Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 956 i MoneyWeek

“It’s hard to understand what’s driving the big bet on bonds, other than force of habit” In mid-2016, just after Britain voted to leave the European Union, yields on government bonds plumbed unprecedented depths. Now, as we head for another Brexit panic (see pages 8 and 21), bond yields are again near record lows. Germany has just issued a bund (a German government IOU) that promises to pay the lender absolutely nothing for an entire decade. Demand was so high that it now trades on a negative yield (in other words, investors are buying it at more than its face value – see page 4). None of this has much to do with Brexit – global investors aren’t piling into “safe havens” because they fear the exact nature of any…

With looser global monetary policy set to ensure that interest rates remain negative or barely positive, gold is on a roll. Gold miners are a geared bet on the yellow metal. Sales rise with a higher gold price, while reserves are worth more too. One to consider is Canada’s Agnico Eagle Mines, says WirtschaftsWoche. It owns nine mines in Canada, Mexico and Finland, all stable countries unlikely to question the group’s property rights. Agnico’s 22 million ounces of reserves have a mineral reserve grade (the concentration of the gold in the ore) of 2.7, compared with an industry average of 1.1. It costs the group $836 an ounce to get its gold out of the ground, while it sells for over $1,400.…

The Germans have a saying that “elected is elected and a majority is a majority”, but Ursula von der Leyen “will take office with her authority already dented” after scraping through her confirmation as president of the European Commission by “just nine votes”, says The Economist. The role, generally seen as the most important job in the EU, puts her in charge of the Commission, which manages the EU’s day-to-day affairs and proposes legislation. But the narrowness of her victory, and the fact that it depended on a last minute change of heart by MEPs from the hard-right ruling parties in Poland and Hungary, means she faces a difficult task. Von der Leyen’s “razor-thin” victory is a win for national governments in their fight for control of the Commission, says…

Markets have been cheered by the idea that Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell (pictured below) now looks likely to cut interest rates later this month. Yet the US central bank is being far too relaxed about the potential consequences of taking out an “insurance” cut (so-called because the idea is to cut rates “just in case”, rather than in response to a downturn in the economy), reckons Sonal Desai, chief investment officer at Franklin Templeton’s fixed-income unit, which has $152bn in assets under management. “You can create distortions in financial markets, and when I see equity markets at record highs in the face of what the Fed is telling us about a worrying economic backdrop, there is something messed up here,” she tells the Financial Times. Indeed, Desai sees a…

Deutsche Bank, which has just made 18,000 staff redundant, is under fire for the “lavish golden parachutes” it has paid to its top managers, says the Financial Times. In the last year it has paid out €52m in severance payments to senior executives. Former CEO John Cryan pocketed €10.9m in April 2018; six more board members took severance pay of at least €41m between them. The total paid out comes to around a fifth of the company’s dividend of €227m. This month Garth Ritchie, former head of the bank, can expect a payoff of “at least €11m”; chief regulatory officer Sylvie Matherat will walk off with at least €9m; Frank Strauss, the former head of retail banking, will take at least €6m. To add insult to injury, on the day…

■ MoneyWeek has long been keen on investment trusts. The latest research on funds backs up our preference. Investment platform AJ Bell examined the performance of 40 trusts and their “mirror” open-ended funds – so called because their portfolios are much the same or they are both run by the same manager using the same investment strategy. Ten-year total-returns data from 40 pairs of trusts and funds, where both had the same manager and strategy, showed that the trust outperformed the fund 75% of the time. Furthermore, in 60% of the pairings the trust cost less than the fund, with respective average annual charges of 0.91% and 0.97%. Star manager Nick Train’s two collective investment vehicles, for instance, are the Lindsell Train UK Equity fund and the £1.8bn Finsbury Growth…

theguardian.com Addiction to online gaming is hurting our children. Social media is depleting our brains. Excess screen time has reduced our attention spans. The headlines make for scary reading, say Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben. But in a world facing threats from ecological destruction and political polarisation, does it really make sense to be so worried about technology, or will these scares go the same way as previous panics about Dungeons & Dragons and Elvis’s hips? You can always tell a scary story if you cherry-pick the data. But our own study, which analysed nearly a decade of longitudinal data from British adolescents, found almost nothing to worry about. If you were determined to extract a scary story from our data, then you could. But the effects are truly tiny:…

