Well it certainly feels like our world is getting back to work again at last, judging by the traffic locally!
It’s been a strange week on a personal front, but I am pleased to say that after much fretting, my Son’s kidney operation finally went ahead successfully yesterday, so whilst its early days, the relief is immense.
In other news, it’s been a real mixed bag of politics and second-guessing, both with the virus seeming to return in numbers here and abroad and also with investment and sharemarkets trying to determine the way forward.
In spite of the clearly publicised issues we are experiencing in the UK (jobless concerns, ending of furlough, localised outbreaks of the virus and of course the fact that it is creeping back in as more people travel abroad once again), our sharemarkets have risen a couple of percentage points in the last day or so, amid encouraging manufacturing productivity figures. Retail sales in most areas are still in the doldrums however and certainly until we have a properly functioning civil service and public sector, I cannot see that we will return to anything like normal, as it is proving just too difficult to get things done (I’m sure we have all experienced this in one form or another, with endless waiting on the telephone and as I recently found in the case of DVLA, not even a functioning email system to use).
Fingers crossed that the return to school goes well and people within the civil service (and their Unions) feel confident enough to get back behind their desks and once again do what they have enjoyed being paid to do for the past 7 months (no furlough for the public sector!). If not, then I would expect the government to act and act hard; we cannot continue to fund a public sector to remain at home whilst the private sector suffers at the hands of their intransigence (personal view).
I have attached a link which shows the most recent performance across various sectors of the investment markets and it is largely encouraging (if only by a small margin this month), although we are still playing catch-up in the UK as I have mentioned recently.
It will be interesting to see how the US sharemarkets open later today after their day off for Labor Day (indications are that they will be up) and I suspect that here in the UK we will now start to focus more upon Brexit and, notwithstanding a severe upsurge in cases of the virus, hopefully see a rapid return to the workplace in the next couple of weeks (indications suggest that new cases of the virus both here and abroad are of a much milder nature, which is good to hear). As people return, I am sure that there will be hard decisions being made concerning jobs and this will make for grim reading, but markets have already factored a lot of these expectations into their valuations, or so one would hope.
I will keep you appraised as to what I know and expect that there will be a few twists and turns to report in the days and weeks ahead for sure!
https://www.trustnet.com/fund/sectors/performance?universe=O