5 Feb 2023

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton, 1887 On 6 May 2020 I published ECONOMIC SHUTDOWN! EMERGENCY!!. This has aged quite well, in my opinion. I forecast a form of stagflation; essentially economic slowdown and rising prices. At the time, in common with almost everybody else, I took the government’s need to exercise emergency powers for granted. The Public Health Act of 1984 was supplemented by The Coronavirus Act, hurried through after four days of whatever passed for Parliamentary scrutiny in March 2020.  The act allowed the government to detain anyone suspected of having the virus (a pretty alarming negation of civil liberties by itself), to close borders, to record deaths without inquests, to restrict the right of assembly, to close schools, to suspend elections. As I recall, it did all of those. Legislation, which normally needs to be laboriously passed through Parliament, is not practical in an emergency. Obviously the question of what constitutes an emergency is a matter of opinion. And a perpetual state of emergency is ideal for anyone who wants to restrict or compel the behaviour of others. This explains why the language of crisis (catastrophe, extinction, mass murder) is employed by Net Zero enthusiasts. There is a website that monitors the progress of extinction claims over time. So the Thunberg team knows what it is doing. But while we may fend off the most extreme demands, the plausibility of Lord Acton’s words was supported all too well during the pandemic.  The leaders of Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, Wales and many other places appeared to relish the power and to believe that authoritarianism was a measure of responsibility.  LABOUR’S FIRST YEAR I recently read a book, published in 1947, about the parliamentary debates of the first year of the post-WWII government. In July 1945, Labour was elected with a dominating 150 seat majority on a manifesto of stunning radicalism. Almost everything that moved was to be nationalised; coal, coking, railways, airlines, healthcare and the Bank of England.  During the war, an Emergency Powers Act was renewed by Parliament annually. Given that the country was fighting the most notorious dictator the world has ever known, who passed...

6 Apr 2021

It was an amiable quarter in the equity markets, despite some warnings of bubbles and the occasional bankruptcy. The FTSE rose by 4.1%, the All Share by 4.5% and the domestic orientated FTSE 250 by 5.2%. Year on year, it looks like boom time because the end of March in 2020 was more or less the bottom of the market. A salutary reminder, in case we needed one, that stock markets try to discount news as quickly as possible. Once the pandemic and the lockdown measures had sunk in, it was panic by sundown.   With this flattering point of comparison, the FTSE rose by 18.8% over twelve months, the All Share by 23.8%% and the FTSE 250 by a drool-making 43.3%. Bond markets were stirred from their seemingly endless slumber. Those terrible twins of inflation and currency debasement might be intruding into investors’ thoughts. US 10 year Treasury yields popped from 0.9% to 1.7% over the quarter. UK gilt yields rose from 0.2% to 0.8% – not exactly a compelling offer but a serious price move. German yields “rose” from -0.57% to -0.32%.  It seems that people are beginning to believe in the vast libraries of money that central banks are printing. They expect recoveries in spending and government-inspired investment and equities are the obvious way to play the trend. If your portfolio performed disappointingly in the quarter it’s probably because you owned sensible shares that survived and prospered in lockdown. Sentiment began to move in favour of “reopening stocks” though most of the reopening that we have seen so far has come from a few US States dubbed by President Biden as “Neanderthal”. So far, the throwbacks appear to be doing rather well. As we said, stock markets try to discount news as quickly as possible, even if it’s...

