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“Rich people have complained for years about inflation. But this round isn’t about them” Interest rates are going to rise before Christmas – or at least they certainly should. This week’s inflation numbers (see page 16) are just too high for the Bank of England to think it can continue to sit on its hands. In October, the consumer price index in the UK rose by 4.2% on the year, the fastest 12-month rise in a decade, and well over double the Bank’s target of 2%. There are apologists aplenty for the number. Many note that if you take out food and energy prices the number falls to not much more than 3%, for example – and it is true that a good 50% of the rise is due to…

Technology giant Google has lost an appeal over a €2.42bn fine imposed by the EU in 2017, says the Financial Times. Google incurred the penalty for breaching competition rules: it favoured its own comparison-shopping service over those of other companies on its results pages. Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager had accused Google of conferring an “illegal advantage” on its own division. Salvator Mundi, which sold at auction to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah in 2017 for $450m, has been downgraded by Madrid’s Prado Museum, says The Art Newspaper. It was sold as a Leonardo da Vinci, but experts listed it in a catalogue for a new exhibition as merely attributed to, rather than painted by the artist. Its provenance has always been controversial but this is the “most critical response from…

Sartorius, a supplier of pharmaceutical and industrial-laboratory equipment, is among the main beneficiaries of the pandemic, says Der Aktionaer. It has just reported a 54% rise in sales to €2.5bn for the first nine months of 2021, with virus-related activities accounting for a fifth of the figure, while earnings per share almost doubled. The group has helped manufacture the hundreds of millions of vaccine doses developed by Pfizer, Moderna and others. Its offerings range from a platform for antibody screening to products designed for water purification and cannabis testing. The stock recently joined the expanded DAX blue-chip index, and looks set to stay there for a long time.…

Boris Johnson has been “bounced into proposing a ban on MPs working as paid consultants or lobbyists” in a bid to shut down the sleaze scandal engulfing Westminster following his “ultimately unsuccessful attempt” at rescuing Owen Paterson, says Jim Pickard in the Financial Times. The PM made his announcement on Twitter, preempting Keir Starmer, who then laid out similar plans. Labour tabled a motion in the House of Commons on Wednesday to ban MPs from holding certain jobs. Meanwhile, an objection from Tory MP Christopher Chope means that Paterson’s conduct and the government’s response will again be debated in the Commons, “prolonging” the agony for the government, says Henry Zeffman in The Times. Although Labour has its own divisions on the issue (like Geoffrey Cox, Starmer also carried out legal…

In the next few weeks there are likely to be a flurry of by-elections. On 2 December, voters in Old Bexley and Sidcup are due to go to the polls to elect a successor for the late James Brokenshire. Two weeks later, voters in North Shropshire will determine who replaces the disgraced Owen Paterson (pictured). There will also be a by-election in Southend West soon (though Labour and the Liberal Democrats will not put up a candidate out of respect to the murdered David Amess) and possibly one in Leicester East if Claudia Webbe is recalled. The Tories are unsurprisingly favourites to win both the first two contests. With £16,483 matched on Smarkets, the Conservatives are 1.09 (91.7%) to win in Old Bexley and Sidcup, with Labour on 12.5 (8%)…

Ten university vice-chancellors earned more than £400,000 each last year, with nine of these pay packages worth at least ten times as much as their employees’ average salary, says Nicola Woolcock in The Times. The report from watchdog the Office for Students (OfS) acknowledged evidence of “pay restraint” from some institutions, but the number of senior staff paid more than £100,000 was little changed from the previous year, says the OfS. Its analysis of university pay found 1.8% of university employees were paid at least £100,000, up from 1.7% from 2019. The average university boss’s basic salary had risen by £1,000 to £219,000. Alice Gast, the head of Imperial College, was the highest paid, on £527,000. She was followed by Baroness Shafik of the London School of Economics, who was…

