This writer supposes there must be a world out there
worth investigating… Some day, anyway.

2022 has been a frenetic year for markets – watching the Truss debacle bring down the whole economy by unravelling the Virtuous Sovereign Trinity of competent politics, a stable currency and a sustainable bond market it’s taken the UK 500-plus years to establish. In the US we’re watching the over-mighty dollar, the prospects for political gridlock and the collapse of the Big Tech Growth Stock consensus.

It’s all fascinating stuff for the English-speaking media to cover in depth – which they have done to the exclusion of absolutely anything else. However, I am reliably informed there is plenty of other ‘stuff’ – just as consequential – going on around the globe. Things like a looming political crisis in Yoorp, China turning insular and wanting to invade Taiwan, plus a general recession about to crush the global economy.

Gosh… Who knew?

And, as usual, it’s we Brits, and the Yanks, who will likely be blamed for it all.

I came to that shocked realisation that there may be a world outside the Anglosphere when the editor of The Property Chronicle idly asked me a simple question: “Why do we spend so much time thinking about Anglo-Saxon politics and markets, but so little time examining the fundamentals behind Europe, the politics and markets of France, Germany or for that matter Japan?”

I did a quick trawl through my own commentary website, The Morning Porridge (www.morningporridge.com) and came to the conclusion that 40% of my market articles are about UK matters, 30% US, 10% China, 10% Europe and 10% rest of the world. Does the rest of the world matter so little? I hear there is a property market in China, oil in the sands of Arabia and some rather good horseless carriage-makers in Italy and Germany (though not in France, apparently).

If I was a fervent Brexiteer (I’ve had that particular stuffing knocked out of me), I might conclude that 30% of my time spent outside the Anglo-Saxon economic multiverse is time wasted.

I could recall my early days working for a US bank, where it quickly became clear only one of the managing board actually had a passport.

Or how HSBC actually stands for the Home for Scottish Bank Clerks – and while abroad all the executive international officers live in dorms redolent of the public schools they once attended to protect them from ‘going native’.

If I was a passionate advocate for the City of London,
I could spout data, demographics and other lies on how many more people work in finance in London than actually live in Finanzplatz Deutchland – or Frankfurt, as the locals call it.

I could comment on how it’s English law and American dollars that spawned the euromarkets, and how the deep well of financial expertise and knowledge residing in London puts any other financial centre to shame.

At least some, and maybe all of the above, are true.

I could, of course, suggest the reason we remain myopically focused on the Anglosphere is Brits and Yanks all speak some form of English (taking note of the bon mot, ‘two peoples separated by a common language’), and therefore focus on investment opportunities that can be explained and rationalised in an Anglo context. Understanding markets requires a shared set of beliefs and jargon. As the ’Mericans are basically Brits in self-imposed exile, without the bright sun of empire and monarchy to brighten and guide their toils, we share common expectations on how markets should work.

It might be because we embrace capitalism to its fullest extent. In the US and the UK, capitalism reaches its purest, most sublime form in the right to fail. The UK has seen so many centuries of corporate failure that almost all our successful surviving corporates tend to operate outside the country these days. In foreign parts, like France, the state tends to intervene to stop corporate failure. French workers being as revolting as they are, that’s probably a good thing.

And then, being Brits and Yanks… Well, of course, we know best. The Brits have the imagination to sell just about everything – when it comes to dodgy financial investments, that usually means dumping them into German banks. We then giggle politely at dinner parties, explaining how German cars might be superbly engineered, but they understand nothing about finance. We never stop to wonder if the reason Germany is growing so much faster than the UK might just be because they are superb engineers and have also realised banking is just a rather trivial service industry in the grand scheme of things….

Then there are ways of doing business… an Englishman’s word being his bond coming a respectable halfway down the list of financial dishonesties. That is confusing to foreigners, who start with the premise that any foreigner’s wallet is there to be emptied. We have rules about dealing with counterparties from some nations on the basis i) they don’t pay, ii) they never pay.

And as for politics… Well, we’ve always been more than a little suspicious of this whole French presidency thing, jumping on their mopeds to visit multiple mistresses and complaining about the number of cheeses in the country. If they were only more British about France it would be much easier to embrace it. Oh, and the French banks know far too much about difficult sums and derivatives for we Anglo-Saxons to be comfortable with them

In terms of Europe, aside from President whatshisname of France, we would be hard put to identify or name a single European leader, aside from Putin in the USSR and that plucky little chap in Ukrania. Apparently some very dull, boring and predictable German lady single-handedly doomed Europe to penury by buying gas from Russia. Silly, but without a PPE degree from Oxford or a Stanford MBA, how was she to know otherwise?

As for the euro, let me be brutally frank and honest: I don’t actually know where the symbol for the euro is on my computer keyboard, so can’t we just agree it’s probably not that important and unlikely to last anyway? Doesn’t really matter as Europe isn’t speaking to us following the beastliness over Brexit.

China, now that’s an interesting place. Just elected an emperor for life apparently. Well, they do things different over there. Lots of very keen Chinese making all kinds of stuff we used to make, but doing it much, much cheaper. Or at least they were till bat flu effectively destroyed their economy and plunged the world into supply-chain confabulation of the most serious kind – inflation.

Then there are places like Japan, where it’s terribly, terribly difficult to understand what’s going on at all. How they have an absolutely stable bond market paying yields lower than the square root of zero is beyond me. Which leaves the Rest of the World, which is apparently very big and largely broke, except for the bits that aren’t, which I suppose is why I ought to go and find out what does and what does not work outside the UK and ’Merica… Sometime, but probably not today, as I have to go down to Ladbrokes to get a price on the Boris/Trump double in 2024.

From the top floor of Porridge Towers with an eye patch.