Our views

It’s a dedicated Frenchman who consents to work in August. But the financial market volatility of the last week has seen Louis hard at it, fielding client questions about the outlook for global markets and economies. In this paper, he sets out the most salient questions, and offers his answers.

China has become another country to many global investors, who now consider the market uninvestible and so rarely choose to visit. They are missing out on seeing transformational changes whose import you only really grasp when in the country, argues Louis. In this piece, he explains that the most likely outcome is the move into a deflationary boom.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Western European powers were locked out of trading routes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Trade was hamstrung unless another route could be found to link Europe with India and China. Cue the age of the great explorers. In this piece, Louis explains why a latter day parallel of this episode in history may be unfolding before us.

Today, Charles's idea is not to say something new about China’s economy but to argue that its current dislocation is inevitable for well-documented reasons. French economist Clément Juglar explored cycles as recurring phenomena based on periods of eight to 12 years, and his ideas may be relevant to China's current predicament.

A new Biden administration catchphrase calls for a “small yard, high fence”: export and investment controls on China will be limited to a small number of critical technologies, but they will be very hard. Yanmei argues that advanced computing technologies will be locked inside that yard, while most other technologies are likely to sit outside it.

The tropical island province of Hainan was the birthplace of China’s first property bubble, an investment frenzy that took off in the early 1990s. But if China’s policymakers have their way, Hainan may also turn out to be the graveyard of the nation’s now decades-old economic fixation on property.