There are two characteristics of a bubble, says Rob Arnott, the investor often known as the godfather of smart beta. First, “we must make implausibly optimistic assumptions in order to justify prices”, he tells Bloomberg. Second, “the marginal buyer doesn’t care about valuation models”. By that metric, tech isn’t a bubble. Yes, the six big tech companies – Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix – are worth $8.5trn, more than the entire Japanese market ($6trn). But for some stocks such as Apple, valuations aren’t detached from reality. “You just have to make moderately aggressive assumptions and you can easily justify the price.” However, “micro-bubbles” abound. “When it comes to things like Tesla... and Netflix, you have to make very, very, very aggressive assumptions,” he says. And how many buyers…

■ ”In how many areas of life, other than fund management, do you pay someone extra to do their job properly?” asks David Brenchley in The Times. Investors are doing just that when they buy a fund with a performance fee on top of other charges – thus further undermining longterm returns. Fund management groups can “just about get away” with charging performance fees for assets that are usually inaccessible to ordinary investors, such as private equity. But it becomes “more galling” when the investments are more common. The two largest technology investment trusts, for instance, Allianz Technology and Polar Capital, come with performance fees of 12.5% and 10% respectively. And while Allianz has significantly outperformed in the past ten years, Polar “has barely done better” than a tracker fund.…

awealthofcommonsense.com Corporate profits and small-business income have been on a steady upward trend in the US with no major reverses since the 1940s, says Ben Carlson. What’s “striking” about that is that this long-term progress has been largely unaffected by high or low tax rates; Democrat or Republican presidents; inflation or deflation; rising interest rates or falling rates; booms and busts in the stockmarket; recessions and expansions… “and everything in between”. Politicians assure us they will do some good. But it doesn’t seem to matter much who is in power. True, policies impact on certain households and businesses. And politicians can change the mood of the country. But the system itself matters much more. “The US economy is so dynamic that we’re able to adapt to almost any scenario. Most…

Mortgage rates are rising. Finance website Moneyfacts reports that average two- and five-year fixed rates stood at 2.29% and 2.59% respectively at the start of November. That is a small increase compared to early October and marks the first monthly rise since June. Although the Bank of England held interest rates at 0.1% last week, lenders are positioning themselves for rate hikes ahead. Moneyfacts says that the number of deals offering rates below 1% has also fallen, from 131 in early October to 30 by 1 November. When they do come, Bank of England interest-rate rises will most immediately hit the 850,000 people on tracker mortgages, say Fiona Parker, Amelia Murray and Helena Kelly in the Daily Mail. A rise in the base rate to 0.75% would cost a borrower…

Shares in Yellow Cake (Aim: YCA), a supplier of uranium oxide (used as nuclear fuel) have been given an additional recent fillip by the COP26 conference: nuclear energy is key to tackling global warming (see page 18). The company has just completed a $150m share placing, having raised $227m in two previous ones. It plans to double its holdings of uranium oxide to 18.9 million pounds between February 2021 and June 2022. The group is a key beneficiary of the rise in the uranium price, which has gained 70% this year amid robust demand and tight supply. The stock is up by 59% in a year.…

Michael Marion Emil Anacletus Pierre Savundranayagam (aka Emil Savundra) was born in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1926. His father prevented him joining the air force so he served with the Ceylon Engineers in World War II, rising to the rank of captain before being demoted after a drunken escapade. After the war he started then dropped out of legal studies and got involved in several dubious ventures, selling non-existent oil to the Chinese government and swindling a Belgian bank over a fictitious cargo of rice. He was imprisoned for fraud in 1954 before being released on health grounds, and was later deported from Ghana. What was the scam? In 1963 Savundra set up the Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance Company (FAM), offering Britons car insurance. The idea was to focus…

Going… Check your change, says Marc Shoffman in The Sun. There are hundreds of online listings for rare Kew Garden-themed 50p coins, with some having sold for up to £700 on Ebay. The Royal Mint released 210,000 of the limited edition 50p coins, depicting the Chinese pagoda at Kew Gardens, in 2009 to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Their rarity means they have topped the latest 50p scarcity index from tracking service Change Checker. By comparison, ten million Brexit 50p coins entered circulation last year, bearing the inscription “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations”. Other coins are also in demand. Last week, a rare Lord Kitchener £2 coin, from 2014, fetched £1,200. Gone… Rumours of the existence of amint condition “no H” penny from 1882…

