Originally published October 2021. The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, was no fan of the merchants of his time. He regarded them as among the most responsible for how “the mercantile system”, as Smith called it, accorded legal privileges to politically connected producers over the interests of consumers. Nor did Milton Friedman have a […]
We are in the midst of the next evolutionary cycle. Enforced mass home-working caused by the pandemic has viscerally demonstrated that in today’s tech-infused world, knowledge-based ‘work’ need not necessarily be performed in an office. This has triggered public debate on what the future holds for offices and indeed whether they have a future at […]
Inflation in the United States was over 7% in 2021. This is dramatically higher than just a couple of years ago when it was less than 2% per year. Why did it go up? The most obvious answer – and the one consistent with an extraordinarily large amount of evidence – is the dramatic increase […]
Originally published October 2021. A decade to be optimistic? Somewhere amid the carnage of the retail sector, the existential navel-gazing of the office sector and the irrational exuberance of sheds, meds and beds (where investment yields are vanishing as quickly as the chances of Arsenal ever winning the Premier League again in my lifetime), there […]
Events in the US following the murder of George Floyd are an object lesson in what happens when policing is ripped out of communities. From Minnesota to Seattle via San Francisco, the progressive fetish of slashing police numbers in reprisal for bad law enforcement – both real and politically expedient – has been disastrous for […]
Originally published November 2021. At the onset of the pandemic, plenty of the trade-offs that societies were asked to make were of a generational flavour. Young people were asked to give up their immediate dreams, their friendships, their jobs and many of the freedoms that they until then had taken for granted. This was all in […]
What to drink in 2022. We ran out of Picpoul de Pinet last week, 2020 vintage. No big deal, stocks do indeed run dry – after all, wine is an agricultural product and the phrase, “We’re just waiting for the new vintage to be bottled and shipped” has been uttered ad infinitum by our trade […]
A story of supply and demand? In a previous article (The Property Chronicle, Autumn 2021, ‘Property Investment: Is it still worth it?’), it was argued that rents are an interaction between what an occupier thinks the space is worth and the minimum amount that a landlord is willing to accept. Ultimately, this is about supply and […]
Whichever way things are going, they’ll go a long way. Inflation was rediscovered in September. Up to that date the quoted REIT sector had risen 25%, rebounding as the economy re-opened against a rise in the All Share Index of less than half that. I’ve been pretty bullish on the sector all year, believing it […]
In this very special series of exclusive articles for The Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker reflects on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Norman has a limited life expectancy of five years from December 2018 due to a diagnosed terminal blood […]
