Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 961 i MoneyWeek

Monaco has suffered a setback to its €2bn plans to build out into the Mediterranean. A 15-acre quarter called Portier Cove, with flats, a marina and a park, had required around 1.2 million tonnes of the right kind of sand, which had been found on the seabed 5km off Sicily. However, Sicilian officials have halted the delivery, saying they need to replenish their own eroded beaches. In a show of camaraderie, Jess Learmonth and Georgia Taylor-Brown, two British triathletes, crossed the finish line hand-in-hand and ahead of everyone else at the World Triathlon Olympic qualification event in Tokyo. But they were denied their prize money of $18,000 and $12,000 and disqualified for participating in a “contrived tie”.…

One primary election was enough to give Argentina an “instant financial crisis”, says Craig Mellow in Barron’s. The country’s Merval stock index plunged 48% in dollar terms in a single day last week after a primary vote gave a clear lead to opposition candidate Alberto Fernández. He is now expected to beat pro-business incumbent Mauricio Macri in presidential elections in October. The market wipeout was the second-largest one-day drop anywhere in the world since 1950. Argentina secured a $56bn bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of a financial crisis last year. Yet the prospect of an anti-market Peronist coming to power means that “a sovereign-debt default is increasingly likely”, says Edward Glossop of Capital Economics. Credit default swaps show that the implied probability of a debt…

US households have spent much of the past decade deleveraging, notes John Mauldin in his Thoughts From The Frontline newsletter. Companies haven’t. They have grown debt much faster than earnings, not least because many have borrowed to fund stock buybacks rather than invest in their operations. The upshot is that firms are 50% more leveraged now compared to their profits than in 2007. The quality of investment-grade paper has also deteriorated: the lowest tier, BBB-rated debt, now comprises 50% of all issuers. “All these are just one downgrade away from being ‘junk bonds’.” Many funds are not allowed to hold junk, so their forced selling will exacerbate the downturn when the next recession hits.…

Chinese online grocery and delivery group Dada-JD Daojia is planning to float in the US, says Emma Lee on technode.com. The group is seeking “more ammunition to maintain its foothold in an increasingly competitive online grocery market”. Its key rivals include ele.me, Meituan and FreshMarket. The biggest shareholder in the venture is e-commerce giant JD.com, while Walmart owns 10%. Dada-JD Daojia has 74 million users and works with thousands of retailers, notably Walmart, Carrefour and Vanguard. During this year’s mid-year shopping festival known as 618 (held from July 18 to August 14), the platform produced year-on-year sales growth of 100%.…

Shares in pub owner and brewer Greene King, which owns 2,700 pubs restaurants and hotels, have soared after it agreed to sell its entire business to the Hong Kong real-estate conglomerate CK Asset Holdings (CKA) for £2.7bn, says Henry Saker-Clark in The Independent. CKA, run by Victor Li, the son of Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-shing, is offering a 51% premium. CKA said it was buying Greene King because of its “established position in the UK pub and brewing market... and resilient financial profile”. Greene King’s attractions are “plain to see”, says Chris Hughes for Bloomberg. Although the UK pub industry has “shed capacity in recent years” the survivors “have adapted by offering food and making pubs more family friendly”. The fact that Greene King owns most of its…

Our impending departure from the EU continues to dominate the headlines and the eight Brexit-related markets on Betfair have attracted plenty of money. The market on the possibility of a no-deal Brexit this year has proved to be particularly popular, with £1.28m matched. You can get odds of 2.42 (41.2%) on it happening, as opposed to only 1.69 (59.7%) against. The question of whether we will have another EU referendum this year has seen £1.18m wagered. You can get 26 (3.8%) on one taking place and 1.03 (97%) against. The exact date that Brexit will take place is also popular, with £346,000 matched. Punters are expecting the UK to leave by the end of the year, putting the chances of this happening at 1.69  (59.1%). Interestingly, the next most popular…

Mexico City Pipeline plugged: The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (pictured) has rattled international investors by refusing to import natural gas, despite the construction of a new gas pipeline from southern Texas. The 500-mile South Texas marine pipeline cost $2.5bn and runs under the Gulf of Mexico to the port of Tuxpan in the northeast of the country. It was completed in June. If the pipeline were switched on, it would increase Mexico’s capacity to import natural gas by 40%, in turn fuelling the country’s all-important manufacturing sector. Instead, the state-owned power utility, the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), has pushed the pipeline’s builders, and two private operators, into arbitration, says The Wall Street Journal. The CFE seeks almost $900m related to delays in construction to the pipeline, which…

