We have been saying for the past six months that the blending and selection of investments for our Investment Portfolios has been challenging with so many global factors conspiring to impact both stock and bond markets. The US tax cuts…
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In the ten years since the financial crisis, the combination of central bank’s increasing their bond buying program’s and an increase in household, corporate and government borrowing has taken world indebtedness from US$173tn in 2008 to US$247tn in 2018. Over…
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The world has come a long way since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Regulators have overhauled the rules of banking and brokering in an attempt to correct the imbalance that triggered the financial crisis. But ten years…
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Fund managers have continued to downgrade forecasts for global growth. The end of Q3 consensus forecasts for 2018 has been reduced to 3.2% from 3.4% in Q2 and for 2019 down to 3% from 3.2%. The most significant changes were…
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The exponential growth in China’s economy over the past forty years has brought hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty and advanced the Chinese people’s standard of living and personal wealth. This has been done through a command…
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In early October, the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell expressed his delight that the US economy was going very well by saying, ‘We are enjoying a remarkable set of economic circumstances’. The US economy saw jobless figures fall to 3.7%…
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In terms of the scale of public debt, Italy has been the elephant in Europe’s room for a long time. The Italian national debt is now €2.5tn which is 132% of Italy’s GDP and making Italy highly vulnerable to economic…
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The US administration’s sanctions against Iranian oil exports came into force on the 4th November. This includes sanctions on corporations buying Iranian oil or trading with their central bank. Without a waiver agreement, foreign oil firms will face the risk…
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The Shanghai Composite Index of the largest 300 companies (CSI 300) has had a very poor 2018 having fallen 24% up until November including an 8% drop in October. These equity losses can be accounted for by the impact of…
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