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“Ask any estate agent and you will hear endless anecdotal evidence of a frenzied boom” In mid-2020, the Office for Budget Responsibility was getting nervous about UK house prices. It was forecasting that they would fall into the end of 2020 and then fall some more, to end 2021 down by 11% on the year. They weren’t alone in their pessimism (or maybe optimism – how you see this depends on whether you are a buyer or a seller). At the same time, the Centre for Economics and Business Research was forecasting a 14% fall. They were all completely wrong. In April, the Nationwide House Price index showed prices jumping 2.1% in April alone (a 17-year high) and 7.1% over the year (see page 5). The average house price is…

Residents of the fishing town of Noto in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture are upset after the local council spent part of its Covid-19 emergency relief funds on a 13-metre long statue of agiant squid instead of medical staff or care facilities, reports Sky News. Officials in Noto hope that the ¥25m (£165,000) statue will lure tourists back to the town, where flying squid is a local delicacy. Rachel Elwell, 50, from the West Midlands, is facing bankruptcy after losing just under £113,000 to a scammer on a dating site, says BBC News. The man, who she had never met, produced documents and pictures to persuade her to send the money, saying he had gone to Ukraine for an engineering contract and that his life was in danger. West Midlands Police said…

UK house prices have risen at their fastest pace in 17 years. Nationwide reports that prices rose by 2.1% in April from the month before, the biggest jump since February 2004. Prices have gained 7.1% in the past year. The upswing should keep going, says Andrew Wishart of Capital Economics. Survey data from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors shows strong sales and limited stock for sale. Web searches for homes hit asixyear high last month. This has been a boom like no other, says Roger Bootle in The Daily Telegraph. House prices fell in real terms during the last four UK recessions. This time they have risen thanks to extensive government support and ultra-low interest rates. The ratio of average house prices to average earnings is now close to…

Commodity prices are roaring. The Dow Jones Commodity index, which tracks a broad basket of energy, agriculture and metals prices, has gained more than 75% over the past year. As this chart from Barron’s indicates, oil has been enjoying a particularly strong rally; Brent crude prices are up by 28% so far this year. Precious metals, by contrast, have lagged as vaccines reduce the appeal of safe-haven assets. Soaring Chinese demand has also sent agricultural prices soaring, says Myra Saefong. Wheat and soybean prices have hit their highest levels since 2013, while corn futures have risen by more than 30% so far this year. Chinese wheat imports are set to hit a 25-year high for 2020-2021. The run-up in global food prices “may not be over yet”.…

Australia’s initial public offerings (IPOs) market is heating up, say Harry Brumpton and Julia Fioretti on Bloomberg. Pub operator Australian Venue Co. and private-hospital group Aurora Healthcare Australia have both just launched flotations and will raise nearly $600m combined. Sydney’s market has had its best start to the year since 2018, with firms raising about $1.7bn so far. IPOs are “running at a record pace” globally, says Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan in the Financial Times. Deal numbers and values are at their highest levels for the start of any year in at least two decades. Proceeds for the year have hit arecord $230bn, well above the dotcom bubble’s high of $80bn in 2000.…

Digital-advertising firm S4 Capital has raised its annual profit targets after a strong first quarter, reports Alex Barker in the Financial Times. S4, founded by Martin Sorrell (pictured) after his acrimonious split with advertiser WPP in 2018, saw like-for-like revenue bounce by 35% in the first three months of the year thanks to account wins at BMW and confectionery giant Mondelez. The group is in a sweet spot as digital advertising gathers pace. S4 has grown to a £3.1bn valuation and plans to issue bonds to finance a £500m takeover war chest. Sorrell and WPP still have scores to settle. Last week WPP cancelled a long-term share award to its former employee, accusing him of leaking confidential client information to the media while he was still in charge. Sorrell has…

