Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 934 i MoneyWeek

One of the biggest complaints of the post-2008 era has been the failure of wages to grow in “real” terms (ie, after inflation). Anyone highlighting Britain’s remarkably strong employment levels throughout the crisis and beyond has grown used to caveating the figures with the observation that the jobs were of poor quality, or were low paid, or that pay packets were stagnating. The welcome news is that this critique is increasingly no longer a valid one. This week, we learned that inflation in the UK, as measured by the Bank of England’s official target rate (the consumer price index – CPI), has fallen to 1.8%. That’s the first time that it has been below the Bank’s target of 2% in two years. Meanwhile the previous target measure – RPI, the…

Investors can be very skittish and bolt at the first sign of trouble. Those with money in Thailand, however, “are generally comfortable with the possibility of a turbulent ride,” say Anuchit Nguyen and Randy Thanthong-Knight on Bloomberg. They have to be: southeast Asia’s second-largest economy has been in political turmoil for years now, and the constant tension has hampered efforts to introduce structural reforms to boost efficiency. This year, the country is due to hold a general election on 24 March. This would be the first vote since the military government seized power in 2014 during a period of unrest and bloody street protests. In the most recent twist, the Thai Raksa Chart party (which is linked to a former Thai leader, now exiled) announced that Princess Ubolratana would be…

“Lloyds and the rest... are still no more than leveraged bets on the UK economy. You’d want to be on the other side of that bet right now, so bank shares look like ones to short. Barclays can offset the UK strife a bit because of its US arm, but in the past quarter most of Wall Street had a shocker, so there’s no reason to think Jes Staley’s crew didn’t... If they have, the bankers at Barclays are complete geniuses. That would be a first. The other reason for concern is the clear rise in corporate accidents. Homeowners are okay so far, but company calamities are plainly on the rise... Even well-run firms are feeling the pinch... RBS, Lloyds and Barclays will swear blind everything is just fine... and…

It’s time to take another look at Nestlé, says Florian Söllner in Der Aktionär. The Swiss consumer-products giant is often written off as a staid and ethically dubious multinational. But it is getting its act together in every respect. It has responded to the rise of vegetarianism with a new meat-free food-range, Garden Gourmet, which includes a veggie burger that supposedly smells like a real hamburger. Consumers worried about the provenance of Nestlé products will soon be able to scan a QR code and find out exactly where it comes from. Meanwhile, management is ditching poorly performing brands, which will give overall profitability a hefty fillip. The stock yields almost 3%.…

“Just what we need,” says Sarah Halzack on Bloomberg. More “drama” over Amazon’s second headquarters. Faced with “criticism” from activists and politicians over an agreement that would see Amazon get $3bn in state and city incentives to move 25,000 employees to New York, it has now decided to “explore alternatives”, says The Washington Post. Although it is unlikely to pull out immediately, the company may try to use a threat to withdraw to “put pressure” on New York. The future of the agreement between Amazon and New York may boil down to local politics, say Joshua Chaffin and Shannon Bond in the Financial Times. The tax incentives need to be approved by the New York State Assembly, which has voted to give “effective veto power” to a three-person panel containing…

President Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who control 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, are to abandon the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, intensifying concerns that the US and Russia will also allow the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to expire in 2021, says The New York Times. Unless a new treaty is negotiated, this means that there will no longer be any “legally binding, verifiable limits on the American or Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972”. Moscow has said that it expects the US to “take steps to contain Russia militarily” and has warned that it is prepared to take “extensive measures” to ensure its security, says Max Seddon in the Financial Times. Putin’s talk of “showy space-age hypersonic missiles” and nuclear…

Brussels’ decision to block the merger of Siemens and Alstom provides “a rare opportunity to congratulate the European Commission on a decision well taken”, says Jeremy Warner in The Sunday Telegraph. The justification offered – that Europe needs “a national champion in train and signalling manufacture to compete with the likes of China’s CRRC” – is “nonsense”. CRRC does not yet provide any meaningful competition to Siemens and Alstom in non-Chinese markets. And in any case “there are better ways of competing against the cheating, stealing Chinese behemoths than creating a matching monopoly”. It may be a pyrrhic victory, says Ben Hall in the Financial Times. France has decided the EU merger rules are “obsolete”; Germany has demanded changes to “better take into account the demands of international competition”. This…

