On Global Markets

It’s been a long week for global financial markets. It at least has certainly felt that way.  Monday saw the largest daily fall in the value of Japanese equities since 1987, with the Topix index plunging by 12% followed by a rough day for European and North American exchanges and, for much of the day, […] 

Winston Churchill once remarked that “if you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions”. Sadly for policymakers, economists offering up multiple opinions and caveating even themselves has never been a uniquely British trait. Harry Truman became so sick […] 

Investment trends (or, if one is being unkind, ‘fads’) come and go. For much of the last two years artificial intelligence has been firmly in the spotlight. Before that the pandemic sparked a wave of interest in biosciences. In the late 2010s, the big trend seemed to be Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). But whilst media […] 

It sometimes surprises those who do not follow fiscal policy closely just how much of the process is often based on a series of polite fictions that those involved sometimes pretend to believe. The best example comes from the United Kingdom and concerns Fuel Duty, the duty charged on motor vehicle fuels.  In theory, and […] 

The life cycle of the archetypal successful American firm was once straight forward. The initial entrepreneur would at first fund their start-up idea utilizing cash from the so-called three Fs of family, friends, and fools. If their business proved to be a hit it would expand using a mixture of debt and injections of equity […] 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology continues to advance rapidly and grab the attention of investors, policymakers, and media opinion formers. For the latter, the ability of the latest generation of large language models (LLMs) to not only write increasingly passable copy but to do so in the style of named authors is causing more than a […] 

Short-termism is one of the frequently invoked criticisms of the management of publicly listed firms, asset managers, and individual shareholders. Critics allege that over the past few decades changes in the structure of financial markets and investor behavior have aligned into a system that encourages managers to focus on short term profits, at a potential […] 

At the end of the twentieth century, the average speed of trips made across central London was lower than in the year 1900. The reason for this regression was obvious to anyone spending time in a car in the United Kingdom’s capital: heavy congestion and frequent traffic jams snarling up the roads. In 2003 London […] 

There are plenty of reasons why Japanese policymakers might favor a stronger yen. With Japan increasingly reliant on both imported food and imported energy, anything which increases the nation’s international purchasing power can be seen as positive. But the supposed benefits of a stronger currency run beyond that obvious implication. It helps to support household […] 

Looking back from 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote of the pre-Great War world as a high point of what would now be termed globalization. As he set out in the Economic Consequences of the Peace: “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of […]