Different companies are taking different views of how quickly, and how far, they should get back to the old nine-to-five office routine that was the norm before any of us had heard of Covid-19. BP, for example, has said that 25,000 of its staff will be expected to work from home two days a week. HSBC has started shifting staff onto home-working contracts, as has Lloyds. A few have gone further. Revolut, the finance app, will not only allow staff to work from their kitchen table, but from a beach bar overlooking the Caribbean for at least a couple of months ayear. By contrast, Amazon says it plans to return to an “office-centric” culture as soon as possible. Google has been accelerating plans to reopen its offices and has said…

A year ago, the outlook for the global economy was extremely unclear. You could make a case for deflationary depression, pent-up inflationary boom, or even stagflation (high inflation and stagnant growth). The odds were in favour of inflation in some form since it’s now widely accepted that governments should print and spend money without limit to support economies at times like this. But even so, it was impossible to say how long it might take for inflation to kick in. “The balance between deflation and inflation has tipped” So when I last updated MoneyWeek’s all-weather ETF portfolio in June (see issue 1004), the decisions reflected that. This model portfolio aims to provide long-term growth while offering some protection from the worst in a crisis. It had performed satisfactorily during the…

The case for freedom has to be won Iain Martin The Times It seems unlikely that the state’s “interventionist instincts” will be curbed when the pandemic ends, says Iain Martin. Interventionism has become the “new consensus” in the West, and voters are happy with the “explosion in public spending”. This realisation has prompted a group of Tory MPs, among them three potential candidates for the next Tory leadership race, to form the Free Market Forum in association with the Institute of Economic Affairs. Their aim is to “refocus the debate” towards “free enterprise and social freedom”. There has long been a “degree of ideological division” within political parties; what matters is a “question of instincts and direction of travel”. It is hard to tell what Boris Johnson’s are. He has…

capx.co A common complaint on the left against “market fundamentalists”, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, is that they reduce human beings to Homo economicus –“a rational, selfish animal searching for happiness in the pleasures of cheap consumer goods and wealth accumulation”, says Philip Booth. But this is a “ridiculous” caricature. Mises explicitly rejected the idea. “No man is exclusively motivated by the desire to become as rich as possible; many are not at all influenced by this mean craving,” he wrote. Hayek opposed central planning because he believed it to be impossible, but this is not to say he rejected society. Indeed, his thinking drew on Christian social thought and was partly a defence of tradition. The height of economic liberalism in the late 19th century was…

The property market has made a pedestrian recovery from the pandemic. The MSCI World index has rebounded by 30% over the past year, whereas one of the key property industry measures, the IPD UK index, is up by a mere 4%. The recovery in the listed real-estate investment trust sector (these trusts are known as Reits) has been more pronounced, but is still a tad underwhelming. Reits are up by 24.8% overall, while the average gain in global equity funds is over 40%, according to data from the funds team at Numis, a stockbroker. You can see why there might be some lingering caution. I’m still not sure how the pandemic will affect the core sectors of offices and retail over the longer term. Take demand for offices. There will…

“China already monitors its 1.4 billion citizens; algorithms rank them on their behaviour” Shortly before the pandemic, I went to a conference where a speaker, to the surprise of many, began outlining the latest developments in sex technology. Smart vibrators are now a thing, apparently. So are oral sex simulators. Both types of devices employ machine learning so that they constantly improve the service they deliver. This is data taken from the most intimate areas of life. Tech is finding applications in fields never before thought of as tech. Smart contact lenses will help you navigate computer screens –and data will be extracted from everything you see. Microphones embedded in your molars will help you communicate and every word you say will be recorded and processed. You might be recommended…

The wheels of government grind slowly. The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) first published recommendations for reforms to inheritance tax (IHT) almost two years ago, but ministers have yet to respond in detail. The Treasury did write to the OTS last month, but only to say it was still considering most of the proposals. And in the meantime, the number of people caught by IHT continues to rise: the £325,000 threshold on estates has not been increased since 2009. Helping your heirs “You can gift up to £3,000 a year without incurring IHT” If you are worried about IHT, private pensions can be an excellent way to plan for the future. Many people do not realise that unused pension savings can be passed on to their heirs, but this has…

