Originally published February 2021. The word of this extraordinary winter in Paris has been couvre-feu. The very expression is still heavy with associations from the 1940s occupation, even if the order to “cover your fires!” was originally intended to protect medieval wooden cities from burning down. The mid-January tightening of France’s latest couvre-feu – to […]
Originally published April 2021. When thinking about successful emerging market investing, the following quote comes to mind: “In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons.” (Maya Angelou, American poet and civil rights activist). The notion to watch and learn before arriving at conclusions is particularly important in rather […]
Originally published January 2021. With the government under pressure to tackle the UK homes shortage, social housing offers yield opportunities to high-net-worth investors. As a developer in the North of England dealing in high-volume but relatively inexpensive units, at the start of 2020 we anticipated continuing demand from the same high-net-worth clients and property funds, […]
Updated draft legislation has clarified many issues but there are still areas of uncertainty. As explained in our article in June 2021, the Government’s policy objective for Residential Property Developer Tax (RPDT) is to collect additional tax from residential property developers to fund the cost of remediating cladding issues which has been/will be borne by […]
Buying a football club can still be lucrative – with the right business tactics. Many Newcastle United fans cheered the announcement on 7 October that their club had finally been sold for £305m. The sale, to a consortium headed up by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, adds to a long list of clubs bought by the mega-rich, […]
Destination shopping will return, says this writer. Having had so much change forced upon us by this cursed viral crisis, we can all be forgiven for despairing that things will never again ‘settle down’. And yet they will, albeit at a different kind of normal from what we considered normal before; itself merely the latest in our […]
Originally published January 2021. In 1929, when an American congressman compared England’s longest river unfavourably with the Mississippi, the MP for Battersea, John Burns, quipped: “The Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history.” Burns was not one for hyperbole. The Thames, which flows from the Cotswolds in the west to the North […]
Blair and Brown presided over unprecedented growth in our banking sector with their ‘light touch’ regulations. The result was the creation of mammoth banks, systemically critical, but fundamentally flawed. When the credit crunch hit in 2008, there was no option but to bail out these same banks. They went about this task by taking them […]
In 1862 we got the Gettysburg Address, in 1941 it was Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy and in 1983 it was Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech. This year it appears we’ll have to settle for Greta Thunberg’s “Blah, blah, blah!” keynote speech at the youth climate summit in Milan. As bad as it was on the merits, it certainly suffers from bad timing. […]
It worsens the housing crisis – but there is a fix. The UK’s housing crisis hardly requires an introduction. It affects people across the housing spectrum – from leaseholders stuck with flammable cladding to tenants in overcrowded housing. The past decade has seen a 141% increase in rough sleeping. And the National Housing Federation puts the estimate for council housing waiting lists at 3.8 million […]