Puneet Dikshit, a 40-year-old partner at global consultancy McKinsey, has been charged with insider trading related to the $2.2bn acquisition of fintech firm GreenSky by Goldman Sachs, says Hugh Son for CNBC. Dikshit advised on the deal, and allegedly used his privileged information to buy almost 2,500 call options (essentially, a leveraged bet on the share price going up) in the firm in the two days before the deal was announced. His investment soared by 1,800% on the news, a profit of $450,000. Yet given his position he appears to have had limited financial knowledge. He apparently went on Google, using his work computer, to search for “what happens to options when company is acquired” the day before the deal was done. He now faces two counts of securities fraud…

Most new cars lose a third of their value as soon as you drive out of the dealership. But not all cars spend 10-15 years gradually depreciating before being scrapped. Some are even worth more than you paid for them before you take your first drive, and others return from an initial dip to become valued at many times their original sticker price. The right car can be a worthwhile investment, so here are some tips on what to look out for when creating your own vehicular nest egg. Two of the key factors in a collector’s car are brand and rarity. Premium brands like Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Bentley and Porsche can often produce collector’s items, but it’s not guaranteed. Everyday Porsche 911s from the late 1990s onwards…

The US dollar is on course for its largest annual rise in six years, says Saqib Iqbal Ahmed on Reuters. The US dollar index, which tracks the greenback’s value against a basket of six major trading partners’ currencies, has hit a 16-month high on bets that inflation will force the US Federal Reserve to hike interest rates sooner than expected. Higher US interest rates increase demand for US government bonds and other dollar-denominated assets. The dollar index has gained 6.5% since the start of the year. Its rally has been accelerated by a fall in the euro, the second-biggest reserve currency, which has hit a 16-month low against the greenback. While talk of a Fed interest rate hike spreads, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde is in no hurry to…

Strong third-quarter profits have driven European stocks to record highs. The pan-European STOXX 600 index had been stuck below and around the 400-point level for more than two decades, but this year it finally broke out of that range. Strong performances by energy and financial firms and the promise of continued easy money from the European Central Bank have kept prices buoyant. The luxury sector has also outperformed, helping propel France’s CAC 40 to its first record close since September 2000. Morgan Stanley notes that the MSCI Europe index is still on a record “33% discount” to US shares on a forward price/earnings (p/e) basis, says Michael Msika on Bloomberg. There should be more gains to come.…

US electric-car manufacturer Rivian made one of the biggest market debuts in history with its $11.9bn initial public offering (IPO) last week, says Harry Robertson for Markets Insider. The company has hitherto delivered a paltry 150 cars, and it suffered a loss of $994m in the first half of 2021 as it invested in boosting production rapidly. However, demand is robust, with 55,400 pre-orders for their R1T and R1T SUV models combined. The shares rose from $78 to $122.9 on their first day, valuing the firm at $107.6bn. The firm’s 38-year-old CEO, R.J. Scaringe, is now worth $2.2bn. Rivian’s top shareholder is Amazon, which owns around 20% of the company.…

Chemicals business Johnson Matthey (JM) lost a fifth of its value last week after “throwing in the towel on its battery business, cutting revenue guidance, and waving goodbye to its CEO”, says Oscar Williams-Grut in the Evening Standard. The company, best known for making catalytic converters, said it would sell its battery-materials business, set up in 2012, after concluding that returns “will not be adequate to justify further investment”: the market is rapidly becoming “high-volume [and] commoditised”. It hopes to earn £340m from the sale, though analysts believe that it “may struggle to find a buyer at that price”. No wonder shareholders are disappointed, says Patrick Hosking in The Times. JM’s nickel, cobalt and lithium-based technology had been deemed a “potential game-changer for the wider UK car industry”. Still, the…

