Tag Archives: Comment

Christmas. It’s not just a day. It’s a feeling. Just ask Mariah and Bing. How then to describe the anger, the anguish, the grief of December 2020? We’ve dreamed of this Christmas like no other. Yearned for it in a year of lost lives and shattered livelihoods. Just days ago …

The last chairman of the Federal Reserve to move from the US central bank to the US Treasury – G William Miller – did so at a moment of turmoil. In the final years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, inflation was out of control, unemployment rising and the dollar falling like …

What is the element of human interaction that you crave most in lockdown? For many of us, it has to be touch. People who live alone obviously suffer most from the absence of physical contact. But even I, living with a husband and three tactile children, have moments of so-called …

As a Brexit supporter, I naively thought that the City would find ways of emerging relatively unscathed from leaving the European Union. Even if there were an exit of some jobs and asset management mandates to Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, the trading and innovative skills of Britain, in areas such …

Shops take on temporary workers to cope with the rush, delivery companies are working overtime, Royal Mail finally has something other than junk to put through the letterbox (more than 1bn Christmas cards are bought into the UK every year), pantos are booked out at the theatre, and the restaurants …

Equity markets are attempting to stabilise after the tech-led sell-off at the end of last week, but the lack of direction from the US on Monday means we are waiting on the Wall Street cash equity open to get a true feel for sentiment. European bourses traded a little lower …

When Royal Mail (RMG) was privatised in October 2013 many suggested it was being sold off too cheap. Given that the hugely oversubscribed IPO price was at 330p and the stock opened up at 450p, that seemed a fair criticism at the time, especially give the healthy profits for those …

ALEX BRUMMER: Europe’s feeble bail-out will not be enough to head off large scale unemployment By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail Published: 22:42, 21 July 2020 | Updated: 23:14, 21 July 2020 The longest summit in the European Union’s history finally has delivered a result. The £680billion Covid-19 rescue package …

Equities enjoyed a good second quarter, with the FTSE 350 rising 20 per cent. You’d expect, therefore, that high beta stocks (those most sensitive to moves in the aggregate market) would have done well. And they have. My portfolio of them rose 41.2 per cent in the quarter, thanks in …

ALEX BRUMMER: Chancellor Rishi Sunak will have to make the most of limited fiscal capacity if a jobs catastrophe is to be averted  There are 9m employees on furlough  The formal data we have so far on the Covid-19 shows a peak to trough fall of a whopping 25 per …