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Around 80% of statistics are rubbish, my politics tutor liked to joke. Look at the recent discussion over GDP figures, and perhaps he was right to be so flippant. Growth figures are more art than social science, and are endlessly revised after they first emerge – usually upwards (except in the US, where they have tended subsequently to be nudged downwards in recent decades, perhaps a sign of incurable American optimism). The Economist noted a few years ago, for instance, that the British GDP growth figure for 1959 was estimated at 2.7% in 1960. In 2012, it was recorded as 4.7%. No fewer than 18 estimates of the figure were made. Or do you recall the fuss over a double-dip recession in 2012? It appeared to have arrived, but a…

“The era of low interest rates is over. In the blink of an eye, [central banks] went from punishing savers to punishing borrowers. If you’re depending on income to fund your retirement, 5% rates are a blessing... if you’re in need of credit, current rates are a curse... For years... investors bemoaned that [low interest rates were] forcing them out on the risk curve. If you wanted to earn some yield, bonds at 2% weren’t a great option. So they bought junk bonds at 5%... Now, investors don’t have to reach for yield... [Life is suddenly hard for borrowers]... it’s much harder to service a loan that is more than double what it was a year ago... Higher rates are a blessing or a curse, depending on where you are…

Struggling retailer Superdry, known for selling clothes “with bold designs and faux-Japanese slogans”, has warned of “material uncertainty” over its future, say Isabella Fish and Max Kendix in The Times. Superdry had been forced to suspend trading in its shares owing to difficulties with the auditors over the “final technical points” of the accounts. And when the accounts were finally released they revealed that the firm had made a loss of £148.1m, with debt rising to £26m. The stock fell by 16% to a record low of 47p. It had already slipped by 60% in 2023. Even before the latest slide, Superdry’s valuation of £55m was a fraction of the £1.6bn it was worth when “its logo-led clothes seemed to be everywhere”, says Simon English in the Evening Standard. However,…

Small appliances such as hairdryers and ice-cream makers “aren’t glamorous products”, says Andrew Bary in Barron’s. But America’s SharkNinja has racked up strong sales growth by being a “consistent and successful innovator”in this area. The group now leads the market for hairdryers costing between $100 and $300, having only entered the field two years ago; and its ice-cream maker, which also allows users to produce sorbet using fruit, has proved popular. International sales, which comprise around a quarter of the total, are expanding rapidly. The shares, on 12 times 2023 earnings, are on a discount to rivals such as DeLonghi and the balance sheet contains little debt.…

Keir Starmer handed a “clutch of ‘Blairite’ MPs key roles” in his Monday reshuffle, in what is likely to be his “final shake-up of the shadow cabinet” ahead of the general election due to be held next year, says Jim Pickard in the Financial Times. The promotion of Pat McFadden, Hilary Benn, Liz Kendall, Darren Jones and Peter Kyle shows how Starmer is seeking to “rebuild his party in a similar ‘centrist’ style to Tony Blair, with a focus on fiscal rectitude and socially conservative policies”. Deputy party leader Angela Rayner was given the role of shadow levelling-up secretary (revealing a welcome and renewed emphasis on localism, says Emma Burnell on CapX) and is now also shadow deputy prime minister. The promotion to the front bench of Blair’s…

Voters in Argentina will go to the polls on 22 October in the first round of the presidential election (the second round is in November). With £1,813 matched on Smarkets, the eccentric maverick Javier Milei is seen as the favourite to win at 1.29 (79.9%). In second place is Patricia Bullrich of the right-wing Republican Proposal at three (33%), with Sergio Massa of the Peronist Renewal Front (part of a wider coalition) much further out at 7.8 (12.8%). It’s fair to say that Argentine voters face a Hobson’s choice, as all three of the frontrunners have major flaws. Patricia Bullrich is alleged to have been involved in a guerilla movement when she was younger. As for Massa, who is currently the economics minister, Argentina’s economic chaos, with its collapsing currency…

Something had to be done. The German economy shrank in a couple of quarters last year, flatlined this year, and is expected to be in outright recession before the end of 2023. With the recent upgrade to British growth figures, Germany is now firmly at the bottom of the G7 growth league, with the worst performance of any major developed economy. It is not hard to work out why. The country has been badly hit by the soaring cost of energy, by cutting off its supply of cheap Russian gas, and by the slowdown in China, its largest export market. Its manufacturing and exporting model is in a lot of trouble. In response, the government has introduced a raft of tax breaks for companies, worth €32bn over four years, with…