My personal take on the opportunities within Asia is based on companies that can achieve leading positions in either their home markets, or regionally and globally. The Asian consumption story is well known but the new facet is the growth in commercialisation of home-grown intellectual property. The perception of Asian companies as copycats and consumers of Western innovation is now outdated. So a portfolio of Asian shares should extend beyond traditional consumption themes. Asian companies are climbing up the value chain, disrupting Western oligopolies and beginning to lead industry trends. Taiwan’s leading-edge chipmaker “Japan’s Nidec is now applying its motor-making skills to electric vehicles” TSMC (Taipei: 2330) is the world’s leading semiconductor foundry, based in Taiwan. It is one of the very few players capable of producing the leading-edge microchips…

2014 Clos Sainte Anne, Côtes de Bordeaux, France £14.10, reduced to £12.50 each by the case, Haynes Hanson & Clark, 020-7584 7927, hhandc.co.uk I am writing this column surrounded by sample bottles from the finest Bordeaux châteaux – Mouton Rothschild to my right, Haut Brion to my left, and rows upon rows of famous names as well as lesser-known estates in between. It is the en primeur time of year and wine merchants and commentators alike are wading through hundreds of 2020 vintages to give wine collectors their thoughts on whether it’s worth buying a few cases of these vinous futures for investment or simply to drink with their friends. By the time this column is published I will have uploaded legions of notes, free to view, on my website,…

This fringed canvas cabana by Australian label Business & Pleasure Co. is a functional and attractive garden accessory and takes just two minutes to set up. It also comes with a handy travel bag should you want to take it to the beach or the park. The centre pole is made of reclaimed timber and the cotton canvas is UV, water and mould-resistant. £370, selfridges.com Take the party well into the evening with a set of these extendable vintage festoon lights. A 20-bulb starter pack is recommended for smaller gardens, b tyou can add up to four extension packs for larger areas. £65, coxandcox.co.uk The Morso Forno Deluxe Garden Package is a pizza oven on wheels. The simple, functional design makes for plenty of counter space and storage underneath for…

• Give Carrie Symonds a break, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. The price of having her walls “lined with gold scrolling ferns” is that the prime minister’s fiancée (pictured) has been “painted asa grasping opportunist who would spend £1,000 on a designer tea cosy, if only she could get some mug Tory Party donor to foot the bill”. She has had to cope with pregnancy, and Boris’s illness. “What woman would not want to take refuge in swatches, in cheering the place up, in perhaps taking tea with Lulu Lytle to discuss her range of delicious chintzes at £270 per metre and ponder over wicker or rattan for the dining room chairs?” The fault lies with Boris. “I can just imagine him saying to Carrie: ‘Yes darling, whatever…

£10,000 The face value of a giant 10kg gold coin produced by the Royal Mint. Its biggest ever coin marks the end of its Queen’s Beasts commemorative coin collection, inspired by ten statues which lined the Queen’s route to Westminster Abbey at her coronation in 1953. £2.1bn The value of consumer book sales in Britain last year, a rise of 7% on 2019, as people “rediscovered their love of reading” in lockdowns, says the Publishers Association. Audio-book sales rose by 37%. £12.1bn The amount the Office for National Statistics estimates that “nature” – woodlands for walks and beaches for swimmers and so on – contributed to tourism and outdoor leisure spending in the UK in 2019, up from £11.8bn the previous year to a record high. £2,543 The value of…

An Australian mining magnate and populist politician has been ordered to pay Universal Music A$1.5m (£837,000) in damages after losing a two-year copyright case involving the US heavy-metal band Twisted Sister. Clive Palmer had “ripped off” the group’s classic song We’re Not Gonna Take It, says Jackson Langford on Music Feeds, and rewrote it with the lyrics “we’re not gonna cop it”. The judge said Palmer, who founded a tax-cutting party called United Australia, evidently thought he could get away with using the song merely by changing some of the words. It transpired that Palmer had approached Universal Music about featuring the anthem in an advertisement but was reluctant to pay A$150,000 for using it and seek approval from Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider (pictured). Palmer insisted he wrote his…