It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for those who predicted the City would be turned into a wasteland if we left the EU. First Brussels decided that clearing of trades, a key piece of the plumbing of the financial system, can carry on in London for euro-denominated assets, even though a succession of European leaders vowed that it would have to move to financial centres on the continent. Now companies are shifting to a sole listing in London as well. There were lots of warnings that dual-listed companies such as Unilever and Shell would ditch their British arms and choose to be headquartered inside the single market instead. And yet first Unilever, admittedly under pressure from its shareholders, and now Shell, the two great Anglo-Dutch corporate giants, have…

There’s a well-known problem in many fields of research where findings from one group of researchers can’t be confirmed by others who try to repeat the same experiment. Areas such as psychology, sociology and medicine are especially prone to this – one study found that only half of a set of psychology experiments could be reproduced, with a number of high-profile and influential findings turning out to be false. This isn’t necessarily because of fraud on the part of the original researchers. Patterns will often emerge by pure chance if you crunch a set of data for long enough, and the incentive for researchers to keep crunching until this happens means that they can end up with a finding that appear to be statistically significant but is really just noise.…

It has been a difficult year for investors in government bonds. Yields on ten-year issues are very low (1.6% in the US, 1% in the UK, just positive in Japan but just negative in Germany) but rising as prices fall, hitting capital returns and turning total returns negative. Most debt funds, however, have not only generated positive, if modest, capital returns but also paid dividends with a yield of more than 5%. Typical are the two listed funds of TwentyFour Asset Management: the £575m Income Fund (LSE: TFIF) yielding 5.7% and the £180m Select Monthly Income Fund (LSE: SMIF) yielding 6.4%. The former invests in UK and European “asset backed securities” such as packages of mortgages and secured loans; the latter in the debt of UK and European banks and…

Traditional assets soar; growth stalls Rana Foroohar Financial Times For all the talk of cryptocurrencies and big data, most 21st-century wealth is still in bricks and mortar, says Rana Foroohar. A new study from the McKinsey Global Institute has some “eye-popping numbers”. Looking at the balance sheets of ten countries representing 60% of global income, it found that two-thirds of net worth is stored in real estate and land. This has a lot to do with falling interest rates as well as “constrained land supply, zoning issues and over-regulated housing markets”, say the authors. As a result, wealth and growth, which traditionally move “in sync with each other”, are now “completely disconnected”. Asset values are 50% higher than the long-run average relative to income. No wonder affordable housing has become…

nytimes.com/upshot Americans are, by many measures, better off than they have been in years, says Neil Irwin. They have “seized the upper hand” in the labour market and won pay rises. They have quit jobs in record numbers, yet unemployment has been falling rapidly too. They are sitting on piles of cash: the median household’s bank account was 50% higher in July of this year than in 2019. And yet, at the same time, polls show large majorities are in a funk about economic conditions. Why? Probably because inflation is rising. Consumers are seeing higher prices and no policies to correct them. They are seeing shortages and other inconveniences, which do not show up in inflation data but contribute to feelings of gloom. Economist Robert J. Shiller led surveys in…

There was just one official outcome from the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party earlier this month. More than 300 top members of the party met for the last time before next year’s national congress to approve a resolution on the party’s history and achievements – essentially a document that talks at great length about how hard the party has worked, how much it has done for the people and how it will keep up its efforts in future. That may seem a scant return for a four-day closed-door meeting, but it has symbolic significance. This is the third time that a Chinese leader has issued a resolution on the party’s history: Mao Zedong did so in 1945 and Deng Xiaoping in 1981.…

When is the minimum pension age not really the minimum pension age? When you’re in a pension scheme with a “protected pension age”. But while there are plenty of these schemes, it is now too late to transfer into one. This is a saga that has been going on since July, when the government announced that the minimum age at which you can begin drawing down private pension savings will increase from 55 to 57 in April 2028. However, the change does not apply to pension schemes offering protected pension ages: schemes where the rules explicitly state that savers will be allowed to access their cash at a specific age or on a specific date, rather than simply at the normal minimum pension age. In these schemes, the protected pension…

