Small mercies

After some uncertain times, the newsflow is getting more positive and the tables appear to be turning. Have we really come through the banking crisis unscathed or is there more bad news in the post?

Stock markets are fickle. That may sound like an excuse to explain away poor performance, along the lines of “a big boy did it and ran away,” and indeed it is. However, that does not mean it is not true. It is just a rubbish excuse. Stock markets are fickle and never more so than when they are faced with that most dreaded phenomenon – uncertainty. At the moment there is quite a lot of good news around. Admittedly a great deal of it is of the second derivative variety, such as the fact that house prices are not falling as fast as they did nine months ago, or the rate of increase in une...