Cover Story

How we chose this week’s images

Insert a clear and simple description of the image

We had two covers this week, on global investing and on economic growth in Britain.

Investors got too used to low inflation. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, as rates fell and stayed down, asset prices surged and a “bull market in everything” took hold. From its low in 2009 to its peak in 2021, the S&P 500 rose seven-fold.

Recently, however, the pain has been intense. As of mid-October, a portfolio split 60/40 between American equities and Treasuries had fallen more than in any year since 1937. Our task this week was to make sense of that and to set down the rules on investing in this new world.

It has been a wild ride for this investor, but now he’s taking a bath—and losing his trunks. House prices are tumbling everywhere from Vancouver to Sydney. Bitcoin has crashed. Gold did not glitter. Commodities alone had a good year, and that was in part because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

The other cover features life after the collapse in asset markets. An old timer has gone back to the basics of panning for gold. That’s not as far from the mark as you might think. It was the era of cheap money that was weird, not today’s dynamics of higher interest rates and scarcer capital.

Our writers liked this variation on the water theme because it fits the story so closely. Titanic forces have snapped the surfing dude’s board in half. A broken board is a big loss (the crab must be painful, too), but he still has to get back into the water. The tide may have turned, but it will turn back again.

All this maps neatly onto the reality for investors. However unpleasant this year has been, they have to get back into the markets and search once again for the wave that is going to carry them furthest.

Sometimes, though, allegorical accuracy is less compelling than immediacy. The prospector has been brought into 21st-century hipsterdom, with a baseball cap, some mirrored sunglasses and a chunky wristwatch. We tweaked the words to make the connection with investing. And we thought that the background was too muted—“mushroom” was one cruel description. The hipster prospector is eye-catching and funny and he got our vote.

This year we have been running a series about the slow economic growth that has plagued Britain since the early 2000s. Our focus in this issue is Britain’s second-tier cities. In most countries the productivity of these matches or exceeds the national average, but every country has some cities that are left behind and Britain has more than most.

This cover, written by smug southerners from wealthy London, risked looking condescending. We grappled with the language. Is “second-rate” pejorative? If so, what about the various alternatives that we dreamed up: “neglected” (but not by the people who live there), “shackled” (inapt overtones of slavery) or “left-behind” (slightly safe)?

A grainy pic and a simple title have the advantage of not seeming to involve Londoners talking down to the rest of Britain. But such a cover might as well be about inner-city life as about the unlocked potential of the country’s northern metropolises.

And there is no getting away from the fact that this unlocked potential is a real problem. A pre-pandemic analysis by the OECD of 11 British second-tier cities, mostly in the north of England, found that gross value-added per worker was 86% of the British average. London is as rich as Paris, but metropolitan Birmingham or Leeds is nowhere near as rich as Lyon or Toulouse.

The Angel of the North in flight was much better. For one thing, it is optimistic: it says we are offering solutions and not just a lengthy account of everything that has gone wrong. For another, it is funny. And it is more optimistic and funnier if we cut out the patch of Tyneside that the Angel is leaving behind.

Britain’s economy cannot keep relying so heavily on London. And its second-tier cities cannot thrive unless they have more control of their destinies. Time to free the north.