weekly-roundup

My good friend, John Reade, chief strategist of the World Gold Council, picked up the latest Shanghai Gold Premium, something we haven’t seen for a while. Gold on the Shanghai Futures Exchange normally trades at the same price as in the global market, but occasionally it deviates. Currently, gold

LVMH (MC) has become Europe’s most valuable company. Last year, they sold €80 billion of luxury goods from 75 different brands, mainly in fashion and clothing. The business of luxury is remarkable because it seems to be one of the few areas outside of software that can make supernormal

UK House prices are back in the news because they have been coming under pressure. Unsurprisingly, that has sent the housebuilding stocks downwards, some more than 50%. That appears to be a painful correction, given how shallow this fall in house prices has been thus far. Are the Housebuilders Forecasting

Yesterday, the US reported that core inflation had cooled slightly from 4.8% to 4.7% for the year, although flat on the month. Digging a little deeper, it was only goods prices that fell, with energy, services and food all a little higher month on month. What is really

Finally, we see the beginning of the long-anticipated monetary normalisation in Japan. This is the only country in the world to still have negative interest rates, which is odd given inflation has been rising, albeit modestly to Western Economies. This ultra-loose policy has seen bond yields remain close to zero

In theory, government bonds are risk-free because they pay an income guaranteed by the government, but that doesn’t mean that prices can’t be volatile, as markets showed last year. To demonstrate this, I show the synthetic prices of UK Government bonds, known as Gilts, since 1990. The 2-year