Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 974 i MoneyWeek

“The greatest danger to capitalism is the rise of powerful established industry players” Read the papers and you will see nothing but misery about how divided Britain is – we can, we are told, agree on nothing. It isn’t really so. There is one thing that almost everyone agrees on: that the world’s very big companies are a problem. I moderated a debate between the FT’s Martin Wolf and Yanis Varoufakis last week. They come at their critiques of capitalism from completely different angles; but a large part of both of their anger was channelled in the same direction. Yanis railed against the “rise of networked mega-corporations” and mega-banks into a “highly concentrated, obscenely powerful power grid”. By the middle of the Noughties, he said, 65 of the 100 wealthiest…

Japan’s Panasonic has been struggling of late, says WirtschaftsWoche. Lacklustre sales in its core consumer electronics division (where cameras and televisions are key products) have depressed the stock. But on a price/sales ratio (see page 16) of just 0.3 and a yield of 3%, most of the bad news appears priced in, while Panasonic isdabbling in some promising areas. It is the key supplier of batteries for electric vehicles to Tesla and it has now agreed to produce car batteries with Toyota. The hydrogen fuel-cells business also looks auspicious. Panasonic makes fuel cells for houses and will supply much of the Olympic Village at next year’s Tokyo Games with cells too.…

HP’s board has “unanimously” decided to reject a $33bn – $22-a-share – bid from rival Xerox, on the grounds that it “significantly undervalues” the computer hardware giant, says Mark Vandevelde in the Financial Times. At the same time, HP’s board has indicated that the door “remains open” to “a potential combination” of the two companies, demanding “more information about Xerox’s business prospects and the scale of any potential synergies”. In making the bid for HP, which involves a mixture of cash and shares, the office equipment provider has been trying to capitalise on a rally in its shares, which have climbed by 47% in a year. One prominent supporter of the $33bn proposed merger between the two companies is activist investor Carl Icahn, who owns 10.6% of Xerox (worth $2.9bn)…

How did Boris Johnson manage to ditch his planned £6bn corporation tax cut at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) annual meeting “without incurring a murmur of protest”? asks The Times. First, our 19% rate is “already the lowest of any big economy”. Second, Johnson has also pledged to cut business rates, boost reliefs for R&D and capital spending and introduce a tax break for around 500,000 small businesses (a package worth £1bn). Third, there is “far more at stake”. Carolyn Fairburn, CBI director-general, was not exaggerating when she warned that a Labour government would “crack the foundations of the economy” with its proposals for nationalisations, employee ownership funds and a 26% corporation tax rate. Johnson needed to “neutralise” Labour’s promise to give the NHS £5.5bn more a year by…

The Trump administration has declared that it “will no longer view Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as illegal”, an announcement that “sent shockwaves across the Middle East” and swept away four decades of US foreign policy, says the FT. The EU and UK condemned the move. The settlements, now home to 500,000 people, have been an obstacle to peace and threaten the viability of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The new stance has stoked fears that “the US will not stand in Israel’s way if it moves to annex parts of the West Bank”. That’s exactly the point of the move, says Joshua Leifer in The Guardian. For all his vacillations, Trump has been “thoroughly systematic when it comes to ending the…

The apparent death of value investing has been a perennial topic for this column in recent years. In fact, I last wrote about it this time last month when Ben Inker of US asset manager GMO had just released a paper arguing that the performance gap between value stocks and the wider market had grown so vast that it was a good idea to bet on value, regardless of how long it might take to “revert to the mean”. Now another high-profile asset manager – Cliff Asness at AQR – has backed up Inker’s views. “The gap between value and growth has rarely been wider” In a new paper – “It’s time for a venial value-timing sin” – Asness notes that many investors reckon the value factor (the tendency, in…

Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Apart from all speaking English and having the Queen as their head of state, what do all those countries have in common? A points-based immigration system. And very soon, it looks as if Britain might well join them. It remains to be seen how the election plays out over the three weeks that remain until polling day. A lot could still change before anyone votes. But right now it looks as if Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are heading for a comfortable victory. If that happens and we finally get around to leaving the EU early in the new year, then the biggest economic impact is likely to be moving from unrestricted freedom of movement for EU workers to a points-based system. How it works In Australia,…

