At a time when investors need to pay European corporations for the privilege of lending them money, the degree of financial madness should have reached level 100. Governments around the world excused themselves from leading their own sluggish economies towards healthier states and central banks surpassed all known boundaries in replacing them on such a…
If you want to figure out what’s likely to happen in the next eight months, a good start is to try to understand what’s been happening over the last eight years – since the collapse of Lehman and the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis. Understanding what a portfolio should look like to cope with…
It was bound to happen – and now it has. India’s love affair with technology and e-commerce has spawned an explosion in “fintech”. We can define fintech as digital technology businesses that compete against (and disrupt) – or sometimes support – the activities of established financial institutions. Businesses in the fintech space serve both customers…
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…
