Don’t lose sight of the big picture, advised Mark Carney. Quite right. None of the highlights from the governor of the Bank of England’s trot around the block could be described as encouraging. The economic weather has worsened alarmingly during 2019.

Global growth has decelerated from 4% to 2.9% in the past two years. Global trade has been falling for about a year and looks weak for some time yet amid worries about trade wars and protectionism. As for the UK, the economy is growing at half its recent pace, and business investment has contracted in the five of the past six quarters. Meanwhile, the latest UK employment growth figures were the weakest since 2015 and the brief mini-boom in pay deals looks to be fizzling out.

Brexit has injected a specific uncertainty into the mix and it’s clearly possible that some clouds would clear if the UK leaves the European Union at the end of January next year, which is what the Bank’s models are obliged to assume. On the other hand, the official projections need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The Brexit analysis may have to be rewritten once the outcome of the election is known. And, even if the withdrawal agreement is enacted on schedule in January, companies may simply obsess about the next crucial step – the terms of future trading with the EU – and keep their investment budgets on ice.

In these circumstances, you can understand why two members of the rate-setting committee, Jonathan Haskell and Michael Saunders, voted for an immediate 0.25% reduction in interest rates. Most of the usual ingredients for a rate cut – low growth, low core inflation and soggy demand – are in place already. The doveish duo are giving a useful early reading. An interest rate cut in 2020 is now the way to bet.

Hard talk needed at Hiscox

Did you miss the profit warning from Hiscox, the FTSE 100 specialist insurer, on Monday? You were not alone. The entire market supposedly only spotted the bad news on Thursday, when the share price plunged 17% at one point, removing £600m from Hiscox’s stock market value.

Hold on, you might say. Surely it’s impossible for a large quoted company, whose every public utterance is examined by a small army of research analysts, to hide a serious development in plain sight? If the share price was going to fall out of bed, shouldn’t the tumble have happened immediately after the third-quarter update was published?

Well, exactly. The crucial ingredient in the tale is the meeting between Hiscox’s management and City analysts that took place at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon. The analysts emerged to publish research notes with a bearish tone – or far more bearish than the company’s pedestrian prose at the start of the week.

Here, for example, is Jefferies’ post-meeting note: “We were left with the distinct impression that Hiscox is preparing for a casualty catastrophe, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the turn of the century.”

In this context, “casualty” means insurance polices bought by companies to cover a range of business disputes. The worry is about so-called “social inflation” in the US, meaning higher awards being given to litigants. Hiscox had flagged the issue on Monday, but clearly not in sufficiently stark terms.

At one level, this is a minor fuss about what Hiscox meant in its statement about underwriting ratios returning to normal in “the medium term”. After questions from the analysts, the company gave more detail in the Wednesday meeting about what it expects to see in 2020 and 2021.

But there’s a deeper point. There are hard rules about how price-sensitive material should be presented and, while Hiscox thinks it gave the analysts no inside information, the share price reaction does not support its case. Even at close of trading it was 10% lower.

At the very least, the communication was amateurish, a point the Financial Conduct Authority presumably made when it told Hiscox to issue an update. This should not happen to a FTSE 100 company.

BHP must lay down the law

Call it a moral victory for rebel shareholders at BHP. There was a 27% vote for a resolution calling on the mining giant to suspend its membership of industry lobby groups that promote goals inconsistent with the Paris climate agreement.

A 73% majority obliges BHP to do nothing, but its board would be unwise to adopt that line. This issue will keep coming back. BHP, whose climate policies are more progressive than most of its rivals, should clean up the lobby groups if it really sees value in membership for other matters. It is the number one operator; it should lay down the law.