Wall Street Journal (June 21)
Investors aren’t quite sure “how to trade a trade war.” Some obvious stocks like Boeing and Caterpillar are being hit hard, but for many others there’s a lack of information on the potential impact, “partly because supply chains are so complex.” While there’s much to “suggest that trade war fears haven’t sunk in properly,” the bigger issue is that it is challenging “to price in something you don’t understand, and the implications of a trade battle are obscure, at best.” We don’t know “precisely which products will be targeted in the next round, or how long the tariffs will last.”
Tags: Boeing, Caterpillar, Complex, Fears, Impact, Implications, Investors, Obscure, Products, Supply chains, Targeted, Tariffs, Trade war
Institutional Investor (May 15)
“The Cambrian explosion has nothing on institutional investing.” Rather than millions of years, institutional investing’s journey from small and simple to enormously complex took only half a century…. The unfortunate and ironic part is that all this innovation has done little to quell crises…. Underlying every instance of disaster is the same root: We simply do not know what we think we know.”
Tags: Cambrian, Complex, Crises, Disaster, Innovation, Institutional, Investing, Simple
The Economist (October 8)
The Brexit journey “will be complex and perilous, beset by wrong turnings, chicanes and elephant traps…. and Mrs May will determine its course. If Britain is not to suffer a car crash, she must ignore the back-seat drivers and fix her eyes firmly on the road ahead.”
Financial Times (June 23)
Some say Brazil “suffers from a complex of grandeza or greatness. Lately, though, Brazil has been big in all the wrong ways. The country is facing its biggest recession. It is engulfed by its biggest corruption scandal. It has the world’s most indebted oil company, Petrobras. This week, it witnessed its biggest-ever corporate bankruptcy” when telecoms company Oi filed for protection.
Tags: Bankruptcy, Biggest, Brazil, Complex, Corruption scandal, Greatness, Indebted, Petrobras, Recession
