This writer supposes there must be a world out there
worth investigating… Some day, anyway.

2022 has been a frenetic year for markets – watching the Truss debacle bring down the whole economy by unravelling the Virtuous Sovereign Trinity of competent politics, a stable currency and a sustainable bond market it’s taken the UK 500-plus years to establish. In the US we’re watching the over-mighty dollar, the prospects for political gridlock and the collapse of the Big Tech Growth Stock consensus.

It’s all fascinating stuff for the English-speaking media to cover in depth – which they have done to the exclusion of absolutely anything else. However, I am reliably informed there is plenty of other ‘stuff’ – just as consequential – going on around the globe. Things like a looming political crisis in Yoorp, China turning insular and wanting to invade Taiwan, plus a general recession about to crush the global economy.

Gosh… Who knew?

And, as usual, it’s we Brits, and the Yanks, who will likely be blamed for it all.

I came to that shocked realisation that there may be a world outside the Anglosphere when the editor of The Property Chronicle idly asked me a simple question: “Why do we spend so much time thinking about Anglo-Saxon politics and markets, but so little time examining the fundamentals behind Europe, the politics and markets of France, Germany or for that matter Japan?”

I did a quick trawl through my own commentary website, The Morning Porridge (www.morningporridge.com) and came to the conclusion that 40% of my market articles are about UK matters, 30% US, 10% China, 10% Europe and 10% rest of the world. Does the rest of the world matter so little? I hear there is a property market in China, oil in the sands of Arabia and some rather good horseless carriage-makers in Italy and Germany (though not in France, apparently).

If I was a fervent Brexiteer (I’ve had that particular stuffing knocked out of me), I might conclude that 30% of my time spent outside the Anglo-Saxon economic multiverse is time wasted.

I could recall my early days working for a US bank, where it quickly became clear only one of the managing board actually had a passport.