Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1016 i MoneyWeek

“The government may struggle to push the overall tax take sustainably higher from here” The UK budget deficit will go well over £300bn this year. Government spending as a percentage of GDP will hit around 55%, the highest since 1946. Our debt-to-GDP ratio will end the year above 100% – a peacetime first. That’s not OK. It’s not good for sterling, not good for the bond market and not kind to our kids. Something must be done. But what? We’d like to see more effort put into encouraging growth. As Liam Halligan notes in The Daily Telegraph, the best way to tackle a ratio problem such as this is to “raise the denominator”. But it is hard to imagine there isn’t going to be huge pressure for afew nasty tax…

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of online fashion retailer Zozo, lost ¥ 4.4bn (£32m) attempting to day-trade stocks, reports the Straits Times. Maezawa tweeted he was “blinded by the virus-driven market swings” and admitted that he hadn’t “familiarised” himself with short-term trading properly. Reality TV fans were upset to hear that after 20 series and 14 years, Keeping Up With The Kardashians will be ending in early 2021. Kim Kardashian West (pictured), the star of the show, said it was “time to say goodbye”. According to the Daily Mail, the family is now paid in the region of $30m per episode, but viewer figures have been falling from a peak of 4.8 million to less than one million now.…

The oil market is “coming back to reality”, Eugen Weinberg of Commerzbank told Joe Wallace in The Wall Street Journal. US oil futures fell below zero in April after lockdowns laid waste to global oil demand. Brent Crude hit an 18-year low that month at a little over $19 a barrel, but then rallied 135% through the end of August to top $45 a barrel. Yet that rally has now come unstuck, with Brent falling back by 12% so far this month to hit a two-month low earlier this week. American petrol demand has flatlined at around 85% of pre-pandemic levels, dashing hopes of a return to normal, says Julian Lee on Bloomberg. Chinese demand is more robust, but the country accumulated vast stockpiles of fuel when prices plunged earlier…

In recent decades the world economy has resorted to more and more debt to juice growth, as Deutsche Bank points out. This chart shows the global economy’s overall borrowings (corporate, government and household) up to the end of the first quarter of 2020, when the figures rocketed. Global debt at that stage was heading for 340% of GDP. The financial crisis in 2008 barely dented the upward trajectory: “central banks prevented a mass default cycle by propping up debt” with quantitative easing, or money printing, and the party soon resumed. Figures from the Institute of International Finance show that public debt has doubled since 2008. State debt-issuance reached a record monthly total of $2.1trn in March 2020.…

Turkey’s insistence on drilling for gas in parts of the eastern Mediterranean claimed by other countries is aggravating “bitter regional rivalries” and fuelling dangerous tensions between Turkey and its neighbours, says the Financial Times. When a Greek naval vessel collided with a Turkish frigate last month, there were even fears that it could lead to direct military confrontation. Germany warned the two countries were “playing with fire”. At stake are the boundaries of the Greek islands that dot Turkey’s coast and Turkey’s economic rights to the waters off the coast of Cyprus. Although international law is firmly on the side of Greece and Cyprus, Turkey argues that existing arrangements make it impossible for it to follow Israel, Egypt and Cyprus in benefiting from the oil and gas off its coastline,…

• Shareholders were set “to blow a raspberry” at Willie Walsh (pictured), the departing chief executive of IAG, the parent company of British Airways, saying that he should not be paid the bonus of £883,000 promised to him for last year, says Robert Lea in The Times. IAG’s fortunes have “gone into freefall” since then, and the firm has also taken money from the Bank of England’s emergency coronavirus fund, which comes with restrictions on directors’ bonuses. Walsh was paid a total of £3.2m last year, up from £3m in 2018. His annual salary was £850,000. • Short-haul Irish airline Ryanair was also “poised for a clash with investors” over executive pay, says the Financial Times. Boss Michael O’Leary pocketed a €458,000 bonus, “despite furloughing staff and taking government pandemic…

