country is a living case study in Eurozone post-bailout recovery. Let me explain. Cyprus is the most Easterly country in Europe.…
A few days ago I tried to sketch out how the upcoming UK-EU In-Out Referendum actually boils down to an argument over whether it is possible to have a European Union with most members in a currency union, and a few of them resolutely outside it. When we Brits look across the Channel, we tend…
It is 07 October 2017 – an auspicious day in Russia. We meet at the Presidential dacha somewhere deep in the woods outside Moscow. For, an important party is in preparation… “Theresa, so pleased you could come. I thought you’d be too busy”. The President greeted the Prime Minister, who was resplendent in her favourite…
On 29 October we learnt from the BBC, that the Prime Ministers of both Finland and Estonia (snowy Baltic neighbours) had no idea what Mr Cameron was talking about. This was not due to some egregious Foreign Office failure to translate Mr Cameron’s speeches into all the major Finno-Ugric languages; but rather the simple omission…