26 Mar 2021

INFLATION – WHAT THEY TEACH YOU AT SCHOOL I remember from economics lessons at school that there were supposedly two categories of inflation, namely cost-push and demand-pull. This was simple enough for anyone, even a pubescent schoolboy, to understand.  Now I can see that this was something of an oversimplification (for which I was no doubt grateful). Supply and demand do not happen in isolation. They respond to each other over time. It is instructive to remember that the price of anything will rise when the current supply is insufficient to satisfy demand and of course it works in reverse.  Yet the demand element of inflation is what occupies most “informed” chatter. That’s probably because we have a more immediate feeling for it. At present there is said to be a dam of spending waiting to spill out as soon as the first world countries are released from lockdown (I’m assuming it will happen one day – stock markets are impatiently celebrating it already).  Consensus says that this will give a transitory boost to inflation which will then subside because private sector unemployment is too high – in short, the poor sods who have been screwed by lockdown will exert a deflationary effect that prevents the economy from overheating. This in turn is offered as a justification for the probability that central banks will not raise interest rates. Well, yes. Given that the US, European, UK and Japanese economies are all funded by the state balance sheets, I think we can reasonably act as if the date for the next increase in official interest rates is approximately never.  SUPPLY SIDE INFLATION But supply side inflation – now that’s a story. Energy, commodity and shipping prices are really moving this year. Given that most of the world’s major economies are still in recessionary territory that’s quite impressive.  SAMPLE OF PRICE CHANGES IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS   Carbon steel 107.8% Container rates 81.4% Oil 49.2% Lumber 44.7% Soybeans 39.8% Iron ore 38.8% Copper 31.7% Coal 31.4% Cotton 31.3% Sugar 23.1% Aluminium 22.9% Natural Gas 21.1% Wheat 12.9% Rice 8.1% IN THE PAST, TECHNOLOGY HAS BOOSTED EFFICIENCY AND CUT COSTS So what is going on? I...

9 Jul 2020

In isolation, Q2 was quite good for stock markets. But in the context of what happened in Q1, we are still in the mire with our Wellington boot just out of reach of our hovering, stockinged foot. The FTSE 100 rose by 9% but is still down 17% year on year. The FTSE 250 recovered by 14% in Q2 (having been down 31% in Q1) but is -12% year-on-year. As usual, the All-Share was between the two. It seems fair to say that we are no wiser about the probable economic outcome of the pandemic though we can see that there is a consensus that central banks can print any amount of money on the single condition that they don’t admit that that is what they are doing. In the US it is more explicit because it is more acceptable to say that anything large is too big to fail when it would involve the loss of large numbers of jobs. Even if you are not seeking re-election as President, it is hard to argue against that. The response to Covid-19 is becoming highly political in the UK, despite there being no general election scheduled until 2024. Mass unemployment cannot be deferred indefinitely, even by money printing. Everyone must know this but no one wants to say it – governing politicians are terrified of hard truths unless they can be floated under a halo of brave sacrifice and oppositions bide their time until they can feign shocked surprise at how badly things turned out.   So we are left with a pretend future funded with pretend money.  Pretend money is far from being just a UK phenomenon.  The euro was infamously pretend money before the financial crash. Greece, Italy etc thought that they could borrow extravagantly but cheaply because their euro liabilities were implicitly guaranteed by the ECB. Kyle Bass, who, in around 2008, took long positions in German Bunds matched against shorts of Greek government bonds, called it the greatest asymmetric trade of all time.  Eight years ago this week, Bunds yielded 1.5% and their Greek equivalents 26%. The spread between the two was 24.5% having been around 0.5% when Bass took his position....

6 May 2020

Things are starting to get serious. The SAGE committee is vast and its remit is the virus and nothing but the virus. It has saved the NHS to the extent that the new Nightingale hospital near the O2 in London is shutting after four weeks. Job done except that most of the public is either scared out of its senses or, more worryingly, preferring a life of leisure on 80% wages. The government is now directly supporting more than half the adult population. Normally I would say that a minority of taxpayers is bearing the burden of the rest but that is nowhere near the truth. Taxpayers are being furloughed too. The printers are rolling and the government is set to borrow from itself. The question is, how long will people be able to live on these new government tokens (once known as sterling currency)? CURRENCY DEBASEMENT My son Leo has just written about the use of the first ancient coins. Greek traders who knew nothing of coinage were happy to use them, even though the gold/silver content was lower than natural bullion of the same weight. Leo was puzzled as to how items of lower intrinsic value continued to be accepted. My answer was that a coin’s real intrinsic value is the belief that if you accept it in return for a “real” good you will be able to pass it on to someone else in return for goods of the same value. But once that belief falters the coins will be swiftly debased. The debasement of our currency will manifest itself as inflation. If you weren’t an adult by the 1980s you will not remember a time when people bought assets today for fear that they would cost more tomorrow. I knew a couple in about 1985 who agreed to buy a small house off the King’s Rd. It was suddenly withdrawn from the market and re-listed at a £50k premium. To their credit, I guess, they did not blink and paid up at once. The US is issuing $3 trillion of debt this quarter. (That’s $9146 for every man, woman and child, or $11,363 for every adult). The US can get...

