MoneyWeek's best calls of the last 25 years – the key trends we got right

We didn’t make any specific calls in our first edition, but flicking through it at the British Library the other day (none of us have a copy), I was struck by how we managed to highlight important themes that recurred during the subsequent 25 years and remain relevant today. They included the flaws inherent in the euro, the burgeoning British public sector, the need to hold technology stocks for the long term, cybersecurity, and the wisdom of investing in gold. It proved an auspicious beginning.

By issue 50, we had started to notice that raw materials were historically cheap following a bear market throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Commodities, like other assets, move in long cycles, and a turnaround seemed likely. Supply had dwindled as producers discouraged by low prices had cut output, while some commentators were beginning to factor in a step-change in demand as Chinese industrialisation moved up a gear. The developing world’s improving living standards also implied strong demand for agricultural raw materials and soft commodities such as coffee.

It wasn’t the first time we’d mentioned gold in a bullish context, but we looked at it in detail on the cover of our 96th issue. In her editor’s letter, Merryn noted that “in the face of dollar weakness and America’s fast-rising money supply, gold has begun to reclaim its natural position as a financial hedge in troubled times”. US dollar weakness has come and gone over the past 25 years, and a lower greenback is, of course, bullish, but the main driver of the structural gold bull market that started in 2001 has been concern over the ultimate impact on fiat currencies of far-too-easy money and continual monetary experimentation. Central banks have piled into the market to ensure their reserves are not too skewed towards paper money, and investors have joined the party.

Most of the US market commentators we enjoyed reading were not based on Wall Street, so they tended to look beyond CNBC’s talking points. This is the earliest warning I could find in MoneyWeek that the run-up in the American property market was starting to look overdone. Of course, it kept going for another couple of years (we are often a bit early, as our bullish Japan cover in 2004 illustrates). But when the bubble eventually burst, it turned out that the market was at the centre of a web of inter-related, vastly complicated credit-based financial instruments that transformed a downturn into a 1930s-style meltdown.

That brings us neatly to one of the most prescient and insightful articles the magazine has ever published. In September 2006, almost two years to the day before the Lehman Brothers went broke, Cris Heaton wrote a beginner’s guide to credit derivatives and their potential for causing trouble. It included the most complicated flowchart any of us had ever seen. “Far from cutting risk, the spider’s web of derivatives could push it through the financial system, with losses in unexpected places.”

When it came to wealth protection during the credit crunch, our regular contributor James Ferguson (now at the MacroStrategy Partnership) had a fantastic run. In February 2008, he told readers to stay away from the Icelandic banks, despite the tempting 6%-plus interest rates on offer. “If it’s Icelandic, then be afraid; these banks are starting to be priced for bankruptcy risk, and it’s not clear what protection UK savers might have with these foreign accounts.”

In September 2015 most pundits would have laughed if you had said Donald Trump could become US president or that the newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn could do well in a general election. We warned readers that in truth, Trump and Corbyn were just the vanguards of a new political reality and that they’d better prepare their portfolios accordingly. Since then, populism on both the left and right has proliferated, and the atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic has become ever more febrile. We also pointed out that populism meant central banks would almost certainly print vast sums of money come the next recession. Once Covid arrived, that is exactly what happened.

In the markets section of issue 1,000, we reviewed how central banks had subverted capitalism by constantly interfering in market and economic cycles. Artificially low or zero-interest rates prevented Schumpeterian creative destruction, leading to zombie companies and resulting in continual bubbles in asset markets. We said we thought all the monetary dysfunction would be resolved through a nasty bout of inflation. It was. Milton Friedman used to say that inflation follows money printing with a “long and variable lag”. The artificially created cash on the demand side collided with fractured supply chains and a jump in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the supply side.