Imagine a continent which leads the world in mobile telephony banking and in fourth generation (satellite) internet access. This is a continent which has achieved remarkable advances in health outcomes as evidenced by levels of infant mortality and life expectancy, and in education over the last two decades. And which is now enjoying supercharged growth.…
The Catalonian insurrection has been defeated by the will of Madrid – mercifully without ugliness. But many Catalans are resentful and do not think the struggle is over. Victor Hill has been visiting Spain’s richest province again. A fairly honourable defeat… On 31 January, a message sent by Carles Puigdemont, the unlikely exiled President of…
Money doesn’t grow on trees – so we are told. Yet central banks like the Bank of England can create it out of nothing. Do they really know what they are doing? And who has gained most from their monetary alchemy? The age of alchemy The Credit Crunch – aka the Financial Crisis – of…
Another year, another pilgrimage to the JP Morgan Biotech conference in San Francisco, now in its 26th year. About 9,000 people scurry around the passageways of the far-too-small-for-purpose St Francis hotel, watching companies present stuff that is now readily available online. The smarter lot, who number about 41,000, hover in the periphery of the conference,…
To Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate), the well-meant one-word piece of advice was “plastics”. To the godfather of value investing, Benjamin Graham, the well-meant three word piece of financial advice was “margin of safety” – and that one happens to have lasted the test of time. Faced with the challenge…
Developing countries like Kenya tend to have shockingly high rates of unemployment. But that should not deter investors – rather it is a sign of potential. Worrying numbers When I wrote last week that Kenya has an unemployment rate of 38 percent, a number of colleagues questioned that figure. How could it possibly be so…
Kenya is once again politically stable and is fast becoming the most mature emerging market in Africa. Jambo!* When you go through customs control on entering Kenya you are supposed to surrender all your plastic bags. Last year, plastic bags were banned in Kenya outright. This impressed me for two reasons. Firstly, it shows Kenya’s…
There are times when certain decisions have an unusual impact on subsequent events. We reach, in other words, a ‘fork in the road’, and the choices taken – or not taken – have an incalculable impact on the future. The weekend of 13/14 September 2008 represented precisely one of those forks in the road. At…
The most important problem facing the UK government in 2018 is that wage growth has stalled. Mrs May needs to give ordinary people hope of a wage rise in the New Year. The Productivity conundrum revisited Productivity is the output recorded per hour worked by the workforce. Successful manufacturing nations like Germany boast high levels…
It’s that time of the year again: when the pundits look back and either tell you “I told you so”, or “mea culpa”, or some variant in between. I don’t really like looking back – except where the past holds some lessons for the future – but it sure has been an “interesting” year. Bond…