Investors will often need to analyse how closely the returns from a fund or portfolio follow the returns of a benchmark index (such as the FTSE 100 or the S&P 500). Sometimes this will be because they want to make sure that an index fund (also known as a tracker fund) that is intended to track a specific index is matching that index as closely as possible. Alternatively, they may want to check that the manager of an actively managed fund is trying to run the fund in a way that can produce returns that are different from the benchmark, rather than following it too closely (known as index hugging or closet tracking). Two of the useful statistics for this type of analysis have confusingly similar names. Tracking difference is…

Media group ViacomCBS’s share price jumped by more than 5% on speculation an activist investor will push for a shakeup at the company following the death of its founder, Sumner Redstone, in August, say Joshua Fineman and Nick Turner on Bloomberg. Credit Suisse, which has previously made trades for investors who want to stay out of the spotlight, bought 12.8 million shares in the second quarter, suggesting an activist might be looking to use the “upheaval” at ViacomCBS to press for the sale of its Paramount studio, “or perhaps the whole company”. That said, an activist might simply see the current price as a good entry point – a coronavirus-induced advertising slump has left its shares down more than 30% on this time last year.…

■ From 2028 workers will have to wait until they are 57 to unlock savings from defined- contribution pension schemes, up from today’s threshold of 55, the Treasury announced last week. This will “most frustrate the pension planning of 860,000 savers now aged between 46 and 48, who may have planned to access their pots in 2028, but will now have to wait”, says David Byers in The Times. ■ The Confirmation of Payee (CoP) system launched in June to add another layer of security to bank transfers is preventing some people from moving money. People are being “questioned about their identity after a new name-matching system, adopted by banks, refused to recognise them”, says Anna Tims in The Observer. CoP is meant to allow customers to check that the…

One simple and inexpensive way to secure broad access to emerging markets is to buy the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets UCITS ETF (LSE: IEEM). This exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets Net Total Return index. Around 40% of the fund is invested in China, with other large holdings in Taiwan, South Korea, India and Brazil. Approximately 70% of the fund is invested in financials, technology, consumer goods and services and communications. The largest holdings are the Chinese technology firms Alibaba and Tencent Holdings, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The price/ earnings (p/e) ratio is 15.8 and the dividend yield is asolid 3.16%, while the total expense ratio is a very low 0.18%. India is one of the fastest-growing emerging markets. One way to invest in it directly is through…

Businesses are running out of time to borrow money from the government-backed Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS). Applications for CBILS funding must be received by 30 September. Lenders then have until 30 November to process loans. More than 60,000 businesses had arranged CBILS loans worth £13.7bn by the middle of last month, the most recent period for which government data is available. The scheme offers loans of up to £5m, repayable over periods of up to six years. The loans are available from around 50 banks and specialist lenders, with the government promising to step in where businesses default on repayments, in order to encourage lenders to take part in the scheme. To be eligible for CBILS, your business must be based in the UK and have an annual…

aier.org State investment tends to “crowd out” private entrepreneurs, leading to less desirable outcomes since politicians have a hard time knowing whether a project is worth pursuing and have little incentive to act appropriately, unlike entrepreneurs seeking to avoid losses and make profits. This is standard economics, say Nicolás Cachanosky and William Luther. It is also, according to Robert Skidelsky, wrong. His argument is that public investment can “crowd in” resources that would otherwise be idle and that the state has always played a leading role in allocating capital. He points to Toyota, Silicon Valley and China as illustrative of his point. But this implies a more limited role for the state than he in fact supports and his cherry-picked examples are not sufficient to make his case. The logic…

One way investors can reduce risk is by buying assets trading at a discount to their intrinsic value. Several metrics can be used to determine the value of a business, including the price/earnings (p/e) and price-to-book value (p/b) ratios. Two others are Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax and amortisation) and Enterprise Value-to-Ebitda. The process can be more complex if a company has several operating divisions, which may have different attributes and prospects. The sum of private market valuations – the value that a trade or private-equity buyer would pay to acquire control – for each division may be higher than the valuation of the whole company, producing a discount to a“sum of the parts” valuation. “Euromoney’s stock could reach £15 in four years, implying ample upside” These discounts can narrow…

