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Superhero series Jupiter’s Legacy (pictured), part of an effort by Netflix to create a Marvel-style cinematic universe based on comics created by Scottish writer Mark Millar, has been all but cancelled, despite the eight episodes costing a reported $200m to make, says Forbes. Having “earned lousy reviews and apparently poor enough post-debut viewership to not get a second season”, it is being rolled into a spin-off, Supercrooks. Asparagus lovers will have to pay up for their favourite dish – supplies of British asparagus are “desperately low”, Chris Chinn, chairman of the British Asparagus Association, tells The Grocer. An “absolutely shocking spring” of cold, dry weather has hit crop yields, putting retailers and wholesalers in the “extraordinary” position of having to rely on imports, mainly from Peru.…

“Over the past decade... the S&P 500... has outperformed real US GDP… Stock prices can’t indefinitely grow faster than the economy... [some] growth is [due] to non-public companies, such as start-ups and the like... economic growth that nonpublic companies generate will not show up in the stockmarket, which only reflects the performance of publicly traded corporations... One can... wonder if an even-greater share of economic growth in coming years will accrue to non-public equity... Given the abundant liquidity in the private-equity market... many [start-ups] don’t end in becoming publicly traded... or [they wait] much longer before doing so... One possible future... is that the growth of the... stockmarket lags that of the economy by an increasing amount... The bottom line? The past decade was extraordinary for publicly-traded US stocks. Don’t…

Six to buy Marlowe Shares This business-services firm keeps companies ahead of red tape, working with clients across areas such as fire safety, air hygiene and compliance software. The potential market for these services is thought to be worth £6.8bn in the UK alone, with especially promising growth in areas such as employment law, HR and occupational health. Management has an ambitious three-year plan to double revenue to £500m and almost treble earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). Now looks a propitious time for investors to buy in. 790p Tritax EuroBox Interactive Investor This real-estate investment trust invests in logistics warehouses in continental Europe, with sites in Germany, Italy, Spain and the low countries. The e-commerce boom means that many warehouse firms now trade at a premium. However,…

• Etsy has decided to buy Depop, the British secondhand clothing marketplace, in a $1.6bn deal, says Ashley Armstrong in The Times. Depop has benefited from “booming growth with Generation Z shoppers” as young customers increasingly turn to secondhand fashion sites as a “sustainable way to satisfy their appetite for new outfits and monetise their existing wardrobes”. GlobalData predicts that the resale market will expand fivefold over the next five years. Etsy hopes to benefit from Depop’s rapid growth (sales rose by 55% in 2019) and tap a younger demographic; most of its own customers are in their mid-30s. The market for “preloved” garments may be “growing fast”, but the valuation of this mostly-cash deal looks “overdressed”, says Lex in the Financial Times. Etsy has paid 23 times sales for…

Voters in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt defied the polls and threw their support behind the ruling CDU on Sunday in the last regional ballot before national elections, says Melissa Eddy in The New York Times. It could be asign of which way things will go in September. The CDU will be thrilled it won 37% of the vote, “breaking a losing streak in state ballots” and doing better than it did five years ago. In contrast, the far-right AfD lost ground; the Greens only slightly increased their share of the vote. CDU leader Armin Laschet will certainly be relieved that the Greens, who are the CDU’s current main rival at a national level, did not make significant gains, says Jenny Hill on the BBC. But the celebrations may be…

• Around 60% of shareholders in events group Informa voted to reject the pay report last week, says the Financial Times. Under the new scheme, the chief executive, Stephen Carter, who was paid almost £1.5m last year, would be in line for stock worth 200% of his base salary every year until the end of 2023, worth £4.6m in total. Gareth Wright, the chief financial officer would be eligible for an award worth 135% of his salary. • Aradhana Sarin, finance chief at Alexion, a US rare-diseases specialist in the process of being taken over by AstraZeneca, will be paid a base salary of £850,000 when she moves to the latter company. That is more than the £788,249 her predecessor earned, says The Times. Sarin will also receive an annual…

