For the past fortnight, the story in every market I follow has been roughly the same one. A Fed chair sounds hawkish at a symposium in Wyoming, rate hike odds climb, bitcoin and gold both take a knock, and everyone settles in for a long, cautious September. I had more or less accepted that as
Two Weeks Of One Story Read More »
Everyone wants to talk about the spreadsheet, the ISA allowance, the interest rate, the right fund. Almost nobody wants to talk about the six inches between your ears that decided, long before you opened that spreadsheet, whether you would feel calm or panicked looking at it. That is your money mindset, and it is doing
Money Mindset: The Inner Work Nobody Teaches Read More »
On September 1, two separate government and industry reports landed within about an hour of each other, and together they described a labour market that has a name economists actually use for it: low hire, low fire. It sounds almost reassuring until you sit with what it actually means if you are the one hoping
Nobody’s Getting Fired. Nobody’s Getting Hired Either. Read More »
If you follow markets at all, you know something happened in Wyoming in late August, because Jackson Hole always makes the news. What almost nobody outside crypto circles noticed is that a second, genuinely consequential gathering happened in that same corner of Wyoming ten days earlier, and it was arguing more or less the opposite
Wyoming Hosted Two Money Conferences. One Made Headlines. Read More »
I sat down on a Sunday evening with three months of my own bank statements and the mildly smug expectation that I would find nothing much. I write about money for a living. I was fairly sure my own outgoings were already sensible. They were not. Not disastrously; nobody was about to repossess anything, but
I Audited My Own Spending. Here’s What I Found Read More »
Somewhere in New York this year, a professional tennis player lost their very first match at the US Open, packed up, and went home a hundred and forty thousand dollars richer. Not the champion. Not even close to the champion. Someone whose entire tournament lasted a single afternoon. That number stopped me, and the more
The Tennis Player Who Lost Round One and Still Made $140,000 Read More »
Once a year, a few hundred central bankers, economists and investors gather in a valley in Wyoming for something called the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, and once a year, financial media treats whatever gets said there as though it were scripture. This year there was a genuine reason for the fuss. Kevin Warsh, only recently
Jackson Hole, Translated Read More »
Every year, around the last week of August, I do the same thing. I open the notes app on my phone, and I reread whatever I wrote myself back in January. And every year the first feeling is the same. Not pride. A small, specific dread, the sense of having somehow run out of road
Four Months Left, Not Four Months Behind Read More »
The Morning I Stopped Checking The Mirror First There was a stretch of my life when the mirror was the first thing I consulted every morning, as though it held the actual verdict on how the day was going to go. I do not remember deciding to stop doing that. What I remember is noticing,
I Got More Attractive by Doing Less to My Face Read More »
The Currency Counter I Remember Years ago, before I understood any of this properly, I stood at a currency exchange counter in an airport and watched the pound buy noticeably less of the local currency than it had the year before. I remember feeling almost personally offended, as though the exchange rate had done it
The Dollar Got Quiet, and Emerging Markets Got Loud Read More »
