Are you tired of all the squabbling over Brexit? Have the playground, one-upmanship promises of the General Election worn you down? Are you feeling deflated after the euphoria of the Cricket and Rugby World Cups? Don’t worry… some innovative research by The Weekly suggests that times may well be getting better soon. But let’s put ‘good/bad-times’ into some sort of context first. For instance, the Annual UN Happiness Index ranks the UK fifteenth (out of 156 countries). That’s not bad, is it? As expected, the Nordic and Scandinavian countries topped the chart again… which The Weekly finds slightly curious given that their weather is even worse than ours! Anyway, the index focuses on a number of key themes including GDP per capita, healthy life-styles, generosity and our perceptions on corruption. In each of these categories, the UK scores rather well with rankings of between nine and twenty-six. However, it seems we let ourselves down when it comes to ’a healthy freedom to make life choices’. Here we only rank sixty-fifth. Really? Presumably… a perception of a growing nanny state, red tape and over-regulation may have influenced this score. Or maybe we are just falling behind the pack by not prodding our politicians hard enough or often enough. After all, since the turn of the Millennium, (excluding this one) the UK has only had five General Elections and two referendums. Compare that with Switzerland, who, ranked sixth overall in the Happiness Index, have had five General Elections and 181 (yes really!) referendums over the same nineteen year period. So… would you like a change and (presumably) be happier? Perhaps we should we put it to a vote?

The MSCI/IPD numbers for Q3 2019 continue to show the income return generated from All UK Property at 4.6% pa. Compared with the bond market, that is nothing short of spectacular. Ten year UK Government bonds are currently yielding just 0.7%. And if that is not enough to convince you to increase your allocation to real estate, take a look at the completely bonkers pricing of European bonds. French, German, Danish and Swedish ten year bond yields are all negative. And would you credit it, Greece… yes, Greece… has recently joined the bandwagon too. They have issued a three month €487.5 million bond at -0.02%. Adding it all up, there is now about $16 trillion of negative yielding stock globally in issuance. What is that all about? It doesn’t make any sense at all to The Weekly.

The Weekly has traced the world rankings of the England ODI cricket side and the England rugby team over the past sixteen years. You will recall that the cricket team spectacularly won the World Cup in July and the rugby team fell just short in the final of the RWC earlier this month. Their respective pathways have been remarkably similar. For all those would-be ‘Stattos’ out there, this probably doesn’t come as a great surprise. After all, somewhat spookily, the two latest head coaches have both been Australian, and eight players on each side have, near-enough, the same names – Eoin Morgan/Owen Farrell, Jonny Bairstow/Jonny May, Jos (Joseph) Buttler/Jonathan Joseph, Tom Curran/Tom Curry, Joe Root/Joe Marler, Ben Stokes/Ben Youngs, James Vince/Jamie George, and Mark Wood/Mark Wilson. But… and this is where our ground-breaking research comes in… (as shown in the graph below) if you square up the two teams’ world rankings (cricket-orange and rugby-blue) and overlay the UK’s GDP numbers (green), lagged by two years to allow for the national feel-good factor to kick in, it is pretty obvious (!) that the Bank of England‘s GDP forecasts for 2020-22 are far too pessimistic. A simple correlation points to the probability that ‘Good times are about roll’. Of course this all depends greatly on the outcome of the General Election, Brexit, whether the cricket and rugby teams can sustain their winning ways, that the Scandinavians don’t take up cricket or rugby anytime soon, and that the next Government doesn’t introduce Swiss-style referendums. Otherwise The Weekly is pretty confident that this prediction (like most of the two leading parties’ election promises) is based on sound and robust assumptions!! We wouldn’t recommend you bet your Christmas dinner on it, though!