Is this the digital worlds last frontier? “We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain” –Stephen Hawking Looking at a map depicting global internet user penetration verifies this thought, but also leaves an important and impactful fact unmentioned: the significant gap between African countries, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, and […]
Recovery will take more than street parties and more bins. For politicians and pundits, the death of the British high street has long been a refrain. The pandemic has accelerated the existing trend towards online shopping. In its recently published ‘levelling-up’ plan for post-pandemic recovery, the UK Government sets the context for its new high-street strategy […]
Originally published April 2021. Markets were shaken but unstirred by the collapse of Greensill and the Archegos unwind trades. Credit Suisse is the ultimate loser of the two scandals – reputationally damaged and holed below the water line. The bank is paying the price of years of flawed management, poor risk awareness, and its self-belief […]
A casual geographic inspection of property yields across the UK’s CRE – inclusive of its PRS – reveals a premium not merely outside London, but the entire South. To be clear, this ‘Northern value discount’ does not capture poor fundamentals. Rather, it reflects a stubborn capital market bias and so an opportunity to enjoy the […]
In the autumn of 2009, I moved from Birmingham to London. At that time, the highest headline office rent in Birmingham’s central business district had just been set at 1 Snow Hill. Returning to Birmingham some 10 years later to head up Sanderson Weatherall LLP’s Birmingham office, the highest headline office rent has not yet […]
Originally published January 2021. A few months ago I came up with a simple way to categorise companies and their shares based on their most important attributes. For me, those most important attributes are quality, defensiveness and value. When combined in various ways these attributes give rise to eight overlapping categories, as shown in the […]
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To read or re-read the first four chapters of French Reconnection, please follow the link at the bottom […]
There is a tendency to over-emphasise China at the expense of a full appreciation of the activities of other foreign actors, including entities from the European Union. Investment inflows over the past 20 years introduced a steep change in the stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) in West Africa from an estimated US$33b in 2000 […]
Last week, I went to an airport. This was my first time since February 2020 – a period of over 500 days. I felt both excitement and trepidation at revisiting this once too-familiar routine. Just a few years ago, I might have passed through an airport a hundred times in any 500 days, an energy-draining […]
The Church of England has confirmed plans to apologise to UK Jews for medieval antisemitic laws, put in place centuries before the church itself existed. The anticipated apology is a curious one, especially as the modern British Jewish community has not been actively calling for it. The measures in question, put in place by the […]