The stockmarket could be on thin ice, notes Lord Rothschild in the latest half-year results for RIT Capital, the investment trust he founded in 1961. Rothschild, 82, who steps down as chairman next month, notes that “valuations are, on many metrics, at the upper end of historical ranges at a time when geopolitical risks abound; credit quality is deteriorating; and global economic growth is weakening”. Can firms maintain their currently high levels of profits against this backdrop? Rothschild is sceptical. “The last decade has seen a confluence of factors which have benefited companies’ earnings to an unprecedented extent.” These features, which include the “lower cost of capital, reduced taxes, stagnant wages and the influence of globalisation”, are “unlikely to be sustained”. As a result, Rothschild’s trust is “cautiously positioned”. “We…

Junior lawyers caught in a turf war between top US and British law firms have benefited with pay rises of up to 20%, says Kate Beioley in the Financial Times. “US firms have taken... significant market share in London and are aggressively hiring associates, mainly from UK firms,” Christopher Clark, director at legal search firm Definitum, tells the paper. “The top-tier US firms are offering between 50% and 100% uplifts in compensation.” That has spurred the mid-cap US firms to go after newly qualified lawyers with pay rises of up to a fifth. Freshfields, a British “magic circle” law firm, raised its starting salary for a junior solicitor to £100,000 in May. The £15,000 increase was in response to US law firm Kirkland & Ellis offering starting salaries of £140,000…

Uber is subsidised by its drivers Ken Wiles and Kep Sweeney The Wall Street Journal Uber reported a $5.24bn loss in the second quarter of 2019, but “even that loss is understated” because a substantial part of the expense – the depreciation of drivers’ cars – isn’t included on Uber’s income statement, say Ken Wiles and Kep Sweeney. Most Uber drivers seem unaware of how the wear and tear on their cars eats into their profits. Our survey of 50 drivers found that all recorded their revenue (payments Uber made to them) in detail, but only a few recorded repairs and only one part-timer detailed his car’s depreciation, which revealed that he was “worse off financially then when he started”. For full-time Uber drivers, this is “serious”. If a driver…

ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog Economists characterise their subject and views as “objective, unbiased and non-ideological”, say Mohsen Javdani and Ha-Joon Chang. But is this true? To find out, we carried out an online survey of more than 2,400 economists from 19 countries. All respondents were given identical statements to agree or disagree with, but the source to whom the quote was attributed was randomly changed without their knowledge. When a statement criticising “pseudo-mathematical methods” in economics was attributed to its real source, Keynes, instead of to a fictitious one, for example, the agreement level among economists dropped by 11.6%. When a statement criticising patents was attributed to a Marxist, instead of to its real source, agreement dropped by 6.6%. At the same time around 82% of participants agreed that in evaluating a statement…

“Suppose I make it so that you are in the story... and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.” Pygmalion’s Spectacles, Stanley G. Weinbaum Virtual reality (VR) – a holy grail of computer gamers who want a totally immersive experience – has been “just around the corner” for years now. It’s not a new concept – it first appeared in 1935 in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s science fiction short story, Pygmalion’s Spectacles, according to Mike Colagrossi on Big Think. But it wasn’t until 1981 that the phrase “virtual reality” appeared. It was reportedly coined by Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, author, artist and philosopher, on whom the lead character in 1992 film The Lawnmower Man – in which a scientist conducts…

Thousands of members of company pension schemes administered by Prudential may be in line for a windfall after inaccuracies in the way their pensions have been calculated were identified. The Pensions Regulator has written to the trustees of around 120 pension schemes following discussions with Prudential over how a change to the law in the early 1990s was implemented. The change followed a legal ruling that employers could not have different retirement ages for men and women; employers therefore had to equalise pension benefits, often by offering men more generous terms. Now, however, it appears that not all schemes followed the new rules in the right way. As a result, some members may have received less money than they were entitled to – as much as 25% less in the…

For the first five months of this year the only thing people were talking about was how much money Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) would raise from its initial public offering (IPO). At one stage many people were expecting the ride-hailing app to receive so much money that it would be valued at more than $100bn. But while the IPO wasn’t a total flop and remains the largest flotation this year, it wasn’t a massive success either. The share price immediately fell to $41 a share from the $45 it listed at. Since then it has done badly, with the price now falling to at $35. But it could go even lower. The reason why Uber’s shares have been struggling is that it has failed to turn its sales into earnings,…