When it comes to installing the “plumbing” for a smart city, few companies are more qualified than Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO). The telecoms giant is the “master plumber of the internet”, as Townsend puts it, having been involved in the creation of internet infrastructures since the earliest days. As smart cities continue to expand, so should Cisco. Earnings per share (EPS) are forecast to grow from $2.6 last year to $3.4 in 2020. The share price has risen by a third already this year. But Cisco’s price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 21 is forecast to fall to 19. The shares may yet have further to go. In Britain, BT (LSE: BT.A) is still reeling from an accounting scandal two years ago. The share price has fallen by a fifth since the…

Freelancers and small business owners face higher tax bills under government plans to extend controversial public-sector procurement rules to the private sector. The off-payroll working rules are likely to result in a change in the tax status of thousands of self-employed workers. “Firms will soon have to decide freelancers’ tax status” The rules, often described as IR35, are designed to tackle “disguised employment”, whereby a company hires freelancers and contractors to undertake work, yet they are effectively operating as employees. The arrangement suits employers, who do not have to pay national insurance contributions for such workers, and the individuals themselves, who often set themselves up as limited companies. As such, they often pay national insurance and income tax at lower rates. Some freelancers and contractors operate as sole traders rather…

Before you head off on your summer holidays make sure you have travel insurance. Research by Sainsbury’s Bank has found that 2.3 million of us go on holiday without it. But if you fall ill or get injured on holiday, being covered could save you thousands of pounds. The average travel insurance claim is £1,300, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI). Don’t just buy the cheapest policy on a comparison site. They all differ and you need one that suits you. One thing to watch out for is mention of treatment at private hospitals. While half of the 20 biggest travel-insurance firms “refer to private medical treatment in their terms and conditions… they all also include carefully-worded caveats that could be used to avoid paying for more expensive…

Double Academy Award winner Michael Douglas has put his seven-building, ten-bathroom Moorish-style Mallorcan home, known as S’Estaca, on the market. The estate, situated in the World Heritage Site of Sierra de Tramuntana, is just 30 minutes from Palma. It was previously owned by Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Habsburg, who bought it in 1867. It is now available for $32.38m. Douglas failed to sell the 250-acre property in 2014 following his divorce from Diandra Luker, when the asking price was around $60m. This time he is hoping that narrating a new two-minute promotional video will drum up interest. (The house is for sale via Engel & Völkers.)…

Saga (LSE: SAGA) provides insurance and travel products for the over-50s. The Kent-based company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2014, issued a profit warning in April 2019. Its insurance business, which currently accounts for 90% of its profits, is facing intense competition and the travel business is struggling too. None of this is helped by the recent announcement that chief executive Lance Batchelor will depart at the end of the financial year, with no successor currently in place. The share price has fallen by 66% since January.…

It was great to see winemaker Stuey Bourne in the UK last week. A serious talent, this chap has spent his life nurturing his relationships with the old grape-growing families in the Barossa Valley. These original settlers have the finest plots of land in the region and Stuey’s handshake is all that is needed to guarantee a few tonnes of their finest fruit for his Soul Growers wines. El Mejor is Soul Growers’ most arresting red, made from the final squeeze of the basket press each time it ekes out precious juice from the amazing bunches of grapes. Stuey unhooks the hose, and places a bucket under the tap and then he drops the press down another inch. It is this incredible elixir that is then put into a single…

The Bank of England has announced that Alan Turing will appear on the new polymer £50 note, set to enter circulation at the end of 2021. Turing was a brilliant mathematician, known today as the “father of computer science and artificial intelligence”. His code-cracking work at Bletchley Park significantly shortened the duration of World War II. In 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency for having a homosexual relationship, and chose to undergo chemical castration rather than imprisonment. He took his own life two years later, aged 41. He was posthumously pardoned in 2013. The 344 million paper £50 notes (with a combined value of £17.2bn) currently in existence will be composted for agricultural use. Good week for: England’s cricketers won the World Cup (pictured ) for the first time,…