29 Mar 2020

On the 23rd of February I published these seemingly prophetic words. SPLENDID ISOLATION Another idea that we are rowing back from is internationalism. To put it another way, nationalism appears to be on the rise wherever you look. A better word might be insularity because this is not primarily about xenophobia. It is mostly an economic phenomenon again. For some reason we don’t really care about global poverty half as much as we care about global warming. Of course I didn’t have the slightest idea of what was about to happen. So sadly this blog is not a description of how I moved all my assets into cash and am now reinvesting at a 30% discount. While the world appears to have been turned upside down in the last four weeks, people everywhere were very already receptive to turning their backs on the rest of the world. And I was too kind when I downplayed the role of xenophobia. Every country seems to want to lie in its own dirt now and in many countries’ foreigners are regarded with suspicion or even hostility.  I am absolutely not referring to the UK, which is a highly diverse and generally welcoming country, but rather to more monocultural nations. I was in Sri Lanka last week just as the country started to go into lock down. Sri Lankans are and were almost uniformly delightful but when I found myself on a crowded bus with many people standing and the seat next to me vacant, no one wanted to sit next to the white man.  There are reports that African countries are wary of Europeans and Mexicans are demanding to be protected from US citizens.   Here is a comment found on Twitter: Today on my final reporting trip in China, my colleague and I are eating when a man walks up: “You foreign trash. Foreign trash! What are you doing in my country? And you, with him, you bitch.” I think he wanted to fight, but we stayed silent and let him rant. Quite the farewell. Poland closed its borders, causing huge disruption to citizens of Baltic states trying to get home. Given how many Poles work abroad,...

21 Mar 2019

In my round-up of Q4 2018 I mentioned three risks that I intended to keep an eye on. Here are three really bad things that could happen in 2019 or preferably later. 1) London house prices fall by 20% rapidly or 40% gradually (or both) 2) A major issuer of government debt suffers a catastrophic collapse in confidence or actually defaults (will the person who said “China” see me afterwards?) 3) A neo-Marxist garden gnome becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain. Numbers 2) and 3) remain of great interest but now I want to update myself on the developing story of property prices. Two observations are becoming quite well known: the apparent insanity of new high rise apartments shooting up all over Zone 2 London and the decline in turnover of the traditional property market. FLIPPERING HELL The FT had a good article on 20 February entitled “London’s property ‘flippers’ forced to sell at a loss”. Flippers are speculators who buy flats off-plan before construction has begun. It seems that they are often individuals either originating from or actually still living in Asia. They are probably rather ignorant about what they have agreed to buy. According to the FT, someone lost £770,000 buying and selling an uncompleted apartment in One Blackfriars, a monstrous glass eyesore (obviously that’s just my unsophisticated opinion) towering over the Thames (which has surely been punished enough). “In 2014, 21 per cent of resales in recently completed developments were sold at a discount, according to property research company LonRes. Last year that number had more than trebled, to 67 per cent. At the same time, the size of discounts has ballooned. From an average of 2.2 per cent in 2014, to 13.1 per cent last year.” To be brutally frank, most Londoners just find these stories of burnt speculative fingers quite satisfying. Some might say that it’s payback for despoiling our historic city with your greed and ignorance. Others might suggest that this attitude is somewhat hypocritical, given that mutual self congratulation about how much everyone had made on their houses was the backbone of London dinner parties for about three decades. PENSION PURGATORY Over those years many representatives of...