He may not be the best-known money manager, but he is one of the biggest players in the market. Yngve Slyngstad, 56, has been running Norway’s $1trn investment fund, which owns nearly 1.5% of global equities, since 2008. Slyngstad, who has five university degrees (in politics, law, economics, business and philosophy), is running the fund for many future generations to come. That means not paying too much attention to headlines on Brexit, for example. “If we look past this – ten, 20, 30 years – the UK will be an important economy in Europe, and it will remain in Europe. We expect business on that timeline to develop positively no matter what the outcome.” In the long run, he notes, “the big driver of the economy and of our... results…

The highest-paid public employees in the vast majority of US states – 39 out of 50 – aren’t politicians, lawyers, teachers or doctors, but college football and basketball coaches, reports ESPN. Heading the list in 2017 was Nick Saban who, as the football coach at the University of Alabama, was paid $11.1m; second was Dabo Swinney, American football coach at Clemson University in South Carolina. The University of Kentucky’s basketball coach, John Calipari, pocketed $7.1m. Of the top-paid employees who weren’t sports coaches, eight worked in education and two in medicine. Alaska paid Keith Meyer, president of the Alaska Gasline Development Corp, $500,000. The highest-paid non-sports coach was Massachusetts’ Michael Collins, who was paid $1m as chancellor and senior vice-president of health sciences at the University of Massachusetts. The salaries…

The future of an eerie abandoned development of 300 mini-castles in Turkey is uncertain, says Bethan McKernan in The Guardian. Burj Al Babas, situated between Ankara and Istanbul, was billed as a luxury housing development but has been left unfinished after its developers went bankrupt, reflecting the downturn in the country’s economy. Of 732 planned buildings, designed to be holiday homes for wealthy Gulf tourists, 587 were completed, at an estimated cost of £151m. Only a handful of the £379,000 houses were sold and several investors have since pulled out. The project has “long been hated by Mudurnu locals”, who say it’s not in keeping with the area’s traditional architecture, which is characterised by Byzantine buildings, traditional Ottoman wooden houses and a 600-year-old mosque.…

It has never been cheaper to fix your mortgage for ten years. The average ten-year fixed mortgage rate has dropped drastically over the past five years, from 4.61% to an average of 3.05%, according to figures from personal-finance comparison site Moneyfacts. “For those looking to borrow less than 60% of their home’s value with a super-clean credit history, there are astonishing deals to be had,” says Miles Brignall in The Guardian. For example, First Direct will let you fix for a decade at just 2.44%, “meaning some households would never have to remortgage ever again”. Coventry Building Society also has a tantalising offer – fix for ten years at 2.55%. It will lend up to 85% of your home’s value with no upfront fees. “Long-term fixed-rate deals tend to come…

Almost one million people are at risk of punitive tax charges because they haven’t understood complicated rules on pension savings and withdrawals, according to new figures released by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). Since 2015, savers have been able to tap their pension funds in various ways from the age of 55. Yet many people who take advantage of the pensions freedom system to take income out of their pension plans do not realise that in most cases, this severely restricts their ability to make further savings. While most people get a £40,000 annual allowance for pension contributions, a lower cap, known as the money purchase annual allowance (MPAA), applies to most of those who have started accessing their savings at age 55 or older. This reduced allowance, worth just…

With less than two months to go until the end of the 2018-2019 financial year, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to prepare for higher costs. The average small firm’s costs have already risen by £60,000 a year since 2011 because of public policy changes, according to research by the Federation of Small Business (FSB). But further increases kick in from April 2019. The FSB’s research focused on taxes, business rates, employee obligations and other government levies, recording a 15% increase in annual costs for the typical small business over the past eight years. But in April new rules on pension contributions, along with a higher minimum wage, will add to the burden. On pensions, the minimum contribution rates are increasing in the auto-enrolment system, which requires all employers to…

