In a recent article, I made a reference to the price of Amazon shares reaching a ridiculous 150 forecast earnings. The price of a company is an indicator of the market’s confidence in its abilities to generate cash and return this to shareholders. The higher the P/E ratio is, the more confident that investors generally […]
Have tech valuations lost all semblance of reality? Read More »
If you’ve been following global financial news, you’ll have noticed the increasing wave of emerging market crises that are spreading around the globe. From South Africa to Turkey, Argentina and Venezuela, emerging markets are facing a torrid time. Add Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and China to the list, and what started out as a currency crisis
Browsing the headlines this morning, I spotted an article from an Australian source talking about how one million property owners are about to default on their mortgage payments. Admittedly, I’m not 100% certain how many people are in the Australian mortgage market, but one million defaults sounds like a significant volume to me. The key
Multiple governments have recognised the need for modern infrastructure, capable of delivering and enabling high performance across our country. As with many issues in the political sphere, ministers have taken it upon themselves to craft a ‘long-term plan’, currently entitled the National Infrastructure Delivery Pipeline. I’ve got to admit, I’m a little sceptical of politicians
As you will likely have read, the UK Ambassador to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow has today delivered a signed letter to EU Council President, Donald Tusk providing formal notice of the UK desire to leave the EU and triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. This follows months of debate over whether June’s referendum
Earlier this month, Aaron Petrou was jailed was three years and eight months after admitting conspiracy to defraud through a two scams involving land banking and carbon credits. Using the false name of Giles Beaumont to sell Carbon Credits (under the guise of ‘Green Investments’), Petrou netted a £1.7m from almost 70 people. According to
Once again, Greece is back in the news following a fallout between European governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over how to handle the on-going bailout of the country. According to the IMF, Greece needs to be cut a bit of slack on its punitive debt repayment schedule before more funds are released. According
In the summer of 2016, I wrote an article about the Panama Papers, the offshore industry and international taxation. The article was brief, but decried the lack of transparency which seemed to be costing the world dearly in lost tax revenues. It’s been pretty much half a year since I wrote that article and I
What has happened to the Offshore Industry since the Panama Papers? Read More »
Anyone that has ever watched Dad’s Army will recognise these famous words, usually frantically yelled by the blustering Private Jones as a situation dissolved into chaos… Now, I’m not usually one to advocate panicking. Indeed, it’s usually a complete waste of time. In most situations of adversity, I tend to lean towards an attitude of
Infrastructure; if people and commerce are the lifeblood of our society, infrastructure are the veins through which they flow. Whilst I could hardly claim to be an expert in economics, I feel reasonably confident in asserting that a correlation exists between long-term growth in a country, and its level of investment in infrastructure. Of course,
Is The West in financial collapse? I might not be an LSE educated economist, but it seems obvious to me that my side of the planet is facing some pretty serious economic challenges. Across Europe and America, inequality is rising, as are housing prices and unemployment. Bank rates remain at ludicrously low levels (even being
For many people, achieving income from savings and investments has been a struggle for the better part of ten years. With interest rates at record lows of 0.25%, the interest from cash deposits is negligible and unlikely to improve soon. The search for income is becoming increasingly difficult in an environment of low-interest rates, but that
The search for income in an environment of low interest rates Read More »
Unless you’re living under a rock, chances are that you’ve heard the news that Donald Trump has somehow won the 2016 US election and is going to be the next President. Whatever your political slant (personally, I wasn’t a fan of Hilary Clinton, but wouldn’t have voted for Mr Trump either), the reality is that
International taxation used to be the purview of a number of niche tax specialists, rarely catching the interest of national government’s or gaining significant public coverage. All of this changed in April 2016 with the advent of the Panama Papers – an enormous leak of documents from the firm Mossack Fonseca, detailing the intimate financial
Today, it was announced that the Greek government and the institutions of the EU had finally come to terms over a third bailout for the heavily indebted country. As an outsider with only limited information on the negotiations available, I can only speculate at the exact contents of the negotiations, but it seems clear that
Negotiation in the Eurozone; a failure of leadership Read More »