Deciphera Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: DCPH) is a biopharmaceutical firm specialising in the development of new cancer drugs. The share price collapsed by 75% last week when trials revealed that the group’s only product, a treatment called Qinlock, was ineffective at halting the progression of gastrointestinal cancers, says Phil Taylor on Pharmaphorum. The sharp drop in the stock price was preceded by months of decline as high research expenditure rattled investors. The company made an operating loss of $271m in 2020. Deciphera’s share price has slumped by 86% in 12 months.…

A 1968 Omega Speedmaster Professional, reference 145.012-67 SP, worn by American novelist Ralph Ellison, will be auctioned in New York on 12 December with Phillips. Invisible Man was the only novel Ellison published in his lifetime, in 1952. In it, Ellison’s nameless narrator chronicles “the black experience in America of being ‘invisible’ to society at large – as if the black experience takes place in a parallel universe that only overlaps American society in acts of violence, oppression, and exclusion”, says Jack Forster on Hodinkee. The book is “one of the 20th century’s most revered works of American fiction”. And for lovers of literature, that only adds to the Speedmaster’s lustre. “Watches are terribly personal things,” says Gary Shteyngart in The Wall Street Journal. “How many times a day had…

• I’ve lost count of the number of women who tell me that they, like me, endure disturbed or sleepless nights, says Ulrika Jonsson (pictured) in The Sun. Maybe it’s the age thing, or the overwhelming sense of responsibility that women bear, or perhaps it’s the dogs and the snoring men we share our beds with. Whatever the reason, I might wake at two or three in the morning, then reach for the smartphone for some “gratuitous, irrelevant and superfluous shopping… I get sucked in by ridiculousness because my mind is blurred and my sense of morality has already escaped out of my open window.” Cleanser, shampoo, canine stuff, unnecessary clothing and, most recently, a window-cleaning device have all been bought on midnight spending sprees. “I need to seek help…

86 The percentage increase in the number of superyachts longer than 30 metres sold in the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period in 2019, before the pandemic, according to industry publisher The Superyacht Group. Vessels typically cost up to $600m. 56 The amount in Japanese yen (36p) that a train driver in Japan had his wages docked by following a mix-up in June 2020 that caused a one-minute delay to the rail service. The driver is seeking ¥2.2m (£14,300) in damages from his employer for mental anguish. €200 The value of vouchers the Italian government is offering Italians for free visits to thermal baths in a bid to jump-start the hospitality sector following a pandemic-induced slump. Around 260,000 applicants received vouchers before the website crashed.…

Pop-singer Britney Spears (pictured), 39, has regained financial freedom 13 years after her father took over her affairs, says Sky News. In 2008 a “conservatorship” stripped her of control of her estate after she suffered a nervous breakdown. Earlier this year she described the arrangement as “abusive” and hired a new lawyer to help her end it. A US marshal has tracked down a bank robber who stole $1.2m from an Ohio bank in 1969 after inheriting the case from his father. John Elliott Sr. became obsessed with the chase but died last year before he managed to track Ted Conrad down. However, his son Peter, who adopted the same profession as his father, has now found the criminal, who died in Boston under a false name in May.…

The US Federal Reserve is “running out of excuses” for high inflation, says James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. US consumer prices rose by 6.2% year-on-year in October, the fastest rate since 1990. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, hit an annual 4.6%, the highest since 1991. Bonds swoon “I expect lots of eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets when they saw the number come in,” Seema Shah of Principal Global Investors told the BBC. Higher interest rates were not expected “before late 2022”, but the Fed now faces pressure to act sooner. The inflation figure triggered a bond sell-off, with yields on two-year US Treasury bonds soaring “by the most since the market turbulence of March 2020”, say Kate Duguid and Naomi Rovnick in…