Populist tax grabs won’t work Noah Smith Bloomberg Prominent economists and politicians, including US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, advocate wealth taxes as a way of reducing inequality, but France’s experiment suggests they may not work, says Noah Smith. France had a wealth tax from 1982-1986 and again from 1988-2017, with a top rate of between 1.5% and 1.8% – much less than Warren’s proposed 6% top rate, but close to the rate she would impose on $50m-plus fortunes. What happened? At least 10,000 people left the country to avoid it, depriving France of all their other taxes too. The revenue raised amounted to around 1% of France’s total take from all taxes. Economist Éric Pichet estimates it cost the government almost twice as much revenue as it raised. In 2012,…

It’s easy to be bullish about the healthcare sector in general and the biotechnology sector in particular. Everyone wants to live a longer and healthier life and people are willing to devote more of their income to healthcare. As Geoffrey Hsu, the manager of the Biotechnology Growth Trust puts it, “we are in a golden era of innovation with a record number of new drug approvals in the US”. But then why does the healthcare sector in the US trade at a 15% discount to the market, having returned just 6.4% in 2019 compared with an S&P 500 return of 20%? “Drugs cost 10% of overall US health expenditure” The bulls tend to gloss over three problems. Innovation has to be paid for, whether directly or indirectly in an insurance-based…

Buying stocks and holding them for the long term makes sense, as a consideration of the long-term performance of the stockmarket reveals: time has a way of erasing the peaks and troughs in share prices associated with exuberance and market panics. Over a long enough time period, major US and UK stockmarket indices go up, mirroring growth in the economy and corporate profits. No seasoned buy-and-hold investor expects their investments to rise all the time. Perhaps the strategy’s most famous exponent, Warren Buffett, routinely tells people that if they would panic if the value of their investments fell 50%, then they should not invest in shares. He should know: shares in his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, have fallen this much in the past, most recently between December 2007 and March…

■ “Sellers who inherited properties are successfully claiming tens of millions of pounds from the taxman by arguing that the homes have fallen in value by the time they were sold,” says David Byers in The Times. If the value of a property falls between the time it is valued for inheritance tax (IHT) purposes and the time it is sold, you can reclaim any overpaid tax. Property-related refunds are up 86%, according to NFU Mutual. Each refund is likely to be worth “thousands of pounds”. Most of those entitled to refunds are likely to be in the south east of England: property prices are typically above the £325,000 IHT-free allowance, while the housing market has been struggling in the past few years. ■ More and more of us are…

Judges Scientific (LSE: JDG) is a holding company that acquires and develops designers and manufacturers of scientific instruments. It has made a series of acquisitions since 2005 and currently owns 14 separate businesses. Its strategy is paying off. The latest interim results showed record sales and pre-tax profits for the first half of 2019 and management is confident that full-year profits will be ahead of expectations. Apart from a period of retrenchment in 2014, the share price has been on a solid upward trend since the firm floated in 2005. It has risen by more than 90% in the last year.…

Richard Whitney was born in Massachusetts in 1888 and graduated from Harvard before founding his own brokerage in 1910 in New York, purchasing a seat on the New York Stock Exchange two years later. His role as J. P. Morgan’s main broker helped him get elected to the NYSE’s board of governors in 1919 and he eventually served four terms as the exchange’s president, retiring in 1935. He played a role as the head of a pool of financiers that tried to halt the Wall Street Crash by buying large numbers of blue-chip stocks. The attempt proved unsuccessful, but it brought him widespread fame as the “White Knight” of Wall Street. What was the scam? Although a successful broker, Whitney was an awful speculator. His worst investment was in the…

The Great Reversal How America Gave Up on Free Markets By Thomas Philippon Belknap Press, £23.95 As a graduate student in Boston two decades ago, Thomas Philippon “was happy to discover” how cheap it was to use American telephones compared with the cost in his native France, says David Leonhardt in The New York Times. More recently, he noticed that this situation has now reversed. In The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets he sets out to find out why. The main culprit, he argues, is lax antitrust policy, which has meant that in one American industry after another a few companies have grown so large that they now wield the power to keep prices high and wages low. “American families are paying the price.” Philippon’s “detailed…