5 Jan 2019

Over the first nine months of 2018, the UK stock market was barely changed. In Q4 the world’s obsession with uncertainty overtook it. Trump took on China again, Trump took on the Fed, Congress took on Trump, the ECB took on Italy, the Conservative party took on Theresa May, everyone took on Saudi Arabia and the oil price took fright. While a falling oil price is sometimes considered broadly beneficial to the world economy, it is currently identified as a harbinger of global recession. The FTSE 100 fell by 10.7% in Q4, the 250 by 13.9% and the All Share by 13.1%. The rule that in nervous times investors favour large international shares (i.e. the FTSE 100) overall held good, though not on a scale to promote rejoicing or relief. For roughly the 17th time since the financial crisis the fear of impending inflation faded away. The underlying assumption that we are living in long-term deflationary times held good again. Government bond yields have duly subsided again. The US ten year yield has slipped from 3.0% to 2.6%, the UK 10 year gilt yield is now c.1.2% as opposed to 1.5% three months ago. It is times such as this (when the Japanese stock market’s daily change is one of the news headlines on the Today programme) that it is most important to remember our (or my) basic investment rules. Sharp and extensive falls in the price of classes of assets are caused only by the forced capitulation of unwilling and unhappy sellers. Great market collapses are invariably accompanied by the realisation that something that everyone took for granted is no longer true. Black Monday in 1987 was, with hindsight, a financial services event. Stockbrokers, fuelled by American money following Big Bang, were being paid more than bank directors had earned only a few years before. It was the time of Loadsamoney (Harry Enfield), Money (Martin Amis) and Serious Money (Caryl Churchill) and I am prepared to say without embarrassment that it was bloody marvellous to be part of when you were in your mid twenties. But when it was over you knew it was over. When the DotCom bubble burst in 2000 it...

16 Oct 2018

  “The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows. ” PG Wodehouse Financial contagion is a phrase employed by those who try to explain a fall in an asset price that they didn’t see coming.  If it means anything, which is not certain, it describes the fallout from the volatility that results when any market falls because people are forced sellers. This is prone to cause panic which in turn means that the attraction of holding cash rises. Given that no one likes to sell a falling asset (a psychologically taxing experience) people prefer to raise money by selling things that haven’t fallen in price but look potentially vulnerable (especially if viewed with a newly sceptical eye). As the quote from PG Wodehouse shows, when things go wrong we tend to cast around for something to blame. Bad things happen to relatively overpriced assets and the nature of the event that triggers their decline is really of no consequence. The need to explain what happened is driven by a reluctance to take responsibility for a poor investment decision. Hence we are allegedly the victim of the devaluation of a currency, the collapse of an obscure foreign bank, the failure of a harvest or the uproar of beating butterflies’ wings. In reality, contagion is not a hidden threat but a constant reality that we should never forget. All assets are in competition all the time, subject to perceived risk and liquidity. All asset values are relative to each other. The most crass mistake that financial analysts make (and I certainly write from experience) is to compare the price of an asset with its own history and to declare that this proves it to be cheap or expensive. Here are ten assets in which you, if your assets and liabilities are UK based, might conceivably invest, ranging from cash (the most liquid) to commercial property arguably the least liquid). Note that all savings are investments, even cash.   Gross yield Cost of ownership Net yield Capital gain/loss? Building society 2.0% 0.00% 2.0% No Government Gilt 1.7% 0.25% 1.5% No Cash 0.0%...

