On Global Markets

The European Union (EU) is currently conducting a review of its rules around mergers and acquisitions. As ever, this is the sort of thing which is closely watched by corporate law firms (and one cannot walk very far in central Brussels without coming across a legal office). Latham & Watkins, one such firm, has provided […] 

Prediction markets, exchanges where market participants can trade contracts based on unknown future events such as sports results or the outcomes of elections, are booming. One recent report looked at trading volumes over the past few years and came complete with a rather striking chart. (The final data point on this chart represents partially month […] 

Late last year, a leader in the Economist asked which industries and sectors China would dominate next? As the article explained: The country’s autonomous taxis, constructed for a third of the cost of Waymo’s in America, are racking up millions of kilometres of driving and are forging partnerships in Europe and the Middle East. In […] 

The polls carried out by the Clark Center’s various Expert Panels are always interesting, but they are rarely that surprising. Last week’s poll of the European Experts Panel was an exception. As Patrick Honohan of Trinity College Dublin put it, “I never thought it would come to this. But it has”. The panel was asked […] 

Nasdaq, the tech-firm-heavy New York Stock Exchange and index provider, is consulting on what, at first, appear to be some fairly technical tweaks to its rules on index composition and inclusion. Given the seemingly dry subject matter and the distraction of the events in the Middle East, this has not received a great deal of […] 

The war in the Gulf has, understandably, taken up most of the bandwidth of global investors and most of the front pages of the financial media over the past few weeks. Soaring energy prices, coupled with substantial falls in bond and equity markets, and a high degree of uncertainty all demand attention. But if that […] 

It is something of a historical irony that, 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, Oliver Cromwell – Lord Protector of England in the years of the interregnum after the civil war and the execution of Charles I – continues to have an influence on the economic policy set-up of the United States. In the […] 

As readers will know, the global economy is in the early stages of an energy price shock driven by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.  This particular crisis is both difficult to write about and clouded in uncertainty. As with any geopolitical issue, and especially […] 

It has always been quite hard to square the Trump presidential campaign’s regular focus on ‘affordability’ – or sometimes just ‘the price of eggs’ – with the actions his second administration has embarked on in office. In the view of most economists, the President’s signature economic policy – the imposition of tariffs – makes many […] 

Over the last few years global equity market investors, and especially those closely following US markets, have devoted an awful lot of time to thinking about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). The promise of speculator returns, and the potential of large first moved advantages, have seen the price of AI-exposed firms – and in […]