Archive

2026 Politics: Nine Guesses & A Certainty

• In what promises to be another year fraught with uncertainty, politics and markets will again be dominated by the United States in general and Donald Trump in particular.
• Widely differing views of equity market prospects demonstrate this, i.e. the ‘bubble is about to burst’ doomsayers versus the bullish seeming consensus on Wall Street.
• However, the biggest challenge facing investors is focusing on what really matters amid the continuing ‘noise’ emanating from the Trump Administration in particular.

By Alastair Newton

Syria, The World And Markets

• The consequences of the Syrian civil war spread much more widely even than its immediate neighbourhood. The collapse of the Assad regime stands to have a similarly widespread impact, including on the Russia/Ukraine war, the prospects for reform of Germany’s debt ceiling, and oil.

By Alastair Newton

EU Politics: A Tale Of Three Cities

(With apologies to Charles Dickens)

• Faced with, at best, floundering governance in the short- to medium-term, at least in both Berlin and Paris, investors should be doubly concerned at the distinct possibility that the incoming College of European Commissioners will be significantly weaker than the outgoing one.

By Alastair Newton

Germany Unemployment Rate 5.9% (consensus 5.8%) in Nov-23

- Germany's unemployment rate in November 2023 surprisingly increased by 0.1pp to reach 5.9%, its highest level since May 2021.
- The current rate is 0.25 percentage points above the one-year average and 0.36 percentage points above the long-run average.