Tennis player Novak Djokovic (pictured) not only lost all of his US Open prize money, but was also handed two fines after being disqualified for hitting a ball at a line judge, says George Bellshaw in Metro. The world number one was handed a $10,000 fine for unsportsmanlike conduct and a further $7,500 punishment for skipping his post-match media duties. But the financial hit “pales in comparison” to the loss of the $250,000 cheque he was guaranteed to pick up after reaching the fourth round of the tournament. Yet while it might sound like “an excruciatingly large amount of money” for mere mortals, it’s a drop in the ocean for Djokovic; for his “on-court endeavours alone” his career earnings exceed $143m. He was the highest-paid athlete on Forbes’ 2020 rich…

America’s stockmarket rally could one day rank among history’s greatest bubbles, says Andrew Parlin in the Financial Times. Shares offering even “a whiff” of exposure to such fashionable areas as “the cloud, digital payments” and “plant-based food” have soared since the pandemic began. Just look at Tesla, whose market capitalisation has vaulted from $80bn in March to more than $300bn today. Turning point or bump in the road? America’s tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index soared by more than 70% from the March low to the end of August, but September has brought a rare reversal. The index lost more than 10% between 2 September and Tuesday this week, officially entering “correction” territory. This has had little impact on the year’s gains, but still wiped an extraordinary $320bn off the market capitalisation…

“Here’s a little anecdote that Peter Hambro, along-standing advocate of the merits of gold... likes to tell. In the late Sixties, his cousin... invited... the Queen to lunch at Hambros Bank in the City, and wishing to put on a bit of a show, he assembled a pile of gold bars to the value of £1m. Quite a pile it was too, taking up an entire corner of the room. But... If you were to do the same exercise again today, the same million pounds would buy you less than two of the larger 400-ounce bars. That’s how much the price of gold has gone up in the meantime. Yet... this actually tells you less about... gold as an investment than it does about the way the value of the…

Two to buy Vestas Investors Chronicle Denmark’s Vestas has installed almost a fifth of the world’s wind-turbine capacity outside China. It is the world’s top supplier of onshore turbines. Government subsidies to the “green” economy have made wind power more popular, but increased competition has squeezed margins. That problem should subside this year, however, and “momentum is building in higher-margin servicing” post-installation. The company has been debt-free since 2013 and has over £1bn of net cash. A valuation of 26 times 2021 earnings is reasonable given the auspicious long-term outlook. 943kr Pernod Ricard The Times France’s Pernod Ricard is the world’s second-biggest drinks group behind Diageo. Activist investor Elliott Advisors had been pressing it to merge with a large rival to improve operating margins, but CEO Alexandre Ricard – whose…

Swiss regulators announced last week that they were escalating an investigation into a corporate espionage scandal at Credit Suisse, says Kalyeena Makortoff in The Guardian. Credit Suisse has already admitted hiring private detectives to track two former executives: Iqbal Khan, the former head of the bank’s wealth management division, and former head of human resources Peter Goerke. While Credit Suisse has tried to reassure investors that the scandal has not affected its business, it has already been forced to sack chief operating officer Pierre-Olivier Bouée, while CEO Tidjane Thiam (pictured) was forced to resign. The scandal is unlikely to hurt the bank’s bottom line, since Swiss regulators don’t have the power to issue fines, say Harry Dempsey and Owen Walker in the Financial Times. But this is just the latest…

With £78.7m now matched on Betfair, the odds have started to shift back in favour of Democratic challenger Joe Biden (pictured). He he is now at 1.89 (52.9%) to win the election for US president in November, compared with 2.18 (45.9%) for President Donald Trump. I still think Biden’s chances are better – the polls are still recording large Biden leads and the allegations that Trump made derogatory comments about dead American soldiers may finally start to cause his core supporters to desert him. Still, if you’ve already put money on this market, I wouldn’t bet any more. As well as the markets run by Betfair, Smarkets and the bookies, Sporting Index is running a spread-betting market on the election. As with normal spread-betting, potential profits (and  losses) depend on…

