Videos

Udith presented on India during Gavekal's Hong Kong seminar in November. This video also includes relevant excerpts from the question and answer session.

Despite poor personal approval ratings, last weekend prime minister Shinzo Abe scored a convincing victory in Japan’s general election. In this short video interview Neil examines what the prospect of five more years of “Abenomics” policies means for Japan’s economy, corporate sector and stock market.

After Louis wrote up today’s Daily on the strange dichotomy between strong growth and moribund yields, we sat down to quiz him further on how this contradiction gets resolved. In this short video, he explains why the bond market is the thing that will probably have to give.

Slow-moving demographic trends have a big impact on asset prices. For the last 35 years, the age structure of the world’s population has created a global savings glut which has propelled secular bull markets in both equities and bonds. Now that demographic tailwind is fading. In a few years it is likely to reverse.

It is hard to open a business magazine these days without finding some grave prediction about machines eating the jobs of middle class professionals from Pittsburgh to Paris. Yet for all the agonizing about mechanized baristas in every neighborhood coffee shop, killer robots and subversive AI algorithms, it is not clear that machines are taking over. Dan has run the numbers, and in this video interview sets the record straight.

Japan’s late conversion to the cause of free trade owes a lot to the recognition that continued trade protection is no longer sustainable in what historically has been one of Japan’s most rigorously defended domestic sectors: agriculture. Demographics and changing diets mean Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate has fallen to 38%, the lowest among developed economies.

China’s onshore financial markets are opening up. Admittedly, neither last month’s inclusion of Chinese A-shares in MSCI’s benchmark indexes, nor this month’s opening of the Bond Connect scheme, will change the world immediately. But together they signal that Beijing is serious about opening its capital markets to foreign investors.

Italy’s economy is enjoying a cyclical upswing, and a long-delayed banking clean-up is finally under way. But while both these developments are welcome, they are not sufficient to change the underlying picture. Nick argues there is little chance that the general election due to be held by May 2018 will produce a government strong enough to press ahead with reform.

In this brief video interview Yanmei Xie outlines the ever-shrinking list of options the US has for solving the problem of a nuclear-armed North Korea. The risk of military action remains slim, but with North Korea's recent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile it is no longer unthinkable.

Japanese equities recently touched a 17-year high in US dollar terms and perhaps more significantly, they appear to have decoupled from their usually tight inverse relationship with the yen. In this video interview Neil considers both cyclical and structural reasons for the apparent breakout and concludes that investors should not underweight a market that has plenty of tailwinds.