The business community has always been wary of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Mexico’s “leftist firebrand” leader, says Ian Bremmer in Time. Yet concern about his policies was tempered by a grudging respect for his commitment to “fiscal discipline and general macro stability”. That had been underlined by his decision to hire the “widely respected” Carlos Urzúa as finance minister. Yet Urzúa resigned last week, firing off a “blistering” letter that lashed out at dubious appointments and “extremist” economic policies. The Mexican peso fell by 2% against the US dollar. It looks as though “powerful members of the left-wing government are pushing for looser fiscal policy”, writes Edward Glossop for Capital Economics. The central paradox of AMLO’s administration has been that it wants to pay for “ambitious social programmes” while…

Sterling slipped to a two-year low against the greenback this week; it remains around 12% below its pre-referendum level. A strong labour market report (see page 10) should have provided support, but the good economic news was eclipsed by the growing possibility of a no-deal Brexit after both Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson said they wanted to ditch the Irish backstop. A general election and a Corbyn government could follow Brexit, which is another key reason the pound is weak. The decline in the pound should really have started to close our external deficit by now, says David Smith in The Sunday Times. Yet the trade deficit in goods widened in the year to May, and the overall current-account shortfall climbed to 5.6% of GDP in the first quarter.…

This month’s flotation of up to $9.8bn shares in the Asian division of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s biggest brewer, had been expected to become the biggest initial public offering (IPO) of the year, eclipsing Uber. But late last week it shelved the deal shortly before it had been due to set a final price. It appears to have been setting its sights too high . The indicative share-price range implied an overall valuation of $54bn-$63bn, but banks had reportedly struggled to drum up demand, says the Financial Times; some analysts reckon the firm is worth just $45bn to $55bn. It contains a burgeoning Chinese business and a more mature Australian and Korean one.…

Tour operator Thomas Cook is suffering an “interminable holiday nightmare”, says Rob Davies in The Guardian. High debt, fierce competition and “one-off factors, including last summer’s heatwave” have pushed tour operator Thomas Cook to the brink of bankruptcy. It now owes banks so much money “that three million out of the 11 million holidays it has been selling per year were funding debt repayments”. With income “under pressure” and “little room” for manoeuvre on costs, its survival now depends on the completion of a bailout that will provide enough “breathing space” to allow it to sell its airline for a good price and move into the hotel market. The deal involves Thomas Cook’s creditors “taking a share in the business in a debt-for-equity swap”, says Simon Calder in the Independent.…

“Is value investing dead?” We’ve heard this plaintive cry many a time during the past decade, as growth stocks (flashy, expensive stocks) have trounced value stocks (dull, cheap ones). Several reasons have been proposed for this performance gap, from the idea that interest rates have hit a permanently lower plateau, to the theory that the nature of “book value” (see below) has changed as intangible assets such as “intellectual property” and “network effects” become more important than tangible assets such as factories. Now we have an interesting new take to add to the mix – that it’s all down to revolutions. “During technological shifts, value stocks underperform” “Value is dead, long live value,” a recently published paper by Chris Meredith at O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, uses a theoretical framework described by…

By the end of next week, Boris Johnson will in all likelihood be our new prime minister. But his cautious campaign, long on optimism but light on actual policies, doesn’t give us much of a clue as to what Boris-onomics will actually look like. Yet the tasks facing him are clear. The arguments over our departure from the EU will have to be resolved before they consume him. The economy will have to be rescued from a potential recession. And he will have to come with a programme that will have popular appeal and restore the country’s standing in the world. Here are the three places he should start. 1. Prepare for no-deal Three years after the referendum, the UK is still not quite ready to get out, but it…