The US government is running “an inflation experiment”, says The Economist. President Joe Biden is pushing for $4trn of new spending on infrastructure and social programmes. On the monetary front, the US Federal Reserve is more relaxed about inflation exceeding its target of around 2% than it used to be. The Fed learns to love inflation America’s consumer price index (CPI) rose by 2.6% on the year in March. The monthly increase of 0.6% was the biggest in nearly a decade. UK inflation has been more subdued but is also heading higher; prices rose by 0.7% in March year-on-year, with inflation forecast to hit or breach the 2% target by the end of the year. The US economy is booming, expanding at an annualised rate of 4% in the first…

“Thousands of people on the street and parliament buildings... under siege [are making] politicians... wake up to the public mood... The harrowing experience [of the] Capitol riot... [will] inform [politicians’] decision making... Giving the people... more money is going to be high on the list of priorities... The [UK] government... is under extraordinary pressure to deliver... a better outcome for people who have been left behind [since] the financial crisis... [and there is]... enormous pressure to deliver a big rebound for everyone to compensate them for... confinement in 2020... [Politicians] really don’t have a choice. They have to spend. The only question is how much and what on... [also expect] taxes on the conspicuous wealth of billionaires... carbon taxes...[and] additional levies imposed on corporations... That’s the norm following big dislocations.”…

Three to buy tinyBuild The Daily Telegraph Instead of developing its own games, tinyBuild takes on “promising titles from independent developers” and helps with funding, marketing and technical expertise. It is “becoming extremely profitable and cash generative” and “little need to invest in fixed assets” has translated into very high returns on capital. The computer-games sector is “bigger than film and music combined”, and tinyBuild will keep growing with it. 265p Crossword Cybersecurity The Mail on Sunday Covid-19 passports are being “actively explored” by governments and firms worldwide. With fraudsters “already at work” offering fake certificates, the documentation “needs to be secure”. Crossword Cybersecurity is working to ensure that Covid-19 certificates are “authentic and safe”. It has trials under way with the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust and…

• Apple has served up an “astonishing” set of quarterly results, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. iPad sales soared by 79% in the first three months of the year. The firm has announced a $90bn share buyback. That is more than the market value of all but eight FTSE 100 firms. Basically, it “has an entire BP lying around as spare change”. The “fuddy-duddy” FTSE is nice if you like “banks, oil companies and miners”. But, if you want “broad exposure to the modern economy”, it has “ceased to be... suitable”. • Private equity giant Apollo Global Management is buying Yahoo, AOL and other media assets in a $5bn deal. The current owner, telecoms firm Verizon, was bound to sell, says Nicholas Jasinski in Barron’s. In 2017, it bought…

The cosmetic surgery industry is “enjoying a Zoom-boom”, says The Economist. Having spent hours staring at their own faces on video calls, people have decided they could do with being freshened up. The US has seen an estimated 10% rise in cosmetic surgery during the pandemic; in France the figure is 20%. But where there is a boom, there is also a boom in fraud. One burgeoning subsector of the plastic surgery market is the Brazilian butt lift; such procedures have risen by 77% worldwide since 2015. It has become popular owing to celebrities, such as reality television star Kim Kardashian (pictured) and singer Jennifer Lopez, “who flaunt their ample curves online”, says Stephen Gibbs in The Times. But the butt lift, which involves adding fat taken from another part…

• London Stock Exchange Group’s shareholders “delivered a sharp rebuke” over the bumper pay rise awarded to chief executive David Schwimmer (pictured), just weeks after the company angered investors by revealing a bill that was much higher than expected for integrating data firm Refinitiv, says the Financial Times. Almost 24% of votes were cast against Schwimmer’s £6.9m total pay for last year, up from £2.5m in 2019. Around £4m of that was related to longterm share incentives that are due to vest. • Investors in education group Pearson “staged a second revolt” over chief executive Andy Bird’s pay, “disrupting a change in leadership”. Around 37% of shareholders “signalled their displeasure” at the £7.4m pay deal in what was one of the “largest revolts to hit a FTSE 100 company this…