Britvic (LSE: BVIC), based in Hemel Hempstead, has been making soft drinks since 1845 and boasts Robinson’s, J2O and Tango among its brands. It manufactures in the UK, Ireland, France and Brazil, and is also the UK bottler for PepsiCo. The introduction of Britain’s sugar levy last April had little impact, with 99% of products exempt. Sales rose by 5.1% to £1.5bn in the year to the end of September, with profit after tax up 4.9% to £111.6m. The dividend rose by 5.2% . Shareholders have also been rewarded with capital growth: the stock has gained 36% in a year.…

Bre-X Minerals was a mining firm founded by David Walsh in 1989, and originally listed on the Alberta Stock Exchange (it later moved to the Toronto Stock Exchange). In 1993 Walsh bought land in the Philippines on the  advice of geologist John Felderhof (pictured). In 1995 Michael de Guzman, who oversaw the project, announced he had discovered gold in the area. This caused the firm’s shares to rise by the summer of 1996 to a peak of nearly 1,000 times from their original flotation level (adjusted for stock splits), giving the former penny stock a market capitalisation of $6bn. What was the scam? As is standard in the mining industry, Bre-X’s claims about its “discovery” were based on samples of rock drilled from the land it had acquired, which contained…

Winners Take All The Elite Charade of Changing the World Anand Giridharadas Allen Lane (£12.99) “Philanthrocapitalism” is the idea that, “by applying their moneymaking acumen to social investing,” business leaders can help “rid the world of disease, want, exclusion and ignorance,” says Edward Luce in the FT. Anand Giridharadas argues this is a sham, a cover for dodging taxes or pushing causes dear to the hearts of the super-rich. Rather than benefiting society, “modern philanthropy largely reinforces the world as it is”. Giridharadas has “embedded himself in the world he writes about”, says Joseph Stiglitz in The New York Times, and he avoids bombast to make a “tactful and subtle” argument. This allows him to present “a devastating portrait of a whole class, one easier to satirise than to reform”.…

• As you scroll through your social-media accounts and see all those “flawless, happy, smiling faces living the good life without a care in the world”, just remember, it’s all a load of baloney, says Lorraine Kelly in The Sun. Those couples looking adoringly at each other? They probably had a raging argument five minutes later. And those “glamorous girls posing with cocktails by the pool”? They “most likely woke up the next day with raging hangovers in a puddle of their own puke”. So, well done singer Frankie Bridge (pictured) for speaking up. Finding success as a teenager in S Club Juniors, she joined girl band The Saturdays. She suffered from crippling anxiety and felt guilty about being depressed despite her success. “It’s brave of her to open up…

£100m How much David Harding, the founder of hedge fund Winton, has donated to Cambridge University through his foundation. It is the biggest ever donation made by a British person to an educational institution. 264,000 The number of barrels of crude oil Britain imported from the US every day last month, making America Britain’s biggest source of oil for the first time since the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Washington sent shipments to Britain to head off shortages. 10 The percentage increase in sales of alcohol in supermarkets last month, compared with the same month in 2018 – a sign, perhaps, that enthusiasm for the abstemious “dry January” trend of recent years is drying up. £300,000 The cost of the proposed bronze statue of Margaret Thatcher that is to stand…

A 22-year old London student, Vlad Luca Filat, has forfeited more than half a million pounds after three of his bank accounts were frozen and he was found to be “unable to demonstrate a legitimate source for the money”, reports FT Alphaville. Filat is the son of the former prime minister of Moldova, Vladimir Filat (pictured), who was jailed for nine years after €1bn “disappeared” from three Moldovan banks. Filat Jnr moved to London in 2016, bought a £200,000 Bentley Bentayga and rented a penthouse flat in Knightsbridge, paying £390,000 for a year upfront. The National Crime Agency says his accounts were funded by large deposits from offshore companies, mostly in Turkey or the Cayman Islands, says Bloomberg. Good week for: Premiership football club Liverpool FC may not have won…

