Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
Introduction
Well, what a splendid month October was, with all the major world stock markets that we cover in this Bulletin skipping merrily upwards. Germany and China led the way with gains of 12% and 11% respectively, and if you only looked at the figures you'd be quite justified in thinking that everything in the world economic garden was rosy.
Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
The end of September, and the end of the third quarter of 2015 – a quarter which, as all the financial press reported, was the worst for global equities since 2011. As CNBC put it:
A sustained collapse in commodity prices, China’s stunning market rout followed by its shocking currency devaluation as well as fears of a Greek default and a US interest rate hike were some of the factors that made the past three months a summer to forget for investors.
Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
July was a dramatic month. Greece held a referendum and emphatically rejected the austerity package offered by its creditors. Motor-cycle riding Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned, calling the creditors “terrorists”, and the new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, was seen going into yet another final, final crisis meeting with his negotiating position scribbled on hotel notepaper. In the event a bailout was finally agreed – Agreekment averts Grexit according to the headlines – more or less along the lines of the bailout that had been rejected in the referendum.
Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
An essential part of writing this bulletin each month is making daily notes on the main business and stock market news. This month we have comfortably broken our record – more than six pages of notes. And as you might expect, about half of those pages are about Greece and its debts.
Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
It now seems hard to remember, but this time last month the UK was only a week away from a General Election – an election that was the most difficult to predict in a generation. The pundits were unanimous: the Election would certainly lead to a hung parliament. There would be weeks of wrangling and quite possibly another Election needing to be held later this year or early in 2016.
Category: Market commentary & Uncategorized
In the UK April saw the clock ticking down towards the General Election. For the rest of the world, life went on pretty much as normal: that’s to say, China and Germany remorselessly cranked out another trade surplus, the American economy gave us more mixed signals, and Greece teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