“Banco Bradesco stands to gain from rising demand for corporate loans” After a strong start to 2019, global and emerging-market equities have hit turbulence thanks to changing US Federal Reserve policy and ongoing US-China trade-related negotiations or tweets. Against this volatile backdrop we continue to search for companies with sustainable drivers of earnings growth that can withstand ongoing market uncertainty. Domestically orientated businesses may be well positioned to benefit from structural demand drivers, such as the confluence of technology and consumption in e-commerce, or consumers’ need for financial services. Seek out Korea’s top search engine A structural shift likely to endure is the role of technology in driving global GDP growth, particularly within emerging markets. Naver (Seoul: 035420) is the leading online search engine in Korea and has been early…

“Audit watchdog leaders quit in overhaul after scandals”. So ran a headline in The Guardian in March, announcing the disbandment of the Financial Reporting Council. It won’t be much missed. Criticised for the “weakness of its response” to a spate of accounting failures, ranging from Carillion to BHS, the FRC was recently slammed by MPs as “too timid”. It’s hardly a rousing finale to the sometime sparkling career of its chairman, Sir Win Bischoff, who will step down in October after a half-century career in finance, says the Financial Times. Appointed CEO of Schroders aged just 42, Bischoff, now 78, “has been a quietly subversive financier at the heart of the City of London for decades” – “a wine-sipping fixture at Square Mile social events most nights of the week”.…

ABC television talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! has been fined $395,000 for breaking the law by mimicking a presidential alert during a sketch mocking the warning system. On the same day as the programme was broadcast last October, the alert was officially tested across the US. Over 200 million mobile phones received a test “Presidential Alert” notification from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, designed to alert Americans to major threats. They look like text messages, but are designed to alert people with a unique sound and vibration, says BBC News. Walt Disney Television-owned ABC said it had thought the “use of the tone was permissible”.…

“The nearest thing the global economy has to a doomsday clock” has “ticked a little closer to midnight,” says Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. Last week the US yield curve – which plots the interest rates on Treasury bonds of different maturities – inverted for the first time since the summer of 2007. That means that the US government briefly had to pay less to borrow money for ten years than for two years. An inverted yield curve has preceded every one of America’s last seven recessions, which typically follow within 24 months of inversion. In effect, it shows that investors think that short-term interest rates are too high and that a downturn will force the Federal Reserve to cut them. Americans are still spending The Dow Jones index…

Three to buy Tate & Lyle Shares Having moved on from its roots in sugar, today Tate & Lyle is a global supplier of corn-based sweeteners and starch ingredients, as well as the Sucralose zero-calorie sweetener. It is well placed to take advantage of consumers’ growing appetite for plant-based proteins. The business has scope to expand margins and earnings upgrades could follow. A prospective price-to-earnings (p/e) ratio of 13.7 looks undemanding and a 4.2% dividend yield is a further attraction. 727.25p Pure Gold Mining The Mail on Sunday Talk of a US recession is prompting growing interest in gold, the ultimate safe-haven asset. This Canadian operator is developing a mine at Madsen Red Lake in Ontario and listed in London in May. Local infrastructure and expertise make the province an…

• US online retailer Overstock’s shares plunged by nearly 40% after its boss Patrick Byrne published “what may be the craziest corporate communication the world has seen”, says Kieran McCarthy in The Register. Byrne claimed he had inadvertently become involved in “political espionage conducted against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump”. He has a record of making “crazy” statements, having previously settled a libel suit for $1m after falsely accusing someone of being “part of a global crime syndicate”. • BHP Billiton’s Andrew Mackenzie has produced a turnaround that “would have been inconceivable” when he became chief executive six years ago, says Stephen Bartholomeusz in the Sydney Morning Herald. The miner has “[toppled] Rio Tinto and Brazil’s Vale as the world’s lowest-cost iron ore producer”. And a record dividend means that…

“A fresh-faced actress is exposed for her crippling cocaine habit. The actor hired to advertise washing powder turns out not to be whiter than white,” says Matthew Moore in The Times. “Who you gonna call?” Your insurer, of course. Brands and studios keen to protect themselves from the financial fallout resulting from a star’s missteps are fuelling a boom in “disgrace insurance”. SpottedRisk, a US startup backed by investors on the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, pays researchers to comb gossip columns and online news for warning signs that a celebrity is heading for trouble, according to New York magazine. A risk score out of 100 is then generated for each celebrity. In the event of a scandal, market researchers Kantar are consulted to gauge the level of damage and…

