After a quiet August, we are back to business as usual, which is 90% about following central banks and 10% about following everybody else. Almost one decade after the peak of the financial crisis, global markets still rely heavily on central banks, with short-term volatility being fuelled by all kinds of speculation about expected central…
“Monetary policy has done as much as it really can and it needs to be complemented by fiscal policy and structural reforms,” – Catherine Mann, chief economist at OECD A new investment paradigm? We’re living in a year of extremes. Record high equity prices, record low oil prices, record low inflation levels, and even record…
One recent addiction to the already huge portfolio of investment possibilities is factor investing, which aims at revolutionising the way we invest. Until today, investors have been allocating the money in their portfolios into several asset classes: bonds, equities, foreign equities, real assets, commodities, currencies, and so on. But what if instead they could allocate…
Every year in late summer the secretive priestly caste that is the world’s central bankers meets in conclave at the Wyoming mountain resort of Jackson Hole. It’s an inconsequential place really – just an upscale mountain cum fishing resort set in a verdant valley between the jagged peaks of the Teton Mountains and the Ventre…
This month, I am composing my column on the train from Edinburgh to London, having just made my thirtieth visit to the Edinburgh Festival. Every year, the Fringe gets bigger and wackier, and every year the ticket prices go up – in fact, quite a lot! This ticket price inflation contributes to a noticeable change…
It is five days now since the world’s Olympians filed out of the stadium in Rio heading home in a blaze of samba. But for the glorious lasses and lads of Team GB their homecoming on golden-nosed flight BA2016 on Tuesday – which we were told was groaning with Champagne – was triumphant. Of course,…
If you have any exposure to the major (or indeed minor) European bourses, prepare for turbulence. 2016 (with an epilogue in 2017) could turn out to be another 1848. That was the year that virtually every major European state succumbed to revolution, and the continent, as Karl Marx observed, passed into a new era. Storm…
A dialogue between the Master and his trusty sidekick, Dr Watson, at 221B Baker Street, unpacks the most intriguing paradox in contemporary economics. Rising government debt levels should drive interest rates higher. Instead, interest rates are plunging to zero and below. As Holmes explains, our ultimate fate might be in the hands of an evil…
So here we are again at a junction where policymakers have only two choices: one leads to a merry-go-round that ends and starts at the exact same point; the other leads to a dead-end, forcing a return to the departure point. This has been the choice faced by policymakers over the last few years and…
By Ed Rose The extension of Entrepreneurs’ Relief and introduction of Investors’ Relief announced in the Budget are clearly designed to attract long-term capital investment into companies, particularly small companies with ambitions for high, rapid growth. Does this mean savvy investors will start looking to get into booming sectors like FinTech? The Rise of FinTech…