The ongoing charges figure (OCF) shows the annual running cost of a given fund, expressed as a percentage; or, as the Association of Investment Companies puts it: “It is the annual percentage reduction in shareholder returns as a result of recurring operational expenses assuming markets remain static and the portfolio is not traded”. It replaced the total expense ratio (TER), though you’ll still find the latter term used, and there are very few differences between them. The OCF is made up of the fund manager’s fees for running the portfolio – the annual management charge (AMC) – plus other costs, such as administration, marketing and regulation. Even though the OCF is deemed (for now) to be the best measure of costs, it’s not comprehensive. That’s partly because it’s historic –…

“It’s not like modelling where you can wing it and charm people and dazzle them with your looks, you’ve got to do the work. There are OK actors, there are good actors, then there are amazing actors. I want to be up there. I don’t want to be good or OK. I want to be flippin’ amazing!” Supermodel Jourdan Dunn (pictured) on training to be an actor, quoted in The Sunday Times “It means I can look after my wife and my family. But I can promise you if football was still an amateur sport, and we got paid nothing, I would still be a footballer. There is no other job that could give me the satisfaction this one does. I just happen to be playing in an era when…

bloomberg.com/opinion We usually respond to “big unforeseen shocks” in one of two ways, says Allison Schrager. We recoil from risk-taking, as in the aftermath of the Great Depression, “leading to the creation of the modern welfare state and a generation that feared the stockmarket”; or we accept risk is a part of life and embrace it –as in the “Roaring Twenties” after the 1918 flu and 1920 recession. How will we come out of the Covid-19 pandemic? “So far it looks like we’re going with the 1920s.” Despite a hard year that saw many small businesses shut down, rates of entrepreneurship are up. True, lots of people lost their jobs in the past year and may have started a business because they had no other choice. And the businesses they…

• NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays, Metro Bank and Santander have all told the Treasury Select Committee that small businesses will now find it much easier to open business bank accounts with them after an extended period of turning away applications. Many banks closed to new applications during the pandemic in order to focus on existing customers. That proved particularly problematic for firms seeking access to government schemes, such as Bounce Back loans, which were often only available to a bank’s own customers. • The Insolvency Service has been handed new powers to investigate company directors it believes have wound up companies in order to avoid repaying emergency Covid-19 debt. The news follows mounting concern that some small companies may be restructuring or shutting up shop simply to avoid repaying support…

Tremor International (Aim: TRMR) is an Israeli advertising company focusing on digital video and connected television (streaming video services via smart TVs and standalone apps). Tremor is “a rare breed that’s making huge amounts of free cash flow”, says Michael Wiggins De Oliveira on Seeking Alpha. Indeed, its latest trading update left investors “shaking with excitement” says Nick Fletcher at Proactive Investors, with first-quarter revenue up by 96% year-on-year to $63m and profits up by $0.5m to $27.5m. The shares have gained 400% in the past year. The group intends to list on the Nasdaq in 2021.…

Dr Frederick Albert Cook was born in Hortonville, New York, in 1865. He studied at Columbia and graduated from New York Medical School in 1890, and went on to serve as a ship’s doctor on various polar expeditions. Roald Amundsen credited Cook with saving the lives of those on one expedition. Cook’s later claim to have reached the North Pole in 1908 was discredited, which made him increasingly bitter. In 1917 he moved into oil prospecting, working for the Texas Eagle Oil Company of Fort Worth. After it went bankrupt in 1920, he refounded it as the Revere Oil Company. What was the scam? Cook bought “sucker” lists of shareholders in oil companies that had recently gone bankrupt, or were struggling. He would then bombard them with publicity, offering to…

Noise A Flaw in Human Judgment Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein William Collins, £25 Behavioural psychology has established that humans are “bad at decision making”, says Martha Gill in the Evening Standard. Our minds are subject to all kinds of cognitive biases that lead us into error. In this book, the authors show that  “noise” is a problem too – that is, errors in thinking produced by our reaction to relatively insignificant events and pressures, such as what mood we are in when making a decision. Unlike bias, which produces consistent errors, noise causes the accuracy of our judgement to vary “depending on the person, the situation, or even the time of day”. Such errors are “everywhere” and can be “seriously disruptive in just the kinds of places…

Some of the world’s largest corporate emitters of carbon dioxide have “suffered a series of landmark boardroom and courtroom defeats, reflecting the waning patience of investors pushing for much faster action to tackle the climate emergency”, says CNBC. Shareholders at ExxonMobil supported an activist hedge fund in overhauling the company’s board; investors in Chevron defied management on a pivotal climate vote; a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to take much more aggressive action to drive down its carbon emissions. It marked, says Bloomberg, the day the world changed for Big Oil. “It’s a bit like telling a panda to lay off the bamboo. The panda dies” The International Energy Agency has joined the scolds, telling us we must drastically cut our dependence on fossil fuels. It called for ahalt…