It’s been a dramatic month for “attacks” by short sellers – investors who profit when share prices fall, rather than rise (see below for how this works). Here in the UK, litigation financing company and Aim star stock Burford Capital saw its shares slide as well-known short-seller Muddy Waters published a long report criticising the company’s accounting and corporate governance. Then US conglomerate GE came under attack from fraud investigator Harry Markopolos, in a 175-page report he wrote for an unnamed hedge fund. Both companies challenged the allegations, while Burford also made changes to its board, including replacing its chief financial officer. “If you can’t argue with the short-selling case, then sell” Investors in both companies will be irritated, to say the least. Short sellers tend to get a bad…

People have always had small, part-time jobs alongside their main career. But the ability of the internet to connect people, to trade specialist items online, and to find new ways of turning what were once simply hobbies into business opportunities, has made such activities a far bigger part of the economy than they were in the past. According to a survey by Vistaprint, one in four people have some form of side gig with average earnings of £6,064 a year. The top 15% of hustlers were making an extra £12,000 a year. Beauty and wellbeing were the most popular gigs, which included hairdressers, beauticians and personal trainers; that was followed by decorating and diet advice. The average hustler is putting in an extra 13 hours a week; 17% are putting…

“Through my taxes on cigarettes I’ve built three hospitals singlehandedly. I never stop giving.” Actress Joanna Lumley (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Times “At the end of the day, however much information wants to be free, writers still want to get paid.” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle on newspaper paywalls, quoted on the Guido Fawkes blog “The money. Why else would I do it?” Jeremy Clarkson on what he likes most about TV, quoted in The Times “I’ve never cared about being indie or cool. I wanted to be on Top of the Pops. Go back to the mid-80s. The [Happy] Mondays were talking to Piers Morgan. None of the other bands in the scene were doing that because it wasn’t cool, but we were just so desperate not to…

quillette.com If you’re middle class, then the media will be keen to hear about how happy you are in your work as a teacher, lawyer, academic, musician, or journalist, says Kevin Mims. Yet when online magazine Quillette published my essay on how happy I am in my work at an Amazon warehouse, I was “denounced as a sycophant and a corporate stooge”. The truth is that the nationals want misery. I have been writing “generally upbeat pieces about my life as a working-class stiff” for 30 years for my hometown publications. But finding a national market for such stories proved impossible. I had success nationally only when I went downbeat. They lapped it up when I told them that a big regret was that I had never been the breadwinner…

Investing in pure-play AR and VR companies is tricky – as with so many of today’s tech-heavy themes. Listed companies that focus solely on VR and AR are rare. There are many small, privately held companies to watch, in the hope that they come to the public markets in the future. Some are mentioned above; others include Chinese startup Rokid, US start-up Magic Leap, and Israel’s Lumus. But the biggest investors are the big-tech companies – Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Sony and Apple, for example. One option for investors is Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM), which makes the Snapdragon chip that forms part of many of the current crop of headsets. But a better bet might be Taiwanese phone-maker HTC Corporation (Taiwan: 2498). As well as smartphones – which will be the platform…

Train fares are a national rip-off. A recent study found that ticket prices have risen by twice as much as average wages over the past ten years. The average fare has gone up by 46% since 2009; the average wage has risen by 23% over the same period. To make matters worse, rail fares will rise by up to 2.8% in January. The annual rise is capped at July’s Retail Price Index, a measure of year-on-year inflation that reached 2.8% last month. “If the full increase is passed onto passengers it could see season tickets from Brighton to London hiked by £125 a year to £4,357,” notes Helen Knapman in The Sun. Tickets from Gloucester to Birmingham could rise by £119 to £4,357 and fares from Edinburgh to Glasgow by…

Over 120,000 businesses that have missed a tax deadline will have their £100 fines waived, HMRC announced this week. A total of 1.2 million small companies and self-employed workers are subject to new rules known as Making Tax Digital (MTD), a state-mandated shift towards submitting online tax returns with specialist software. The idea is to reduce errors in tax returns that cost taxpayers nearly £10bn last year. MTD applies to firms or people with a turnover above the £85,000 VAT threshold. Around 490,000 businesses should have completed their first return by 7 August. The expense and hassle of adapting to MTD has been widely criticised, and HMRC has chosen not to enforce penalties in the first year; it has also acknowledged that small companies may now be fully focused on…