Our Doom index ticked up to nine this month. The last time this happened, all hell broke loose a few months later. Major banks went broke; Wall Street needed to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve; General Motors and Chrysler, too, would have gone under without federal help. And in September of 2008, Ben Bernanke, Fed reserve chief, told Congress that “we may not even have an economy on Monday” if it failed to pass a bailout programme. When the dust finally settled in March of 2009, stockmarket investors had lost half their money… and seven million people had lost their homes. Measured in terms of gold, the losses were even more severe – and part of a more revealing picture. Stock investors were on top of the world…

Bruce Bagley, aMiami professor and author of a book on drug trafficking and organised crime, has been accused of putting his expertise to use in all the wrong ways. Bagley, who co-authored Drug Trafficking, Organised Crime, and Violence in the Americas Today, plus several academic articles on the subject, has been charged with laundering $2.5m into the US, taking $250,000 for himself. The money is alleged to have come via Swiss and UAE bank accounts held by a “purported food company” and a wealth management firm controlled by an unidentified Colombian, reports Bloomberg. It comes from embezzlement, corruption and bribery, say prosecutors. He has been released on $300,000 bail. Good week for: Kylie Jenner (pictured), the 22-year-old star of TV and Instagram, has sold a 51% stake in her make-up…

Legalisation in Canada and California meant that the cannabis sector was “white-hot” last year, says Kristine Owram on Bloomberg. Yet many North American pot firms have now “lost two-thirds... of their value”. Canada’s Canopy Growth Corporation, the world’s largest, has reported poor sales. The shares are down 47% so far this year. CEO Mark Zekulin told analysts that the “addressable market is only about half of what was originally expected”, reports Ciara Linnane for MarketWatch. Cannabis retailer MedMen announced at the end of last week that it will cut “more than 20% of its staff” as it struggles with a cash crunch. The industry faces several problems, says Owram. Efforts to legalise it in new markets have stalled, established black-market dealers are providing stiff competition and big institutional investors are…

The KMEFIC FTSE Kuwait Equity UCITS ETF (LSE: KUWP) has made little progress since HANetf launched it in London earlier this year. But that could soon change. Kuwait is due to be promoted from a“frontier” market to an emerging one by index provider MSCI next June. That should entice almost $10bn of global investors’ cash into the market, reckons HANetf. The overall market capitalisation of the local index is only around $30bn. Meanwhile, Kuwait has the world’s sixth-largest oil reserves, but is sensibly diversifying in an effort to become a regional commercial and financial hub. The ETF, which tracks the FTSE Kuwait All-Cap 15% Capped index comprising small, mid and large caps, has low exposure to oil.…

Saudi Aramco has scaled back the valuation of its initial public offering (IPO) amid underwhelming international demand, say Bloomberg’s Matthew Martin and Javier Blas. The latest price tag on Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant— between $1.6trn and $1.71trn — is well below Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s original goal of $2trn. Plans for international marketing have also been scrapped. International investors are concerned about the shift away from oil owing to the “strengthening global movement against climate change”. Saudi Aramco is nonetheless still set to overtake Apple Inc. as the world’s biggest public company.…

Despite the ongoing violence in Hong Kong (see page 4), demand for Alibaba’s secondary listing has been so strong that the Chinese e-commerce giant founded by Jack Ma (pictured) will stop taking orders from retail investors earlier than planned. The listing is expected to raise up to $13bn to supplement the $25bn mustered in the 2014 initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. It “isn’t a surprise” that Alibaba has decided to list in Hong Kong, says Jacky Wong in The Wall Street Journal. The company only opted for New York for its 2014 IPO because Hong Kong regulators “refused to compromise on their one share, one vote principle”. But they changed the rules in 2018, so the way is clear for Alibaba, which has a dual-class…

This week, I’m going to look at the Liberal Democrats. As late as September they were regularly getting more than 20% of the vote in the polls, and were hoping to benefit from a surge in support from disillusioned Labour and Conservative voters. However, any Lib Dem moment seems to be passing, with their predicted vote share now down to around 15%. Not only is their leader Jo Swinson (pictured) struggling to get noticed, but surveys indicate that her net popularity has declined, suggesting she may be alienating more voters than she is winning. You should therefore take Bet365’s offer of 15/8 (34.7%) on the Lib Dems getting 14.99% or less of the vote, as well 2/1 on them getting 15%-20%, for combined odds of 68.1%, splitting a £10 betting…