5 Jul 2017

The UK stock market was on a rollercoaster ride to nowhere in Q2. The FTSE 100 fell by -0.3% and the 250 managed a rise of +1.8%. Given that we had a shock election, a shock result, a hung parliament and that the shadow Chancellor thinks that democracy has failed, you could say that the stock market has been amazingly calm. Likewise the government bond market. The 10 year gilt yield was 1.23% at the end of Q1 and 1.26% at the end of Q2. This is the dog not barking in the night time. We are widely told that the pale imitation of austerity that has been attempted for the last eight years is to be abandoned but the bond market is not panicking yet. Here is a picture of gilt yields since 2007.    One of the lessons of the election was that voters under the age of fifty or so are not frightened of the things that made the 1970s rather messy. Inflation, double digit interest rates and labour unions challenging the government’s right to run the country to name but three. It remains the case that the return of inflation is what bears warn about most frequently. In the 1970s the best way to protect oneself against inflation was to buy property. House prices rose by 492% over the decade. I wouldn’t advise the same strategy now. In fact I would consider doing the opposite. The world still seems pretty deflationary to me. You can choose your own explanation and file it under “uncertainty” but it still seems to me that listed companies are still being very cautious about capex and expecting their shareholders to approve of this caution. Here are five domestically exposed UK companies that have reported March or April year-end results recently. Halfords cut capes by 11% and raised its dividend by 3%. Dairy Crest cut capex by 62% and raised its dividend by 2%. M&S cut capex by 25% and kept its dividend unchanged. Stage Coach cut capex by 18% and raised its dividend by 4%. Royal Mail cut capex by 16% and raised its dividend by 4%. All these are behaving in a risk averse...

15 Mar 2017

THE LAND OF THE FREE-FROM-RESPONSIBILTY The Occupy protesters (what was it they were protesting about again?) used to chant “We are the 99%”. The 1% were portrayed as the selfish and/or crooked people who had appropriated most of the wealth. It is demonstrably easy to be part of the 99% – in fact, it’s darned hard not to be. Rarely had so many ever been against so few. The trouble with being part of a 99% majority is that it is difficult to be focused. Even the French revolutionaries of 1789, who had pretty much the same numbers on their side, could not agree on their objectives and ten years later succumbed to dictatorship (by a chap named Napoleon). But the recent UK budget, delivered by the harassed Chancellor, Philip Hammond, highlighted one point on which close to 99% of politicians, lobbyists and commentators are agreed. They all have limitless opinions about how public money should be spent but next to no constructive suggestions about how that spending should be funded. There is no responsibility for funding that is commensurate with the responsibility for spending. This seems unfair because the latter offers all the joys of patronage and moral superiority and the former, as Mr Hammond might agree, is like having toothache in a land of no dentists (whose absence is widely attributed to your own austerity policy).      I believe that most citizens are supportive of the idea that they should pay their fair share of taxes. But what weakens their support is any suggestion that the government is misusing their money, either by waste and incompetence or by channelling it to family and friends or by funding causes with which they do not agree. (The 2016 EU referendum ticked all those boxes for many people). There was a great experiment in California in the 1970s that showed what happens when people revolt against their social obligation to pay taxes. PROPOSITION 13 Essentially, Proposition 13, passed overwhelming in a referendum in 1978, imposed severe restrictions on the ability of local Californian politicians to raise taxes. Its genesis was the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. The US has a history of taxing real estate that...

