Since the Paris terror attacks of 13 November it is as if we have awoken from an all too peaceful sleep to find ourselves in the plot of a James Bond novel. Except that if this were offered by the James Bond franchise it would be dismissed as too improbable – and too violent. A…
The appalling attacks in Paris in the late evening of Friday, 13 November 2015 will linger in the annals of infamy for many years to come. About 130 innocent people lost their lives and many more were seriously injured. No doubt the number of fatalities will rise in the days to come. On 31 October…
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…