The price/sales (p/s) ratio is a company’s market capitalisation (the number of shares outstanding, multiplied by the share price), divided by its revenues. So a company with a market cap of £25bn and sales of £10bn has a p/s ratio of 2.5 (also known as a “sales multiple”). All else being equal, the lower the number, the cheaper the stock. P/s is calculated in a similar way to other metrics, such as the price/earnings (p/e) ratio (market cap divided by profits). Of course, sales aren’t the same as profits, so the p/s may appear less useful as a gauge of whether a firm is cheap or not. However, it can be a helpful tool when looking at firms or sectors where earnings are temporarily depressed as a result of one-off…

• Former chancellor Philip Hammond has found a job paying around £125,000 a year within a week of stepping down as an MP, says The Guardian. Hammond (pictured) is a non-executive director of packaging firm Ardagh and will serve on its audit committee. In addition to his salary, he will be paid travel and accommodation expenses for meetings at the firm’s Luxembourg headquarters. He will be expected to attend around ten meetings a year. Ministers who are offered a private-sector job within two years of leaving office must get approval from the advisory committee on business appointments before accepting it. • Investors in troubled government outsourcer Kier have rebelled against the company’s pay report that would have handed CEO Andrew Davies more than £1m in bonuses despite “disastrous profit warnings…

“At drama school, it was always the middle-class actresses with ambitious dads complaining about my surname. But you  can’t lose the Fox. It’s not my fault.” Actor Laurence Fox (pictured), son of actor Edward Fox, on nepotism, quoted in The Sunday Times “I’ve found the magic money tree, it’s in the Cayman Islands – we’re going to dig it up and bring it here.” Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, on Twitter “My father used to say… ‘No one in the family is an actor. You can’t sing. You can’t dance’. That’s the way it was in Brooklyn, where everyone was from a family of immigrants. My parents were smarter than me. They knew what it was to be poor. They knew I was heading for danger.” Film star Harvey Keitel, 80,…

Activist investor Engaged Capital is back for “another bite” of nutrition and weight-loss company Medifast, says Corrie Driebusch in The Wall Street Journal. Engaged Capital has taken a stake of around 15% in the company, whose offerings range from meal replacement shakes to diet plans. It wants to shake up the board and is advocating “operational fixes” in an attempt to boost the stock, which has slid by 40% this year due to disappointing results. Problems have included supply-chain disruptions and a cyberattack. In 2015 Engage Capital forced Medifast to nominate five new directors.…

I’ve just written a book all about the past, present and future of taxation. Not the most enticing subject for a book, you might think, but I promise you it is. There is fascinating story after fascinating story. Today and over the next two weeks, I’ll be telling you some of them. The book’s called Daylight Robbery and we actually get that expression from the window tax that was levied in Britain between 1696 and 1851. Window tax began as a replacement of hearth money, which involved collectors entering people’s homes twice a year to count their fireplaces. It was hated and the monarchs William and Mary had it abolished after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to ingratiate themselves with the people. A replacement for the lost revenue was soon…

Amigo Holding (LSE: AMGO) is a sub-prime lender that makes loans to customers who have poor credit histories but a creditworthy guarantor. Amigo had a good start to 2019, with increased revenue and numbers of customers, but the year isn’t ending well. The Financial Conduct Authority, the industry regulator, is taking a close interest and as a result Amigo will change some of its business practices, which will reduce repeat business. It also warned recently that impairments will be higher than anticipated, while growth will flatline. The share price has slid by 75% in a year.…

“It’s futile forcing the super-rich to scrub potatoes and make their beds when they’re used to luxury” Robin Williams said that a cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money. In my view there is today a surer sign: an addiction to therapy. It may also signal a deficiency in common sense. There is, however, no shortage, in these plutocratic times, of fools easily parted from their money. “More and more centres are being opened to cater for the upper echelons in search of a private place to detox or reset,” says Kate Wills in the Evening Standard. The people who frequent these establishments are not only looking for the “very, very best treatment available”, but also for luxury and “100% confidentiality”. It’s not hard…

