FT's Stuart Kirk: Only two events have mattered in my 30 years of investing

Key topics:Most geopolitical events have had little lasting impact on marketsChina’s WTO entry drove major global growth, inflation and trade shiftsCovid-19 debt surge may shape future inflation, rates and policy risks.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Stuart Kirk.When children are in such a funk they reject everything, it’s useless offering more options. Burgers, pizza, sushi? No, no, no! The only way out is to flip the onus. OK, tell me what you want.Heads explode. Being forced to give a positive answer instead of dismissing all and sundry is a challenge. And one I’m embarrassed to say it’s time to set myself. I’ve spent decades arguing that not much matters for investors. So what does, eh?I’ve been pondering this again recently as another war comes and goes without huge repercussions for returns. Sure, oil traders have wet themselves. But for the rest of us — so far — it’s the same downy uppity as ever.Indeed, in previous columns I’ve shown that geopolitics can mostly be ignored when it comes to asset prices. Likewise, interest rates, tax regimes, governance and whether your favourite colour is blue or green.Most of this was known to me before I started as a portfolio manager three decades ago. The historical data is unequivocal. Looking back now though, it still amazes me how little the events we were freaking out about at the time actually changed anything..Read more:.South Africans still paying the price of Long COVID: Exhaustion, anxiety and cognitive decline.The Asian and Russian crises in the late 1990s barely distracted us from the money we were making in dotcom stocks. The lifts didn’t stop working at midnight on December 31 1999, either. When the crash eventually came, it was over in 24 months.The financial crisis was even shorter. All but $30bn of the troubled asset relief programme money — some $440bn — has now been paid back. US banks will report bumper profits (and bonuses) next week. Plus ça change.And you can imagine working at Deutsche Bank during the Eurozone debt crisis. Boy did we panic over Greece, Spain, the lack of a fiscal union and the like. It all blew over, didn’t it? Indeed the countries we worried most about are booming now.But it’s not only the Brexits, tariffs and Ukraines that fail to smother returns, as we thought they might. Sky-high valuations don’t seem to bother investors either. Nor do extreme equity concentrations, autocracies as trading partners, or any of the supposed “megatrends” such as demographics or climate.What makes a difference, then? If I’m the moaning child who keeps shaking my head, is there anything over my career that has had a meaningful effect on investment returns?Actually, there are two. The first — China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 — has had a massive impact on economics and finance. Right before it happened, I remember sitting in a Sydney office listening to arguments about why the Australian dollar — commodity-heavy and internet-light — would depreciate forever.Nope! Thanks to easily the biggest consumption of natural resources in history, the country of my birth has been rolling in money ever since. At its peak, China accounted for half the world’s copper, aluminium, cement and iron ore consumption.Meanwhile, the toys, gadgets or furniture we once looked after so carefully dropped so far in price as to become disposable. The west couldn’t buy enough and was soon racking up massive trade deficits with China.The corresponding savings glut — written about for years by my colleague Martin Wolf — was a major reason for a decades-long fall in global inflation and borrowing costs. Got a bond or credit trader friend with a mansion and Ferrari? Cheers WTO.The second is Covid-19. Unlike the above, however, in some respects it’s too soon to tell. The worst repercussions are still to come.We know governments took on huge levels of debt during the pandemic. Some vital, much squandered. Few politicians recite the spending numbers today. They are too big to swallow. Some $5tn of Covid relief funding in the US was more than 10 times gross disbursements from the financial crisis. The low single-digit billions spent per day in Iran or on the Artemis II mission are irrelevant in comparison.In many western countries, unsustainable net debt to output ratios would be around a fifth lower if it wasn’t for the pandemic. If bond markets eventually swoon, the writing of blank cheques during this period will be much to blame..Read more:.The Economist: Trump’s trade victims shrugging off attacks - and China is gaining.It’s also too soon to tell because post-Covid, voters now demand that governments bail them out of every problem — from oil shocks to expensive student debt. This makes it impossible for politicians to make vital reforms, say to welfare.So yes, two things have mattered over my investment career so far. I’m not sure I have the nerves to handle a third right now..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT's Stuart Kirk: Only two events have mattered in my 30 years of investing

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