Former chancellor George Osborne has been “pilloried” for taking on nine jobs since leaving office in July 2016, says Gabriel Pogrund in The Sunday Times. But he looks “positively work-shy” compared with his successor, Philip Hammond. Since leaving Parliament last December, Hammond has taken on “no fewer than 11 paid positions and two unpaid roles”, according to official documents. His seven advisory roles include those to the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund, the Saudi finance minister, Japanese investment bank Nomura, and property developer the Canary Wharf Group. He isalso thought to be earning up to £125,000 a year as director of Ardagh, an Irish glass company, based in the tax haven of Luxembourg. Hammond said he had obtained the role through “an acquaintance”. Since the spring he has also been a…

Investors must be willing to pay “unreasonable prices” for high-tech growth stocks to take advantage of the huge potential returns that these companies can deliver, says James Anderson, the co-manager of the £13.5bn Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust. Many investors shrink from the valuations of firms such as Amazon and Tesla – which are Scottish Mortgage’s two largest positions – because they are obsessed with value investing or with tracking the market cheaply, he tells the Financial Times. But both these approaches badly misunderstand what drives long-term returns. “All the excess returns in world markets since 1990 have come from just 1.3% of companies,” says Anderson, citing research by Hendrik Bessembinder, professor of finance at Arizona State University. Outsize growth is concentrated among a tiny number of stocks. For these, “we…

■ A real estate investment trust (Reit) targeting a 7.5% yield from homeless shelters is seeking to raise £250m from investors ahead of a London listing next month, says Dylan Lobo on CityWire. Home Reit, by Alvarium Home Reit Advisors, will provide emergency accommodation while targeting inflation-protected income and capital returns. Alvarium (which oversees £1.5bn in UK property) is working in collaboration with homelessness charity Shelter, which estimates that 320,000 people were sleeping rough in shelters or temporary housing across the UK in November 2018. Home Reit will invest in a diversified portfolio of UK assets dedicated to providing housing to homeless people. This property will either be let or pre-let on very long leases to registered charities, housing associations, and other regulated companies with a proven operating record in…

If you want to avoid paying stamp duty on your next property purchase you need to get a move on: there has been a surge in people keen to move. “Between 8 July and 8 August, the number of people registering to buy across the country was up by 38% on the same period last year, boosted by the stamp duty holiday,” says Hilary Osborne in The Guardian. Properties are going under offer faster than ever. One in seven homes are under offer within a week of listing, according to Rightmove. But things slow down after that. “A ‘conveyancing log-jam’ after lockdown means that even if a sale is agreed quickly, a transaction could take six months to complete, especially if it is in a chain,” says Melissa Lawford in…

The headlines of the Treasury’s new Kickstart jobs scheme are attractive. The state is providing £2bn of funding for employers prepared to offer work placements of up to six months to 16 to 24-year-olds currently on universal credit. The money will cover the cost of paying each participant’s wages – at the national minimum wage – for 25 hours a week, plus associated national insurance and pension costs. There is also £1,500 per job available for setup costs, support and training. “This is a fully funded mechanism for hiring young workers” The scheme could support businesses in a wide range of industries. Employers have to show they are not using Kickstart to replace existing or planned vacancies; they are also required to explain how they will help potential candidates develop…

Why Japan is nervous about China Editorial The Economist A souring of the mood between Japan and China, along with new rules seeking to protect industries and diversify supply chains, has led some to talk of a “great decoupling”, says The Economist. Closer inspection reveals more of a “quiet rebalancing”. The Japanese government’s measures are focused on “strategic choke-points” such as medical supplies, but many other areas remain open for commercial activity. Outgoing prime minster Shinzo Abe’s ¥244bn programme to induce Japanese firms to diversify away from China, for example, has brought some medical production home, but the sums on offer are “far too small to spur all-out decoupling”. Most Japanese firms with lots of exposure to China are in “wait and see” mode and, even if tensions keep rising,…

