Far from memory is the time when Saudi Arabia and OPEC were in control of global oil prices, as are oil prices above $100. A nascent fracking industry in the US, deteriorating social conditions in some oil producing countries and a desire in Saudi Arabia to retain market acted like an explosive mix that changed…
France goes to the polls this Sunday for the first round of a presidential election of existential importance – both for France and for the European Union as a whole. If La Belle France has a bout of flatulence (the triumph of the far left and the far right candidates) there’s going to be an…
After some initial enthusiasm, investors are now having second thoughts about the reflation trade and once again pouring more money into bonds, as inflation is expected to remain low for longer than first appeared. But, when yields on a 70-year sovereign are at 1.65%, something must be seriously wrong and it can all only end in tears. Financial markets…
At the Master Investor Show in London on 25 March, which many of my readers will have attended, one question came up again and again to the various luminaries gathered to dispense their insights and knowledge. Where do you foresee Sterling going? Overall, most of the assembled experts, including my friend Evil Knievel, were Sterling…
Following Tim Price’s article on the slow death of the stockbroker, written from the perspective of a fund manager, here is that of an analyst insider whose City career spanned pre-big bang, when the species hardly existed, to today – when Mifid could be about to hammer a final nail into their coffin. Or maybe not.…
At the latest Master Investor Show, Jim Mellon, one of the UK’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, revealed his current passion and new investment focus: longevity science. Jim truly believes that longevity is the next “money fountain” and that in 30 years’ time, life expectancy will easily reach 110 years due to cutting edge technologies…
In a previous article on these pages, I examined the outlook for the Brazilian Stock Exchange – the Bovespa – and asked the question if it could sustain 2016’s rally, which made it one of the best equity performers last year with an 80% year on year uptick in dollar terms (+39% in local currency…
The constitutional historian Professor David Starkey has compared the invocation of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on 29 March with King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s[i]. As Professor Starkey describes in his numerous books, that event had momentous historical consequences for Britain. Politics in those days moved more slowly – and were…
Back in 1998, the author Michael Lewis, then a columnist for Bloomberg, wrote as follows: “When historians of everyday life look back on 20th-century American capitalism they will be astonished by the role played by our stockbrokers. Certainly, it will be hard for them to explain to their readers the willingness of a prosperous American…
Financial markets have been on an impressive run since Donald Trump was elected in November. The S&P 500 is up 10.7%, the Dow is up 13.1% and the MSCI World (which is a proxy for developed markets) is up 9.9%. Trump’s promises in terms of tax cuts, infrastructure spending, protectionism for US industries, repeal of…
