China’s ports are humming, its exports booming to the point that it is causing evident stress in maritime trade. Freight rates are soaring and dockside space is becoming limited, threatening production and raising costs across the board. Despite the macro strength – and the vote of confidence this has received from forex and equity markets – the last few weeks have been testing ones in credit. Once more the nation’s vast superstructure of debt has creaked and groaned – but just about held firm, once more. One of these fine days…
Category Archives: Trade
A recent, long post on Linked-In relates the story of how an attempt to set up a business recycling aluminium cans in the city of Toulouse in France failed for reasons of cost, lack of customer appetite, and ultimately out of the sheer technical impossibility of achieving the desired 100% ‘Green Loop’ for which the enterprise – La Boucle Verte’- was named.
Last week, as the Trade War with the US worsened – and as the assault on China’s flagship telecoms company, Huawei, was intensified – President Xi Jinping, accompanied by his chief trade negotiator, Liu He, made a highly symbolic visit to Jiangxi, the starting point of the Communist Party’s fabled ‘Long March’ in 1934. [First […]
Please find links to some of the commentaries made as part your author’s role as investment strategy adviser to Phenix Consulting & Asset Management over the course of 2018. ‘Market Movers’ provide updates on developments in and projections for commodity markets themselves while ‘Primary Concerns’ presents the L/S fund’s monthly results:-
For many an age, a principal element of Britain’s strategy in its frequent wars with its Continental rivals was that of the naval blockade. Throughout the long years of increasing mastery of the High Seas, the nation’s fleet admirals, frigate captains and often forcibly-impressed jack tars were frequently to be found, hovering just beyond the […]
The so-called ‘war’ over trade being conducted by the US & China has given rise to much ill-informed commentary about its supposed benefits, its prospective victims, and China’s putative responses.
Previously featured by the good folk at Real Vision, my look at how the narrative we construct around the events of the market is all important in determining how we react to it and, hence, what further ramifications these might involve.
Going into to their 21st May referendum on energy policy, the Swiss find themselves confronted by some dreadfully misleading propaganda – issued not just by the usual motley crew of environmental extremists and green rent-seekers, but also by a government whose own tortuously-constructed programme is at stake in the vote.