Perspectives
Finely Balanced
August, 2020
At Tacit we have spent the past ten years investing for ‘real returns’ and feel it is important to explain why this focus is so relevant at this juncture. Investors often look at returns without taking the impact of inflation into account: a concept known as money illusion. Simply put, a £10 note in your […]
What Changes, What Doesn’t
August, 2020
In this crisis, as in any other, it is good to spend some time thinking about what permanently changes in the economy and what does not. What is temporary and what is permanent? What is structural and what is cyclical? These are very important questions, but the answers are not always intuitive especially when one […]
What Matters, What Doesn’t
August, 2020
As of yesterday’s close, the largest public company in the world, Apple Inc, has a market capitalisation which is approximately equal to the total market capitalisation of the FTSE 100 – an aggregate of the largest public companies in the UK. What may come as an even bigger surprise is that the combined market capitalisation […]
The Price We Will All Eventually Pay
August, 2020
As investors, we have a habit of focussing on the most recent events and forgetting history. Much focus over the past few months has been on the containment of COVID-19 around the world and the emergency measures used by central banks and governments to limit the economic impact of lockdowns on individual countries. This time […]
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 […]