iea.org.uk The policy for addressing low pay and insecure working conditions has for the last two decades been the minimum wage, says Sarah Ang. Both main parties in this country are committed to raising it. But bumping it up too far risks higher unemployment and is in any case a “blunt instrument” for tackling low pay: those who suffer from in-work poverty often work fewer hours and thus do not much benefit from wage rises; only 17% of those in the poorest households earn the minimum wage; and wage floors do not address the lack of career progression in sectors such as hospitality and retail. Singapore might point to a better way forward. It has implemented a “progressive wage model”, which focuses on specific low-paid sectors and “provides a clear…

Shares in drug-development specialist Ergomed (Aim: ERGO) have outperformed the market by 70% over the past three months, says Michael Green on Stockopedia. The firm told investors in July that underlying earnings for the full year would be “materially ahead of... expectations” after assessing its first-half performance, which saw its sales grow by 14.8% to £40.4m. Ergomed says it is “becoming a recognised provider of coronavirus research support” through its drug-monitoring and contract-research services. The stock has doubled in 12 months.…

Martin Grass was born in 1964 and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and doing an MBA at Cornell, he started working for Rite Aid, the pharmacy chain set up by his father, Alex, in 1962. In 1989 he was arrested for attempting to bribe a member of the Ohio state pharmacy board to step down in exchange for $33,000, although he was ultimately acquitted 15 months later when a judge ruled that the prosecution’s evidence was “circumstantial”. Despite this scandal, he took over from his father as both CEO and chairman of Rite Aid in 1995. What was the scam? When Martin Grass took over, Rite Aid was one of the largest pharmacy chains in America. Grass wanted to expand further, borrowing heavily…

Lights Out Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric By Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,$28 (available in the UK via Kindle) General Electric (GE) was founded in 1872 and grew to become America’s premier power and lighting company, then into a “behemoth”, encompassing “media, plastics, aerospace, energy, digital, financial services and more”, says Mary Kay Linge in The New York Post. At one point in early 2000, GE was valued at $600bn. Today, however, its market capitalisation stands at around a tenth of that figure. In Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann tell the “damming” story of GE’s decline, mostly under the reign of chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, whose 16-year tenure at the top oversaw a “rubber-stamp…

• “Staycations” have brought out a new and exciting form of oneupmanship between neighbours, says Virginia Blackburn in the Daily Express. Whereas in the past you might have smugly informed next door that you’d just visited Borobudur (the world’s biggest Buddhist temple in Java, if you didn’t know already), these days it’s some remote little spot in Northumberland. Meanwhile, the local villagers in these little spots, “all of whom can speak perfect RP and were putting their accent on solely to confuse the visitors, were torn between overpricing their new guests to the power of about 100 or putting poison in their porridge because they couldn’t stand the braying a moment longer.” No wonder we’re all so desperate to get away. “We can’t stand being around our fellow countrymen.” •…

There’s a lot of talk about whether the post-Covid-19 recovery will be V-shaped, or U-shaped, or some other shape. Our bet is that it will be an L – in other words, there may be no recovery at all. How is that possible? Isn’t there always a “recovery” after a correction? Doesn’t the stockmarket always bounce back? And the economy, too? The answer is, “No”. The Japanese stockmarket peaked in 1989. It is now more than 30 years later. It has never recovered. “At ‘normal’ interest rates, they would all go broke, as would the government” The Argentine economy has been in a downward trend (compared with the rest of the developed world) for 70 years. The Roman Empire went into decline about 190AD. It still hasn’t recovered. And look…

£368,000 The record price fetched for a sheep at the Scottish National Texel Sale in Scotland. Bidding started at £10,000 for Double Diamond, a six-month-old Texel ram, but quickly progressed to smash the previous record of £230,000, set in 2009. $364.5m How much Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden raised last month in campaign funding, breaking the previous monthly record of $193m set by Barack Obama in September 2008. £1,200 The annual cost to every household in Britain that will result from behavioural shifts, such as working from home and being less inclined to go out, based on pre-pandemic 2019 economic output, says The Independent, using figures from the Bank of England. £2.6bn How much the organic food sector is set to be worth by the end of the year, according…

