Latest news with #Britishism
Bloomberg
03-05-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
Thou Shalt Not Live by Panettone Alone
I've always been fascinated by the Britishism 'gobsmacked.' The first time I heard it, I thought it was vile because back in the US a 'gob' was something you hawked into a spittoon — not the kind of culinary experience I tend to write about. However, that's not how the adjective is used here in the UK. The website for the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks English usage through the centuries, says its meanings can range from 'flabbergasted' to 'astounded' to 'speechless or incoherent with amazement.' Being gobsmacked might throw you for a loop — to use an Americanism — but it needn't involve something you want to expectorate. Earlier this year, I was gobsmacked by the luxuriousness of what's being called the 'marble panettone.' Self-described 'pastry provocateur' Gianpaolo Bassi has concocted it with several items of fashionable foodism: low-gluten heritage grains, butter from the Italian alps, costly manuka honey from New Zealand and tough-to-harvest, supposedly therapeutic birch sap. The key innovation? It is leavened and baked in marble vessels originating in the Carrara quarries in Tuscany, from which Michelangelo took the stone he chiseled into the monumental David. The calcium carbonate in the rock is said to lower the acidity in the final loaf, which arrives on a marble serving platter. It is a rectangular block, not the traditional globe in a plus-size cupcake wrapper. The marble panettone is also packaged in an elegant box of pale wood. If all that doesn't leave you 'incoherent with amazement,' maybe the price will. There is yet to be a price set for the basic model — but, like a Lamborghini, you can customize your panettone with special ingredients. Adorned with chocolate, candied fruit, chestnuts, raisins, all the above and more, the top-of-the-line version can set you back £1,000 ($1,330).
New European
19-02-2025
- Politics
- New European
Few silver linings for Playbook's new boy Jack
But among the political class, it's POLITICO's Playbook that's gathering attention for all the wrong reasons. Playbook is the morning email almost everyone in DC reads – it has a Westminster equivalent that fills a very similar niche – while complaining that it's not as good as it once was. Washington DC is a city that knows its priorities. The federal government is in disarray, the president is ripping up the post-world war two security compact and the US might be in the biggest peacetime constitutional crisis in its history. Playbook was recently taken over by a new author, Jack Blanchard – a well-liked and highly regarded journalist in the Westminster lobby, but a virtual unknown in Washington DC. Few have accused DC of being welcoming to newcomers, but POLITICO's decision to drop a near-total outsider into the ultimate insiders' email is prompting an early backlash. Blanchard has just had to write a mea culpa for suggesting that Trump's first month had seen more activity than any previous president – prompting a flurry of reminders from readers that Franklin Delano Roosevelt got a lot more done. But Blanchard's decision to add in several paragraphs from FDR's Wikipedia page made a bad situation even worse. 'Hiring someone with at best a passing knowledge of American politics to write one of America's premier political newsletters was an odd choice to say the least,' said former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer. 'I am a believer in the economic benefits of immigration but I think maybe Playbook should be written by an American,' said centrist commentator Matthew Yglesias, while Julia Ioffe from the Puck News site posted: 'Will agree that the latest iteration of Playbook has been, erm, subpar.' Blanchard can surely recover from this baptism of fire, but some within DC's press corps observe that he may have enemies inside the house, as well as beyond it. A few days before the FDR gaffe, one noted, he referred to the Super Bowl 'pitch' – instead of 'field' – and his editors allowed the glaring Britishism through untouched. Good to see DC has got its priorities straight.
Reuters
05-02-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Wall Street shows its 'bouncebackability': McGeever
ORLANDO, Florida, Feb 5 (Reuters) - "Bouncebackability." This Britishism is usually associated with cliche-prone soccer managers trumpeting their teams' ability to respond to defeat. It's unlikely to find its way across the pond into the Wall Street crowd's lexicon, but it perfectly sums up the U.S. stock market's resilience to all the setbacks, shocks and everything else that's been thrown at it recently. And there have been a lot: U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff flip-flops, stretched valuations, extreme concentration in Big Tech and the DeepSeek -led turmoil that recently cast doubt on America's "exceptionalism" in the global AI arms race. Any one of those issues still has the potential to snowball, causing an avalanche of selling that could push U.S. equities into a correction or even bear-market territory. But Wall Street has become remarkably resilient since the 2022 rout, especially in the last six months. Just look at the artificial intelligence-fueled turmoil on Jan. 27, spurred by Chinese startup DeepSeek's revelation that it had developed a large language model that could achieve similar or better results than U.S.-developed LLMs at a fraction of the cost. By many measures, the market move was seismic. Nvidia shares fell 17%, slicing nearly $600 billion off the firm's market cap, the biggest one-day loss for any company ever. The value of the wider U.S. stock market fell by around $1 trillion. Drilling deeper, analysts at JPMorgan found that the rout in "long momentum" - essentially buying stocks that have been performing well recently, such as tech and AI shares - was a near "seven sigma" move, or seven times the standard deviation. It was the third-largest fall in 40 years for this trading strategy. But this epic move didn't crash the market. Rotation into other sectors accelerated, and around 70% of S&P 500-listed stocks ended the day higher, meaning the broader index fell only 1.45%. And buyers of tech stocks soon returned. U.S. equity funds attracted nearly $24 billion of inflows last week, technology fund inflows hit a 16-week high, and momentum funds attracted positive flows for a fifth-consecutive week, according to EPFR, the fund flows tracking firm. "Investors saw the DeepSeek-triggered selloff as an opportunity rather than an off-ramp," EPFR director of research Cameron Brandt wrote on Monday. "Fund flows ... suggest that many of those investors kept faith with their previous assumptions about AI." PANIC MODE? Remember "yenmageddon," the yen carry trade volatility of last August? The yen's sudden bounce from a 33-year low against the dollar sparked fears that investors would be forced to sell assets in other markets and countries to cover losses in their huge yen-funded carry trades. The yen's rally was extreme, on par with past financial crises, and the Nikkei's 12% fall on Aug. 5 was the biggest one-day drop since October 1987 and the second-largest on record. The panic, if it can be called that, spread. The S&P 500 lost 8% in two days. But it vanished quickly. The S&P 500 recouped its losses within two weeks, and the Nikkei did likewise within a month. So Wall Street has passed two big tests in the last six months, a period that included the U.S. presidential election and Trump's return to the White House. What explains the resilience? There's no one obvious answer. Investors are broadly bullish about Trump's economic agenda, the Fed still seems to be in easing mode (for now), the AI frenzy and U.S. exceptionalism narratives are still in play, and liquidity is plentiful. Perhaps one key driver is a well-worn one: the Fed put. Investors – many of whom have spent a good chunk of their working lives in the era of extraordinarily loose monetary policy – may still feel that, if it really comes down to it, the Fed will have their backs. There will be more pullbacks, and risks of a more prolonged downturn do seem to be growing. But for now, the rebounds keep coming. That's bouncebackability. (The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.) Get a look at the day ahead in U.S. and global markets with the Morning Bid U.S. newsletter. Sign up here.