A put option gives the holder the right (but not the obligation) to sell an asset, such as a share, for an agreed price, on or before a certain date. When you buy a put option, you pay a fee (known as a premium) to the seller of the option (also known as the writer of the option). If you exercise the option, the seller must buy the underlying asset from you at the agreed price. Otherwise the option expires worthless and the seller has no further liabilities. Let’s assume that Acme Widgets is trading at 100p per share and a put option to sell at 90p costs 5p. You buy a block of 1,000 options at a cost of £50 (5p × 1,000). If the shares fall to 70p,…

“I’m not hand-to-mouth, but as a freelance artist I’m still pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque… Meanwhile, [Disney CEO] Bob Iger is sitting in a billionaires’ retreat, saying that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic, when that b*tch is making $78,000 a day.” Actor, singer and writer Billy Porter (pictured) on the Hollywood actors’ strike, quoted in the Financial Times “The first rule of an investment is don’t lose [money]. And the second rule of an investment is don’t forget the first rule. And that’s all the rules there are.” Warren Buffett, quoted in Fortune “It wasn’t until it was all organised that I realised how much work goes into these things and how much money it costs and how much money you don’t make.” Comedian Gail Porter on the production of her…

capx.co Many people associate Sweden with socialism, but actually the country was something of a “capitalist pioneer”, says Rainer Zitelmann. The period from 1870 to 1970 was characterised by decentralisation, limited government and minimal regulation. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations had became famous all over the world, but 11 years before its publication, in 1765, the Finnish-Swedish economist Anders Chydenius had published a booklet, The National Gain, that made much the same points. Sweden also pioneered many aspects of the modern market economy, as a recent paper shows. The country hosted the world’s first publicly traded company: the first share was awarded in 1288. The first bank to issue credit notes and the first central bank were established in Sweden. It was also the first to allow women to…

A portfolio of corporate loans with a yield to maturity of 17% to 18%, trading at a 6% discount to net asset value (NAV). Surely this is too good to be true? It seems not, for reasons that Peter Staelens, manager of the CVC Income & Growth Trust (LSE: CVCG), explains. The trust, launched in 2013, has £220m of assets and two share classes, denominated in sterling and euros (the CVCG ticker is for the sterling class; the less-liquid euro class is CVCE). It invests in “senior secured credit” – loans to companies secured against assets. These loans “used to sit on bank balance sheets but banks have been squeezed out by regulation and excessive risks taken in the past”, says CVC managing director Mitchell Glynn. Instead, investment banks arrange…

According to Zoopla’s latest Rental Market Report, rents registered double-digit growth for the 15th month in a row in June owing to an “ongoing chronic imbalance” between demand and supply. The number of privately rented homes has barely changed since 2021, but demand for rental properties has continued to grow. On the demand side, landlords have been exiting the market as the government has hiked taxes and bought in new, costly regulations. But despite these challenges for landlords, rising rents mean the economics of buy-to-let investing still remain attractive in certain regions. The latest data from Zoopla shows buy-to-let investors looking to make an inflation-beating return should look North, and especially in Scotland. West Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire in Scotland tied for first place with a yield of 9% on an…

Could an energy broker save your small business money? The answer is yes, in theory. But it is vital to ask some very searching questions before you sign up for their services. Around 60% of small businesses use a broker to help them find the best deal on gas and electricity. The broker’s job is to navigate the complexities of small-business energy deals (whereby firms often sign up to contracts with fixed terms of two to three years) to negotiate the cheapest prices. That can work very well. Brokers should know their way round the energy market, which is a more complex proposition for small companies than for individual customers. They may even have access to enhanced rates with certain suppliers. “Tougher rules on transparency are to be introduced” However,…

