We came across an interesting article from The Independent which states that Paris is now Europe’s largest stock exchange. London has fallen from first place.
Britain has lost its position as Europe’s largest stock market, as Paris overtook London for the first time since records began in 2003.
The Independent
The hurt for Britain doesn’t stop there. The Atlantic recently had an article that summarized how Britain became Europe’s poorest country.
In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s
The Atlantic
government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and
poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages
and stunningly low productivity growth. Although British media worry about robots
taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018,
the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined
by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets)
increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an
interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the
robots’ jobs.”
We have yet to encounter any country that follows an “isolationist” path that leads to better lifestyles and if anyone reading this can point one out, please let us know. We like these type of articles because it demonstrates that each country on earth is a lab experiment. What was Britain before it’s isolationist ways? It was a global empire, expanding trade and commerce everywhere with a strong currency and now it’s done the opposite losing the top stock exchange status is but another metric as how far London has fallen.
The UK’s fall is a good example for what may happen to the United States as some political parties pursue isolationist policies. There are amazing parallels between the UK and US, both countries have demographic crisis, both are/were overextended and both were seeking for solutions in the wrong places.
We’ll keep a sharper eye on France now that it is the investment exchange capital of Europe and see what investment opportunities pop up. In the meantime, stay tuned and stay solvent…