“Scams are running rampant in the cryptocurrency markets as a huge rally in bitcoin, a lack of regulation and the anonymity of digital money have created a ripe environment for fraudsters,” warns Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal. US consumers lost almost $82m to related scams in the six months to the end of March. That’s more than ten times as much as in the same period last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and it relies on self-reported figures, so is almost certainly an underestimate. It’s not just the US – investors in Germany are estimated to have lost between €500,00 and €1.5m to a crypto venture called LUB. Its supposed new cryptocurrency promised daily returns of up to 10%, but its anonymous creators vanished in May.…

The bulls are charging back into emerging markets. The MSCI Emerging Markets index has lagged so far this year, gaining 6.8% to the developed world’s 11.7%. Yet last month it outperformed developed markets for the first time since January, says Bloomberg. The commodity boom has powered the latest rise: materials and energy make up 14% of the MSCI EM index, compared with 8% for the developed market gauge. Global money managers pulled $44bn from emerging markets during the first half of 2020, says Jonathan Wheatley in the Financial Times. But they have since returned in force, pouring more than $100bn into emerging equities and bonds during the nine months to 31 March. Covid-19 blues An emerging-market economy is one that is moving “from low-to-middle income to high income”, explains Fidelity…

It’s a fresh start for Danone, the food giant behind Activia yoghurt and Evian water, says Hubert Couëdic in Le Revenu. Danone is the world’s leading supplier of fresh dairy and plant-based products and the world number two in infant nutrition. This is a profitable and defensive business, but the group has not done as well as its major rivals in recent years. Activist shareholders forced out the old boss in March. New CEO Antoine de Saint-Affrique will focus on cutting costs and improving margins. The shares trade on a discount to rival Nestlé, but that gap should close as the new plan takes effect. Reopening, which will boost sales of bottled water, is another tailwind.…

Normally, the first week of June would see the summer blockbuster season in full swing, says Lex in the Financial Times. This year however, “the blockbuster is the cinema”. AMC Entertainment Holdings has become the latest “meme stock” – a stock that suddenly becomes fashionable among individual investors, with word of mouth and social-media hype, rather than fundamentals, underpinning interest. GameStop is the classic recent example. AMC’s shares have surged by around 465% in the past month. Distressed debt trader Jason Mudrick bought $230m of stock from the company last week “only to flip it within hours and lock in a profit of perhaps $30m”. Shortly afterwards AMC shares doubled again, “aided by the offer of free popcorn for retail investors”. The group then decided to cash in on the…

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, could be unseated on Sunday, after lawmakers hold a vote of confidence in a new coalition government, says Patrick Kingsley in The New York Times. The vote is expected to dethrone Netanyahu after 12 years and usher in Naftali Bennett, a former high-tech entrepreneur who “opposes a Palestinian state and believes Israel should annex much of the occupied West Bank”. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader who assembled the coalition, calls it a “government of change”, and it will differ from previous governments in various important aspects. If confirmed, Bennett will lead a coalition of eight parties with huge ideological differences, including, for the first time, an independent Arab party. Although Arab Israelis and Palestinian Israelis make up 15% of voters, Arab parties only have…

At the time of writing, the ongoing trade negotiations between the UK and Australia seemed to have reached a critical point. Boris Johnson is supportive in principle, but Australia was threatening to walk away from talks unless granted greater access for its agricultural exports. It’s clear, however, that of all the trade deals that trade minister Liz Truss (pictured) is looking to sign, the ultimate goal is an agreement with the US, the world’s largest economy. As a result, Smarkets has been running a market on whether a trade deal between the UK and US will be agreed before the end of the year. The terms of the market cover awritten agreement, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be ratified this year, and includes deals that cover  individual sectors. Punters…