30 The percentage of income tax paid by the top 1% of income-tax payers in Britain, according to a new study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies – up from 24% in 2008. Helped by the rise in the personal allowance to £12,500, 42% of adults pay no income tax at all. $1,714 The rental price per square foot of property on London’s New Bond Street, making it the most expensive shopping street in Europe, according to property consultants Cushman & Wakefield. Causeway Bay in Hong Kong is the world’s dearest at US$2,745 per square foot. 55 The percentage of family offices around the world surveyed for the 2019 UBS Global Family Office Report that expect the global economy to enter a recession next year. Cash reserves are being raised…

“False alarm?” The inversion of the US yield curve sparked talk of impending recession earlier this year, says The Economist. Yet yields on US government debt have returned to a more normal pattern since mid-October. The curve completely uninverted for the first time in a year earlier this month. Financial markets are “celebrating a bullet dodged”. US indices have been hitting new all-time highs in recent weeks as investors go back into “risk-on” mode. The Dow Jones index has gained 4.5% in the past month; the S&P 500 has risen 24% so far this year. But “the bullet may still be on its way”. Doomsday delayed The yield curve plots the interest rates on US Treasury bonds of different maturities. Under normal circumstances investors will demand higher interest rates for…

“[Last week] talk of the Dow Jones... at 30,000 didn’t seem so fanciful as when Barron’s suggested it in January 2017, as the blue chips hit 20,000... ‘the global economic backdrop has, for the first time in 18 months, begun to improve’, writes Michael Pearce [of] Capital Economics. It’s not just because of prospects of a trade deal. Recession risks have, well, receded. Growth may slow to a 1% annual rate in the current quarter, but odds of falling into an outright recession have slid... the risks from financial excesses still appear moderate, according to Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle. Commercial real-estate risks have eased, helped by slower price appreciation and better rents. Corporate debt is high, compared with GDP, but a better comparison is debt versus earnings and assets.…

Three to buy Airtel Africa The Times Africa’s youthful population, rapid growth and “swelling ranks of affluent consumers” give it vast economic potential. Yet it remains difficult for investors to gain direct exposure to the continent. This telecoms group operates in 14 African countries. Nigeria is its most important market and Airtel also has scope to expand into liberalising states such as Ethiopia. On just 8.9 times forecast earnings the shares look a bargain for investors “prepared to think longer term”. 67p Future Shares The £140m purchase of TI Media, the owner of Marie Claire UK and Country Life, could prove a catalyst for further share-price upside at this FTSE 250 publisher. Disruption in the publishing industry means that many established titles can be snapped up relatively cheaply and CEO…

• In 2015 a profit warning by Walmart sent “a shiver through US retailing”, says Lex in the Financial Times. Four years on, the company has not only “survived Amazon”, but is also “firing on all cylinders”. It has reported a 6.1% rise in third quarter operating profit, “the best in eight years”. Credit must go to CEO Greg Foran, who “sold underperforming foreign businesses, updated stores... and ploughed money into e-commerce”. But with the stock trading at nearly 25 times forward earnings, Walmart’s challenge “is to keep up the momentum”, especially since Foran’s departure has been announced. • With Eddie Stobart Logistics (carved out of the wider Stobart Group in 2014) “close to collapse”, it seemed until recently that the haulier may be forced to accept a £55m “Wonga-style…

It’s rare to hear an upbeat take on negative interest rates. But Kasper Lorenzen, chief investment officer of Denmark’s biggest commercial pension fund (whose equities portfolio returned 19% in the first nine months of 2019), sees a positive explanation behind the phenomenon. Lorenzen, who helps to run more than $100bn in assets, tells Bloomberg that the world is going through “a massive, positive supply shock, similar, though with a reverse sign, to the negative supply shock we saw in the 1970s”. Then, a shortage of oil drove inflation much higher and “investors didn’t really make any returns for 12 years”. But just as investors underestimated how poor returns were going to be back then, so today, investors underestimate “the effect of this positive supply shock”. If Lorenzen is right, then…

