Perspectives
A New Gilded Age
July, 2020
During the gilded age in America, a few industrialists like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John P. Morgan, among others, had a strong hold on the American economy. In many ways, the companies they founded and ran were the tech companies of the day because they developed new and scalable solutions […]
Russian Roulette
July, 2020
The Russian author Leo Tolstoy noted in his novel, Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike whereas each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same can be said for investing, admittedly without the flair of Tolstoy; All good investment decisions are alike whereas all bad investment decisions are unique in their […]
On Globalisation
July, 2020
Globalisation is a term that is used a lot. Very few however, truly understand how globalisation has transformed the world other than through the goods they purchase being manufactured overseas. Globalisation has four key components: trade, capital flows, flows of people and the sharing of intellectual capital. Each component, although independent of each other, works […]
The Coming Inflation
July, 2020
In 2010, just after the global financial crisis of 2008, a long list of esteemed economists and commentators were signatories to an open letter sent to then-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. The main point of the letter was to serve as a warning that the large-scale asset repurchase program, which later became known […]
When the Tide Goes
July, 2020
The recent revelation of fraudulent activity in the German payment processor and financial services company, Wirecard AG, has once again dented investor trust in auditors. Wirecard was previously a member of the DAX 30, the German equivalent of the DOW 30 in the USA. For a company of such size, importance, and prestige to be […]
After Covid
June, 2020
As Lenin put it, “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” Certainly Covid 19 comes at the end of a long decade punctuated by crisis; Financial, Euro and Brexit but the pandemic has changed the world beyond recognition in a matter of a few weeks in a way that […]
Something New
June, 2020
As the search for a cure and vaccine continues, a simple and uncelebrated method of reducing transmission of the virus has revealed itself – the humble face mask. Face masks can be thought of as a very primitive vaccine. The analogy is quite crude since masks do not provide the user with immunity. However, immunity […]
Moral Hazard
June, 2020
Moral hazard is a concept that does not get talked about a lot in day to day investment commentaries but at Tacit we believe it is something that poses significant risks and therefore should be considered carefully. In economics, moral hazard occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because […]
What is Sustainability, Really?
May, 2020
As the pandemic and the secondary effects of the lockdowns have unfolded, global equity markets have declined. Some ESG (Environmental Social Governance) funds have actually had very muted declines, relatively speaking. This is mainly because they have avoided most of the hardest hit sectors of the economy because of their environmental impact – the energy […]
Kitchen Sinking
May, 2020
The major consequence of the global financial crisis in 2008 was a decade of “austerity” where the excesses of global finance in the run up to the crisis were paid for in a decade of cuts to public budgets. In the famous formulation of the time, “profits were privatised but losses were socialised.” Having lived […]