MoneyWeek

It is usually better to be early than late, unless you are going to a dinner party. MoneyWeek prides itself on being early or punctual: we decided we liked gold in September 2002 (it is still going strong), not long after the long-term bear market bottomed; two months before Northern Rock disappeared we warned that a credit crunch was coming; and we became increasingly wary of banks in early 2008. In one case, however, we were very early indeed – Japan. We have been advocating the market since 2003, but only in the last few years has it begun to look as though it has truly shaken off its seemingly endless torpor. It is now at 33-year highs after a seemingly endless series of false starts. There were some impressive…

The 35th Sunday Times Rich List, topped by Gopi Hinduja this year with an estimated £35bn fortune, has registered the first annual fall in the number of UK-based billionaires since the 2008 financial crisis, says Robert Watts in The Sunday Times. There were six fewer billionaires in 2022 (171 in total) and their collective wealth, despite posting a nominal £30.7bn gain to £683.9bn, fell by 4.5% when adjusted for inflation. “The party is over and it’s time to sober up.” Shares in satellite venture Virgin Orbit have collapsed and founder Richard Branson (pictured) has seen his fortune shrink by 43% to £2.4bn. Denis Sverdlov, the founder of electric-vehicle maker Arrival, which was worth £10bn at its stockmarket debut in 2021, has dropped out of the list, as has Alex Chesterman.…

Japanese “equities have had many false dawns” in the 30 years since the 1980s bubble burst, says Gearoid Reidy on Bloomberg. “Bull markets have arrived with great fanfare... only to quietly peter out.” Say it quietly, but perhaps this time really is different. Japanese stocks have reached 33-year highs, with both the Topix and Nikkei 225 indices climbing to levels unseen since August 1990. Despite the gains, the Nikkei remains some 25% short of its 1989 peak. “The four most dangerous words in investing” are “this time is different”, says Jacky Wong in The Wall Street Journal. Yet there “are indeed grounds for optimism” about Japan. Corporate governance has been gradually improving since former prime minister Shinzo Abe initiated reforms in 2014. Local shareholders are now joining foreigners in pushing…

The centre-right’s victory in last Sunday’s Greek election (see page 11) has given local assets a boost. The Athens Stock Exchange General Index has surged by 29% since the start of 2023, while the government can borrow at cheaper rates than Italy. “Greece was in the eye of the storm during the eurozone crisis, an apparently doomed economy forced into painful measures” after years of economic mismanagement, says David Smith in The Sunday Times. GDP plummeted by 23% in the five years through 2014. Yet Greece is now something of a growth champion. Since pro-business prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis took office in 2019, growth has outperformed both the wider eurozone and the UK. There has been a 44% inflation-adjusted rise in investment since 2019. “If we could have figures like…

Singapore and Hong Kong have long vied for the title of Asia’s top financial centre, says Banyan in The Economist, but it is clear that Singapore wins hands down. Hong Kong’s standing has been sunk by the imposition of a “draconian national-security law” in 2020 and its notoriously unaffordable housing market. Meanwhile, “stringent pandemic travel restrictions compounded the sense of claustrophobia”. Roughly 200,000 expatriates have left Hong Kong in three years; “in 2022 the number of foreign professionals in Singapore grew by 16%”. Growth has also diverged. In 1997 both cities had similar GDP per person; “today Singapore’s is 1.7 times higher than Hong Kong’s”. Hong Kong retains the edge as a wealth-management centre for now, with $4.6trn of assets under management, compared with $4trn in Singapore, says Nathaniel Taplin…

Chilean president Gabriel Boric risks “killing Chile’s golden goose”, says Lex in the Financial Times. The left-wing leader plans to nationalise his country’s “vast” lithium industry. Lithium is a key ingredient for the lithium-ion batteries needed to power the electric-vehicle (EV) revolution, says Eduardo Porter on Bloomberg. Combined, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia “account for 61% of the world’s identified lithium resources”, with “52 million tons dissolved in underground lakes of brine in the highlands of the Andes”. Latin America also boasts other green metals, such as 40% of the world’s copper and 25% of its nickel, says The Economist. “Resource nationalism” is on the rise. In Bolivia, where “property rights have been thrown down a mine-shaft”, foreign investment has dried up and the country has struggled to produce the metal…