News & Insights

Japan spent $59bn in a single day defending its currency. The US then joined in and paid for it by selling euros, not dollars. Here's the chain reaction, and why it doesn't stop at Tokyo. The yen hit a 40-year low last week. Japan intervened at record scale. Then, for the first time in over a decade, the US Treasury joined it buying yen through the NY Fed, funded by euro sales, executed via Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Why would Washington bother? Japan holds $1.19 trill

The amateur's error in forecasting is to fall in love with the point estimate. The professional's job is to price the distribution around it, and the past two weeks in oil markets have been a live exam in exactly that. The setup first. On 3 July the Ministry of Industries, Mines and Energy cut Walvis Bay petrol to N$22.48/litre, correctly, off a June of truce, Brent near USD 70 and healthy over-recoveries. Four days later the truce collapsed. Within a week merchant ships were

Our World Cup model got the winner wrong. It also got almost everything that mattered right. That distinction is the point. One month ago, we published a forecast based on 100,000 simulations. France was our central pick, and France is out after losing to Spain. Our single best estimate of the champion was wrong. The broader model was not. The four teams with the highest probabilities were France, Spain, Argentina and England. Those were exactly the four teams that reached t