INSIGHT

SORBUS Spotlight: The new global economy

April saw the release of the International Monetary Fund’s latest forecasts. On the basis of the IMF’s five year forecasts the 2020s will see the weakest growth amongst the advanced economies as a whole in five decades. And whilst the emerging economy will also slow, relative to the 2010s, it will remain at a much brisker pace.

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SORBUS spotlight: Is the British gloom overdone?

It is very easy to be gloomy about the British economy. Indeed, Spotlight sounded rather downbeat in the aftermath of March’s budget. But whilst the prospects for the British economy are hardly sparkling, it may be the case that the gloom is now being overdone.

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SORBUS spotlight: Tariffs and the dollar.

We have discussed the impact on asset prices of the “Trump tango”, but we wanted to explore the US dollar more closely. The two words that have cropped up the most so far when analysing the economic impact of Donald Trump’s second term have been ‘uncertainty’ and ‘tariff’. Indeed, the two have often been used together. It is not difficult to see why.

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SORBUS spotlight: European growth

Last Autumn Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s rate-setting executive committee, made a speech simply entitled “escaping stagnation”.

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Nvidia

On Monday, Chinese company DeepSeek claimed that after investment of a mere $5.6m it was able to replicate the functionality of, what were deemed, the leading AI models. DeepSeek R1, its new “reasoning model”, was released on 20th January 2025 and has already become the top free app on the Apple Store (source: Apple Store), startling its rivals and stockmarkets.

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SORBUS spotlight: The Uncertainties in 2025

It is traditional for investment banks, brokers and research houses to put out their year ahead outlooks in December. In general, such documents mostly repeat the consensus and attempt to stand out with a few bold calls. It is equally traditional for many of these bold calls to have proved wrong by the end of January.

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SORBUS spotlight: Trump

It was not too long ago that “political risk”, the notion that an election result or a political decision could seriously impact upon asset market returns was primarily the concern of investors in emerging markets.

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BUDGET REFLECTIONS

Labour won a loveless but decisive majority in the UK general election in July promising to be “stable and boring”. Their budget was both and neither.

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SORBUS spotlight: China Watch

Spotlight tries to make a habit out of casting a closer look at China at least once every six to eight months. The reason for this is simple: China is too large to ignore.

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SORBUS spotlight: longer and more variable

Regular readers of Spotlight have probably become slightly bored of references to changes in monetary policy taking “a long and variable” time to impact upon the economy. Nonetheless, the point remains a crucial one.

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