“A 48% discount to NAV at Chrysalis Investments looks too negative” Investment trusts have had a torrid time over the past year, with share prices moving from premiums to net asset value (NAV) to wide discounts. The derating has stemmed from rising bond yields and increased competition from asset classes such as public debt, which until the advent of monetary tightening offered meagre returns. Moreover, misleading guidelines from the Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, on reporting layered fees has created a buyers’ strike by traditional institutions. As a result, the investment-trust sector now offers compelling value and attractive income streams covered by sustainable and growing earnings. A juicy yield attracting insiders Greencoat UK Wind (LSE: UKW) is now a major part of the UK power-generation supply through its 49…

British boat builder Sunseeker used the occasion of the Düsseldorf International Boat Show at the start of the year to launch the “Earth-shattering” return of the Superhawk, says Julia Zaltzman on the Robb Report. The Superhawk 55 is “an open-style express that has had performance in its DNA since Sunseeker debuted the Superhawk 34 back in 1997”. A dozen years later, the line was discontinued and the Superhawk 55 heralds its return, but this time “in a more luxurious, accommodations-friendly and decidedly less go-fast form”. In other words, this is a high-performance boat for luxury yacht owners “who like their comforts”. They do say good things come to those who wait and the Superhawk 55 does not disappoint, says Hugo Andreae in Motor Boat & Yachting magazine. “Clearly, today’s…

Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration Peter TurchinAllen Lane, £20 In the West there is a “deep foreboding” that society is falling into crisis, says Francis Fukuyama in The New York Times. “Evergrowing polarisation, economic inequality and inflation” have led many on both the right and left of political opinion to believe that “once revered political institutions have become dysfunctional and illegitimate”. Some worry that things are so bad that, in the US, “simply getting past the next election without the democratic system grinding to a halt” would be a big achievement. End Times by political scientist Peter Turchin joins the growing body of literature arguing that “we are in the midst of a major crisis”. As in his previous works, Turchin argues that “statistical patterns…

Jimmy Buffett, the US “singer-songwriter... and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like Margaritaville… made him something of a latter-day folk hero”, died last week from cancer, aged 76, says Bill Friskics-Warren in The New York Times. The Caribbean provided Buffett with the grist for his songwriting, as well as “the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and boutique tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines, all of which made him a millionaire hundreds of times over”. But unlike the characters in his songs, Buffett was a “shrewd manager of his fortune”, which Forbes put at $1bn this year. Of that, $570m was attributed to touring and recording and $140m in planes, homes and shares in Berkshire Hathaway…

“Getting engaged just got cheaper,” says Jinjoo Lee in The Wall Street Journal. Polished diamond prices have fallen by 27% since their peak last year. A one-carat, round, “near-colourless natural diamond with very slight flaws” costs $5,185 in the US, compared with $7,000 last year. The industry is in a cyclical downturn following a Covid-era boom. Lockdowns briefly prompted consumers to spend more on material goods such as diamonds, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted supply last year. Analysts might be wrong to predict a rebound in prices soon, says Thomas Biesheuvel on Bloomberg. The rising popularity of lab-grown diamonds, which are chemically identical to the natural kind and can be grown in weeks “in a microwave chamber”, is leaving the natural diamond industry “reeling”. Once limited to cheap costume…

Brent crude oil futures have hit their highest level this year. At $88 a barrel on Monday, the global benchmark is up 9% in 2023, although it remains about one-fifth below last year’s highs. This year’s rally has been driven by large output cuts agreed by the Opec+ oil producers’ alliance, which is led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. The latest jump came amid speculation that the production cuts will be extended into the autumn, says Alex Longley on Bloomberg. Data suggesting a Chinese manufacturing recovery has also increased expectations for demand. Supply towards the end of the year is looking “really tight if Saudi and allies don’t reverse their output cuts plan”, says Zhou Mi of the Chaos Research Institute.…

The “premature resignation” of one high-ranking employee at a $66bn Sydneylisted company seems “unfortunate”, says Jonathan Barrett in The Guardian. But “when three leave in less than a week, it shows all may not be well at miner Fortescue”. Just days after its 20th anniversary, the world’s fourth-biggest iron-ore producer has seen the departure of its CEO Fiona Hick, chief financial officer Christine Morris, and director Guy Debelle. The news, which marks the departure of 11 executives in three years, came as the firm released “its weakest result in three years, weighed down by a sputtering economy in China”. One of the key reasons for this turmoil at the top is executive chair and founder Andrew Forrest’s plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to zero, says Antony Currie on Breakingviews. Forrest…