Optimism about Brazil has been running high. Latin America’s largest economy has announced free-market reforms under right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. Brazilian stocks have already risen rapidly in anticipation. They have gained 13% in dollar terms in four weeks, beating the MSCI Emerging Markets and the S&P 500, notes Kenneth Rapoza on Forbes. Last year, as Bolsonaro’s election was gradually priced in, Brazilian stocks gained 10%. The centrepiece of the reforms consists of changes to pensions, a severe drain on state expenditure. Public sector workers can currently retire after only three decades on the job. They can finish working at any age if they have paid into the system for 35 years, or 30 for women. The plan now is to increase the retirement ages to 62 years for men and…

More than 1,400 CEOs of US companies left their jobs in 2018. Departures rise when the economy slows and earnings and share prices weaken, so it’s no surprise that the number of leavers hit a ten-year high, says Ryan Derousseau in Fortune. But CEO exits can spell opportunity. If they occur in the context of a “strategic realignment” rather than retirement or scandal, the shares tend to struggle for a year or so but then rebound and do better than their sector counterparts. Strategic overhauls usually mean firms concentrate on improving their businesses rather than engaging in gimmicks such as share buybacks. After three years, capital expenditures increase by 36% on average.…

It was a “dry January” in the initial public offerings (IPO) market, says Katie Martin in the Financial Times. Due largely to the US government shutdown, which paralysed the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulator that reviews new listings, the number of flotations on Wall Street fell to just one, compared with 18 in January 2018. Shares in New Fortress Energy, an exporter of liquefied natural gas, slumped by 8% on their debut. Recent market volatility also helps explain why there were no new listings in Britain and only one in Europe last month. Globally, the number of IPOs declined by 60% year-on-year; the amount raised, $2.6bn, marked an 80% reduction.…

Sainsbury’s and Asda shareholders will have to wait a little longer to learn whether the two companies can merge. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has delayed its final decision until 30 April, citing the complexity of the investigation, says The Daily Telegraph. The £12bn merger aims to create the UK’s largest supermarket group, eclipsing Tesco with almost a third of the market and more than 2,000 stores. If the deal is approved it could be “a grocery industry game-changer”, says Deirdre Hipwell in The Times. The two companies claim the combination would result in an “innovative, large-scale group with serious buying power”, generating lower prices for customers. They also insist the deal is necessary to enable them to compete on level terms with “gargantuan” firms such as the German…

It’s still nearly a year until the Iowa caucuses begin, traditionally the start of the presidential primary campaign in the US, but Ladbrokes is already offering a market on the winner (in terms of overall state delegates). The favourite is Kamala Harris at 5/1, followed by Elizabeth Warren at 10/1, Cory Booker at 20/1 and Kirsten Gillibrand (pictured) at 25/1. I’d steer clear for now, however, as potential candidates such as Joseph Biden aren’t currently listed. I’d also steer clear of the vice-presidential nominee market at the moment. Vice-presidential nominations depend heavily on the nominee, and can either be candidates who performed strongly in the primary (such as John Edwards in 2004), respected grandees (Dick Cheney in 2000 and Joe Biden in 2008), or candidates intended to provide geographical or…

We know that most fund managers fail to beat their underlying benchmarks consistently over the long run, partly because their fees are too high. Any number of studies prove this point. However, this isn’t necessarily because managers are bad stock pickers – other papers note that managers’ “best ideas” tend to beat the market. So what’s the problem? An interesting new study might have the answer. Selling Fast and Buying Slow: Heuristics and Trading Performance of Institutional Investors, a 2018 paper from academics and researchers Klakow Akepanidtaworn, Rick Di Mascio, Alex Imas and Lawrence Schmidt, suggests asset managers are indeed generally good stock pickers. The authors looked at more than 750 portfolios between 2000 and 2016. On average, new buys beat both the market and a “counterfactual portfolio” – where…

Just before trading stopped for the Christmas holidays, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index plunged into bear-market territory, with a 20% fall in its value from its peak at the close of the summer. Plenty of other major markets slipped into bear territory as well, and most others were very close to it. What was by some measures the longest bull market on record, in sheer length if not in overall strength, was brought to a close. It was not hard to imagine that 2019 would turn into a punishing year for investors. A short, sharp shock It has, however, turned out to be a short, if sharp, episode. Through January and the start of February, equity prices have recovered. If we measure a bull market as a 20% rise from the…

