Central Banks and Politics will be the dominant theme this week/month/year. Politicians are anxious to show inflation and recession are not their fault. Blame Central Banks! The Politics of Blame has profound consequences for markets.
NFTs are in the press for all the right reasons – insider trading, zero value and scams, but as digital assets in a digital world have enormous potential – for making your wallet lighter….
ESG is getting a bad press these days, blamed for energy insecurity and much else wrong with the allocation of capital. It needs to be refined: ESG version 2.1 will be critical for addressing the massive threats arising from social injustice and income inequality.
Markets remain in a major correction – but fear not. When the hurly burly is done, what goes down and survives will (eventually) come back up! As the pain bites, I recommend the wit and wisdom of Ace Greenberg, the best banking CEO ever, a man who understood the primacy of common sense.
Yesterday’s ongoing pain in crashing financial asset markets demonstrates the need to diversify portfolios and decorrelated returns. Shipping is one such asset; returns have been boosted by scarcity as a result of the pandemic – the question is: can these returns be maintained?
Markets look distinctly soft, and vulnerable to further downside pressure. The gaps between value, hype and narrative are becoming clearer – spelling opportunity, but also raising the risk of a crash.
Yesterday’s market meltdown was heralded as a “capitulation trade”, but who knows? What we do know is there an awful lot to worry about, and the conditions for the BIG ONE have been building for decades. Time to re-read The Great Crash, 1929.
Calls to break up HSBC to realise the value of its Asian franchise are a critical moment for the bank as it pays the costs of being too big, too bureaucratic and for the inability of management to spot its critical weakness…..
Central Banks have one real job: avoid inflation! It’s here, and the consequences will be devasting as conventional rate-hiking wisdom is used to fight a wholly exogenous supply side shock. There may be alternatives, but “credibility” is everything to Central Banks.