Inflation is the rise in the general level of prices in an economy (or a sector of an economy) over agiven period of time. Alternatively, it is sometimes defined as the decline in the purchasing power of each unit of money, which amounts to the same thing. Inflation is usually measured by looking at the change in a price index that is based on the average prices of a basket of goods and services. Typically we look at the year-on-year inflation rate (eg, the change in the price index between May this year and May last year), or the annualised rate over longer periods (eg, if the price index is up by 9.3% over three years, that’s an annualised inflation rate of 3%). When we talk about inflation in general,…

“We’ve all heard the call for more stories to be written, directed, lit by women. It’s all good and well doing that and putting millions into finding these people when they’re coming out of school and getting them into apprenticeships. What’s the f*cking point if they don’t keep them there when they’re in their 30s?” Actress Charlotte Riley (pictured) on the lack of flexible childcare in the film industry, quoted in The Times. She has just started a nursery, WonderWorks “America innovates, China duplicates, Europe regulates.” Maxim quoted in The Daily Telegraph “Novelists are like farmers who sell a wheat crop and get a sizeable amount of money in one hit, if they’re lucky. Prudence is required to manage your financials for when liquidity squeezes.” Author Thomas Keneally, quoted in…

thehustle.co On a warm Texas night in 1956, Bette Nesmith – later Nesmith Graham – sat in a garage surrounded by buckets of white tempera paint and empty nail-polish bottles, says Zachary Crockett. “She didn’t know it then, but she was on the brink of something magical.” Graham was a single mother working as a secretary, earning $300 a month. She was not great at her job and decided she had to find away to fix her numerous typos. An idea struck. Why not just paint over the errors? She whipped up a white-coloured liquid in her kitchen blender, poured it into an empty nail-polish bottle, and the now-familiar correction fluid – hers she went on to dub Liquid Paper – was born. By 1957, Graham was selling 100 bottles…

The fight to dominate, or at least get a slice of the lucrative and fast-growing cloud-computing market is where the real action is in the technology sector. We might think of technology more often as, say, social media, e-commerce, or film and music streaming. But none of this works without the cloud, which is why some of the leading names in the industry are spending big bucks to try to dominate the sector. The cloud is that vast array of ever-expanding data centres where information is remotely stored, analysed and used by businesses; they find this cheaper and more practical than building their own. They get access to significant processing power, which means their apps can, for instance, allow every customer to check their bank balances and make payments simultaneously,…

The moral implications of this theme are so profound that it is not necessarily a trend one would want to “get exposure to”, to use the typical investors’ parlance. The obvious way to “play it”, however, and my stomach curdles as I say that, is to buy tech. Tech is, as we know, bafflingly overvalued, but it is has been bafflingly overvalued, at least to traditional value investors, for years. The trend is up and there is no reason it can’t get more bafflingly overvalued. The scalability of digital technology, the quick returns it offers and hence the capital it attracts mean the sector is in a virtuous circle. The obvious place to start is with the big guns. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), for example, owns me. I have an iMac…

■ How much are you paying for your income-drawdown plan? Research from the consumers’ group Which suggests savers drawing income directly from their pension savings in retirement could be paying annual charges ranging from 0.5% to 1.25%. Over time, that difference could reduce the value of your savings by tens of thousands of pounds. Alarm about high drawdown charges is growing. In April, the think tank New City Agenda called for regulators to review the rules that exempt drawdown plans from the caps on charges that apply to other types of pension. Savers building up their pension funds, including millions of members of workplace pension schemes, cannot normally be asked to pay annual management fees of more than 0.75% a year. But no such cap applies on drawdown plans. That…

