Investment opportunities are looking bleak – so what do you do?

We’re facing the prospect of a really tough summer ahead with no easy answers, writes Hamish McRae

If you bought shares in Netflix, Alphabet or Meta at the beginning of the year, you would have lost a bundle of money (Christopher Bill via Unsplash)

Where is safety for investors in a world of surging inflation and rising interests? These are deeply worrying times for many reasons, and when people get worried they seek safe havens for their savings.

Even before the horrible invasion of Ukraine people were worried, for inflation was already eating into most people’s real incomes. Now there is the prospect of a really tough summer ahead. So what do you do?

There are no easy answers, but a few things have become clearer in the past few weeks. One is that the long period of cheap money will draw to a close. It already is happening, as the central banks around the world start to increase interest rates and end quantitative easing, that ugly expression used to describe the way in which they pumped money through the banking system into the economy.