“Chancellors… like to introduce... a tax break here and a relief there... to gain a headline or two. Each one is sensible when assessed according to its own, internal logic. But the overall effect is to dramatically increase the complexity and unpredictability of the system... Under Gordon Brown, a tinkerer par excellence, the tax code trebled in size... under George Osborne, who eulogised simplification, it doubled again... the [UK] code now stands at ten million words, eight times longer than Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the world’s longest novel (Hong Kong’s tax code is just 350 pages by comparison). No... expert can now predict how a new relief will dynamically interact with other elements of the code, creating loopholes and anomalies that provide lucrative opportunities for accountants…

Three to buy SDI Shares Scientific-products maker SDI, whose offerings range from digital-imaging equipment to electrochemical sensors, has had “a very encouraging” recovery. It says it has enjoyed “very strong sales and profits” recently thanks to an unexpectedly good performance from Monmouth Scientific, which it acquired last December. The company looks set for multi-year growth. The shares have gained 23% in six months but there should be further to go. 216p Wizz Air Investors’ Chronicle Budget carrier Wizz Air has struggled with the implementation of vaccine passports because vaccination rates in its key markets (central and eastern Europe) are lower than in the rest of Europe. However “there is hope of a rapid turnaround”: the percentage of Romanians who are fully vaccinated is expected to jump from 30% to 75%…

• Shares in Marks and Spencer rose by almost 20% last week after the group hiked its annual profit forecast by 40% on the back of “stellar” interim results, says Graham Ruddick in The Times. Pre-tax profits jumped by 53% from pre-pandemic levels as full-price sales rose by 17%. You could almost argue that M&S and some of its peers have benefited from Covid-19. It drove “struggling” competitors out of business and forced them to “accelerate their online operations and to... integrate it with their shops”. One of the most striking things about the results is “just how little the high street actually matters to [M&S] today”. Footfall at its shops selling clothing and home products “was down by 36% compared with two years earlier”. No wonder, then, that the…

The first official meeting between US president Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping “produced no breakthroughs in a relationship that has spiralled dangerously downward”, says Steven Lee Myers and David E. Sanger in The New York Times. Although officially cordial, the meeting revealed “acrimony” between the two superpowers that “could prove difficult to resolve” – the two leaders failed to even “cobble together the sort of joint statement that has typically punctuated summits between the United States and China over the decades”. Indeed, the individual statements issued after the three and a half hours of talks read like “catalogues of mutual grievances that offered little room for compromise”. Taiwan remains a particular point of contention, says Keiran Southern and Didi Tang in The Times. China claims it is “patient…

• Larry Culp (pictured) chief executive officer of General Electric, will make “extraordinary financial gains” from the break-up of the US conglomerate, says MarketWatch. CEOs tend to get the biggest contract-termination payments during such changes. The exact nature of the break-up is as yet uncertain, but according to an earlier proxy statement, had a change of control taken place on 31 December 2020, Culp’s performance awards would have been worth at least $100.4m. His total pay for that year was $73.2m, mostly from two stock awards. • Close Brothers, the FTSE 250 merchant bank, was facing a backlash from investors this week over plans to nearly double the basic salary of CEO Adrian Sainsbury, from £550,000 to £900,000 for next year, says Sky News. His overall guaranteed pay would rise…

Finance theory divides investment returns into two parts. Alpha is the value added through the decisions made by you (or the manager of the fund you hold). Beta is the return that results from the overall market. Assume that a portfolio of investments goes up by 15% while the overall market rises 10%. In this case, beta is 10% and alpha is 5% (15%–10%). In reality, the calculation is a bit more complicated because it depends on whether the type of stocks in the portfolio would be expected to fluctuate more than the overall market, but this demonstrates the idea. Beta is what you get from simply being invested in the market (ie, what a passive index investor gets); alpha is what an investor gains or loses from active investment…

Activist investor Gatemore Capital Management has been amassing a stake in furniture chain DFS since September, says Mark Kleinmann on Sky News. It sees “material upside” to the share price that could materialise through a “private-equity take-out at a significant premium” or a share buyback scheme, according to a letter to investors by one of the managing partners. DFS has a market capitalisation of £730m after a rise of 30% in the share price in the last 12 months. But the stock has barely risen since the group floated in 2015. It saw a jump in sales and a return to profitability in the year to 30 June, but there has been severe disruption to its supply chain. Gatemore has stakes in other UK retailers, including Moss Bros and Superdry.…