With Wall Street hitting new highs and even the FTSE 100 index back above 7,500, many investors will wish they had bought stocks six months ago. But what should you do now? Jump in and risk an autumn sell-off or stay on the sidelines expecting a slide? The market gives no clear answer other than the old Irish quip – “if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here”. Ed Yardeni, a strategist and economist, points out that the US economic expansion, now ten years old, is the longest on record. No boom, so no bust This leads many to assume that a recession is due. But Yardeni points out that the long expansion has also been one of the weakest on record, with GDP up just 25% in a…

Don’t fear China’s expansion Tom Holland South China Morning Post China’s activities in central and eastern Europe are causing “considerable disquiet” in Brussels, says Tom Holland. Over the last few years, China has signed up 12 EU members and five prospective members to its “17+1” forum – countries which run in a band from Estonia to Greece. To Beijing, the grouping brings together the eastern European participants in its Belt and Road Initiative influence-building programme. To those that have signed up, China represents a source of much-needed infrastructure funding that they struggle to get at home. EU officials fear that China is pursuing a “divide-and-rule strategy”: dangling investment dollars before poorer members to “secure the diplomatic influence needed to water down EU criticisms of its protectionist economic policies and human…

stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com Some Labour Party members are advocating the abolition of private schools. This is “a tricky issue”, says Chris Dillow. The case against is simply one of freedom – people should be able to spend their money how they want. Yet this freedom imposes “negative externalities” onto others. Private schools spend much more than state ones and this is bound to lead to inequality in results, which in turn leads to the over-representation of privately educated people in politics and top jobs. It’s not clear that abolishing private schools will do anything to help, however. Children from rich and powerful backgrounds will still enjoy advantages whatever school they go to. What we could do instead is impose quotas, as George W. Bush did in Texas. This would require that universities…

The lights in the bedroom gradually brighten and you wake up feeling refreshed. You know you’ve slept well: the fitness and sleep tracker on your wrist says so. Downstairs in the kitchen, your refrigerator places an order for more orange juice just as you upend the last drop from the carton into your glass. The coffee-maker gurgles into action right on cue. After breakfast, the mirror in the bathroom bids you good morning and informs you that road-traffic sensors are reporting light traffic, while the leaves on the railway lines have been swept away. All trains are running on time. Oh, and the weather will be warm. So might the wardrobe suggest you wear summer clothes today? The sun is shining as you step outside. The car has charged overnight,…

What are the circumstances in which fiscal expansion (see box) might be appropriate? And those in which it would be inappropriate? These questions are extremely important in Britain. There has been a stream of pronouncements warning against a no-deal exit, and lurid warnings of fiscal disaster should a government pursue such a course. That has led to plans from No.11 and the Treasury to support the economy if necessary with expansionary fiscal policy. Any sensible discussion of this question must start by recognising the causes of our present economic situation, in which negative real (ie, after-inflation) interest rates and asset-price and credit bubbles are necessary to keep on deferring recession across the globe. The cause of the problem is too little saving: too much spending has been brought forward from…

• What does your business do? The ROXi music entertainment console is the ultimate antidote to small screen and social-media addiction in the home. Simply plug ROXi into your TV and instantly get access to a comprehensive catalogue of more than 35 million songs from every label, album, genre and decade. Plus you get karaoke, you can play music games, you can tune into thousands of radio stations from across the globe, and you can even enjoy yoga and meditation. We bring friends, family and loved ones together through the power of music. • What has been your biggest challenge? Cost-effectively educating the mass-market consumer. Our solution has been to invest heavily in direct-response TV advertisements, which feature our celebrities, such as Sheryl Crow, Alesha Dixon and Robbie Williams. These…

Anyone who drives regularly on the motorways of Britain and Europe will have noticed the big warehouses that have appeared at the side of the roads. These represent the flipside of internet shopping and corporate supply chains: every delivery has to be backed up by vans or lorries delivering from local hubs. These are in turn supplied from large warehouses situated close to road networks; they handle the bulk deliveries from factories and airports. E-commerce, according to Evert Castelein, manager of Aberdeen Standard Investments European Logistics Income PLC (LSE: ASLI), now accounts for 20% of sales in the UK, but only 10% in Europe, where it is growing faster. This means strong growth in demand combined with continuing falls in vacancy rates, now down to 5.5%. A big footprint in…