The lunatic reality of our tax system Simon Jenkins The Guardian The US billionaire Ken Griffin recently bought two London properties worth £195m and a £200m penthouse in New York, says Simon Jenkins. The property tax on his New York home will be at least £280,000 a year; in London he will pay a grand total of £2,842 council tax. This is the “lunatic reality of Britain’s hyper-centralised public finances”. While the Treasury “squanders money” on high-speed trains, local councils have experienced a real-terms cut of 49% between 2010 and 2017 and say they are barely able to sustain “core” statutory services. This is a “tacit and cynical power grab” by Britain’s political establishment. According to the OECD club of developed nations, local taxes comprise just 1.6% of GDP in…

Last year was one to forget for investors in smaller companies, says Professor Paul Marsh of the London Business School. The Numis Smaller Companies Index (NSCI), the bottom 10% of the UK market, returned -11%, 2.3% behind the FTSE 100. However, if investment companies are excluded, the gap increases to 6.6%, and if companies listed on Aim are included, to 7.1%. The NSCI is made up of all 707 stocks (of which 348 are investment companies) with a market value below £1.33bn, and has a combined value of £231bn. Including Aim, it comprises 1,617 companies worth a total of £307bn. This compares with the £1,814bn value of the FTSE 100 index. Small-cap managers have many more companies to research than their large-cap counterparts, each with far less research coverage, less…

The Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, has asked open-ended property funds to provide daily updates on the health of their portfolios, say Judith Evans and Kate Beioley in the Financial Times. Investors continue to pull their money out of the sector. In the last three months of 2018, investors withdrew a net £336m from British funds that own property directly, according to figures from trade body the Investment Association. Of this, £228m was taken out during December. Increased scrutiny by the regulator is not too much of a surprise. After the EU referendum in 2016, several open-ended property funds were forced to suspend trading to stem the flow of redemptions from people worried about the state of the market. Many of these funds imposed a “fair-value adjustment”, essentially marking…

“No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers”, wrote TS Eliot of the “remarkably fat” Bustopher Jones in his Old Possum poems. But these days commonplace mousers, pedigree cats and a wide array of other animals have their own outfits. In Japan, dogs are “often trussed up in a T-shirt and jeans or the latest fashions from expensive boutiques”, says The Economist. “It is common for a parent taking a baby for a stroll to exchange a look of solidarity with another pram-pusher, only to glance down and realise the other’s contains a furry friend.” Welcome to the world of “fur babies”. It isn’t limited to Japan. Lavishing cash on cats, dogs and rabbits “Our research shows that millennials are particularly devoted to their furry companions,” says Chana Baram of market…

“Some ghastly piece of legislation was always going to be passed while everyone was distracted by Brexit. Now we know what it is: a whopping hike in probate fees that will cost grieving families £145m in its first year,” says James Coney in The Sunday Times. The government has pushed ahead with its plans to change the way probate fees are charged. From April, the flat £215 fee (or £155 if paid through a solicitor) will be replaced with a new sliding scale. If your estate is worth less than £50,000, you pay nothing. Between £50,000 and £300,000, the charge will go up by just £35 to £250. For estates worth £300,000-£500,000, the fee increases to £750, rising to £6,000 if your estate is valued at more than £2m. Last…

Circassia (LSE: CIR) was founded in Oxford in 2006 and listed on the stock exchange in March 2014. It focuses on making products to manage respiratory diseases such as asthma. It has a foothold in the UK, Germany, US and China; it also has a commercial partnership with AstraZeneca, which has given the larger company almost 20% of Circassia’s shares. Despite rising revenues, costs are high and it has yet to make a profit. It has been forced to cut back on research and administrative expenses. The share price has slumped by 60% in the last year.…

This week’s column is about magic. Not the David Copperfield or Penn & Teller style of magic, but real magic. Not sleight of hand, not camera tricks, not misdirection or illusionism – real magic you can touch and indeed taste. The 2017 Rieslings from von Kesselstatt are true vinous magic and I have no fewer than three for you this week, and they are all obscenely good value for money. First, my featured wine, the beautiful Wiltinger Trocken. This is guaranteed to cast a spell on your senses – it is so enchanting. There is a crystalline purity to this Riesling which lifts the mood, pierces the senses and caresses your taste buds all at the same time. When I first tasted this wine, I sighed. I actually emitted a…

