The bad news is, everything's awful. The good news is, everything's so awful it can only get better. Convinced? The City Grump is....
After five years of being told I was a miserable moaning minnie, now everyone everywhere is in despair. That’s good news, time to get back into our equity markets. It has been a long wait but at last all is gloom apart, of course, from the short-term splendid palliative that is the Olympic Games for our armchair enthusiasts.
From the “greatest show on earth” to the worst. So:
UK GDP numbers are dire.
Osborne is being called “a Chancellor on work experience”.
Cameron says it will be 2020 before we emerge from the financial swamp
Our banks are out of control.
The Financial Times entitles an article on AIM, “Pond life” and suggests all companies with a market cap of less than £10m should leave.
Pension funds and insurance companies hold the lowest percentage of equities for forty years.
Everyone with more than two brain cells now admits that Euroland is finished in its current form.
The US is politically paralysed as the traditional Punch and Judy fest, known as the Presidential election trail, gets under way.
World food prices are going to rocket as corn yields, etc, are biblically awful.
China is slowing down.
The Middle East becomes scarier by the day.
South American economies are heading south and then there is that crazy lady running Argentina.
Oh and lastly, there is the frightening possibility that arch FSA opportunist, Lord Turner, might talk his way into the Governorship of the BoE.
In short everything is awful. Even our very own irrepressible Charlie Mullins says the Olympics is bad for business. But this is great. You see when everyone has given up that means, to put it in the context of equity markets, everyone who was going to sell has by now done so. When there are no sellers left then, guess what, share prices go up!
More than 200 years ago the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty said:
“buy when there is blood on the streets”.
Well there is plenty of the modern-day equivalent all around us. Over the 21st century ,most stock prices of companies at best are back to where they started or are substantially…
