Is the bubble only starting?

READY for a melt-up? Investors are generally upbeat about the prospects for equity markets this year but one intrepid fund manager thinks it is likely that American share prices could rise by 50% in the next six months to two years. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the identity of that pundit: Jeremy Grantham.

Mr Grantham, one of the founders of the fund management group GMO, is best known for a cautious approach to valuations. He was one of the investors who got out of the dotcom boom well before the top. His firm’s most recent prediction for seven-year returns are for an annual loss of 2% from American largecap equities; indeed among all the asset categories, only cash and emerging market equities and bonds are expected to produce a positive real return over the seven-year period. 

So how can Mr Grantham justify his views? He does not...Continue reading

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Are America’s airports the worst in the world?

SOME airports are known for being the antithesis of elegance. The reputation of Luton Airport in Britain was famously trashed by a television advert for Campari, a posh drink, in the 1980s. In the clip, a well-dressed man offered a drink of the stuff to a fashion model on holiday and asked, “Were you truly wafted here from paradise?” She replied in her full cockney accent, “Nah, Lu’on Airport!” Its reputation as a place to fly from has never quite recovered since. In August it was named Britain’s worst airport by Which?, a consumer group.

But at least Luton’s terminals are modern and safe—and that cannot be said of others around the world. In this week’s print issue, Gulliver’s colleagues from around the globe have reviewed some of the world’s worst airports. These range from departure lounges with no toilets in...Continue reading

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2018 will be the year that large, incumbent companies take on big tech

ACCORDING to Ginni Rometty, IBM’s boss, the digital revolution has two phases. In the first, Silicon Valley firms make all the running as they create new markets and eviscerate weak firms in sleepy industries. This has been the story until now. Tech firms have captured 42% of the rise in the value of America’s stockmarket since 2014 as investors forecast they will win an ever-bigger share of corporate profits. A new, terrifying phrase has entered the lexicon of business jargon: being “Amazoned”.

The second phase favours the incumbents, Ms Rometty believes, and is starting about now. They summon the will to adapt, innovate to create new, digital, products and increase efficiency. The schema is plainly self-serving. IBM is itself fighting for survival against cloud-based tech rivals and most of its clients are conventional firms. Yet she is correct that incumbents in many industries are at last getting their acts together on technology.

Enough time has elapsed for even...Continue reading

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New research reveals simmering misunderstanding under the tree

IS THERE any other time of year when good intentions and materialism converge so tightly? The caring, the artistic and the diligent spend their days before Christmas wrapping gifts. Whatever lies inside, their love for the recipients will also be expressed through paper, tape, bows and ribbon.

Then it all goes horribly wrong. New research* into the unwrapping of presents by two professors at the Yale School of Management and one at the University of Miami bravely applies rigour where sentimentality has long ruled. Their paper draws on a half-century of studies by scores of economists and psychologists as well as fresh field trials using hundreds of people from three universities.

The result is, for wrappers, a distressing discovery. Americans spend $3.2bn a year on wrapping paper. Yet their work not only fails to enhance joy, it creates unrealistic expectations that lead to discontent. Gift wrappers may think they are transforming the mundane into the magnificent; recipients seem...Continue reading

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America’s Department of Commerce imposes a tariff of 292% on Bombardier’s C-Series jets

Flying away from Boeing

A YEAR ago Dennis Muilenburg, the chief executive of Boeing, the American aerospace giant, had a big problem. Tweets written by Donald Trump, America’s newly elected president, were hitting Boeing’s share price. Their value was initially lifted by the new president’s promise of extra spending on defence. But in December last year Boeing’s shares fell after a tweet from Mr Trump suggested that an order for new presidential planes worth $4bn should be cancelled. The newly-elected president then picked a fight with its rival Lockheed Martin over its new fighter jet; Boeing’s executives were left in fear of being the next target in his gunsight.

And so, it seemed, Mr Muilenburg came up with a plan: snuggle up to Mr Trump’s “America First” agenda to avoid the flack. Boeing started to stress in its press releases how many American jobs it was creating; it asked to president to unveil the first 787-10 jet produced in February and in April it filed a trade case against Bombardier,...Continue reading

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Russia’s dysfunctional funeral business gets a makeover

Stiffer competition is coming

THE calls began shortly after Yulia’s grandmother died. The undertaker offered help arranging the funeral, for 47,000 roubles ($800) in cash. She then travelled to Moscow’s Khovanskoe Cemetery, where she was offered a discount on a gravesite—150,000 roubles off—if she could bring cash within three hours and sign a receipt saying she had paid half that amount. Yulia (whose name has been changed) and her family gave in. “We knew we were paying a bribe, but what else could we do?”

To bury a loved one in Russia often means entering an underworld of corruption and red tape. The myriad goods and services needed, from preparing the body for burial to funeral arrangements to carving a headstone, all represent opportunities for extortion in a largely informal market. “Instead of a funeral as a commercial service, the consumer is offered a strange sort of quest,” writes Sergei Mokhov, editor of The Archaeology of...Continue reading

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An experiment with in-home deliveries is under way

AFTER staying at home one afternoon for a delivery of discounted toilet disinfectant that never came, Valentin Romanov, a Stockholm IT manager, installed a special lock on his flat’s entrance. When no one is in, deliverymen unlock the door and slip packages inside. Four months on, Mr Romanov has doubled his spending online and says he cannot imagine life without in-home deliveries. These are sweet words for delivery firms and online retailers, Amazon included, that are setting up partnerships with lock manufacturers to overcome a big hurdle for e-commerce.

Conventional deliveries fail so often that a parcel is driven to a home an average of 1.5 times in the Nordic region, says Kenneth Verlage, head of business development at PostNord, a logistics giant operating in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It is an expensive inefficiency made worse, he says, by the fact that recipients have still often had to wait for a failed delivery. Some couriers leave packages on doorsteps, but this invites theft....Continue reading

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