Last week’s State of the Union message from the president of the United States was disappointing. What we had found refreshing about Donald Trump was his willingness to say things that others won’t – often idiotic, but occasionally true. He said the stockmarket was a “big fat ugly bubble”, for example. He said US foreign policy was a “disaster”. He said we needed to “drain the swamp”. All true. But now it’s all blah, blah, blah. Since entering the White House, Trump has been partially, but not completely, tamed by the Deep State. He no longer sees any evil in bubbly stock prices. He no longer hears any evil in the Pentagon’s misadventures. And he no longer speaks up against evil coming from “the swamp”, of which he is now,…

Three to buy 4imprint Shares This US-focused business sells branded promotional products, such as mugs, pens and dongles, putting companies’ logos on them to help them advertise their wares. It outsources the actual manufacturing of the products to third parties, using its proprietary software and database analytics to concentrate on marketing its offerings to clients efficiently. The business generates plenty of cash, while management has “a nice habit of under-promising and over-delivering”. The shares are currently trading towards the bottom of their historic range, marking a good entry point into a long-term growth stock. 1,962p Inspired Energy Money Observer This energy procurement consultant advises businesses with atypical needs on the best contracts and tariffs using a “highly sophisticated” set of tools. It earns money from both switching commissions and per-unit-of-energy…

• The “major profit warning” issued by spread-betting group Plus500 is another reminder that “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”, says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. Despite tougher new European regulations governing high-risk contracts for difference, which were always likely to hamper the whole sector, the company had issued a “series of statements” that kept insisting it would beat earnings forecasts. Now the investors “sucked in by the euphoria around its bullish trading statements” have lost a third of their stake. • “All the truly great department stores began as personal fiefdoms, and had most success” under “private ownership,” says Matthew Vincent in the Financial Times. Debenhams is no exception. The shares have fallen by 98% since its 2006 listing. The latest twist in this…

Leverage means the use of debt to fund an investment, which has the potential to enhance returns, but also to amplify losses. Imagine two funds have investments of £100m. The first is entirely equity-funded (to the tune of £100m), and the second is financed with 50% debt and 50% equity. The following year the assets in the funds double in value to £200m. The first fund’s return on equity is an impressive 100% – if it shut down now, it could return its investors’ original £100m, plus another £100m. However, while the second fund would need to pay back £50m of debt to the lender, the remaining £150m would be returned to investors, meaning they would have made an even more impressive profit of 200% on their original equity. So…

• Jeremy Corbyn has published his tax return for 2017-2018, reports the Daily Mirror. It reveals he was paid a total of £132,611, which included his MP’s salary, pay received as leader of the Opposition, and pension. Apart from taxable interest on savings of just £1, he received no other income, but did get £6,648 in state pension and £2,438 in pension from the union Unison. He paid income tax of £46,074.90, plus £6,442 as a result of previously being on the wrong tax code. • Lara Newman, the chief executive of LocatED, a company set up by the Department for Education (DfE) to find and buy properties for free schools, is paid a salary of between £185,000 and £190,000, says the Times Educational Supplement (TES). Last year she was…

“I don’t look at sales. As long as no one tells me I’m in red, no one tells me I’m in debt, and I can still pay my rent and feed my dog, then I’m fine. And feed myself, of course. I’m good with my money so I’m not really worried about that.” Jorja Smith (pictured), Grammy-nominated British soul singer, quoted in The Observer “There’s a trick to getting away with dressing like a chav in a nice restaurant. Own the restaurant.” Northern restaurateur Gary Usher, quoted in The Times “Isn’t it funny when you walk into an investment firm and you see all of the financial advisers watching CNBC? That gives me the same feeling of confidence I would have if I walked into the Mayo clinic or Sloan…

