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Imagine you are the CEO of multinational food, snack and beverage corporation PepsiCo. You receive a call from an investor who has accumulated more than $1.3 billion dollars of shares in your company almost overnight. They are demanding you acquire another company and then split PepsiCo into two entities. You have two options: comply with their demands or risk being replaced.

Investors were left shaken after hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped from the world’s financial markets following the recent plunge of the Chinese stock market. Although our market has recovered somewhat, we are not out of hot water just yet. The real concern is that the underlying cause of the plunge, the slowing Chinese economy, will have a notable impact on Australia’s economic growth for some time to come.

The following sounds like the plot to Mel Gibson’s 1996 movie “Ransom”, but could represent a summary of events last week.

Cast your mind back to 10 years ago. Can you recall seeing pop up shops in Australia? I can’t. Aside from the odd plant shop offering to sell pine trees at Christmas time, I can’t quite recall the phenomena. And when you think about it, the prevalence of pop up shops tells us quite a bit about current levels of consumer confidence.