When looking at investments, the key is to assess the return opportunity and what risks threaten that assumed level of return. In a low-return environment it is particularly important to gauge what the downside risk could be and what measures are in place to help preserve value. To illustrate how this approach can be applied, let’s look at three examples. A well-managed property group AEW UK REIT (LSE: AEWU) aims to deliver an 8p annual dividend by means of four quarterly payments, implying a dividend yield above 8%. The results to March 2019 show that the latest annual dividend was fully covered by earnings. Investing in predominantly regional property with a bias towards shorter leases, it has adopted an approach that runs somewhat counter to the prevailing property market focus…

“There is something profoundly depressing about the market’s obsession with US monetary policy,” says Jonathan Allum in The Blah! newsletter. Naïve souls might have thought that Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell’s decision to “accentuate the negative” while giving testimony to Congress last week would spook markets. Far from it. That’s because his gloomy remarks about trade tensions and the global economy have left it a virtual certainty that the Fed will cut interest rates at the end of this month, and liquidity-addicted markets love easier money. The news sent America’s S&P 500 soaring above the 3,000 mark for the first time ever. The index is now up 20% so far this year. The Dow Jones industrial index also breached 27,000. This may herald the start of a new cycle of…

“The 2020 election [is a risk to the macro and market outlook]... while the President remains wildly popular among his base, his approval rating is a dismal 40%. And this is coming off the peak of the economic expansion, and stockmarket, and the low in the unemployment rate. Meanwhile, the only reason we have such a wide field of Democratic candidates is because they each smell a huge opportunity. Yet [most] are left-of-centre and the only centrist is seen as too old... if you are a US business today [you see] Democrats threatening to roll back at least some of the corporate tax cuts. So what do you do? Wait and see... which means cash gets built up on the balance sheet instead of being deployed into the real economy.…

Three to buy Everyman Cinema The Mail on Sunday Today’s release of The Lion King remake should provide a welcome boost to this boutique cinema provider. In contrast to the mainstream “multiplex monsters”, Everyman venues have just four screens at most, with the focus on providing comfy seats, “proper food” and wine and cocktails served in glasses. The chain should more than double in size over the coming years. Investors need not fear a downturn: cinema attendance rises when the economy is doing badly. The shares are a bargain. 171p RHI Magnesita The Daily Telegraph RHI Magnesita is the world-leader in refractories, a product used to line blast furnaces. Intense heat and corrosive substances mean that these materials need to be replaced regularly, making for a steady stream of business.…

• With Marks & Spencer (M&S) on the cusp “of being booted out of the FTSE 100”, the departure of “clothing supremo” Jill McDonald shows that chairman Archie Norman “is taking no prisoners”, say Zoe Wood and Sarah Butler in The Guardian. McDonald’s departure was prompted by an error where her buyers “failed to order enough stock for a widely trumpeted collection”. But the real problem was that she lacked experience in fashion and wasn’t “an inspirational leader”. With Next and Primark “biting at its heels”, M&S faces an “existential challenge”. It urgently needs to inject more “flexibility and reactivity” into the business. • Netflix is putting in a “smooth performance”, says Laura Forman in The Wall Street Journal: sales are set to grow by 26% to $4.9bn this year.…

Book value is also known as equity, shareholders’ funds, or net asset value (NAV). It is the value of all of a company’s assets, less all of its liabilities (debts). Book value is sometimes used as an estimate of what a company would be worth if all of its assets were sold for their balance-sheet values. If you know the book value, you can get an idea of how cheap or expensive a share is by dividing the share price by the book value per share (hence the price/book, or p/b, ratio). A p/b of below one means that – technically speaking – you can buy the company for less than its assets are worth on paper. So if you could buy the whole company, you could sell all of…