Renalytix AI’s (Aim: RENX) diagnostics platform KidneyIntelX uses artificial intelligence to gauge the odds of progressive kidney function decline in chronic kidney disease. The firm has secured a contract with the US government to provide 140 departments with KidneyIntelX, says Christopher Ruane on The Motley Fool. Veterans’ agencies are likely to be especially keen on it. KidneyIntelX is the only technology to improve diagnostic rates in high-risk type-2 diabetes patients, of which there are 29 million in the US. The stock is up by 267% in a year.…

Trendon Shavers was born in 1982 and grew up in McKinney, Texas. He developed an early interest in computers and after leaving high school studied for various certificates in computer engineering, qualifying him to work as a technician. He become interested in the digital currency bitcoin (invented in 2009) and started making posts on bitcointalk.org under the name Pirate@40, looking for people willing to lend him bitcoin for an investment scheme initially known as First Pirate Savings and Trust (later Bitcoin Savings & Trust). What was the scam? From 2011, Shavers claimed he had found a way to make virtually risk-free money through a form of arbitrage. He supposedly sold bitcoin at above market rates to people who needed it quickly for various reasons and then used the proceeds to buy…

“What you doomsday prophets [fail to explain is why] the market continues to roar in the face of [your] diatribes. If we were keeping score, we would say Fed: 40; Bonner: 0.” So writes a dear reader. And yes, of course, we have been wrong about a great number of things. Not so long ago, we were laughing at investors who were buying Hertz, which had gone bankrupt. Now, it’s come back to life. Many years before that, we had dismissed Amazon as “The River of No Returns”. Readers who were smart enough to ignore our advice could have bought the stock for under $50. Today, split-adjusted, it is trading at over $3,000. “If you leave the dishes unwashed, the cockroaches will come” Still, publicly traded stocks don’t really interest…

Star US divorce lawyers will be busy after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda (pictured) announced they are ending their 27-year marriage. Bill Gates, worth $130.5bn, is the fourth-richest man in the world and the divorce will be the biggest division of assets since the $150bn split between Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie Scott in 2019. Both spouses have hired lawyers who worked on that case, while Melinda’s team includes Robert Cohen, who has worked for two of Donald Trump’s ex-wives. Fans of sound money have been enjoying the work of a prankster this week. Every night for the past few days an irreverent message has been projected onto the facade of the Bank of England, says fintech site Finextra. These include “Printing money is stealing from…

Shares in Germany’s INIT Innovation have more than doubled from their 2020 low, says WirtschaftsWoche. But there is ample scope for further gains. The group specialises in the digitalisation of public transport, with offerings ranging from planning and dispatching services to ticketing systems for buses and trains. Turnover rose by 15% to €181m last year, while operating earnings jumped by a fifth to €19.6m. INIT’s systems are used wordwide, from Abu Dhabi to Seattle, and demand should rise strongly thanks to the increase in spending on infrastructure in the US, Germany and the EU. MM Warburg’s Robert-Jan van der Horst expects 2023’s net income figure to be double today’s.…

Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of legendary investor Warren Buffett, has held its annual shareholder meeting. The event, dubbed “Woodstock for capitalists”, has been happening virtually because of the pandemic . It yielded the usual mixture of folksy commentary and gnomic wisdom. Buffett said that the US economy is “red hot” and Berkshire’s portfolio of businesses “is seeing substantial inflation”. He joked that Charlie Munger, his 97-year-old deputy, will be ageing at just “1% annually” once he hits his centenary. Munger dubbed bitcoin “a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists”. It hasn’t been quite the usual love-in, says Robert Cyran on Breakingviews. The “pew-sitters in the Church of Buffett” revolted, with one-quarter of shareholders voting to require more disclosure about efforts to “address climate change” and encourage “workforce…

Boris Johnson announced new trade and investment deals worth almost £1bn with India this week, as the two countries outlined a “2030 road map” to strengthen bilateral ties, says Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe in the Financial Times. The package comprises £533m of investment into the UK from India, generating more than 6,000 jobs, and trade deals within India for UK firms, worth around £446m. Johnson said the deals, alongside any future trade agreement, due to be negotiated this autumn, could take the UK-India relationship to “new highs” and “double the value” of the existing trading partnership, currently estimated to be worth £23bn. Any trade deal will “require substantial compromises and reforms from both sides”, says Mark Littlewood in The Times. India wants Britain to open its market to “both their products and…