America’s market for initial public offerings (IPOs) “is finally reopening after the sleepiest stretch in 32 years”, says Bloomberg. Proceeds from listings hit their lowest level since 1990 last year. Now, Instacart, a grocery-delivery outfit, Chip designer Arm and Klaviyo, a specialist in data automation, have all filed to go public. But the market may never regain the “sizzle” of 2021, when the median technology IPO achieved an eye-watering offer price of 15.2 times sales. With the era of easy money now over, that kind of valuation is unlikely to be seen again soon. Investors should also note that in the past half-century, IPO slumps have lasted at least two years.…

London House prices slide: Higher borrowing costs are constraining activity in the property market. House prices across Britain are, on average, 5.3% lower than they were a year ago – the sharpest drop since July 2009, according to the Nationwide house price index. The decline accelerated from the 3.8% year-on-year fall recorded last month and August marks the seventh monthly decline in prices in a row. A typical house now costs £259,153, down from £273,751 a year earlier. Mortgage approvals have fallen by around a fifth compared with 2019. “Nevertheless, a relatively soft landing is still achievable,” providing unemployment stays below 5% and “the vast majority” of borrowers continue to be able to weather the effects of rising interest rates, says Robert Gardner (pictured), Nationwide’s chief economist. Rising wages and…

● Watch-shop chain Watches of Switzerland makes about half its sales from Rolex, making it a proxy for the unlisted watchmaker, says Andrea Felsted. So investors should be worried that Rolex is buying Bucherer, a Swiss watch and jewellery retailer. “WoS now faces a more powerful rival, whose owner also happens to be its biggest supplier.” Until now, Rolex has eschewed the trend among luxury peers to push out the middleman and sell direct to consumers, so this deal is a “seismic shift”. While Rolex says Bucherer will be run as an independent business, there is a clear danger that over time it becomes the go-to store for Rolexes. WoS is best insulated in its home market of the UK, which accounts for 50% of sales; Bucherer has just four…

Hedge-fund manager Michael Burry gets plenty of attention for his big calls after making $2.69bn in profits from betting against the US housing market back in 2008, says The Times. The news that he has bet $1.6bn on another Wall Street crash by the end of the year is no exception. Filings with the US regulator show that Burry’s firm Scion Asset Management has bought $866m in put options on the S&P 500 and $739m in put options on the Nasdaq 100. In total, the short position amounts to more than 90% of his fund’s portfolio. Yet despite his success during the global financial crisis, Burry has now become “the latest seer with a shaky encore”, says the Wall Street Journal. “He has also made at least five dire predictions…

dailysceptic.org The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recently took to Twitter to criticise ministers, says J. Sorel. Like archbishop Justin Welby’s interventions on refugee policy, it spoke in a “coltish and halting cadence” that implied things must really have come to a pretty pass if such quintessentially English bastions as these felt obliged to enter the fray and speak up “like Paddington Bear raising his voice for the first time”. Such organisations “pose as the embodiment of ancient English sentiments”. But “from this deep cup, two can drink”. Another current in our island story is the “old hatred for the conscientious meddler, for the well-funded busybody”. This is what did it for the monasteries. We should use it. In the film Oppenheimer, president Harry Truman loses patience with…

Activist investors have put forward industry veteran Randel Freeman as the new CEO of Swiss fund manager GAM after voting down a takeover bid from Liontrust, says the FT. The investor group NewGAMe, which owns 9.6% of GAM, led opposition to an offer from Liontrust that would have seen GAM investors get 12.6% of the merged business despite contributing 40% of assets. Just 33.5% of shareholders voted to approve the deal. Following the vote, GAM’s board members said they would step down and recommended that shareholders vote for new directors nominated by the activists. GAM was caught up in the scandal centred on the failed Greensill supply-chain finance group, and its shares have fallen by 95% over five years.…

In yet another sign of the chaos unfolding in the UK property market, Zoopla has found it’s now cheaper to rent than buy for the first time in more than 13 years. Even though landlords are fleeing the market, and rents are surging, the rising cost of borrowing means it’s cheaper to rent rather than buy in most regions across the UK. The property portal looked at the cost of mortgage repayments for the average local house price versus the monthly rent for first-time buyers using a 15% deposit, 30-year mortgage term and 5.6% mortgage rate, based on a UK average house price of £263,000. Zoopla found that the average monthly mortgage repayment would be £1,285, but renters typically pay £1,163 across the UK – a £122 monthly saving. The…