Philanthropist, author and ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott, became the wealthiest woman in the world this week, says Jazmin Goodwin on CNN. Her net worth rose to $68bn, “propelling” her past L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott received a quarter of Bezos’s Amazon shares as part of their divorce settlement in 2019. The chunk of stock was worth more than $35bn at the time. The rise of the “kidult” has boosted UK toy sales in lockdown, with Lego reporting a solid rise in sales and profits in the first six months of the year, say Sarah Butler and Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. Lego’s global sales rose by 7% year-on-year in the first six months of 2020 to 15.7bn Danish kroner (£1.9bn), fuelled partly by “more adults…

• Zhong Shanshan, owner of Chinese mineral water brand Nongfu Spring, is now the third-richest man in China, say Hudson Lockett and Sun Yu in the Financial Times. His fortune has eclipsed $50bn after the initial public offering (IPO) of his company on the Hong Kong market was 1,148 times oversubscribed, causing the shares to rocket by 54%. Still, remember that even “stonking debuts” can fizzle out. Royal Mail’s shares soared by a third on their first day. Seven years later, they cost half the IPO price. • It’s one of the “oldest truisms” of business that “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”, says Jim Armitage in the Evening Standard. However, too much of an obsession with profit margins can be unhelpful too, since events such as Covid-19 may require…

President Macron of France (pictured) is betting big on a €100bn reboot of the economy that will focus on green technologies. The EU’s new €750bn coronavirus rescue fund will also focus on environmental projects. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged €40bn for a green recovery fund. Joe Biden, if elected as president of the US, has said he will spend big on a “green new deal”. Massive green stimulus packages are all the rage, and there will be those arguing that Britain should do something similar. That would be a mistake. The perils of overinvestment Not that there’s anything wrong with green technologies. Climate change might or might not turn out to be quite the global emergency it is cracked up to be. But most green energies deliver cheaper…

In a perfect world, investors are fairly rational people, making independent decisions about each investment. We all have biases and blind spots, but hopefully these cancel out to create a market that accurately reflects all available information. And much of the time, this theory seems to describe the reality fairly well. The fact that certain types of investment – such as smaller stocks or very cheap and out-of-favour companies – have tended to beat the market over time doesn’t invalidate it: you can see those returns as the reward for doing in-depth research or being willing to take uncomfortable risks. “Tracking error has only been higher in the dotcom bubble” Where this idea breaks down is when the cost of sticking to your convictions becomes too high. And increasingly we…

You don’t have to be a vegan to think that if we are to feed as many as nine billion people with high protein foods in the next few decades, then we might need some alternatives to traditional meat products. There will always be a market for high quality, intelligently-farmed natural meat products, but they are likely to be more expensive. The good news is that new food technologies are emerging and becoming profitable. Not all of the new products are perfect, but they are more “sustainable”.. Two disruptive sectors Food is just one sector where the next “disruptive” technologies are already building momentum. I suspect another opportunity lies in next-generation educational technology (or “edtech”). Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, many were questioning the value of traditional educational delivery, and…

It has taken a pandemic, “but making a will has finally moved into the 21st century”, says Lindsay Cook in the Financial Times. Since 1837, “making a will … has required the physical presence of at least two witnesses”. But now the Ministry of Justice says witnessing a will can be done over a video call in England and Wales. The will-maker needs to hold the front page of the will up to the camera to show the two witnesses. Then the video must capture the will-maker signing the document. It must record them “actually writing their signature, not just their head and shoulders”, says Jane Dalton in The Independent. “A frozen screen owing to poor internet connectivity can invalidate the procedure” Then the will has to be sent to…

