2022-09-27
Russia🇷🇺 is most likely the first and only country in the world where people flee not because someone invaded their country, but because they invaded another country. pic.twitter.com/TzKnoBldP7
— Mikhail Khodorkovsky (English) (@mbk_center) September 27, 2022
Wrap
A couple of Fed Presidents (Evans, Mester and Kashkari) are reassuring markets, which went down but bounced a bit to end just a tiny bit down ($NDX up 0.5%, $SPX down 9bp). Bond yields were up everywhere, but especially in the UK where gilt yields (10Y) were up 25bp. The Euro and JPY were down, but the GBP was flat after three days of heavy selling.
Worth a look
The FTSE has taken a hammering over the last few days. Maybe with the pound so weak, overseas earners such as BP and Shell as well as GSK and GLEN might be worth a punt. This is not investment advice!!
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Thoughts
I listen occasionally to the podcast called “The Rest is Politics” in which Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell agree about politics far too much. One topic that came up when I listened today was why the coverage in the mainstream media of failures in the NHS take up so much more space than coverage of failures in state education. The two pundits agreed that this was because the mainstream media is full of people who would never dream of sending their own kids to state schools.
The unsaid thing was that these parents would be happy to send their kids to grammar schools, except that they tend to live in London where grammar schools are long gone. Campbell in particular dismisses grammar schools as intolerable because they increase inequality (not defined), and carefully states only that he attended a ‘state school’ (not a grammar school, which he did in fact attend).
UKIP is the only party which actively advocated for the return of grammar schools. Supporters of it were derided by the bien pensants like Rory and Alastair, but these schools were the only mechanism by which clever working class kids could get to Oxbridge. If this increases inequality, I’m all for it.
It’s not that I am mindlessly in favour of grammar schools, it’s that I’d like some considered discussion of the pros and cons of these schools. Just like I enjoyed the detailed discussion of the role of IQ in ‘The Bell Curve’. Burning books is wrong!
I’ll stop ranting now.
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