Which US asset classes perform best or worst amid periods of high inflation (6% or more)? Answer: commodities perform best, while bills perform worst. It’s commonly recognised that bonds are not a good inflation hedge – and they aren’t – but less recognised is that equities also fail in this regard; each has returned only […]
Bruce Springsteen selling his music to Sony for a half-billion dollars has gotten me thinking about my music and what I might get for the songs I wrote when my radio show was touring the country, such as my song for Milwaukee (“Where men still wear hats they look rather sporty in/And children still take […]
How land commissions can lead the fight against urban land grabs When Boris Johnson sold the 35-acre Royal Albert Docks in London to Chinese buyers in 2013, it was his biggest commercial property deal as mayor of London and one of China’s largest investments in the UK. The Greater London Authority sold off further parcels of land in […]
Last week, I started the discussion of the great debate that is actually turning into the great resignation. Employees are talking with their feet and when a company starts demanding that they come back to the office they make the choice that it’s time to find a more humane company that understands the trials and […]
Free enterprise is fascinating, especially for us socialist communists who want to make the world into a dormitory with a cafeteria where on Mondays everyone has mac and cheese and on Tuesdays franks and beans, and so forth, but with free enterprise you get to see old empires crash and bold upstarts take over the […]
A niche idea that won’t save the high street. There have never been so many different ways to shop for groceries. The biggest chains offer customers a choice of vast superstores, smaller branches and online options to buy from home. Now some of the UK’s best-known supermarkets are experimenting with checkout-free stores. Following Amazon’s lead (it […]
We’ve come a long way, baby, but we still have a long way to go! Wow, 40 years is a long time and the commercial property market has come a long way. We’re now a legitimate asset class. We have lots and lots of people following our industry, and we have more journals and other publications focused […]
How we decide who and what to believe We appear to live in an age of misinformation. Certain broadcasters and social-media celebrities openly promote fake facts or misrepresentations of science and data to their audience, many of whom do not seem to care whether they are right or wrong, as long as they are hearing […]
The news on 2 December will have brought a beaming smile to the person responsible for the morning meeting at the Bank of England. They will have been able to leave all the house copies of the Financial Times open at this page. UK household wealth reaches record high despite economic hit from Covid. Such […]
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 […]