“For me, money means help. My mam was a single mother with two kids. She scrimped and scraped, although we never wanted for anything. When Iwent on The X Factor, I just wanted a good life for my mam and my brother. Buying her a house was the best thing in the world. The majority of my money just goes to my family.” Perrie Edwards of girlband Little Mix, who won The X-Factor in 2011, quoted in The Sunday Telegraph “It went from a bunch of hereditary thickos to a bunch of snollygosters who bought their entry.” Broadcaster Andrew Neil on the House of Lords, quoted in The Mail on Sunday “My dad [said]: ’You’re getting all uber-capitalist all of a sudden; you’ve always been dead against it.’ I know,…

theconversation.com The pandemic threw many businesses and their workers into crisis. But strong leadership can be the key to turning things around, says Christian Harrison. Here are the three key skills of effective leaders. 1. Be empathetic. Leaders “need to show they are human”. The late Arne Sorenson, for example, former CEO of Marriott International, recorded a video message for employees that has since gone viral expressing compassion for his employees as his firm’s revenues plummeted due to lockdowns. 2. Be decisive. Successful businesses respond quickly to change and adapt. When people were confined to their homes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon swiftly recruited 175,000 extra workers and increased pay. This was instrumental in helping to increase Amazon’s profits. 3. Build effective teams. Leadership is about motivating people and that is…

The long-term trends in China point to three distinct risks for investors. Economic growth in future may be much weaker than expected. The state may continue to squeeze private businesses. And the relationships between China and other countries – especially the West – may deteriorate, potentially to the point where we see a disorderly outflow of foreign investors (perhaps even forced by rules enacted either by Western countries or by China). All of these factors need to be taken into account in deciding what price you are willing to pay for Chinese stocks. Many investors – including me – used to feel that the long-term potential of China (especially consumption themes) meant that the better businesses there were worth a premium to many emerging markets, (although many dreadful firms also…

The daily headlines in Britain can make grim reading: there has been constant news of fuel shortages, rising inflation and frictions over Brexit, while the pandemic is still with us. But take a closer look and the economic backdrop, from our perspective at least, doesn’t seem nearly so bad. There has been an extraordinary increase in household savings through the pandemic; the housing market has remained strong; and jobs and wages have recovered rapidly and vigorously. So it is no surprise that UK consumers’ confidence in their own personal financial situation recently hit a 14-year high. As such, we think there are tremendous opportunities in many UK-related stocks that are potentially being missed through all the doom and gloom. A highly profitable bank for a low price “We are excited…

Last year, I alerted you to the inaugural 2018 vintage of Farvie grenache and its sibling syrah. With scores of 19.5/20 and 19/20 respectively, these are two of the finest debut wine labels I have ever tasted. So how did these daring wines fare in the cooler 2019 vintage, and did they suffer from the all-too-familiar “second album syndrome”? I am beyond excited to announce that they are a triumph. The Farvie syrah gains a near-perfect 19.5 mark in my notebook, and Farvie grenache has to make do with a mighty 19! In top-flight wines from warmer climes, such as South Australia’s Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, and the Rhône and Languedoc in France, syrah and grenache tend to summon up deep black-fruit notes only occasionally spiked with regal red-fruit…

In an earlier age, Greta Thunberg, now making her way home from the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, might have turned to God or the church. But this is the 21st century. And today’s most popular faith is climate change. Saint Greta believes, with all her heart and mind, that she can lead the world to victory over rising temperatures. Unlike some of the poor saints that went before her, Greta is unlikely to feel the hot flames licking her toes. But she may eventually come to see the many confusions and contradictions of her faith. “Such complexities do not seem to trouble the mind of the saint” Signalling her exalted status among the disciples, for example, she eschewed flying to the US to give a talk at the 2019…