Beware the return of politics

Investors used to be able to more or less ignore politicians, says John Stepek. Not anymore.

I was in the pub with a financial adviser friend earlier this year, not long after the Brexit vote. Being based in Scotland, he'd already seen his business disrupted by the independence referendum in 2014, and now, post-Brexit, he was worrying about the prospect of a re-run. "I've been in this business for 30 years," he told me. "But I've never spent as much time thinking about politics as I have this year."

I know what he means. There was a time, before the financial crisis, when markets would cheerfully shrug off political leadership. The blissful assumption was that most nations were heading in the same direction. An embrace of shareholder capitalism, free trade, "independent" central banking, and minimal interference in markets was inevitable.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.