Philip Delves-Broughton

The Republican party is showing all the attention span of a hyperactive toddler this primary season, moving from one shiny toy to the next. Donald Trump still dominates the nursery, like some giant plastic fire engine. But the pieces are starting to look careworn and the battery is going on the siren. The former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now tied with Trump in some polls, is the teddy bear dragged around the playground a few times and now slumped in a corner. Fresh out of the box though is Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, gleaming amidst the gaggle of tired rivals. At the most recent Republican debate, Fiorina wore what seemed from podium height upwards to be an electric-blue wetsuit.

 New York It takes a strange bird to run for the White House. To think you’re worth all the fund-raising, the protection, the applause, the haters, the heel-clicking Marines. But with a mere 18 months till the next election, the field is taking shape: Hillary Clinton, still pitching herself as the nation’s benevolent grandma even after it emerged that she and her husband had in the past year raked in $25 million in speaking fees; Jeb Bush, 30 pounds lighter on his ‘paleo’ diet, trying to prove he’s not the Pete Best of the Bush family; and tucked in behind, various curiosities from the Senate (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul) and governors’ mansions (Chris Christie of New Jersey), all hoping they can channel some mysterious electoral force.

Technology businesses have a genius for inflicting indignities on us and spinning them as virtues. When they don’t want to respect copyright, they talk about the ‘democratisation of content’. When they want to truffle through our contact lists and browsing histories, they talk about ‘openness’ and ‘personalisation’. A hundred years ago, when a widow had to take in lodgers to pay the bills, it was called misfortune. Today, when an underemployed photographer has to rent out a room in his house or turn his car into a taxi, it’s called the ‘sharing economy’. First Google took his job. Now Airbnb wants his house. Next they’ll be after his pets. In fact, they already are.

Deflation terrifies economists because once it starts, they have no idea what to do about it. When demand in an economy shrinks, companies cut jobs, and with fewer employed demand shrinks even more. The deflationary spiral is self-reinforcing. Central banks can cut interest rates to near zero and slosh money around like drunken lottery winners, but once hope flickers and dies, there is nothing they can do to persuade anyone to invest in the economy. Deflation took hold in Japan in the early 1990s and despite the government straining every sinew, its economy is still ailing 20 years on. Europe is right, then, to be in a panic. Inflation across the eurozone is just 0.

There are two major schools of technology investing. The first believes that all investments these days are fundamentally technology investments. Every big company relies to a greater or lesser degree on the innovations and efficiencies of technology to replace the high costs and laggardly habits of human beings. The faster they do this, the higher their returns. The second school covets the pop and fizz of the new. It rejects the tedium of earnings-based valuations in favour of the helium of potential. It piles into the latest new share offerings and regards Twitter as the future of mobile advertising, not a punchline. One school feels like traditional, copper-bottomed investing, the other like a long night in Las Vegas. Each attracts investors with very different risk profiles.

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of 2008 turned out to be an epic buying opportunity, and you didn’t even have to use your own money.

Turn right along the American political spectrum and you find all kinds of curious species. First there are country club Republicans bemoaning the loss of their party to extremists. Then come Evangelical Christians, trying to reconcile themselves to voting for a Mormon. Further along, you find the Tea Party, crowing over their improbable rise and Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate.

What a long and nasty campaign that was. It is hard to imagine that a political race of such magnitude could be so intellectually and emotionally bunged-up. But it’s over, and we can now ask ourselves what the point was of President Obama clubbing his way to another four years of access to the White House gym. What now? Because even after so many months of campaigning, it’s not entirely clear. Certainly not the way it was in 2008, when voters swooned over his promise of hope and change. Then, Obama promised light after the darkness of the Bush-Cheney years. He would bring peace and harmony, end wars and reconcile the partisans of Washington. This time, his promises were more grounded: competence, experience and more of his statist approach to managing the economy.

Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practise neither a science nor an art but a bad game of darts. Boozed up on shoddy theory and meaningless statistics, they wobble to the oche of public life, hurl an arrow at the backboard, then blame the flight, the lighting, anything but their own incompetence, when it falls to the floor. So why listen? Why bother with their endless fainting fits over the slightest flicker in the numbers? When they try to tally the Office of National Statistics’ claim that the British economy shrank by 0.

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett may sound cuddly, but he’s talking from both sides of his mouth August was a typical month for Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man. While the leisure classes lolled, he called for higher tax rates for the rich. If America had a debt problem, he wrote in the New York Times, it was high time the rich paid a greater share of their earnings to the government. Then, two weeks later, he sank his fangs into the fleshy rump of Bank of America, one of the bailed-out giants still staggering three years since the start of the financial crisis. Buffett had been circling Bank of America for a while, hoping that its problems would force it into his arms. It was simply a question of when not if they would have to take his money.

There is nothing more maddening to an old-school investor than a bubble. And especially a bubble in which young people are getting outrageously rich. But here we are, 11 years after the last technology bubble popped, in the midst of another of those exuberant moments. Facebook valued at $75 billion. Groupon, a three year old coupon business, at $25 billion. College dropouts with a knack for programming and a devilish knowledge of our online behaviours are suddenly worth more than a roomful of Goldman Sachs partners. The valuations are crazy, the value investors splutter. There are real businesses with real earnings worth nothing like these shooting stars. It’s immoral! Well, maybe. The most dangerous thought in any bubble is ‘this time it’s different’.