The terrorist attacks that occurred last weekend in Paris will certainly be part of our memories for a long time; but the implications for our society and for the future of the European Union are manifold. While the attacks carry many regrettable implications and challenges, they also help shed some light on the unsolved puzzle…
The September edition of the Master Investor magazine was largely dedicated to an examination of how likely interest rates were to rise, and what would be the consequences of a rate hike for your portfolio. I argued in my contribution that waiting for interest rates to rise was like Waiting for Godot. We might wait…
The equivalent to cheap money is expensive “everything else”. When money is made abundant while the stock of assets is held constant, inflation must pick up. But the higher prices do not always come in the form central banks wish for… There are so many things money can buy. A watch, a pack of beer,…
By Dom Wolf, Co-founder of investUP – the crowdfunding supermarket Hot of the press research by the Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) suggests that around 405,000 ISA savers could choose to use crowdlending (P2P), as it becomes part of the ISA family in 2016. This marks a huge number of people entering into the crowdlending market.…
Some thought commodity prices were going to rise forever due to the mismatch between supposedly unlimited demand growth from industrialising nations and limited supply of much-needed and irreplaceable raw materials. Others even believed that a new world order was rising, where a homogeneous group of wannabe industrialised countries would support the growth of the rest…
When Swen asked me to get down to Cyprus to cover the olive harvest I thought this would be a dull assignment. But since arriving on Aphrodite’s enchanted island, I now understand that this country is a living case study in Eurozone post-bailout recovery. Let me explain. Cyprus is the most Easterly country in Europe.…
Yesterday the FT uncovered a series of meetings between ECB policymakers and the private sector that occurred just before the governing council meetings from which important, market-moving, interest rate decisions resulted. Central banks were made independent from the government to avoid an evident conflict of interests that allowed us to achieve more stable, lower inflation…
On 29 October we learnt from the BBC, that the Prime Ministers of both Finland and Estonia (snowy Baltic neighbours) had no idea what Mr Cameron was talking about. This was not due to some egregious Foreign Office failure to translate Mr Cameron’s speeches into all the major Finno-Ugric languages; but rather the simple omission…
It is bad news! The worst! Highly strung, highly paid investment banking economists are to be seen standing on the ledges of the top floors of investment banking skyscrapers, ready to hurl themselves off. Market and strategic analysts are reporting to suburban psychiatrists to get their neurosis levels topped up before committing frantic prose to…
Every year, in this season of mellow fruitfulness, I come to the Viva Mayr Clinic by the beautiful Worthersee Lake in Austria. The clinic is a sort of detox retreat, and I have been put on Diet no. 1, which allows for Lilliputian morsels of food on two occasions a day. Diet no. 0, on…
