Raking over the smouldering embers of the UK general election, there is one salient theme that speaks to the future. The deep socio-political-demographic divide between the Elders and the Millennials has reached a tipping point. A youthquake has struck. Society – not just in the UK but across the West – is about to change…
It was the big-budget West End musical that flopped. The “snap” UK general election of 2017 never really had a compelling plotline. Its major characters were poorly drawn, the acting wooden and the singing excruciating. The theatre had to be evacuated twice for security reasons. The diva-heroine didn’t even make it on the stage for…
I just came accross an article on CNBC about a trader from Saxo Bank who predicts that Bitcoin will be worth $100,000 in 10 years time, as cryptocurrencies gain market share in the highly liquid foreign exchange market. While 10 years is still a long time to wait for such a bold prediction to materialise,…
What’s done cannot be undone. William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Here in Scotland, the British general election is a referendum on whether there should be a second referendum on independence. Increasingly, it is a binary choice between the Scottish Nationalists and the Tories. What will be the impact of the election on the Scottish economy? And what…
In the past month, I’ve been going around the British Isles, talking to groups of people about my research into longevity, ahead of the launch of the Juvenescence book in July. I know it’s always a mistake to develop confirmation bias, but the more I talk on the subject, and the more I look into…
Campaigning resumes today in the British general election after three days of self-imposed reflection following the abominable events in Manchester last Monday night. Those who thought that it was a one horse race are in for a shock. According to a You.Gov poll last night the Tory lead over Labour is down to five percent.…
The budget document is unrealistic… Investors have been anxiously waiting for Trump’s budget proposals, to see if the fiscal shock they have been waiting for has any chance of materialising into a real deal. A big step came on Tuesday, when the government presented its budget for the 2018-2027 period. But, as with everything else…
You can tell a political ideology by its tax-and-spend policies. The two far extremes of the English-speaking political world – the new US populist right and the old UK corporatist left – are fashioning very different fiscal programmes. Might Post-Thatcherite Mrs May be the new Middle Way? The wealth of a nation In an interview…
Stretched Valuations Since the beginning of the year, I have been drawing the attention of the reader to the lack of volatility in U.S. markets, as such a high level of complacency is extreme by historical standards and is not supported by current fundamentals. Recently, the VIX (INDEXCBOE:VIX) fell below 10, which is a rare…
Historians, in their quest to make sense of the past, refer to two types of source material. Primary sources are those artefacts, diaries or documents created more or less at the same time as the events they depict. Secondary sources, as their name implies, are somewhat second-hand; they refer to books or articles written subsequently,…
