Grant Williams's Contributions

Last year at this time, I wrote a year-in-review piece for 2012, which, from a retrospective angle, looked back at the events that I foresaw happening over the last twelve months (stay with me here). How did I do? Well, frankly, appallingly.

A decade that began with Britain's recognition of Taiwan and troops from the North Korean Army crossing the 38th Parallel on their way to Seoul in June of 1950, and ended with the signing of the Antarctic Treaty, by which twelve countries including the USA and the USSR (remember them?)...

Nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees lies a tiny town that boasts a mere 176 inhabitants. The town centre consists of just two narrow streets, there is little agriculture in the surrounding area, wild orchids grow in abundance, and the air is as fresh and clean as you will find anywhere on earth.

Conspiracy theories regarding price manipulation have polarized some of the finest minds in finance for many years, and many commentators for whom I have the utmost respect feel they are all utter nonsense. Personally, I believe there is no smoke without fire, and I always apply the two criteria of motive and means to any suspected conspiracy.

Investors desperately want to believe the words of the likes of Schaeuble, Geithner, Merkel, Bernanke, Obama, Hollande, and the rest of the gang, while they in turn are desperate to convey a sense of invincibility in the hope that nobody will see the real sickness that lies beneath the thin veneer of confidence.

Part of Information Theory is something called the Shannon-Hartley Theorem, which Shannon developed with the help of Ralph Hartley, a colleague at Bell Labs. This theorem tells the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise. It has become known popularly as the Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

As a kid, my Saturday nights used to echo to the cry of "Come On Dowwwwn!" squawked by Britain's answer to Bob Barker—an ageing former child star named Leslie Crowther—to eager Brits crammed into fold-down seats in a sparkly TV studio near the banks of the River Thames in a place called Teddington, which was just far enough west of London to not be considered "West London."

The list of human phobias is comprehensive to say the least. Over the centuries the human race has managed to find a way to be afraid of just about everything around it.

For over a century, the modern Olympic Games has captivated the world as the finest athletes on the planet come together to compete against one another an attempt to prove which of them was the superior competitor and to give their countrymen and women, sat at home, a burst of nationalistic pride that could transcend whatever the economic conditions were at the time.

This week saw statements released by both the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee and the ECB and, as is the norm when these pronouncements are made, every word is scrutinized for the tiniest clue as to future action.

Historically, GPIF has been one of the largest buyers of Japanese government debt and has done more than its fair share to confound those who have predicted Japan’s day of reckoning; including Kyle Bass who has been waiting an awfully long time for his view on Japan to play out as he expected.

For whatever reason, there are not very many famous ‘Cliffs’ in the pages of history. It just appears, by pure happenstance, to be one of those names bestowed upon people destined for lives of quiet dignity as opposed to great fanfare.

Fans of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books will be vaguely familiar with the name Nicolas Flamel, though, unlike the book’s eponymous hero, his wizardly sidekicks and characters such as Professor Dumbledore, Hagrid and, of course,

They say it’s always darkest before the dawn but in the financial world we seem to repeatedly go beyond ‘dark’ into pitch blackness when the periodic stumbles that are part and parcel of an ever-growing world come along.

In 1335, a Spanish author named Don Juan Manuel published a book of Castillian folk tales en-titled ‘Libro de los ejem-plos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio’ or, to give it its English title, ‘Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patriono’.

For many years, this classical conditioning has been prevalent across financial markets the world over but, while its prevalence cannot be doubted, it has remained unobtrusive for one reason and one reason only—it has worked almost flawlessly.

In March 2001, the Bank of Japan embarked upon a program that was called ‘ryōteki kin’yū kanwa’ or, to put it another way, ‘量的金融緩和’. To the vast majority of us it translated into something we are now intimately familiar with: Quantitative Easing.

For those amongst you who like tales of drunken British businessmen, unexplained deaths, cyanide poisoning, swift autopsies, mysterious political figures, Lady Macbeth type wives and police chiefs fleeing for their lives - read on.