Last year was a bumper one for executive pay in the biggest US companies despite Covid-19, say Theo Francis and Inti Pacheco in The Wall Street Journal. Median pay reached $13.4m for the CEOs of America’s benchmark S&P 500 index in 2020, setting a fifth straight annual record. Most bosses received raises of at least 5% as their companies recorded annual shareholder returns of around 8%. Seven CEOs were paid more than $50m, compared with two in 2019 and three the year before that. The best-paid tended to lead businesses that benefited from the pandemic. Chad Richison, founder of Paycom Software, was the highest-paid overall, taking home around $211m in total; he received $21m in 2019. Video-games-maker Activision’s Robert Kotick received $155m, compared with $30m the previous year, and Leonard…

In his 1996 book, The Death of Inflation: Surviving and Thriving in the Zero Era, economist Roger Bootle argued – rightly as it turned out – that we were at the dawn of a new era of low inflation and low interest rates. Now that era is over, and we’re at “the start of a sea change”, he warns David Goodman on Bloomberg. “The danger of deflation has passed, and the risks are definitely tilted in the other direction,” says Bootle. In the 1990s, globalisation, the collapse of trade unions and stronger competition combined to act “like a reverse oil shock”, he argues. Those forces are no longer as powerful as they once were. In the wake of the pandemic, we have “pent-up demand... you’ve got people with lots of…

fee.org Smuggling – illegally transporting goods into or out of a jurisdiction – “has a certain stigma attached to it”, says Lawrence Reed. Most people think that if something is against the law then there must be a good reason for it. But this is not always the case. Totalitarian regimes try to prevent the free movement of thoughts and ideas, for example: I am proud to have played a role in smuggling Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose into Communist Poland. Often government forbids the movement of goods for no better reason than to confer monopoly privileges on a politically favoured and well-connected group – I am therefore equally proud to have helped my father smuggle milk from Ohio into Pennsylvania when I was a child. Even when what is…

If Matt Hancock doesn’t stop you going on holiday this summer then the cost of Covid-19 tests just might. A negative PCR test (the type that must be sent to a laboratory for analysis) is required for entry into many countries and on return to the UK, but the costs can rack up quickly. Providers on the government’s official list for England and Northern Ireland offer tests costing between £42 and £399. The median price is £100. A round trip to a green-list country is likely to include at least an outbound PCR test, a lateral-flow test (the ones that give a result on the spot in 30 minutes) before return and then a second PCR test on day two of return. Those quarantining after travel to amber countries need…

Amazon has launched a £2.5m fund to support small businesses trading on its platform as they seek to take on apprenticeships. The funding will enable such businesses to take advantage of the government’s Apprenticeship Levy scheme. Amazon estimates that the cash could fund 200 apprentices. The initiative is a reminder of the potential of apprenticeship schemes for small and medium-sized enterprises, with less than one in four currently employing apprentices, according to the Federation of Small Businesses. The Apprenticeship Levy, under which large businesses are required to help fund three million apprenticeships, is in theory an opportunity for smaller companies, since firms with a wage bill of less than £3m do not have to pay. However, while these firms are entitled to draw on the fund in order to meet…

Napster Group (Aim: NAPS) is a music streaming and virtual-reality (VR) entertainment company. Formerly called Melody VR, the company bought the Napster streaming platform – once synonymous with peer-to-peer music filesharing – for $70m in December 2020, rebranded itself as Napster Group in March, and is pinning its hopes on combining its streaming service with broadcasts of live VR concerts and music, which it hopes will boost subscriptions. In 2019 it made a loss of £15m and all the recent upheaval appears to have unnerved investors: the stock has lost 40% in the last 12 months.…

£15, xistowines.co.uk, 07980-616927. Xisto Wines is run by Anton Mann and Lela McTernan and they import wines from Portugal under sail. Working with a new wave of young winemakers, they source sustainable, limited-release, high-quality wines bursting with character and a true sense of place. They have reconnected Bristol with its twin city of Porto, using sailing ships laden with their zero-carbon wine cargo. I have picked two terrific red wines from their portfolio for you to enjoy – my featured suggestion for this week’s column boasts this legend on its label: “Made by Rebels, Shipped by Pirates, Drunk by Heroes!”. My featured “Port O’Bristol” red is bursting with velvety bramble and spice flavours and, in spite of its youth, it is already drinking perfectly. The 2017 Quinta do Boavista Rufia…

