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The death of inflation has been greatly exaggerated. Its return will ruin the traditional balanced 60/40 portfolios. Investors need to prepare for a world of greater inflation volatility and with it the possibility that bonds and equities fall in tandem.

28 mins | Ruffer Review

Remind me why you own bonds

November 2020: The future looks even more uncertain than usual. Normally uncertainty translates into lower asset prices. But not this time. And with the prices of all assets buoyed by abundant liquidity, we fear a traditional ‘diversified’ portfolio is not going to be much protection in the next market convulsion.

Hermione Davies

7 mins | Green Line

Investment Review

October 2020: Whatever one’s outlook, there have been times in 2020 when the markets seemed to echo one’s innermost thoughts, and times when we shout out like Falstaff, that the whole world has gone mad.

Jonathan Ruffer

12 mins | Investment review

The Barber Boom

The story of an economic gear shift which sent post-war Britain careering around country lanes, before skidding on an oil slick and being sent ditchward. There it was left, engine smoking, entangled in the brambles of inflation. It wasn’t until 1980 that road-side recovery eventually arrived in the shape of Paul Volcker and his inflation curbing toolkit.

8 mins | Market views

Blowing up the Box

Across many developed economies, the prevailing economic and financial policy framework – what we’ll call the Box – is failing to deliver for much of the adult population. The mood is ripe for a policy revolution, a new monetary settlement. When the Box is blown up, inflation objectives will lose their privileged position. Fiscal orthodoxy will be abandoned. This will demolish the pillars on which so many investment strategies are built.

Peter Warburton

18 mins | Ruffer Review

Investment Review

June 2020: This review touches briefly on what has gone before, then sets out what we expect for the coming months and years.

Jonathan Ruffer

12 mins | Investment review

Covid-19 and the dawn of a new market era

April 2020: The era of monetary dominance is over. Helicopter money signals investment regime changes ahead.

Alexander Chartres

8 mins | Green Line

Dismantling the deflation machine

Seeking to escape the inflation of the 1970s, policymakers have inadvertently engineered an equally powerful deflation machine.

18 mins | Ruffer Review

Gravity: suspended until further notice

February 2020: What on earth is going on? Gravity is a universal constant. But it turns out that zero interest rates can suspend it – in financial markets, at least.

Alexander Chartres

8 mins | Green Line

Investment Review

October 2019: There’s a childhood game, whose name changes each generation – currently called Jenga. It starts as a wall of wooden bricks, and successive players remove individual pieces until the loser takes one out, and down falls the edifice.

Jonathan Ruffer

12 mins | Investment review

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