“Emerging markets’ cyclically adjusted price/ earnings ratio is 15.5, compared with developed stocks’ 23.6” We all like to think of ourselves as cosmopolitan. But while we may watch the latest Hollywood films, buy electronic goods manufactured in China and eat Thai food, when it comes to our money, we’re far less adventurous. British investors have long exhibited a strong “home bias”, favouring domestic assets over foreign ones. A 2018 survey, for instance, found that 75% of respondents intended to invest most of their money in their home market, even though UK equities accounted for just 6% of the global market. Some geographical diversification, however, is important in an equity portfolio. There are some compelling opportunities abroad, especially in the developing world’s equity markets, known as emerging markets. They now offer…

Businesses are under pressure to bring staff back into the workplace, with the government worried about the damage done to town-centre economies with so many people working from home. However, the costs may be off-putting for many employers: one recent survey found the average SME would have to spend almost £22,000 to bring everyone back. Nucleus Commercial Finance says the figure comprised costs such as new health and safety measures, reconfiguring the workplace, and investments in new technologies. The bad news is there is no specific financial support for employers incurring back-to-work costs. They will be able to set these against their profits for corporation tax purposes, like any other cost, but that’s about it. The £1,000 job retention bonus, payable to employers for each member of staff who took…

“I’ve been a model since before smart-phones... I didn’t think I would do it for this long. I thought it would last a couple of years... and then I would get a proper job... And yet here I am … 300 fashion shows... 15 years of sucking in (both cheeks and tum) and 900 quizzical looks [at a] camera later.” Supermodel Edie Campbell (pictured), 29, quoted in The Sunday Times “Terrifically spoiled at an early age by huge financial success… thoroughly selfish and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with a million dollars… To him the future of a small capitalistic class is safer under a Hitler than under a Churchill.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s verdict on Joseph Kennedy, pro-appeasement US ambassador to…

cato.org/blog Investor James Altucher has said that New York is dead. His argument attracted the hostility of many New Yorkers, says Randal O’Toole. They missed the point. New York as a city may survive, but as an idea – as “a place that builds wealth and fulfils dreams like nowhere else in America” – it may not. The pandemic has taught high-income people that they don’t have to deal with all the congestion, high costs of living, homelessness, crime and other stresses of the densest city in America in order to make a living. They have therefore left and the things that made New York attractive are dying – restaurants are closed, entertainment venues are next. The density of cities make them a valuable place for business, it is argued.…

■ The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is targeting four housing developers that may have broken consumer protection law in relation to leasehold homes, says Ryan Bembridge on Property Wire. Barratt Developments, Countryside Properties, Persimmon Homes and Taylor Wimpey are under investigation amid evidence of unfair terms surrounding ground rents in leasehold contracts and potential mis-selling. The CMA is worried developers failed to explain clearly what ground rent is (the regular payments made by a leaseholder to the freeholder), whether it will rise, and when increases will occur and by how much. The regulator also found evidence that some properties on an estate advertised as leasehold-homes only were later sold as freeholds to other buyers. Homeowners have “long chafed” at all this, says Lex in the Financial Times. They are…

NatWest Group (LSE: NWG), like the rest of the sector, continues to grapple with the fallout from Covid-19, says Aaran Fronda on IG.com. NatWest had a “disappointing” first half of trading, recording a £770m pre-tax loss in the first half of the year. Though it expects the second half to be less eventful, the virus is likely to keep hampering the business. NatWest cancelled its dividends for the year after the Prudential Regulation Authority advised lenders to set money aside and brace themselves for a rise in bad loans . The shares have slipped by 43% in a year.…

In 1877 Zaccharie Geoffray bought Château Thivin and his family has run the property ever since. This was the only Beaujolais producer to make the cut in a book I wrote, many moons ago, entitled The 100 Most Iconic Wine Estates of the World. Thivin is one of the greatest vignerons in France and its wines represent some of the best value you will ever find. This exemplary outfit makes sensational reds from the gamay variety and they all manage to capture the essence of their village, the history of the region and the drama and splendour of top-flight Cru Beaujolais. This entry-level Côte de Brouilly, Les Sept Vignes, is made from a blend of seven different parcels of vines. With wild, red-berry fruit and a dusting of earthiness and…