making sense of the narrative
April 28, 2021
An under-rated risk for western economies is that in pushing back against the centralisation of state power under the Health Crisis, voters will unintentionally now allow an even greater grab of power by different parts of the state under the Read more…
April 27, 2021
Back in the 1990s a colleague used to pronounce on the annual “Red Glasses Award’ designed to highlight the most egregious examples of rent extraction from gullible management teams for corporate ‘rebranding’. Our favourite back then was the 1989 multi Read more…
April 26, 2021
Our good friends at Redburn alerted us to the fact that the S&P 500 Equal weighted index made a new all time closing high this week, which we thought made a good occasion to revisit the relationship between the Equal Read more…
April 20, 2021
Short term Uncertainty and Medium Term Risks While we continue to puzzle over official pronouncements on the pandemic, markets are nevertheless thinking about growth, inflation and asset allocation. One of the issues challenging asset allocators in particular at the moment Read more…
April 16, 2021
Way back in 2010 – like before the Ipad – a computer programmer used Bitcoin to buy a Pizza. The cost? 10,000 Bitcoin. Yes, 10,000. That is $630m at today’s exchange rate. That’s some pizza. This week we saw the Read more…
April 14, 2021
There is a corner of the FT that continues to do sterling work as financial journalists, having alerted us to, inter-alia, Wirecard, Greensill, Softbank, (especially with We Work but also some of the other egregious actions of the former Deutsche Read more…
April 12, 2021
The following is the text of an article submitted to Australian Financial Review – albeit with a title added by us. We do this on a regular basis, but since it is behind a paywall many of our readers can Read more…
April 9, 2021
In reviewing the behaviour of markets in the first quarter we can use the prism of our Model Portfolios as well as the general benchmarks to try and capture the important elements of what happened, partly for review, but also Read more…
April 6, 2021
As March ended and closed out the first quarter, it also marked the anniversary of the equity and Credit market lows triggered by the Great Covid Panic of 2020. Intervention by the Fed to prevent market dislocation and an unprecedented Read more…
April 1, 2021
Normally on April 1st in the UK we would expect to see various spoof articles in the paper and on the TV, but on the basis that almost everything announced over the last 12 months might previously have been considered Read more…