US hedge fund Cat Rock is pressuring takeaway service Just Eat to merge with a rival rather than appoint a new chief executive, says Julia Kollewe in The Guardian. “A merger with a well-run industry peer would be a far better outcome for shareholders than relying on the board to choose a new CEO, particularly given the board’s poor record of CEO selection”, said Cat Rock, which owns 1.9% of Just Eat, in an open letter to the board. The fund’s latest salvo seems “unlikely to be palatable to the current management, given it effectively calls for them to be out of a job”, said Russ Mould of broker AJ Bell. Yet its stake “does not carry much weight on its own and it will need to garner support from…

This Grade II-listed property dates back to the 14th century and is situated on Herefordshire’s black and white trail. It is currently a restaurant but was originally the village pub and retains the relevant licences to be run as both. It has beamed ceilings, open fireplaces, and three main dining areas seating a total of 52 people and a further garden seating area for the summer months. It has commercial-grade kitchens and customer restrooms, a bar area and secondary kitchen and cold room. Upstairs is currently laid out as a four-bedroom flat but it could be turned into B&B accommodation for customers, subject to planning permission. There is also a private garden and garage area with a local authority-owned car park with space for 30 cars. But can you guess…

Toss out the old cushions, shoes or chewtoys. Get rid of that tatty blanket. In today’s pet-friendly society, if you welcome an animal into your house, then its new abode should reflect the esteem in which it is held. That’s the ethos behind the modern concept of design for pets. After all, what does keeping an animal in a cage say about human-animal relationships, asks Tom Wainwright in the introduction to his book Pet-tecture: Design for Pets. On page after page, you will find examples of stylish doggy dens and kitty scratching posts. It’s a relatively recent trend and a potentially lucrative one. In the same way Robert Adam in the 18th century, Le Corbusier in the 20th and Zaha Hadid in 21st turned their attention to designing a chair…

• “The timing could not have been worse. As snow blanketed parts of Britain... the energy regulator was preparing to authorise one of the biggest price rises in a decade,” says Emily Gosden in The Times. Just weeks after introducing the energy-price cap – which limits how much firms can charge per unit of gas and electricity – Ofgem announced the cap is to be increased. Rising wholesale costs mean the price cap for customers on default tariffs will rise by £117 a year. “The significant increase, which wipes out the average saving of £76 from the cap, will be embarrassing for ministers, who promised that people would save money under the flagship policy,” says Adam Vaughan in The Guardian. The 10% increase is “on a par with the worst…

• What does your company do? Migrate saves households money on energy bills without homeowners having to lift a finger. Our technology automatically switches energy providers for our users every year – for free – ensuring they are always on the cheapest deals. The average household could save over £300 by switching energy providers every year, but too few people customers felt like such a big deal for us. That’s when Migrate stopped feeling like a project and started feeling like a real business. • What has been your biggest challenge? Moving into a whole new industry, in this case energy, was a big challenge. We started off by being focused on what we were doing, our technology, our process and our product. We were then suddenly confronted with having…

There is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the British economy and stockmarket. But despite all the doom and gloom, the economy is in better shape than many realise. Indeed, in stark contrast to the horror stories and negative headlines, what we’re seeing on the ground, at the company level, are a number of bright spots. It’s easy to miss these opportunities if you don’t tune out the Brexit-related noise. JPMorgan Claverhouse aims to provide both capital and income growth for its shareholders by investing in a portfolio of 60 to 80 quoted British equities: reasonably valued quality companies with improving prospects. The fund has just announced its 46th consecutive annual dividend increase, the longest of any UK-only investment trust quoted on the London Stock Exchange. The housing gloom has…

David Pecker made a good living making the lives of the rich and famous the subject of national scandals. Now, he is the subject of his own. During the course of a lengthy career as “the bad boy” of US publishing, David Pecker has had his fair share of run-ins. But taking on the world’s richest man may prove a step too far – even for the pugnacious, Bronx-born boss of the National Enquirer. Jeff Bezos – having made the explosive allegation that the Enquirer, America’s leading “supermarket tabloid”, threatened to publish “intimate” photos of him unless his private investigators backed off the newspaper, is “unlikely to let the matter drop”, says Bloomberg. The Amazon founder says he’d rather stomach the exposure of even “below the belt” selfies than “capitulate…