£5.5bn The bill to deliver 589 new Ajax light tanks for the British Army. The project, however, is facing “major issues” and may be “unachievable”, aleaked government report conceded last week. Soldiers have become ill after testing them. £41,000 The income a retired couple needs annually to live luxurious lives that take in health clubs, long-haul holidays and a new car every five years, according to consumer magazine Which. Just to live comfortably costs £26,000 a year, while £18,000 covers “essential” needs. £150m The cost of the Blue Abyss, a project to build the world’s deepest and largest indoor swimming pool, in Cornwall. The pool will be 50-metres deep and hold around 42,000 cubic metres of water, equivalent to 17 Olympic-size swimming pools or 168 million cups of tea. HK$10.2m…

“Carpe diem” seems to be the post-Covid-19 motto of the world’s super rich, Sam Tucker, head of superyachts at VesselsValue, tells The Daily Telegraph. According to the consultancy’s data, sales of superyachts (those which are 24 metres and longer) are soaring. There are now 731 on order, compared with an average of around 250 a year for the past decade. Prices vary, but $1m per metre is the rule of thumb. Ruffer Investment Company, the first fund manager to buy bitcoin, revealed this week that it had made a “quick” $1.1bn in five months from the trade, says The Sunday Times. The trust invested around $600m in November last year as a way to hedge against inflation, but sold in April asit hit all-time highs, reported investment director Hamish Baillie.…

Brent crude was trading north of $71 a barrel this week, its highest level since May 2019. The latest leg of the rally was due to Opec+, a group of major producers led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. The group has been collectively withholding millions of barrels of daily production from world markets in order to prop up prices. Last week they agreed to maintain their existing plan to unwind those curbs slowly rather than upping production more quickly to take advantage of higher prices. The surge in crude has also been fuelled by optimism about economic reopening, says Patti Domm for CNBC. America has now entered its summer “driving season”. Reopening economies mean global demand should grow by seven million barrels per day (mbpd) between the first and third…

Global food prices are rising at their fastest pace in a decade. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that prices jumped by almost 40% in May compared to a year before. Its index tracks a basket of soft commodities including sugar, dairy, meat, vegetable oil and cereals. Droughts in Brazil, akey agricultural exporter, have contributed to the shortages. On the demand side, strong Chinese imports and growing global use of biodiesel are the chief causes. Higher prices are more bad news for the poorest nations, says Emily Barrett on Bloomberg. Developing economies are much more sensitive to dearer food than developed countries – “food accounts for almost 30% of consumer expenditure in India, versus just 6.4% in the US”.…

US doughnut brand Krispy Kreme first floated in 2000. It was taken private in 2016 by a fund owned by investment group JAB Holding Company. Now it is set to return to the stockmarket, listing on the Nasdaq later this month with the ticker symbol DNUT, says Luisa Beltran in Barron’s. Whether equity investors will deem it a tasty morsel this time round isunclear. Last year the group sold 1.3 billion doughnuts through its network of shops and partnerships with retailers. But it didn’t make any money. Annual losses almost doubled to $60.9m as sales rose by 17% to $1.1bn. The group says it will use the cash it raises in the initial public offering (IPO) to reduce its $1.3bn of debt.…

Investors have turned their noses up at Thungela Resources, the London-and-Johannesburg-listed South African coal business spun out of Anglo American. Its shares slumped from 150p to 113p on its first day of trading in London on Monday, says Neil Hume in the Financial Times. One problem was that many big funds cannot hold Thungela because it has a market cap of only £150m, and is thus too small to meet their investment mandates. However, the flop also suggests that markets are only approaching coal stocks with “an extremely long barge pole”, says Ed Cropley on Breakingviews. Nevertheless, despite its poor reputation, coal could have “a long future”, as some analysts reckon it will still comprise 31% of global power generation in 2030, thanks chiefly to South Asian economies “being slow…

Last week the American cinema chain AMC started offering a free box of popcorn to anyone who owned its shares. Soon afterwards, armies of small investors, the same crowd that drove the valuation of GameStop through the roof at the start of the year, piled into the shares, sending them into the stratosphere. AMC took a lot of flak for encouraging wild speculation. But in truth there was also the, ahem, kernel of a good idea in there. Better the mob than the hedgies The freebie for private shareholders is far less common than it used to be. Founder shareholders in Eurotunnel got a set number of free tickets every year. Retail chains such as Marks & Spencer would routinely offer some form of discount to owners. Over the last…

