Forget the tech bubble and the property bubble – now we have a government bubble

Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey of Odey Asset Management is worth listening to. He's one of the few investors who managed to make money from both the crash and the rebound, shorting banks all the way down, then buying them all the way back up. So what's he saying now?

Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey of Odey Asset Management is worth listening to. He's one of the few investors who managed to make money from both the crash and the rebound, shorting banks all the way down, then buying them all the way back up. So what's he saying now?

The big news is we're back in bubble territory. "Markets are now entering a bubble phase," says Odey. This may last "until the end of the year," he reckons. The bubble has been pumped up by the Bank of England's quantitative easing (QE, or 'money printing'). As a result, "individuals and institutions are stampeding into real assets eager to have anything but cash or government bonds... The latter are expensive because of the QE."

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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.