China has been hurt by Covid. The response of the national government has been a catastrophe, and the capabilities of the healthcare sector in China have been shown to be extremely feeble, both the capability of developing vaccines, and the ability of the country to deliver …
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Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) said “Any life, when viewed from the inside, is simply a series of defeats.” An old friend of mine, somewhat given to pessimism, always used to argue that only people who were clinically depressed had a realistic view of the …
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While I was producing a meal this evening, I caught half the interview of Emily Maitlis and John Sopel with Keir Starmer. I try to avoid listening to what politicians have to say. They occasionally have ghost-written pieces in the paper, but these are mostly excruciating. Active politicians …
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Matt Levine is always worth reading. Signing up to his newsletter is about the highest return investment you can make in the world of finance (the fact that it’s free helps with the ROI). He manages to make complicated ideas in finance funny and easy to …
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Today was quite scary. There was a lot of economic news today, most of it bad. This included retail sales, industrial production, PPI (down) and capacity utilization (down). Bonds rallied, but particularly at the five-year maturity. Rather than the curve steepening across the full range of maturities, it …
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Our masters are those who managed to climb the greasy pole the fastest. Their reward is their dominion over us. Life’s also-rans may not be happy about this state of affairs, but probably console themselves with the idea that …
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This calendar year has started with a burst of gloom:
Rising interest rates, driven by central banks trying to fight labour shortages by making capital more expensive,
central banks promising to double down on their fight against inflation, in spite of the pain being …
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All right-thinking economists dismiss gold as money. Keynes famously declared it a ‘barbarous relic’. But even after all these years, the yellow rock still gets investors and journalists excited (e.g. in today’s FT)
Part of the appeal of gold is its …
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