The Scots are superstitious about “first footing”, who first crosses your threshhold in the new year. And yesterday, the first full makret day for 2015 was a right bust.
Today is Twelfth Night, Epiphany, the formal end of the Christmas season, but yesterday already hinted how things will play out. There may be no Santa Claus after all. The wealth of the east, oil, is still losing value and the cartels which have controlled it have lost their way. Nobody wants a partridge in a pear tree or an oilwell. The Three Kings' gifts of frankinsense, myrrh, and above all gold also seem to be beside the point.
Euro-denominated stocks fell on average 2.1% over renewed concern about a Gr(eek)exit. This is something like the Ghost of Christmas Past, a phantom which appears from time to time. There is as yet no good poll of the Hellenic population indicating how the Syrisa rebels against austerity will be viewed. I think the Greeks will vote sensibly rather than rebelliously. I also think there may be some give from the Angela advocates of the make-them-suffer line. The supposed threat of inflation is very hard to find anywhere in the world.
François Hollande, fighting for leftism somewhere around the Elysées Palace in Paris, has stumbled upon the Tobin tax, which he wants to revive and apply not only to stocks and bonds, but also to derivatives. The financial transaction tax in its latest variation is to pay for environmental cleanup.
Ireland has now begun exporting beef to the USA, the first European country to have exited the ban based on mad-cow disease decades ago and foot and mouth fears. Erin go braugh!
And India's stocks fell very sharply today although why this should be is hard to figure, as it gains from lower oil prices as a major importer of fuel.
Today is the last blog from England, as I fly back tomorrow when there will be no blog. So I'll tell you about Britain's charms. I am quoting from a report by brokers Charles Stanley and Reuters when I state that the UK;s appeal is as a generous payer of dividends. In 2014, the average yield of the FTSE 350 (the broad index( was 4.3%. In fact the largest and most global British companies paid out even more, around 5%.
