Feature

Deciding how best to ease the UK's coronavirus lockdown is proving as divisive as Brexit.

The first quarter was a rollercoaster for global credit markets with a severe, homogeneous sell-off, followed by a sharp, if more modest, central bank-induced recovery.

The global lockdown has decimated some businesses with those in leisure, travel or retail seeing revenues collapse to zero.

During the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, recovery was largely in the hands of the governments bailing out troubled companies and providing liquidity to the system.

Investors who have sat out the bull market in precious metals may wonder if they have missed the train.

2020 will be remembered by UK income investors for decades to come.

Following the financial crash of 2008, investors have benefited from a decade of bullish markets, and while there were indications that a slowdown was on the horizon, economic stasis caused by a flu pandemic was not on anyone's radar.

Emerging markets have underperformed global and developed market indices over the past ten years, in spite of having greater opportunities for earnings growth.

A steep contraction in the UK economy is all but inevitable. Indeed, the latest survey data points to a sharp drop in activity since the start of the Covid-19 crisis.

With the UK facing the prospect of the sharpest drop in economic activity for more than 300 years, now seems a challenging time to be searching for growth.