Bigger is better in trading blocs. And last Sunday, 15 East Asian countries signed an historic accord to form the world’s largest trading bloc, containing a third of the world’s population and accounting for around 30% of global GDP. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is bringing together the ten ASEAN members with their Northern…
The November rally in stock markets finally petered out this week as it felt as if ‘November finally got the memo about 2020’. This was despite further positive vaccine news that bolstered optimism for next year. On Monday, US firm Moderna announced that phase 3 test results of its messenger RNA based vaccine had a…
With the US Presidential election now decided (barring unlikely success in the courts), and a coronavirus vaccine by the year-end now looking a near certainty, markets are feeling positive about the prospects for 2021. But as noted before, much of the growth story for next year hinges on additional demand generated by a step up…
This week, Beijing forced out several pro-democracy lawmakers in Hong Kong, declaring them a threat to national security and putting another nail in the coffin of the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle. The move gave the Chinese authorities the power to dismiss politicians without having to go through the courts. On Thursday, President Trump issued…
Investors have enjoyed another very good week. Optimism had already returned the previous week, with the US election eventually delivering a clear verdict. This week then brought the news that literally everybody had been waiting and hoping for, and which we had portrayed as probable in our ‘optimistic case’ forward-look on these pages two weeks…
The American people have spoken; it just may take a while to figure out what they said. Since voting closed on Tuesday night, the US election has been nothing short of a rollercoaster. When initial results started filtering through, it looked like predictions of a comfortable Joe Biden victory were well wide of the mark.…
Here we go again. Having had our fun, and eaten out to help out over the summer, the UK public is back indoors for the rest of November. What the government was keen to prevent still came as hardly much of a surprise last Saturday, given rapidly-rising hospital admission numbers, the tiered shutting of regions…
The up and down markets of September resulted in what we described as a flat overall picture of consolidating markets. At first, the picture for October looked much the same, but ended with a more pronounced sell-off over the past two weeks. The looming uncertainty of the US elections, together with the return of lockdowns…
We wrote only last week that markets hate uncertainty. Given that equity, bond and commodity markets are all quite a lot stronger at the end of this week, many investors must have gained clarity, if not optimism. There are a lot of important things going on, too many to cover adequately even in our weekly,…
We have seen some impressive returns in capital markets since the depths of March. US equities stole the limelight for most of the year, soaring above their pre-crisis highs in the summer, but equally impressive has been the rally in some of the less traditional assets. On a percentage basis, Bitcoin – the much-hyped cryptocurrency…