It’s always exciting to go somewhere new. China is so different from anywhere I’ve ever been before, as well as being the focus of so much of my work at Fathom, that my recent ten-day trip was more highly anticipated than the average holiday. I am not exactly sure what I expected in advance, aside from good food, of which there was fortunately plenty. I suppose I was hoping to increase my understanding of China, flesh out some of the

At its core, the subject of economics is about how best to use scarce resources. So, when I discovered my name on the roster to write the company blog Thank Fathom It’s Friday (TFIF) earlier this week, I immediately knew that I needed to practise what I preach, and find the time to write a decent TFIF, even though I knew that I had very little time to do so. In the end the solution was obvious: write a TFIF

More than two years ago, my first Thank Fathom it’s Friday explored the question of how Formula One could transition to net zero by 2030. The solution? Optimise the racing calendar to minimise the total distance travelled from race to race. Easy. I even offered a revised schedule. Since then, there have been 53 iterations of fast cars going vroom vroom and Dutch stars going quicker than everyone else because the Red Bull car was the fastest… But has the

All kinds of ideas have been floated on how the government could raise revenue in the UK’s Autumn Budget. From hikes on income tax or a new wealth tax, to spending cuts, income tax/National Insurance ‘two up, two down’, or even changes to the fiscal rules — the list goes on. Less discussed than most has been extending the freeze on personal tax thresholds; but this is perhaps the most effective weapon in a Chancellor’s armoury for increasing the tax

The US-China trade deal was the major economic news story this week. Fathom put out a note early on 31 October (which clients can read here), explaining Fathom’s key takeaways from this development and considering who really ‘won’. Even before it was written, the note generated a lot of internal debate. So, to keep our readers abreast of the range of views in Fathom, we thought that for this week’s Thank Fathom It’s Friday blog we’d share some of the

When Dutch traders began swapping tulip bulbs in the winter of 1636, they were not cultivating mania so much as cultivating a market — one that grew faster than the flowers themselves. A bloom that lasted only a few days each spring had become a collectible, prized for its symmetry and rarity. What followed has been described as mass delusion, but was rather a kind of social experiment in how value forms, and ultimately unravels, when enthusiasm becomes a currency

The annual announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize is a prestigious political event that always sparks attention. US President Donald Trump repeatedly expressed his desire to win this year’s prize, but in the event the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Venezuela’s opposition leader María Corina Machado for her work in promoting democratic rights. Whilst reading the news I was reminded of the Nobel Committee in 2010 awarding the prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned in

“Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard.” This is one of my favorite aphorisms, and that’s because I’ve seen examples of it in action in so many different areas of life. Across the sports we love, I’m sure we can all think of a player who took the world by storm but eventually faded away. Or even peers in school who were brilliant at understanding what was taught in class but never got around to doing the assignments.

In Salman Rushdie’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, we are introduced to the concept of the P2C2E. How does a magic carpet actually fly? It’s a P2C2E. When you say there’s a genie trapped in that lamp, how does that actually, mechanically, happen? Another P2C2E.[1] It’s a bit like the ‘flux capacitor’ in the Back to the Future series: something extremely important and impossibly difficult to explain. There are a couple of real-world examples of this floating around

I have a confession: I used to be a gold bear. I was sceptical about gold’s soaring price around 15 years ago, when advanced economy central banks launched quantitative easing and gold rose to almost $2000. Investors were betting that this might cause inflation. I struggled to see the appeal of the yellow metal — it did not provide an income stream and was not much practical use to industry. It was challenging to value, and seemed mostly to appeal to