Serious investment thinking that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
$120,000 for a banana. This was December, 2019, at Art Basel in Miami. An Italian artist duct taped a banana to the wall. It sold for $120,000. The state of modern art, ladies and gentlemen. It’s easy to laugh at the decadence of the art world. It’s not as easy to laugh at the broader financial...
An inevitable consequence of the Coronavirus will be the acceleration or magnification of existing trends – be it towards home working or the intensification of the shift from...
WE ARE TOLD that China is a challenge for the West, that its emergence as an economic power is a “Sputnik” moment for American leadership and will affect UK...
Dear Friends and Colleagues, 1. Will agriculture finally out-perform energy? This Commentary explores the likely pathways of food vs. energy commodities in the 2020s and ‘30s. It...
“The economic mechanism of Europe is jammed.” - J M Keynes [1] The Dutch finance minister Wopka Hoekstra is somewhat brazen. Like his German counterpart, he...
The go-to tool for puncturing outlandish conspiracy theories is Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation for something is also the most likely to be true. For...
According to the old Sufi tale, a man and his son lived in a valley. They were happy but very poor and they wanted desperately to change this. So, feeling entrepreneurial, the...
As I mentioned in my last missive, markets are reacting to expectations of the future rather than the horrors of the present. At the time of writing, despite its welcome...
Having recently completed proptech investments in Unissu and Dashflow, I was interested to read Andy Saull’s article, “Proptech disruption won’t hit any time soon”, in the last...
Incredibly, I have been involved in preparing forecasts of the UK economy for 45 years. I have a reputation for making bearish calls – occasionally successfully – but have never...