The number of employees at Highways England who earn more than £100,000 a year has increased tenfold since 2013, reports the Daily Mail. The quango, which looks after the country’s motorways and A-roads, has 63 executives on six figures, compared with 26 in 2017 and just six in 2013. It has a budget of £3bn and employs 5,000 staff, many of whom have had their pay rises capped at 1% until 2025. But the combined pay of the top executives is in excess of £8m, which is “a bit rich” says Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union. Jim O’Sullivan, the chief executive, was handed a pay rise of £54,000 last year, says the Daily Mail, including a bonus of £51,727, bringing his total earnings to…

■ When it comes to ethical investing, funds’ marketing can be misleading and there is no agreement on what various terms, such as “sustainable” and “green”, actually denote. So Britain’s Investment Association, which oversees around £7.7trn of assets, has come up with labels to standardise and categorise environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, notes Lucca De Paoli on Bloomberg. As of next year, companies will be asked to classify their funds’ strategies. Terms such as “impact investing” (investments that generate a return as well as have a positive social or environmental effect) and “ESG integration” (whereby ESG factors are explicitly factored into investment decisions) will be used to “give customers a clear picture of the opportunities available to them and the confidence that their chosen product matches their expectations”, said…

The top toys for this Christmas include a Barbie Dream Plane and a Lego Knight Bus. These gifts may go down well on the day, but eventually they are likely to end up in landfill or at the local car-boot sale when your children or grandchildren get fed up with them. So how about breaking with tradition this year and giving the gift of cash? “Giving cash is sometimes seen as impersonal or not very thoughtful, but when children have more toys than they know what to do with, it can be the ideal present,” says Kalpana Fitzpatrick in Good Housekeeping. “The advantage of a Junior Isa is that it is tax-free for life” Giving cash doesn’t have to mean just stuffing notes into a festive card. There are several…

Our cautious approach means worrying about the downside much more than being excited by the upside; concerning ourselves with what might go wrong, not what could go right. It is about avoiding mistakes and letting the upside take care of itself. To that end, when assessing potential investments we take a long-term view of businesses to understand better the risk we are taking. Aspects of this approach are straightforward. For example, we do not buy hugely indebted businesses. A key determinant of an equity investor’s success is the price paid for an investment, but using valuation alone is only half the job. There are many valuation metrics, ranging from the very simple price/earnings ratio (p/e) to the complex discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. However, we contend that if a stock…

I have recently returned from a trip to Australia, bookended with two lengthy stopovers in China. I hosted a large number of masterclasses and tastings on this journey, but the main thrust of my visit was to oversee and, of course, taste, in my annual The Great Australian Red competition. Every year Brisbane-based wine scribe Tyson Stelzer (look out for his awesome new book on Champagne) gathers together 11 elite judges to determine which are the finest cabernet/shiraz blends in the country. This is the blend that defines Australia and I think it is one of the finest of all styles of red wine. You can see the full results on my website, but Majella did well this year. The Musician 2017 picked up the trophy for best red wine…

May at 10 By Anthony Seldon Biteback Publishing, £25 Few modern politicians have experienced such a dramatic rise and fall as Theresa May. After becoming prime minister following David Cameron’s post-referendum resignation, followed by the mutually assured destruction of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove in the leadership contest and the implosion of Andrea Leadsom, she looked set for a long time in office and had commanding poll leads. A disastrous election campaign later and the Conservatives had lost their majority. Over the next two years, May would cling on to power, only to see major figures in her cabinet resign and Parliament reject her Brexit withdrawal agreement three times in a row. She was finally forced to resign after postponing Brexit. May at 10 delivers an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at…

•“I’m loving the Beeb’s raunchy new drama Gold Digger,” says Saira Khan in the Sunday Mirror. It portrays “a young, hot bloke chasing an older, rich woman” (played by Julia Ormond, pictured) rather than the other way round. That’s refreshing – it’s still seen “as weird if a bloke dares to fancy someone with more wrinkles than him”. But younger guys get a good deal: wisdom, life-experience and confidence. “I hate the terms ‘toy boy’ and ‘cougar’. Why stick a label on love – or a shelf life?” Age and bank balance are not as important in a relationship as mutual respect. Besides, it’s great to see an older woman portrayed on screen as sexy and independent. “Yes, we do exist!” • Experts believe “buying-shopping disorder” (BSD) should be added…