Indholdsfortegnelse for 1071 i MoneyWeek

“A better predictor of stock performance than inflation levels is simply starting valuations” Gas prices are up. Oil prices are up (see page 4). Food prices are up. If you’ve noticed all this you aren’t alone. The Bank of England sees inflation hitting 4% by year-end and in a recent survey from Interactive Investor, 84% of people said they have noticed prices rising and 55% (quite rightly) view rising inflation as one of the biggest threats to their personal finances (the other 45% clearly aren’t concentrating…). The key thing to know then is whether our current inflation is transitory or not. Central bankers insist it will be gone by next year – most economists agree. For them the supply crunches – of everything from semiconductors to gas to workers –…

Dubliners will have to wait longer than expected for the MetroLink to connect Swords, a town near the capital, with Dublin Airport and the city centre. The project was meant to be finished by 2027 but transport minister Eamon Ryan has now admitted it was “never likely to be achievable”, says The Times. It’s expected to cost more than the €3bn initially budgeted and open in 2032 at the earliest. The Kunsten museum in Denmark has lost 534,000 kroner (£62,000) after lending it to an artist to replicate an earlier piece (which displayed the annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane in glass cases), reports Bloomberg. When the museum opened the box that apparently contained artist Jens Haaning’s work, the cash was missing from the frames and the title…

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that equities will always go up in the long run,” says Philip Coggan in the Financial Times. Yet the FTSE 100 has gone virtually nowhere since 2000. Even when you count reinvested dividends, the annualised total return of 3.3% in the 20 years to the end of last year is underwhelming. True, the dotcom bubble was at its height around the turn of the millennium. But US indices, which also experienced that boom, are up roughly threefold since then. The UK index lacks the kind of exciting tech companies that have set the world on fire over the last two decades. Still, America’s tech-heavy-index can’t outperform forever, says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. If we are heading for higher inflation, then “history suggests that…

Silver may be a more promising play than gold at present, says Jörg Schulte of Swiss Resource Capital. Gold is trading “about 10% below its all-time high”, but silver is still 50% short of its 2011 peak in US dollar terms, and 44% below it in sterling terms. That gives it more room to rise. Higher inflation should see precious metals begin to attract more attention from investors. Silver also has industrial uses, so it should get a lift from the wider commodity boom. The metal’s conductivity means it is used in “the circuit boards or electrical contacts” that are vital for both the rollout of renewable energy and the “billions of devices” that are being connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).…

Renaissance Insurance Group, one of Russia’s leading privately-owned insurers, is planning to float on Moscow’s stock exchange. It hopes to raise 21bn roubles (£212m) to fund organic growth, digital investments, acquisitions and the potential repurchase of shares. Russian initial public offerings (IPOs) “have come thick and fast in the last 12 months”, says Ben Aris on Intellinews. Investors are hoping to tap into the country’s rebound from the pandemic and to profit from the rapidly growing e-commerce and financial sector. The country’s RTS index is up by 30% so far this year, and stocks in the banking sector have jumped by an average of 60% over the same period.…

Investment management group Blackstone is breaking out the champagne after selling the Cosmopolitan casino and hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for $5.6bn. Around $1.65bn of the sum comes from MGM Resorts and the other $4bn from a real-estate consortium, says Craig Karmin in The Wall Street Journal. Blackstone acquired the hotel for $1.8bn seven years ago, and “spent an additional $500m” on upgrades, so it is likely to make $4.1bn in profits once a share of the property’s future cash flows (via Blackstone’s share in the real-estate consortium) is taken into account. This will make it its “most profitable single asset”. Blackstone has been a “little lucky with the timing”, says Lauren Silva Laughlin on Breakingviews. It managed to acquire the property when “Las Vegas was in a deep…

Only a few years ago,the music industry was being written off as a relic, with the slow death of the CD destroying its financial base, and with easy pirating making it impossible for anyone to make any money. And yet in the last couple of years it has come storming back. Last week Universal, the company that skilfully used the downturn to acquire labels such as Britain’s EMI, listed its shares in Amsterdam. Other major music companies such as Warner and Sony are doing just as well. Indeed, shares in Warner are up by more than 50% in the last year and the business is now valued at more than $20bn. At this rate the Kajagoogoo catalogue will be changing hands for a few hundred million by the end of…

