M&G Bond Vigilantes Christmas Quiz 2017 – the answers and the new champion

Happy New Year to you all.  Thank you for another bumper crop of entries for our Christmas quiz.  This year’s winner and new reigning champion is Adam Begg of UBS Investment Bank.  Many congratulations.  As you know, this year we donated £500 to Cancer Research UK in lieu of a trophy.  Via CASCAID, the fund management community in the UK this year decided to try to raise £1 million for Cancer Research UK and I’m very happy to say that it hit, and more than doubled that target. The totaliser now stands at £2.25 million.  The money that you all kindly donated will do good.  Thanks very much.  If you enjoyed the quiz and wanted to bung a fiver into the pot, here’s your very last chance to do so: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=JimLeaviss&faId=772830&isTeam=false.

Second place went to Michael Haslam of Barclays Investment Solutions, and third was Grant Robertson of Kuwait Investment Office. Well done.

Right, the answers:

1. Tsar Alexander III gave Empress Maria Fedorovna the very first Faberge egg for Easter in 1885.
2. Stuart Dallas and Conor Washington both play for Northern Ireland and were in St. Jakob-Park for the game against Switzerland in football’s World Cup playoffs in November.
3. The music video is “Close to Me” by The Cure.
4. JELLO PERM WOE = JEROME POWELL.
5. The strange machine is the MONIAC, built by economist Bill Phillips to model national economic flows.
6. The FA removed the referee from a Blackpool FC game held shortly after a court case had found that the owners of the club had incorrectly paid themselves a dividend, because his name was Ben Toner.
7. A Veblen good is one where demand increases as its price rises, as the high price signals desirability.  This is often seen in luxury goods where a high price denotes exclusivity.
8. A Giffen good is an “inferior good”, with few substitutes.  This might be a staple good like bread or rice.  When the price of such a necessity rises, consumers may buy more of it as they can no longer afford more expensive foods to go with it.
9. Bieber, The Weeknd, Neil Young and Lavigne are all Canadian.
10. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold for $450 million in November, an annual return of 1.35% since it was painted.
11. The logo is that of Leander Club, the rowing club formed in 1818, based in Henley-on-Thames.
12. Rachel Whiteread won both the Turner Prize for best young British artist and the K Foundation art award for worst British Artist on the same evening, netting her £20,000 from the Turner and £40,000 from the KLF, totalling £60,000.
13. Delia Smith baked the cake photographed on the cover of the Rolling Stones’s “Let it Bleed”.
14. The pink area of the chart is consumer surplus, the purple area is producer surplus.
15. The sparrows and horses economic theory became better known as “trickle down” economics.  In the original, the sparrows would benefit from largesse given to the horses, but only in the form of a few grains of corn that passed through the horse undigested.
16. The 40^th hill climb of my cycling year was the Paterberg, a cobbled climb in Flanders.
17. From a taxation per unit of alcohol, the IFS says that cider is the most efficient way to get drunk.
18. The developmental model neighbourhood of the next day is better known as the EPCOT centre at Disney, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
19. The Hulk’s favourite tube station is Turnham Green.
20. The queues are for the Roman Temple of Mithras, discovered in Walbrook in the City of London in 1954, and now re-opened as part of Bloomberg’s new UK HQ.

Have a great 2018.