Investing involves making assumptions about the future. That’s unavoidable. We’re not talking here about trying to time the market in the short-term. We’re talking about the long-term decisions you make about how much to invest and what assets to invest in. These choices contain implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions about the likely direction of inflation and interest rates, about your own life expectancy, about politics, and about the range of returns you might expect to make from a given mix of assets. All of these factors are, unfortunately, out of your control. “One key aspect of investing is under your control – cost” However, one key aspect of investing is very much under your control, and it can make a huge difference to your returns. That’s your cost of investing.…

A revolution food begins Anthony Browne The Spectator The sale of a plate of laboratory-grown chicken nuggets in a Singapore restaurant last December may have been the start of an “industrial, social and cultural revolution”, says Anthony Browne. Globally, more than 30 start-ups are working on laboratory-grown meat, including Britain’s Ivy Farm Technologies, which aims to sell around 25,000 tons of cultured sausages by 2025. Billions of dollars of investment are “pouring into the sector”. The arguments in favour of cultured meat are clear: animal welfare, the environment (meat production accounts for an estimated 15% of greenhouse-gas emissions) and the desire for “clean” food (70% of antibiotics are used on livestock and animals may also harbour toxins such as mercury or pathogens such as salmonella). It could also increase food…

conservativehome.com Unless you live in an area already blighted by them, the chances are you haven’t heard of LTNs, says Charlotte Gill. “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods” are a wheeze of local councils designed to ban traffic from certain areas. That sounds like a nice idea, and the result is indeed lovely, quiet roads for those who live on them. But LTNs are also causing “huge inconvenience and anger” for others. Closing roads means drivers suddenly have fewer roads to go down, forcing them onto longer, more convoluted routes. That makes taxis and delivery drivers late. It means more time spent in traffic while everyone heads onto the same road (and misery for those who live on those roads). They cause delays for emergency services, suffering for the disabled, and might even…

When Queen Victoria told her prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that the people were crying out for change, he is reputed to have replied: “Change, your majesty? Aren’t things bad enough already?” Change is not always for the better, so when directors of investment trusts change their investment manager, it doesn’t necessarily work out well. After persistently poor performance or the departure of the nominated fund manager, the directors simply used to ask the management company to come up with a new team. In recent years, they have conducted what is known as a “beauty parade”, inviting other managers to pitch for the contract. Investors are often offered a cash exit at close to net asset value (NAV) but if the new team is well-regarded, few will exit and there will…

Small-business owners and directors face a potential timebomb following the pandemic. New research suggests that hundreds of thousands have put personal assets, including their homes, at risk. Last year, more than a third of small businesses took out loans with personal guarantees attached, according to Purbeck Insurance. Small businesses typically manage their finances, including borrowing, separately from the personal affairs of their owners and directors. This protects owners if the business fails because lenders cannot come after them personally for outstanding debts. However, where lenders are nervous about the risk of lending to businesses, they may demand a personal guarantee from directors or owners. The guarantor is then legally responsible for settling the debt if the business cannot meet the repayments. Lenders can pursue guarantors for unpaid loans, demanding they…

Global small-cap stocks often fail to gain the attention they perhaps deserve. Their appeal is frequently either underappreciated or overlooked, especially when the dominant narrative and newsflow routinely revolves around the attractions of Big Tech behemoths with trillion-dollar market valuations. Yet small-cap performance has been strong – and not just since the Covid-19 crisis. Smaller companies have considerably outperformed larger companies since the turn of the century. This has been driven primarily by faster revenue and earnings growth, and we expect this to continue. While it is true that small-cap stocks can be more volatile than large caps, historically investors are rewarded with higher returns. An encouraging worldwide backdrop “Samsonite, the top global luggage brand, is poised for a profitable rebound” We see several good years of global economic growth…

• “How much, in terms of hard cash, do you love your pet?” asks Tom Utley in the Daily Mail. “It’s a brutal question… and most of us would answer… it’s impossible to p ta price on love – even when the object of our affection happens to be a dumb animal.” But what if you were told a life-saving operation would cost £500, “would you cough up?”. How about if the cost was £5,000, or £10,000? “Unless you are so rich that money means little to you, at what point would you say, with a heavy heart: ‘Much as I adore Rex (or Tibbles), I’m not prepared to make the financial sacrifice needed to keep the poor creature alive and well’”. Love does come with a price. That said,…