• The highest-paid celebrity in the world is the 29-year-old American singer Taylor Swift, says Forbes. Swift (pictured), who has won ten Grammy awards, made $185m in the year to the start of July. Her 2018 tour was the highest grossing in US history, pulling in $266.1m in the US, and $345m in total. Kylie Jenner came second with $170m, while Britain’s top celebrity earner was singer Ed Sheeran, number five in the list, who made $110m. His two years of touring have grossed more than €600m worldwide. • Andrew Bailey, the head of the Financial Conduct Authority, which has been criticised for failing to deal adequately with the collapsed investment firm London Capital & Finance, as well as the Neil Woodford debacle, has seen his pay rise by £3,000…

A Czech activist investor is making waves at Switzerland’s embattled asset management group GAM. Krupa Global Investments, which owns 1% of the firm, wrote to the board this week demanding that former star fund manager Tim Haywood (pictured) compensate GAM for the damage he caused to its reputation. Haywood, who managed a $7bn portfolio of absolute-return bond funds, was fired for gross misconduct last February after an internal investigation found that he had failed to meet risk-management and record-keeping standards. Since his suspension in July 2018, the stock has lost 60% and assets under management have dropped by 17%.…

“I was earning money like you would never have believed when you were a kid. I had a bank account with thousands of pounds in it… I remember buying a skirt for £70 which felt like a huge amount of money… what was uncomfortable was that my friends couldn’t do that.” Actress Jill Halfpenny (pictured), whose career began in the 1990s BBC television children’s drama series Byker Grove, quoted in the Big Issue “You always get a seat in a restaurant. You can bend the rules a bit if you’re famous… If someone said 35 years ago that I would have the success I had now, I would sign straight away.” Tennis ace Boris Becker on fame, quoted on the BBC “Expansions don’t die of old age. I like to…

entrepreneur.com Tesla founder Elon Musk says meetings are “the blight of big companies” and advises walking out of them as soon as it’s obvious you’re wasting your time. One estimate put the cost of wasted time in meetings at $37bn a year in the US alone. To avoid “meeting creep”, you need a strategy, says entrepreneur Aytekin Tank. Here are four tips for running better meetings. 1. Drop the status meetings. Meetings that get everyone together to update the group on progress seem reasonable, but they eat up too much time and are seldom really necessary. 2. Take a walk and talk. Stretching your legs and your brain at the same time boosts health and creativity and increases happiness. Informal walks with the boss can also help tear down hierarchies.…

Last August, Pictet Asset Management launched its SmartCity fund. Below, we ask Stephen Freedman, senior product specialist, thematic equities, five questions. Why should investors put their money in smart cities? The smart-city theme is underpinned by powerful structural trends. These include urbanisation; cities will acquire an additional two-billion inhabitants by mid-century. It is also driven by the growing focus on sustainability and technological advances to solve societal problems. Companies that support smart approaches to urbanisation or offer solutions to social challenges should enjoy long-term growth. Can investors still find value? The focus on smart cities by the investment community is still in its early days. We believe there is plenty of value. What do you look for in your investments? We look for businesses with sustainable profitability, strong management and…

The economic goal of most developed-world governments is to foster steady growth while avoiding high inflation. When a government raises or lowers taxes, or increases or cuts public spending, it is using fiscal policy to pursue this aim. Both fiscal and monetary policy (which is under the jurisdiction of central banks) can be used to influence the economy in the short term. In theory, governments aim to keep control over public spending, avoiding incurring too much debt as a proportion of GDP. This notion of running balanced budgets has come under particularly fierce attack during the post-2008 era, as heavy national debt burdens and persistent government overspending (deficits) have failed to drive inflation or interest rates up. Economist John Maynard Keynes argued in the 1930s – partly as a response…