Thousands of businesses that sell through marketplaces such as Amazon often run into the same problem: to grow, they need to buy more stock, but they lack the cash to purchase as much inventory as they would like to. The obvious answer is to borrow, in which case, the marketplace will almost certainly want to help. Indeed, Amazon, eBay and others see finance as an increasingly important source of revenue. Amazon, for example, has been offering conventional loans, repayable over a fixed term, to British small businesses for some time. And earlier this summer, it launched “merchant cash advances”. With these arrangements, you pay a fixed fee for the loan, with repayments made from the future revenues you earn on the marketplace. Such deals can work well in the right…

2022 Flint Vineyard, Bacchus, England £18.99, flintvineyard.com It’s funny how things go. I called in a set of newly released samples from Ben Witchell, Flint’s winemaker, as I have done the last couple of years around this time, expecting to wax lyrical about his superlative 2022 Charmat Rosé (£24.99, flintvineyard.com; £24.75, bbr.com). It is a stunningly pretty wine made from 11 different grape varieties, including rondo, for its pinky colour. This is the finest Charmat-style sparkling wine in the UK, and it looks and tastes fantastic, with a bone dry, tense, floral and forest fruit cocktail of flavours. But this wine is not the lead in this week’s column, because a pair of bacchus wines completely seduced me. These seriously rewarding white wines parade all this haunting white grape’s characteristics…

Many market participants on Wall Street, which sets the tone for global markets, are feeling pessimistic, says Hardika Singh in The Wall Street Journal. The S&P 500 index fell in August, its first monthly drop since February. Some ask whether this year’s artificial intelligence (AI)-induced technology-stock boom has got ahead of itself. “It has shades of what happened during the crypto craze,” says Jim Besaw of investment manager GenTrust. “These tech megacaps went up too far, too fast – the AI hype had a lot to do with it,” adds Mel Lagomasino of WE Family Offices. S&P firms are currently trading on 19 times forward earnings. That compares with 6.8 at the start of 2023 and is some way above the ten-year average of 17.7, leaving US corporate earnings with…

Shares in troubled online fashion retailer Boohoo soared by 7.5% last week when it emerged that retail billionaire Mike Ashley, the founder of Sports Direct, raised his stake in Boohoo days after buying more of Asos, a rival internet clothing group, says Tom Powell in The Times. Frasers Group, of which Ashley is the majority shareholder, now owns 9.1% of Boohoo and nearly 20% of Asos. Frasers has previously claimed that there are “potential synergies” between Boohoo and two of its own brands, Missguided and I Saw It First. Trying to guess Frasers’ long-term intentions “is a full-time game”, says Marcus Jaye in The Industry Fashion. But the decision to increase the stake in both firms raises the prospect of “a potential giant, online fast-fashion merger”. Such a move would…

Four to buy Costain Shares This infrastructure engineer is a great example of an unjustly overlooked UK small cap. The infrastructure business is low-margin and dependent on contract wins, but it is also reliable work in times foul and fair, and Costain has a solid order book. The shares are still 70% short of their pre-pandemic level on a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of just 7.5, which represents excellent value. The market capitalisation is so depressed that it barely exceeds the group’s net cash pile, a sign that the shares are “far too cheap”. 55p CRH Investors’ Chronicle This building-products giant will complete its shift from the unfashionable London stockmarket to New York later this month. The move of the primary listing makes sense for a business that generates 61% of…

Ali Bongo of Gabon, whose family had ruled the African country for more than half a century, last week “became the latest African head of state to be swept out of office in a coup”, says David Pilling in the Financial Times. Unable to shake off the perception that his country “was little more than a family slush fund”, he was removed by the head of his presidential guard, Brice Oligui Nguema. Nguema, who is currently interim leader, said that Bongo “was not competent to run the country” due to the effects of a stroke and that recent elections “had not been transparent”. Few in Gabon will mourn the departure of Bongo, says The Economist. Unemployment and poverty are rife; corruption is widespread – last year French authorities charged nine…

