Category: finance

General recommendation: Find shelters!  You will understand when reading this issue that the clouds are gathering during the end of this year and the beginning of the next. Take out your umbrellas, raincoats and wellingtons! This is not the first time that we have alerted you this way, but the GEAB is intended to signal […]

Largely criticised by some, glorified by others, cryptocurrencies keep raising questions and represent as many threats as opportunities depending where we stand; whether on the side of citizens, institutions, businesses or governments. After a spectacular rise in valuations, we are currently witnessing a collapse in the capitalisation of most crypto-assets. The euphoria is well behind […]

General strategy: the eye of the storm Like we started warning in our last GEAB issue, the utmost caution is still required these days. The appearance of recovery, here and there, is either the effect of short-term communication, or sources of disruptions with unpredictable consequences (or both). Our general advice is to stay vigilant and […]

Oil – It’s working In spite of many interests that obviously want to minimise the impact of the agreement on oil production between OPEC and its allies, and doubts related to the sustainability of the deal, it seems that Russians and Saudis are planning to extend the Vienna Agreement[1] until – at least – the […]

The anticipation work must watch closely the “weak signals”, as futurists used to call them. They are accessible items of information, but hardly reflected within the media, information which provides relevant insight into major changes in society. Paying attention to those signals, interpreting them and cross-referencing them is part of the work of any decision-maker […]

China’s decision to introduce in 2018 the gold-convertible petro-gazo-Yuan currency is an important step in the process of internationalisation of the Yuan. It confirms the will of Beijing (asserted for a decade already) to impose the Renminbi (official name of the Chinese currency) as new global reference currency. In October 2016 the IMF decided to […]

– European Automobile Industry – The long and winding road
– GM – LOL
– General Electric – Will it fail or not?
– Oil: Seesawing to its death
– Financial market: Ashes to ashes, junk to junk
– Investments – Where does the money go? 
Convinced that the emissions scandal is now behind it, the German automobile industry is ready to restart. VW (Volkswagen), for instance, lined up 440,000 vehicles in October (compared to the 310,000 last August). But two markets are about to escape VW – and not the least important …

Ten years after the Lehman Brothers collapse, the fear of another major financial crisis hasn’t totally disappeared. In a recent forum, Nouriel Roubini, one of the economists who had anticipated the 2007-2008 crisis, announced for 2020 the possibility of a new financial crisis, plunging the global economy into recession. For him, all the ingredients of […]

The future is filled with the factual data on which we base the anticipations that inform our decisions. That’s why, on a quarterly basis, our team shares with the GEAB readers the ‘raw’ data of this work in the form of an annotated calendar of upcoming events for the next three or four months. It […]

Currently, the media is marking 10 years of a crisis they didn’t see coming in the first place and questioning experts they did not listen to at the time (at best) or who became experts after its advent (at worst). Hence, it’s time to recall that LEAP/E2020 and the GEAB were among the very few who first forecasted the crisis – in the midst of complete media indifference – with a degree of detail that was barely equalled…

Europe’s out-of-time love for low-cost air carriers Europe is in love with low-cost air transport. Over the past few years the low-budget end of air transport has boomed, globally and in Europe alike. The sector grows as fast as few others. More people than ever choose air transport over railways, despite the fact, that Europe […]

While the wave of buzz and hype around cryptocurrencies, or virtual currencies, is running out of steam among people in general,[1] the movement that has emerged remains robust. The versatility of the technology, its deployment in a digital context which can quickly reach millions of people, its potentially anonymous character and the place it could […]

Following the removal of the last of the bolts imposed by the previous world order[1], and in line with our anticipations, vast amounts of until now restrained transforming energy are now being released along paths that have long been marked out but were previously forbidden. The challenges raised by this transition are immense, but the […]

At the beginning of February, the US stock markets, followed by the financial markets of the rest of the world, experienced a violent correction. In two days, the Dow Jones Index erased its January gains and entered a downward spiral. Since then, the financial world has been looking feverish. The correction developed its own momentum, […]

“Brexit means Brexit”[1]. For Theresa May, soft Brexit does not exist: an exit from the European Union necessarily means an exit from the European single market. Brexit therefore means hard Brexit for the British government. Within our GEAB bulletin no 103, we have already stated the possibility that the City might find itself “on the […]

As happens every year, LEAP/E2020 presents in January a panorama of the “up & down” main trends[1] of the coming year. Besides the intellectual added value of this contribution, which of course reflects many of the analyses our researchers made over the last few months, LEAP/E2020 aims to enable a better perception of priorities within […]

To preface our up & down trends presented in this issue, here are the orientations which we consider structuring for 2018. This panorama, combined with the 33 up & down trends, presents a vision of the landscape we see for this year.  In our latest bulletin, we took record of the end of the “global […]

End 2017/early 2018, all major Western Central Banks will be putting a final stop to the 2008 crisis-related unconventional monetary policies, namely the famous quantitative easing policies (QEs) which enabled to provide liquidity to those banks which saw their mutual confidence for borrowing collapse in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Fiscal QE in rich […]