Worldwide Financial Planning

The US has also felt the effect of unintended consequences as the bitter divisions which caused the government shutdown seem to have dented consumer confidence in the run-up to the key holiday shopping season. Any downturn in activity may turn out to be fleeting, as was the case with the UK last year, but it is a good example of how short-term political expediency can trump our national long-term interests.

There's an old line I once heard from a retired trawlerman and, oddly enough, from a nervous investor in the same week: “When the sky turns black, you don’t debate the charts, you head for the lighthouse.” In a market storm, when headlines scream and spreadsheets freeze, some things are meant to just work. Gold, for many, is/was that lighthouse.

Unless you are a furloughed government employee or you had planned to visit US national parks or museums, the immediate effect of a shutdown may be hard to see. But the longer the shutdown drags on the more problems become apparent.

Part three in the series on gold. If gold is, as some insist at the bar to me, “the thing that never lets you down,” what does the evidence actually say about its performance?

President Trump’s whirlwind Asia tour has seen a series of high-stakes summits, with markets closely watching his interactions. The much-anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping produced a one-year truce on trade tensions.

After World War Two, the world was exhausted and searching for structure. Ration cards and rubble gave way to grand visions. In 1944, at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, delegates from 44 nations built a bold new architecture.