6 Jul 2016

On the face of it, the quarter was dominated by the UK Brexit referendum decision on 24 June though, in the main, trends were consistent throughout the quarter. The FTSE 100, which delivers its rare moments of outperformance in times of nervousness, had continued to do better than the FTSE 250 up to 23 June. After the referendum result this trend was dramatically extended, partly fuelled by the sharp fall of sterling against the US dollar. At the close of business on 30 June, the 100 was up by 4.9% in the quarter and the 250 was down by 4%, a huge difference in fortunes. (Despite this, over the last 5 years the 250 is +35% and the 100 just +8%). If this signalled nervousness about the future viability of the UK there was no sign of that in the performance of gilts. 10 year gilts yielded c.1.50% three months ago. Now they pay just 0.80%. What this seems to tell us that a prolonged depression is more likely than either a renewal of inflation (normally a probable result of currency devaluation) or a default by the UK government (even though we don’t really have a government at present). The message from elsewhere, especially the EU, is the same. 10 year bund yields were 0.14% three months ago. They are now, as predicted, negative (-0.17%). In Switzerland, even 30 year government bonds yield less than zero. This seems to be confusing aversion to risk with a disinclination to continue to remain alive. The future is unknown. Get over it. I sold some shares ahead of the referendum result on the mistaken view that we would probably vote to Remain. I think that the EU economy is burdened by many problems – unreformed labour markets, burdensome state pension liabilities, unfavourable demographics and ailing banks. European politicians have been allowing the ECB to carry the burden with its “whatever it takes” monetary policy. As I wrote before, “QE looks desperate and desperation does not promote confidence”. It is the banks that really concern me. The share prices of some of Europe’s best known banks are trading near or even below their financial crisis lows. Deutsche Bank...

2 May 2016

THE “UNREPEATABLE” MISTAKES OF THE 1930s According to the IMF (and pretty much everyone else, I believe) the Great Depression of the 1930s was made worse by protectionism. After the financial crisis that blew up in 2008, leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) economies pledged to “refrain from raising new barriers to investment or to trade in goods and services, imposing new export restrictions, or implementing WTO inconsistent measures to stimulate exports.” They all agreed that a return to protectionism would be a disaster. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is not a promotor of liberal free-for-all trade. It is an organisation of 162 countries based in Geneva (where else?) that employs 640 Secretariat staff. It particularly promotes the interests of developing nations and negotiates and monitors international trading rules. As we shall see in a moment, developed nations are showing an increasing wish to do their own thing. In its own words: “WTO agreements cover goods, services and intellectual property. They spell out the principles of liberalization, and the permitted exceptions.” Agreements are negotiated and then ratified by member countries one by one. Many of them ratify with qualifications that they individually require. The phrase “bureaucratic nightmare” comes to mind. The Doha development agenda has been under discussion since 2001. It is easy to suspect that these negotiations will occupy entire (probably highly agreeable) working lives. Consider this sinister undertaking: “Virtually every item of the negotiation is part of a whole and indivisible package and cannot be agreed separately. This is known as the “single undertaking”: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”.” Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Wow. IS INTERNATIONAL TRADE REALLY CONDUCTED BETWEEN NATION STATES? The WTO was founded in 1995 on the premise that international trade is an activity that takes place between nations. As far as this applies to undemocratic nations it is at least partly true. North Korea, for example, exports a fair amount to China. I’m guessing that the nations involved monitor this pretty closely. Yet much of what passes for political debate seems to assume that we all function in this way. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Donald J Trump on...

14 Oct 2015

Next Monday is an evocative date for those of us who worked in the City of London in 1987. The nineteenth of October became known as Black Monday (not the first or the last) as global stock markets went into meltdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 22.6% in that single day. At one point during the trading day it was reported that the Chairman of the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) had mentioned the possibility of suspending trading. Naturally this increased the level of panic. It felt all the more dramatic because the previous Friday, the 16th, had seen the Great Storm that felled trees all over Southern England. My wife and I drove into work that morning through streets that had been laid to waste a few hours before. The City was spookily quiet and the stock market felt abandoned but was also very weak. It turned out to be an eerie harbinger of the full scale panic that was to follow. If you search for explanations of Black Monday you will generally read that the stock market was overheated, partly inflamed by excited takeover activity. In September 1987, the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi made an approach to buy Midland Bank. Nothing better exemplified the mood of the time – that anything was possible for the new money of the eighties. The Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher and Chancellor Nigel Lawson, had won the General Election on 11th June, seemingly confirming that the corpse of socialism had been buried and that capitalism could bring prosperity to anyone with the ambition to pursue it. It is certainly true that the developed world stock markets had risen substantially in 1987. By mid-July the FTSE 100 was up by 45%.  In that sense, prices were high though of course that is not the same as saying that they were expensive. All value is relative, as we know. As stock markets rose, bonds fell. This is a classic danger sign. Ten year gilt yields rose from 8.8% in May to 10.1% in September. High street savings accounts paid 9%. From today’s perspective, it seems incredible that equities were so popular. In relative...