A boom can easily become a bubble. One way to distinguish robust growth from the late stages of a bubble is through the skyscraper index. There are several versions of this, but they boil down to a simple principle: if a country is building the largest skyscraper in the world, then stay away from its stocks. The rationale is that large skyscrapers are usually poor investments, prompted by a combination of vanity and excessive optimism rather than the reasonable expectation of healthy returns. Their appearance is therefore both a sign of irrational exuberance and an indication that there aren’t any alternative investment projects with a higher capital return. Since large property projects usually require construction companies to borrow huge amounts of money, their presence also suggests that credit is too…

Acacia Mining (LSE: ACA) is a Tanzania-focused gold miner formerly called African Barrick Gold. Ever since March 2017 the company has been plagued by an export ban imposed by the Tanzanian government following a dispute over tax. However, earlier this month Acacia was given the go-ahead to resume exports from North Mara, its biggest mine in the country. The board has recommended a recent buy-out offer from the world’s second-biggest gold miner, Barrick Gold. Last year, Acacia earned $59m from sales of $664m. The previous year it made a loss of $707m.…

Ernest Terah Hooley was born in Nottinghamshire in 1859, the only child of a lacemaker. Ernest started work in his father’s business and by 1888 had earned enough to buy Risley Hall in Derbyshire for £5,000 (about £640,000 in today’s money). He then moved into stockbroking, making headlines when he bought the Pneumatic Tyre Company for £3m and then floated it (now named Dunlop) for £5m. Over the next decade he would repeat this trick with several other firms, including bicycle maker Raleigh and beefy drink brand Bovril. By 1895 he was wealthy enough to be able to afford to buy Papworth Hall in Cambridge for £70,000 (£9m). What was the scam? In order to get the public to buy shares in the firms he was floating at inflated prices,…

• “When I was a cute 20-something I totally failed to get myself knocked up by a septuagenarian rock god, thus setting myself up for life,” laments Virginia Blackburn in the Daily Express. So well done to Mick Jagger’s latest “baby mama”, Melanie Hamrick (pictured), who now has a $5m Manhattan townhouse. “It would be worth putting up with the ageing rocker on a part-time basis for that.” Nor is she alone in her good fortune, for a new report has just said that tying the knot multiple times is better for women than for men as they get a financial boost. Rich widows get out without a divorce and are like bankers in that they too “accumulate humongous amounts of dosh”. If only they had been in charge at…

Actor Steve Coogan (pictured) avoided a lengthy driving ban after pleading to the court that his comedy character, Alan Partridge, who is due to be featured in a travelogue series, would never take public transport. The “exceptional hardship” caused to workers if the new television series were cancelled had been taken into account, the court said. The Catholic pilgrimage site of Lourdes, in southwest France, has staged a resurrection. Visitor numbers are set to rise by 15% this year to 1.2 million, driven by the success of a documentary in cinemas. The Catholic sanctuary had run up losses of €5m, but broke even last year after increasing pilgrims’ “contributions” from €2 to €2.50.…

“The UK [may] depend on a significant fiscal boost over the next couple of years, returning the budget deficit to… 5% of GDP by 2021-2022… Tax revenue growth has weakened, despite the bullying tactics of HMRC, while public spending is booming again. More spending will be committed to no-deal preparations and appeasement payments to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland… this autumn’s Budget may also contain… income-tax cuts… The challenge for the Bank of England is to use the cover of dramatic fiscal relaxation to resume the normalisation of the bank rate. Whole economy average weekly pay growth has lurched to 3.7% and unit labour cost growth in the market economy is well above 3% and plainly inconsistent with the official inflation target. Once the Bank takes off its Brexit blinkers,…

The town of Grasse, in Provence, is known as the global capital of the perfume industry, says Wirtschaftsoche. It is also the headquarters of Robertet. This family-run company (the Maubert family, which set the business up in 1850, owns 43% of the stock) is the world leader in natural fragrances and flavours for the perfume, cosmetics and food sectors. The shares have risen steadily in recent years, and there is ample scope for further gains given the long-term growth prospects of the industries Robertet serves. Last year sales climbed by 4% to €525m, while earnings reached €52m; growth should continue at this pace. The balance sheet is very solid, with no net debt.…