Since HMRC does not publish a definitive guide as to who falls within the IR35 system, both organisations and individuals face considerable uncertainty – potentially facing an unexpected tax bill if they make a judgement that the taxman subsequently challenges. In practice, HMRC depends on three principles to assess whether an individual is a genuine freelancer or contractor, rather than someone who is really an employee of the organisation. First, it assesses how much control the freelancer has over what work they do, and how, when and where they do it. The more control the freelancer has, the more likely it is that they will qualify for IR35 status. HMRC also considers substitution: whether the freelancer is providing a personal service, or is able to send a substitute in their…

McCarthy & Stone (LSE: MCS) is the UK’s largest developer and manager of retirement properties. Since 1977 it has built 56,000 apartments in 1,200 developments. The group increased revenues by 17% in the first half of 2019 and brought 15 new developments to market. Reduced operating costs, coupled with the strategy of tapping into its ever-growing customer base with discounts and part-exchange deals, seems to be working: underlying operating profit for the same period rose by 47%. The share price has risen by 46% in the last year.…

Gregor MacGregor (born 1786) served in the British Army, rising to the rank of major before being forced to resign in 1811 as the result of a fight with a superior officer. After the death of his wife later that year he joined the Venezuelan army in that country’s fight for independence from Spain. He later fell out with independence leader Simon Bolivar and so moved to London in 1820, announcing that he had been made the Cazique (tribal chief) of Poyais, a new country in Central America. He then proceeded to sell £200,000 (£17.9m) worth of bonds in the government of the new country. What was the scam? MacGregor had legitimately acquired land on the Mosquito Coast, in what is now Nicaragua. MacGregor claimed this was a thriving settlement…

If you like to go skiing regularly, or biking, you might have heard of GoPro, the line of action cameras popular with people who like to film their adventures and stunts, or just capture a record of traffic offences. The cameras are so small and light that you can mount them on your body, or even your head, and use them to produce close-up action videos from your point of view. Social-media sites such as Vimeo and YouTube are filled with thousands of action videos taken using the devices. The GoPro Hero 7 Black is the successor to the Hero 6, which was launched two years ago to great acclaim, and brings a host of improvements, including new technology intended to produce smoother footage. To test the device under real-world…

Walter Bagehot was perhaps one of the most influential thinkers on politics and finance from the Victorian period. He edited The Economist “brilliantly” for nearly three decades, and his writings, which prescribed cures for the  banking panics and runs that plagued England in the 1800s, and explained the unwritten British constitution, are still read today, says Publishers Weekly. Financial historian and journalist James Grant’s biography of the man “gives a thoughtful, evenhanded and frequently witty take” on a man he clearly “passionately admires”, yet who was not without his flaws. Grant is definitely not a “rapt idolater” of Bagehot, agrees Michael Dirda in The Washington Post, and does not hesitate to point out his numerous personal failings, which included “priggishness and a supercilious condescension toward the uneducated”. He was also…

• Singer Ed Sheeran is “one of the world biggest stars”, says Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. Despite having a £160m fortune he married his childhood sweetheart and lives in a £1m home in Suffolk, close to where he grew up. “With his mop of ginger hair, geeky glasses and hoodie, Ed [pictured] looks as though he’s just fallen out of the local Oxfam shop.” In 2017 he paid £5.29m in taxes – “more than both Amazon and Starbucks”. What a contrast to Formula One (F1) racing driver Lewis Hamilton. “Yes he’s the first and only black British F1 champion. Yes he’s a formidable driver and his brilliance has deservedly earned him a £187m fortune” at 34. Yet, unlike Ed, “once he hit the big time, he left this…

Jerome Powell, head of the US Federal Reserve, has put his cards on the table. He has said that “incoming data” tells him that there are “uncertainties” and “concerns about the strength of the global economy”. So he has abandoned his planned rate rises and is mulling a cut. Regular readers will not be surprised. Central banks face a choice: inflate or die. Powell doesn’t want to die. “Instead of inflating stock prices, fiscal inflation will inflate consumer prices” In a free, healthy economy, markets would weigh the data and signal to investors, bankers, lenders, and savers in prices, giving them a clear and honest measure of what was going on. Instead, in our late, degenerate, Fed-managed system, a central planner decides for himself what short-term interest rates should be,…