The Hole In The Wall

Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to my blog! It is a mish-mash of whatever happens to be going through my mind but if it does possess an underlying theme, economics, capital markets and finance are it. For a long time I´ve had a peculiar fascination with how seemingly distant events  – a bit of a skirmish in the Niger Delta for example, can have a huge impact on how much I pay for a litre of milk in my local supermarket.

My aim in this blog is to try and de-mystify what the markets are and how they operate, and of course their effects on us as individuals. We´re living in extremely uncertain times, something which is reflected in the volatility we´re seeing across the board in oil prices, gold, currency exchange and especially government treasury bonds in the European Union.

I´m aware that for many of us the financial pages in the press appear to be a non-sensical cross between sudoko and scrabble, full of jargon, void of clear explanations... which is a great pity because underneath all the industry terminology is information that has a direct impact on almost every aspect of our lives.  From how much we pay for a tank of fuel to what our pension is worth. Property prices, electricity bills, interest rates and unemployment levels. It´s all in there, we just need to coax it out in language we understand.  

Over the course of 2012 we´ll dissect events as they unfold, but at the same time I´ll endeavour to provide some background information. We´ll find out just what quantitive easing is all about. How does a credit default swap work? What was the gold standard? What is the EFSF? Where does the IMF get its money? We´ll gradually build up a glossary of terms and I might even do the odd profile of the main players so we´ll be able to answer questions like: Who the hell is Herman van Rompuy and who has ever voted for him?

The idea is to keep it as simple and light-hearted as possible. I´m no economist but over the years I´ve asked lots of silly questions on lots of forums and occasionally people were patient enough to explain something I didn´t “get”, or took the time to point me in the right direction for some relevant further reading. I’ll attempt to impart some of the information I've gleaned, here…