In “a major test of investors’ appetite for fast-growing but unprofitable start-ups”, We, the parent company of WeWork, has filed a financial prospectus for its forthcoming initial public offering (IPO), report David Gelles and Erin Griffith in The New York Times. WeWork is currently valued at more than $50bn, making it the second-largest unicorn (private company worth over $1bn) to go public this year after Uber”. Its core business model involves taking out long-term leases on commercial real estate, jazzing up the spaces “with amenities like fashionable furniture and free beer”, and then renting out individual offices and larger suites to other companies. It’s not hard to understand why people might want to invest in WeWork, says Shira Ovide on Bloomberg. After all, it is growing at a furious rate,…

The recent “diplomatic tussle” over the detention of an Iranian tanker in Gibraltar has put Britain in a “difficult position” as it strains to “balance its Iran policy between American belligerence and European emollience”, says The Economist. The vessel was eventually released, against the wishes of Washington, although it may yet struggle to sell its 2.1 million barrels of oil as America has “threatened to impose sanctions on anyone doing business with her”. The backdrop to the crisis is President Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Since then, America has been tightening sanctions on Iran, while Iran has warned that unless the deal’s other signatories (which include Britain) help it to withstand them, it will start violating the nuclear deal. This puts Britain’s Iran policy…

After several years of “rapid expansion” there are signs of gloom in India, says Ken Koyanagi in the Nikkei Asian Review. Business leaders are increasingly frustrated by regulation and the high cost of capital, “consumer confidence is waning and foreign direct investment has plateaued”. Trade wars and a global slowdown, not to mention the crisis in Jammu and Kashmir, threaten to compound the problem and threaten newly re-elected Prime Minister Modi’s “ambitious” target of becoming a $5trn economy by 2025. There is indeed “widespread malaise” in the Indian economy, says Una Galani for Breaking-views. Rising unemployment, the fact that the growth rate is “the slowest in four years” and a fall in the value of proposed new projects to below the levels of 2004, all suggest that India “is heading…

When most investors put money in the stockmarket, they go “long” – they buy shares in the hope that they will go up. Short selling is the opposite of this – it’s a method of profiting from a share price going down. Here’s how it works. A short seller borrows the shares from someone who already owns them (usually a fund manager), and sells them in the open market. Then, if and when the price falls, the short seller buys the shares back at the lower price, returns them to the lender, and pockets the profit. So, for example, say you want to sell shares in Acme Widgets short. You borrow 10,000 shares from your local index fund provider in return for a small fee, and sell them at £1…

• Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business and energy secretary, criticised National Grid for “prioritising commercial ventures in the US over the UK’s energy security” after it emerged that its chairman, Peter Gershon, flew to the US two days after parts of Britain were hit by a blackout. Gershon officially works two days a week (the Grid says he works more in practice), for which he was paid £523,000 last year, with £83,000 in benefits. John Pettigrew (pictured), the CEO, has been handed a £1m pay rise for the past financial year to reward his “strong performance”, the Grid revealed in its annual report. • The base salary of Simon Cooke, chief executive of charity Marie Stopes International, has risen from £173,067 to £217,250 a year. He also received a performance-related…

Engine Capital, a $250m US hedge fund known for urging retailers to revamp their operations, has taken aim at the board of Care.com. Engine owns 3% of the shares in the online marketplace for carers. They have fallen by 60% since an investigation by The Wall Street Journal unearthed serious deficiencies in its vetting procedures: some people hired through the platform to care for clients had police records and were accused of crimes including child abuse and murder. The company says it will overhaul its business model, but Engine thinks the only way to recover from the scandal is to sell the business, note Gregory Zuckerman and Kirsten Grind in The Wall Street Journal. “Under new ownership it would be easier to establish a clean break from the past.”…

Shortly after leaving office in 1981, Senator George McGovern set up in business, says Bill Haley. As the owner of a hotel, he was then faced with all the regulations and taxes he had previously fought to get implemented. In a letter to The Wall Street Journal in 1992, McGovern said that although he “never doubted the worthiness” of the goals of such regulation, what eludes legislators is whether or not consumers can afford to pay the higher prices that result. If not, firms go bust. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has had a similar baptism of fire. He has been campaigning for a $15 minimum wage. When it was revealed that his own field staff were not getting that sum, he upped their wages – then eliminated most overtime to…

