Forget, for a moment, the uncertainties surrounding President-elect Donald Trump. Because in the East, the world’s biggest ever credit boom is set to get even bigger. What’s more, it is not being built around the US dollar, but around a new emerging global currency: the Chinese yuan. Constrained in East Asia by a combination of […]
A quarter of a century ago, it might have sounded like madness to predict that China would today consume half the world’s output of commodities, or that almost a third of bonds issued by the rich developed nations would have negative yields. The reason why this is happening is largely because global capital is shifting […]
Central Bankers’ traditional end-of-Summer hideaway in Jackson Hole, Wyoming may be especially monumental this year. Whatever the nuances about US interest rates read into to Fed Chairman Janet Yellen’s headline speech, they are not the big takeaways. Rather the two messages coming from the Teton summit will be that low (and negative) interest rates have […]
Brexit has greater implications for the World outside of the UK, than for Britain itself. It demonstrates how much ordinary industrial workers have been economically and (until now) democratically disenfranchised by the political and business elites. More and bigger electoral tests face the West over coming months, culminating with November’s US Presidential contest. Like the […]
Sterling is understandably being whipped around by the uncertainty of Brexit. Official commentators and option market pundits even suggest that a ‘No’ vote could send the pound plummeting by a further whopping 15%. But this seems unlikely. Financial markets are forward discounting mechanisms and it would be misleading to suggest that hordes of nervous speculators […]
The Euro currency unit lies at the heart of the European project. The Brexit campaign should focus more on this basic fact. Currency arrangements, like the Single Currency, are imposed by geo-politics and disposed by economic reality. The Eurozone will be forced by its economic inefficiencies to become a ‘transfer union’, involving future centralised budgetary […]
This could be the week when the World’s two most celebrated General Theories were proved correct. Both spell out the dangers of black holes. But whereas the risk of Earth disappearing into a cosmic black hole may be hypothetical, the liquidity black hole in global credit markets is here-and-now. Watch-out, we are being sucked in. […]
2016’s biggest question for half a billion people across 28 countries may be decided by a few swing voters in Britain’s northern cities. The arguments both for and against Brexit – Britain leaving the European Union – are compelling. This we know from the current stalemate in the opinion polls. Yet are the pollsters asking […]
Are the greatest threats to economies inevitably political? Even without next year’s Race for the White House, politics in 2016 look like landing three bruising blows on economies from oil, China and Brexit. Oil, arguably the most important price in the World economy, not only plays a critical role in the economic and political stability […]
We may all have to bone-up on Jerrynomics. The victory of Jeremy Corbyn will immeasurably change the left’s political argument, arming it with a new and highly credible agenda (to the many millions of disenfranchised): People’s QE, more wealth redistribution, no Trident, no HS2, attacks on poverty, reverse privatisations, bank nationalisation and possibly Brexit. Dismiss […]
As the World gets bigger it seems to become more volatile. So, its financial markets ride an endemic 8/9-year roller-coaster with dizzying, white-knuckle peaks occurring in 1972, 1981, 1989, 1998, 2007/08 and now maybe again in 2015. Once more disappearing money flows are the culprits behind crashing stock markets. Are we no longer slaves to […]
