News: 22 March 2022
More broadly, are ESG (environmental, social and governance) concerns simply going out the window at the current time? Are investors losing interest when there are more pressing concerns elsewhere?
News: 14 March 2022
Central bankers have a very difficult job on their hands. The market has priced in several rate hikes and pressure is mounting to turn to a tightening cycle with inflation running out of hand. But with an ongoing war and fears of slowing down the economy, it feels as if they are trapped between a rock and a hard place.
News: 07 March 2022
The coming days and weeks are going to be uncomfortable. In particular, we are most concerned about how the situation around Kyiv will evolve. Central Banks are likely to tread very softly around their treatment of inflation, with their primary aim now to keep capital markets liquid and open.
News: 28 February 2022
Today is one of those few occasions when reporting on financial markets takes a degree of gravitas beyond the usual daily wheeler-dealering of the trading floors. It is also a reminder that extreme events can and do happen. Of all the possible scenarios that have been building over the early weeks of 2022, a full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was the least likely. But the Devon Loch of European politics has unfolded in front of our eyes.
News: 21 February 2022
Power, as we have argued before, is the great fragility of the modern world. Having possibly thought that storms and power cuts were things that happened only in the North and Scotland, Eunice’s damage to the Cornish grid was a nasty surprise.
News: 14 February 2022
Given our knowledge of the world’s half-hearted crawl towards carbon net zero, this makes Russia exceedingly important. It becomes doubly exceedingly important when the West is staring at both barrels of generationally high inflation and rising interest rates.
News: 07 February 2022
That was then. The ‘now’ is something altogether different. The great worry of the Banks is that inflation expectations have weighed anchor. Inflation is over 5% both here in the UK and in Europe. In the United States it is over 7% and likely to rise even more.
News: 25 January 2022
The greatest falls in share prices have been seen in the most speculative and loss-making stocks. These have become contagious and are dragging down, without any clear logic, the stock prices of even the most reliable, profitable and recession-resistant businesses.
News: 17 January 2022
2022 has started not so much with noise, but with a screeching cacophony. Our intention this week is to attempt to make some sense out of what is, yet again, a sensation of information overload.
News: 12 January 2022
The problem is that history is not a great guide to 2022, where the amount of debt turns even the smallest rise in its cost into a significant change.
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