A fortnight ago on this page, I suggested that quite a lot of economic statistics were pretty much useless and a distraction for investors. Afterwards, I wondered if I was being too harsh. Maybe there are some traders who get some value out of the purchasing managers’ index. Perhaps we would have less grip on what’s going on if we weren’t constantly bombarded with so much data. Then we got last week’s story about how the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has overhauled its estimates of UK GDP for the last few years. It now reckons that by the end of 2021, Britain’s economy had passed its pre-pandemic peak – previously, it thought GDP was still 1.2% smaller. This in turn implies the UK recovery was not the weakest in…

The Old Lady’s blind spot Julian Jessop The Spectator The failure to discuss growth in the money supply when talking about inflation is “worrying”, says Julian Jessop. “Changes in the supply of money are key to understanding what has happened to inflation – and where it might be heading.” The latest figures show that the annual growth of M4ex (cash, sterling deposits and short-dated bonds held by households and non-financial companies) has “slowed to zero”. With no extra money circulating, inflation should lower further. People instinctively understand that when too much money chases too few goods you get inflation, but you would be “hard pressed” to find a “single reference to the money supply” in the Bank of England’s statements. Even the impact of quantitative easing only gets a “passing…

bloomberg.com/opinion The fraction of enterprise value of large US firms represented by tangible assets – real estate and inventory and so on – has fallen from 50% to 20% over the past 15 years, says Aaron Brown. Moreover, only about 25% of enterprise value is in identifiable intangible assets, such as patents and copyrights. The remaining 55% is in assets “too intangible to even identify clearly” – technical knowledge, corporate culture, customer relationships and so on. But there is something “less tangible still”: knowledge of what doesn’t work. Businesses seek to protect the positive and tangible things they create from competitors, but what they know about what doesn’t work is just as valuable and yet harder to protect in an age of increased employee mobility, remote working and the internet.…

■ Investment trusts are “at their cheapest since the 2008 financial crisis”, says David Brenchley in The Sunday Times. Investment trust discounts blew out in 2022 as uncertainty gripped markets, and they’ve struggled to recover. Only 28 out of the 400 investment trusts listed by the Association of Investment Companies (AIC), a trade body for the sector, are trading at a premium to net asset value (NAV), with the average discount standing at 14%, according to data from wealth manager RBC Brewin Dolphin. The biggest discounts are to be found in the alternative assets space. Trusts that own real estate, infrastructure or renewable energy have been hit by rising bond yields, since these make their dividends less attractive in comparison. HICL Infrastructure and 3i Infrastructure, both of which traded at…

● According to the Sunday Times, average savings rates have risen to 2.96% for easy-access accounts and 5.35% for one-year fixed-rate offers, suggesting most providers are still failing to pass on the full extent of the Bank of England’s recent rate hikes. Topping the charts for one-year fixed offerings is a new product from NS&I, a 6.2% fixed-rate, one-year guaranteed growth bond. All NS&I deposits are guaranteed by the Treasury, which makes this offering particularly attractive, but savers will have to be quick. The provider is tasked with raising a certain amount each year by the government. Its target is £7.5bn in the current financial year, and it is about £400m behind target, so the offer might be short-lived. ● The average household spends £43 a month on telecoms services,…

● It has never been more important to protect your business with good cybersecurity arrangements. Security experts warn that small companies, regarded as vulnerable by fraudsters, are an increasingly popular target for attacks. For example, there is growing concern about Adhubllka, a piece of ransomware software that appears to target small businesses and individuals. Adhubllka is a variation on the traditional ransomware model – attackers aim to lock up your IT systems, at which stage they will demand a payment for release. With Adhubllka, the payment demands are relatively modest, with the attackers hoping this will persuade small businesses to pay without making a fuss. ● Good news for small companies facing additional costs now the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) scheme has come into effect in London and other…

Book of the week Virtuous Bankers A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England Anne Murphy Princeton University Press, £25 A book that takes a snapshot of the Bank of England in 1783, based on a report by a team of inspectors, might sound like a dreary academic monograph of interest only to a select few. But Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England is well worth a read. The second half of the 18th century marked a crucial turning point in the Bank of England’s journey from being a private enterprise owned by shareholders to becoming a modern central bank, arguably one of the most important (and powerful) parts of government. At the time of this transition, the Bank of…