Last night we went to a brilliant play we missed earlier, the adaptation of 1984 by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan now in London’s The Playhouse under the arches of The Embankment. Inevitably, and a bit fatuously, the revival referenced recent events like the Edward Snowden revelations and how our internet and social media use leads to our lives being monitored.
For a pro writer like me, the key takeaway from the performance was the importance of language, with the hero employed in the Oceania Recdev to advance Newspeak, removing words from Oldspeak (aka English) to make it impossible to say or even think against dictatorial Party doctrine.
Snowdon is not a hero like Orwell’s Winston Smith, in my view, among other reasons because his persecution is inefficient! Marketers are not Big Brother! Contemporary social media traps are easier to escape than 1984.
Take Facebook‘s decision to favor notes from those people “friended†over news or sales notes. This is intrusive and biased but it is hardly the thin edge for imposing dictatorship on us.
Asia was mixed today with Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Karachi, and Bombay all up, although Tokyo barely, and Shanghai down. In London trading today, the FTSE 100 is up over 0.53% while the smaller FTSE 250 is down fractionally. European markets are all buoyant. Johannesburg and São Paulo are down.
However, world stock markets are on the way to chalking up their worst performance since January for June according to Reuters. On the other hand, Dow-Jones’s Marketwatch says today is the most bullish day of the year and calls some shares ready for a 98% rise in market price.
Two major bits of news for my US holdings, not in the Model Portfolios of course. Alcoa (AA) will split in two defying attempts by its Australian jv partner Alumina Ltd (AWC) to block the spin off of the upstream assets. And GE Capital, having exited financial operations, is no longer on the US “too big to fail†list.
More for paid subscribers follows with news from Spain, Britain, Denmark, Canada, Mexico, Israel, India, Singapore, China, the Philippines, Brazil, Fin-, Hol-land, and Colombia.
Banking
*I paid $3.32 per share yesterday for Virgin Money as it rose 19.3 pence while I was writing up the idea, to GBX 242.3 (GBX is market code for British pence). Moreover sterling recovered nearly 3% as well so we may have been hit by a “dead kitten bounce†in the pound. Time will tell.. The VM UK share is still down GBX 32.5 from a week ago, before the Brexit vote came in.
Consumer spending is now expected to decline because of concern about the UK economic future and higher food prices, according to new polls. So maybe credit is not the growth engine I expect. Note also that buyers of other Virgin lines like music are also being sold VM products and credit cards.
*Once again, Banco Santander (SAN) failed its annual US stress test, along with Deutsche Bank (DB) because of “broad and substantial weaknesses†in their capital structure. Both Euroland banks’s US arms will be barred from paying dividends to their parents or doing buybacks because of concern about the capital adequacy of their US banking arms, which Uncle Sam wants them to separately incorporate, so he can check on their liquidity. Morgan Stanley (MS) was told to sharpen its pencil and improve its numbers by year-end, the only US bank sanctioned.The Financial Times mocked the exercise: “does my capital look too big in this?†but it is serious.
