The Spring equinox arrived this week and you can’t help thinking of change. Well, at Gravitas, we are always monitoring CHANGE. But, this week could have prompted the thought that nothing changes. Banks are imploding again. The usual suspects Putin, Trump and Johnson break international and domestic laws with impunity but still keep their liberty. And, of course, if you’re a government in perma-crisis there’s always the old reliable, Rwanda, to keep Suella and the fans of fear happy. Or hysterical. We might not share those cackles but we can be upbeat. In fact, we can see big changes ahead. Ba ..read more

Ireland still managed to beat Scotland with five disruptive injuries in Sunday’s 6 Nations rugby showdown. Injuries are part of the game but so are substitutes who can step in to keep the team functioning. But…sometimes even the substitutes get injured and then we are into Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” territory. Ireland did survive a double-whammy loss in the specialist hooker position to win but it was hairy stuff. Now, think about the banking industry this past weekend. The Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse is arguably a “known known”, the unknown bit just being the identity of the bu ..read more

Truth is under attack. The weapons blamed include a fragmented internet, social media platforms and dysfunctional political systems but let’s not go woke, let’s wake up. Deep breaths…but I’m now going to coin a US gun lobby phrase, “Guns don’t kill people – people kill people”. There it is, the scourge of modern political engagement – the data-demolished lie wrapped up in an undisputed truth. However, in the case of the battle for Truth I’m beginning to wonder are we going a bit easy on our fellow humans. Do we need to conjure up our inner-Suella and ruthlessly call out dreadful human beings r ..read more

I know it’s Lent but seriously???? The media wants us to worry about Stanley Johnson being given a knighthood by his disgraced son, Jeremy Corbyn flogging Bohemians’ football shirts and…. US right-wing presidential contenders frothing at the mouth about the threat to children from drag performances. And yet, there’s not a peep about the daily “Bakhmut” of 400 million US guns, or the jaw-dropping judicial revolt by Israel’s fighter pilots or the £80 billion loss to City prestige as ARM and CRH flee to New York. Perhaps the nonsense stuff is the flagellation our politics and media consumption de ..read more

Three days in hospital can focus the mind. Apart from some personal rebuild opportunities to look forward to, my post-op thoughts were mainly out-of-body. Sadly, not out of hospital. It was truly shocking to see many wonderful healthcare workers work within infrastructure so badly fit for purpose, and yet I’m optimistic. Maybe not yet for our health service, or “Angola”, as the ministerial department brief was once nicknamed. But further afield. We could go to “the world’s most exciting economic zone” which the Brexit Tory government now thinks is Northern Ireland but only because of its unfet ..read more

The UFO speculation of the past week did prompt a few random thoughts. First, there was the faint hope ET’s mates were coming to take Donald, Jacob, Vlad and Enoch away but no such luck. Then there were childhood memories of playing Space Invaders in amusement arcades and on ancient TV gaming consoles. And finally, I thought of Pachinko. What??? Lansdowne Road on Saturday and the Super Bowl on Sunday were the triggers, but I was thinking more broadly about the role of games in different societies east and west. Games may differ across the generations or individual countries but engagement and ..read more

Hey Alexa, play Burt Bacharach “One More Time Around” ! Sadly, Burt has has run out of earthly time and has left us to join Siri, Google and Alexa in the cloud(s). Perhaps it appears sacrilegious to mix clouds and a music god with digital virtual assistants but I’m only human. We don’t do probability. Indeed, Bacharach over six decades did the improbable as perhaps the greatest musical assistant in history; writing more than 120 Top 40 hits in the UK and US charts. On the other hand, Alexa and her Artificial Intelligence (AI) buddies probably won’t see out the decade. There’s a new hit AI assi ..read more

Being Freezbrury season perhaps the hot air antennae in Gravitas Towers are tuned a little too sensitively. But, seriously, Liz Truss and Chinese weather balloons hitting the front pages on the same weekend? What fresh hell have our prayers to St Bridget failed to forestall. Lizteria is busy telling the Torygraph echo chamber that she was brought down by the ‘left wing economic establishment’. Yep, that would be the City grandees, the Treasury, hedge funds, the IMF and that notoriously ‘woke’ bunch from the global bond market ALL agreeing KamiKwasi economics was batsh*t crazy. Not to be outdon ..read more

I’m having the weirdest dreams these days. Last night I dreamed of a GB News TV chat show hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg (now true) and Enoch Burke as a guest who refuses to leave the studio (very possible). Oh well, we live in hope or horror. Back in the real world, my daytime thoughts are dominated by three structural themes which will be overshadowed by short-term earnings results on Wall Street this week but which merit closer scrutiny. First, let’s move from the clouds to the earth, and I literally mean that. Arguably, not much has changed in 50 years in activities like flying(Boeing 747s), ca ..read more

My genetic weakness for celebrity-following often invites deserved ridicule. How could the World Economic Forum(WEF) in Davos and ITV’s Love Island dating clown show both be on my observational radar? Actually, who cares? The nonsense gap between the apparently influential WEF elite and wannabe reality TV influencers closes rapidly by the day. Arguably, political and corporate leaders have parked the “influence” card and settled for vacuous media profile instead. Leadership in terms of action and words of truth are in dangerously short supply. How else can the elite political and corporate lea ..read more