Armageddon Outta Here
The Greeks could do us all a favour by voting Trotskyite and neo-pagan and thus ending a saga that could go on for decades.
The Greeks could do us all a favour by voting Trotskyite and neo-pagan and thus ending a saga that could go on for decades.
The bond market vigilantes appear to have gone as quiet as the sound of one hand clapping.
“Would you rather be the world’s best lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst? Or would you rather be the world’s worst…”
The Bank of Japan’s decision to adopt an inflation target and double its bond purchases completes the global flight to soft money.
The road to fiscal hell is sometimes paved with the best intentions. As Europe’s politicians seek to win electorates round to brutal budget cuts, they would do well to look to the experience of Japan.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The biggest surprise for equity investors in 2011 was not the weakness of the crisis-ravaged European markets, but the carnage in the stock markets of the emerging economies.
Imagine the US economy shrinking by 30% over the past four years, the Chinese economy growing at 2%, not 10%. Imagine UK house prices down 60% and commodity prices sliding back to the levels of the mid-1970s.
The biblical parable of the talents contains a timely warning for the gold market. In the story the master distributes his wealth between three servants. The first and the second put their capital to work in businesses and generate healthy profits. The third, scared of losses, buries his share in the ground.
Sovereign downgrade? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Such is likely to be the response of any investor in Japan to the news that Standard and Poors has removed its triple A rating on US
The world has come to think of Japan as the economic equivalent of Duran Duran – an over-hyped 1980s phenomenon that has fallen into justly deserved obscurity.