The shift by businesses away from expensive and inefficient in-house information technology to “cloud-based” computing and software is still in its infancy. Firms find it more practical and cost-effective to rent or buy IT services or software – or store data – on the internet rather than deal with computing infrastructure and software (and the staff that may come with it) themselves. The trend has a long way to go, however. With most companies only a fifth of the way there, according to consultants McKinsey & Co, this is still an early-stage opportunity to back a technology shift with significant growth ahead. Research groups are projecting that the cloud industry is expanding anywhere between 15% and 30% a year, potential gains that have been attracting enough investor money to help…

Britvic is hoping to reduce the cost of its staff pension scheme by cutting the size of the increases it makes to pensions each year. The move could pave the way for other employers to do the same. The drinks company currently increases pensions each year in line with inflation as measured by the Retail Price Index (RPI), but wants to move to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure for future increases. Since CPI is typically lower than RPI, such a move would result in lower annual pension increases for Britvic pension scheme members, reducing the cost of the scheme over time to the company. RPI currently stands at 2.8% while CPI is only 2.1%. The change in the scheme rules requires court approval and is opposed by employee representatives.…

A ban on cold calling in the pensions industry introduced in January has seen fraud decline sharply. The number of reports of pension scams received by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau is down 75% so far this year, according to stockbroker AJ Bell. Financial losses from pension fraud have fallen by 85%. The drop follows changes in the law that came into effect in January, making it illegal to approach savers and investors with unsolicited telephone calls or emails offering advice on pensions. Scammers had previously used such calls to push schemes such as pension liberation plans, or even outright frauds. However, AJ Bell’s figures reveal that the number of scams related to investment, which is not covered by the cold calling ban, has almost doubled this year, with 8,000…

This last fortnight has been a mixed bag for my tips, with exactly half the six longs rising and the other three falling. JD Sports climbed from 582p to 601 and Superdry from 389p to 392p. Safestore was the star performer, going up from 607p to 641p. In the case of Hays and Bellway, the falls were relatively minor, with Hays declining from 147p to 146p and Bellway from 2,868p to 2,842p. However, Bausch Health Companies, which I tipped two weeks ago, did especially badly, falling from $24 to $21.72. This means that my six long tips are making a total loss of £42. My four short tips were also split down the middle, with two increasing and two falling. Weis Markets rose from $38.38 to $39.40, while Netflix also…

Plus500 (LSE: PLUS) is an Israel-based online trading platform that allows individuals to trade contracts for difference (CFDs – a form of bet on the movement of asset prices). Lower market volatility and a regulatory clampdown in Europe on leveraged betting has buffeted the stock in recent months. However, investors are hoping the worst is over. Profits increased to $379m last year from a little under $200m the year before; sales recovered to $720m from $437m. A share buyback plan of up to $50m boosted the share price by a fifth in August 2019.…

There are a good few retailers out there for this wine, so please do have a browse of the Bride Valley website if you would like to support your local indie. For convenience, I have listed Waitrose, which sells more English wine than all of the other high-street titans, and it was there that I first tasted this wine while standing next to its maker, the legendary wine writer Steven Spurrier. This wine is an instant classic – a smooth, enticing, beautifully balanced number. It is drinking perfectly already and is underpinned with pristine acidity. It was this facet of the wine that Steven and I chatted about while we were tasting it. He lowered his voice conspiratorially and told me a little secret that I am happy to share…

Is our Crash Alert flag still flying? We hope so. It’s been up the pole for so long, waiting patiently for the stockmarket to fall, we’d hate to miss it when it finally happens. Stocks sold off last week after the 30-year Treasury bond hit a record high and the yield curve inverted. What does that mean? Ten times since 1950, an inverted yield curve (when yields on longterm bonds are lower than those on shorter-term ones) has signalled a recession. But don’t worry, say the stock pushers. A recession has a long fuse. Between the time the fuse is lit by an inverted yield curve and the time the stockmarket blows up investors usually have 18 months to take their profits. And it’s not unusual for stocks to hit…

2.38m The number of workers employed in Britain who were born in the EU hit this record high between April and June, according to the Office for National Statistics. In the past year the number rose by almost 88,000, driven by a rise in people arriving from eastern Europe. Numbers fell off after the 2016 referendum, but have recovered. The number of workers born elsewhere in the world (and outside Britain) rose to 3.34 million. £3,067 What the average cost of an annual rail season ticket will be from January – up from £2,980 last year, according to an analysis by the Labour party. Rail fares rise by the retail price index (RPI) for July, which stood at 2.8%. 31 The percentage of millennials who have fallen into debt as…