Supply chains are a mess. A real mess. Go on to the strangely absorbing website www.marinetraffic.com and it all becomes very visual. Panama, Suez, Mallaca, Hormuz, all the big name areas of shipping glow up, and whilst this may not be that unusual, shipping analysts tell an expensive tale of empty ships, bottlenecks, not enough… Read More Messy

It is often instructive to see what corporates do with their cash. Some buy more machines or their own shares or a new tech stack. Some go wallet out to an auction of NFTs and drop $150,000 on a CryptoPunk with clown green eyes. Quite what shareholders muttered to themselves on reading VISA’s decision to… Read More Punting

As summer sets and Labour Day looms there is an air of boom time to markets that rip out record highs day after day. Powell played the ball with soft hands at the Jackson Hole highbrow pow-wow and investors collectively exhaled. All is good with the data which, in the main, is behaving as is… Read More Canary

It is a good time to be an M&A banker. Neptune kitchens and oversized hot tubs beckon, come bonus time. In the first half of 2021 global big-ticket M&A clocked up $2.8 trillion in deal activity. $2.8 trillion. This is the fizziest first half on record for both value and volume. Indeed, a wide-eyed Matt… Read More Deals

In late 2019 Philip Morris was added to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) North America which recognised, in the eyes of the tobacco giant’s suited PR, the company’s “exemplary sustainability performance” and “best in class” performance against the DJSI’s apparent wobbly ESG metrics. It’s a development that jars with the view of the World… Read More Scoring

‘It’s not going to be normal by September’ so the readership of the FT was bluntly informed, many apparently reeling from a market sell-off that left headline indices just a tick or two off all-time highs. The fast spreading ‘delta’ variant, by all accounts, having put paid to the much-vaunted reflation trade and hopes of… Read More Surprise

Whilst the market skulks about at giddy all-time highs there is stuff happening below the surface. Violent rotations: out of this, into that, recoiling from data that is starting to come off the boil. The 30-year bond yield just stooped below 2% for the first time since February, shepherding skittish investors back into the growth… Read More Stage left

Half-time. Not only in the Euros, but in markets too. With June all but in the can, there is much to ponder. Indices bounce about at all-time highs giving the punch bowl its punch, and for good reason. It’s been a fiesta of economic data on the upside, with everything, literally everything on a tear.… Read More Half Time

Tighten the belt. Lind Rendle on a recent call said “… we’re seeing an incredibly inflationary environment. I think that’s true in what your seeing across the industry, on both the retailer side, the manufacturer side, and supplier side, it is intense for sure”. Linda Rendle is CEO of Clorox, the purveyor of all sorts… Read More Debt

For the beleaguered executives of the retail C-suite the Covid pandemic was almost it, capping a brittle and bitter multi-year period that saw bankruptcy courts claim many peers and set in motion a slide in profits that would likely claim many more. The assault of Amazon.com on high streets and precincts savaged many a flat… Read More Paradigms