Investment comment

In LS Lowry's 1949 painting, The Football Match, hundreds of 'matchstick' spectators are gathered around a pitch at a football match in Manchester, England, against a backdrop of belching factory chimneys. In May this year the painting was sold for $9.2m, a record for the artist's work at auction. Amid signs that the world's latter-day factories might be operating less confidently at the end of the first half of the year than at the beginning, investors wondered whether the world's leading (and mostly debt-saddled) economies would manage to stage a second-half comeback.