12 Feb 2015

Quantitative easing is a process by which a central bank buys relatively safe assets (mostly government bonds) and thereby puts cash into the hands of the newly-ex owners of those assets. In the early years of the financial crisis, this was effectively a life-support system for financial institutions which, post-Lehman Brothers, looked like they might fall domino-style. As the central bank bids up asset prices it creates a rising tide that floats many boats. One side effect of this is that the wealthy become wealthier. QE is quite tricky to justify from this point of view. If it is necessary to prevent the collapse of the banking system it is a jagged pill that needs to be swallowed. As I have written before, this is broadly how the Bank of England justified QE in 2009. “Purchases of assets by the Bank of England could help to improve liquidity in credit markets that are currently not functioning normally.” But gradually, while the music remained the same the lyrics changed. Expressing an idea that was essentially imported from the US, the justification from the Bank in 2011 was quite different. “The purpose of the purchases was and is to inject money directly into the economy in order to boost nominal demand.” You see what they did there? Once again, it was party time in financial markets. Bonds and equities were rising nicely. Bonds were rising because the Bank was buying them and other people were buying them because the Bank was buying them and equities were rising because they looked cheap compared to bonds. And property in the areas where financial people live began to go up again, despite the fact that prices appeared to require mortgages that quite high incomes could not plausibly service and that damaged banks could not reasonably be expected to offer. My friends and I have done splendidly from this once we had “got it”. And although I don’t know any influential people, some of my friends do. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want but these influential people soon popped up all over the place saying how brave and wise central bankers were to extend QE. THE HIGH MORAL...

6 Feb 2014

“The bond markets are suggesting that we are looking at a fairly gentle, low inflation recovery.” The dangerously alluring feeling of comfort that I wrote about in my Q4 report did not last long. Major stock markets have fallen this year: FTSE -4%, Dow Jones -6%, Nikkei -13%. Many financial commentators are saying that this is the result of weakness in emerging markets which are in danger of being starved of investment dollars as the Federal Reserve continues its tapering policy. Even writing that makes me feel slightly ridiculous. It is typical of the confusing non-explanations offered by the financial services industry, helping only to encourage ordinary punters in the belief that all this is far too hard for them to understand. “Emerging markets” is an inherently biased way of referring to exotic countries in need of investment.  The term seems to have been invented in the 1980s. According to Wikipedia, prior to that the label Less Developed Countries (LDCs) was used. In 2012, the IMF identified 25 emerging markets. For the record: Argentina;  Brazil; Bulgaria; Chile; China; Colombia; Estonia; Hungary; India; Indonesia; Latvia; Lithuania; Malaysia; Mexico; Pakistan; Peru; Philippines; Poland; Romania; Russia; South Africa; Thailand; Turkey; Ukraine; Venezuela Note, sadly, that that the only African country is RSA. Looking again at the list, if you are particularly attached to democracy, private ownership rights or tolerance of homosexuality, you might find the thought of investing in some of these countries hard to digest. You might also ask how many countries have succeeded in emerging since the 1980s. The answer to that would appear to be zero. Foreign investment in emerging markets tends to be tidal: it flows in and it flows out again (if it can). Why then should this concern the risk-averse investor? There are two reasons, one specific and one general. The specific reason is that businesses in which we might be invested could be hit by diving emerging market economies. Global companies that sell consumer products are especially prone to this. Last week, Diageo the drinks company reported weakness in China and Nigeria. The general reason is that nervousness is infectious (especially in the banking industry). Undoubtedly, we have both these...