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck last year, several media barons in the US made headlines for voluntarily cutting their take-home pay and forgoing salaries, say David Lieberman and Brent Lang in Variety. “But the belts that companies tightened still seemed to stretch a lot with bonuses and perks that ensured media CEOs will continue to rank among the nation’s highest-paid executives.” While average CEO pay at AT&T, Comcast, Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, Netflix and ViacomCBS fell by an average of 12% last year, it still amounted to $28.9m apiece. And much of what was lost in salary will be recouped eventually in long-term incentives. “Looked at another way, a typical employee would have to work 306 years to match what the CEOs averaged in 2020. That’s an improvement from 416 years…

Inflation is back and it’s here to stay, reckons Mohamed El-Erian, the former co-chief investment officer of Pimco, the giant bond fund manager, tells CNBC. There are upward pressures on prices across a range of different industries, he says, pointing to recent comments by CEOs, including Warren Buffett. “We’re seeing very substantial inflation,” Buffett told shareholders in his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway last week. “We’re raising prices, people are raising prices to us and it’s being accepted.” For example, in housebuilding “the costs are just up, up, up”, with the price of raw materials such as steel rising constantly. The US Federal Reserve should pay attention to these trends, says El-Erian, and to the improving labour market. The unemployment rate may fall below 6% this month, with a million jobs created…

conservativehome.com The significant achievements of rail privatisation – soaring passenger numbers and investment in trains – have been thrown away in lockdown, says Tony Lodge. The diktat not to travel “necessitated de-facto nationalistion”. To date, more than £10bn has been spent keeping near-empty trains running. The shift away from train travel to working from home will be hard to reverse. The direction of travel is clear: ministers seem to have accepted that “Whitehall knows best” and most of the firms “are of course happy to keep running empty trains with a huge state subsidy”. The losers will be passengers, taxpayers and the Treasury. This is the wrong conclusion to draw from the pandemic. Instead, the situation should be seen as a “rare opportunity”. This is the “perfect landscape in which…

“The biggest problem is the increased risk of falling into negative equity” The government has rolled out its latest weapon in the battle to turn Generation Rent into Generation Buy. A new state-backed mortgage scheme, launched in mid-April, aims to help prospective home buyers with 5% deposits. First-time buyers and existing homeowners who are moving are eligible, up to a purchase value of £600,000 (second home and buy-to-let acquisitions are excluded). The help takes the form of a guarantee to the lender: the state will step in for the portion of the loan over 80% if the buyer defaults. The latest state subsidy for the housing market aims to address a shortage of 95% loan-to-value (LTV) options. Data from comparison site Moneyfacts shows that there were 391 such mortgages on…

• Thousands of people who filed their tax return after the normal deadline may need to take action to protect their state-pension benefits, tax experts are warning. The issue potentially affects self-employed people who took advantage of HM Revenue & Customs’ flexibility on self-assessment tax returns during the pandemic. HMRC said that returns filed after 31 January 2021, the usual deadline, would not be penalised if they arrived before 28 February. But while this provided some useful breathing space, if you used your return to say you want to pay voluntary National Insurance (NI) contributions in order to build up state-pension benefits, there may be a problem with your NI records. Anyone potentially affected should ring HMRC’s National Insurance Helpline on 0300 200 3500 to ensure their contributions are allocated…

Epizyme (Nasdaq: EPZM) is a biopharmaceutical company that develops and commercialises therapies for cancer patients. But it has been struggling recently. Anyone who has held it over the last year “knows what a loser feels like”, says Simply Wall St. The share price has slipped by 54.9% in 12 months. Sales have fallen by 34% over the past year and profits are nowhere to be seen. Epizyme’s performance over the last year could also “indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 5.5% over the last half decade”.…