Over the last few months, I’ve been focusing my attention on boring funds. The equity bulls haven’t yet been reined in, but my hunch is that we are in for a more volatile ride and a small move to a more defensive position might make sense. That brings me to the capital of boring, Canada – apologies to all Canadian readers but I hope you take it as a back-handed compliment. Canada has just been beset by election mania, for the second time in two years. Yet despite the increasingly frenzied electioneering, the result was never on course to make much difference to investors. This makes it very different to Germany, where the swing leftwards at the weekend may have huge consequences. A no-change election The election ultimately saw Justin…

We’re seeing the return of the 1970s Philip Aldrick The Times With energy and wage prices rising, fears of stagflation – the “dreaded combination of high inflation and weak growth” – are understandable, says Philip Aldrick. If anything, the situation is worse than the 1970s. Britain has been “running on empty for years”. Foreign workers have “topped up” our labour markets, NHS under-capacity led to strict lockdowns and “bequeathed” us the “deepest recession in the G7”, and domestic energy supplies have withered. We’re “increasingly reliant” on imports, often with long supply chains. This is a problem, not least because pinch points are unpredictable, as we have seen with the carbon dioxide shortage. But increasing resilience means diversifying supply chains and that means less efficiency. Spread the effect across industries and…

thecounter.org For years, biotech start-ups have been raking in cash while making bold pronouncements about the future of meat, says Joe Fassler. The promise is that we will no longer need to raise livestock, we’ll just grow meat cheaply in giant bioreactors. The idea has gone viral, backed by influential writers pushing for government subsidies and studies that seem to suggest costs will come down. But the nascent industry is on a collision course with reality. Growing animal protein in labs has been possible for years and is standard in pharmaceutical research. A byproduct is animal cell slurry, similar to what these start-ups want to process further into meat. But that process is known to be highly technical, resource-intensive and expensive. How could it be used to produce cheap, abundant…

Want to do your bit for the environment? Don’t invest in a climate change fund. That’s according to a new paper – Doing Good or Feeling Good? Detecting Greenwashing in Climate Investing – by researchers Noel Amenc, Felix Goltz and Victor Liu at French business school Edhec. As Steve Johnson notes in the Financial Times, not only do such funds not help, they may even be “undermining the fight against global warming”. The authors looked at exchange-traded funds issued in Europe which track various climate-focused indices from major index providers. They found several problems. One is that climate data accounts for a very small portion (a maximum of 12%) of the rationale for including a given stock in an index. Market capitalisation matters far more. In other words, a fund…

Britain is having a “divorce boom”, says Sophia Money-Coutts in The Daily Telegraph. The misery of lockdown sent Google searches for “divorce lawyer near me” up by 233% in the year to December 2020. “DIY divorces”, where couples seek little or no legal help, are also on the rise, says Esyllt Carr on the BBC. One survey by family-law reform group Resolution found that 57% of divorces in the last five years went down this route. That can keep costs low – perhaps just the £550 application fee – but those with dependent children, or significant property and pensions, are likely to find that they need more help. Those going the do-it-yourself route don’t always realise that “divorce, and dealing with the financial issues arising out of the divorce, are…

• Rising inflation and labour shortages in many parts of the economy could see small businesses forced to raise salaries sharply. Research from employee-benefits consultant Willis Towers Watson suggests that the average small company will raise wages by 2.9% for 2022, but some employers are likely to face demands for substantially higher pay increases. The media sector faces the toughest pressure, with increases likely to average 3.3%, followed by leisure and hospitality at 3.2%. • British businesses have now repaid £1.3bn in furlough support, with £300m of government assistance repaid in the past three months alone. The statistics cover voluntary repayments made by businesses that have decided they do not need the payments, or that they have overclaimed from the scheme, which helps employers hit by the Covid-19 crisis to…

Deepverge (Aim: DVRG) specialises in environmental monitoring and life sciences. It applies artificial intelligence to analytical instruments to identify toxins and bacteria; its water contamination-test equipment can detect Covid-19 in wastewater. Deepverge’s half-year results for the six months to June revealed a deeper loss than expected because a large increase in investment raised costs and negated stronger sales. Revenue rose to £3.3m in the first half of 2021, up from £1m the year before, but pre-tax losses rose to £2.6m, compared with £1m in 2020. The stock has slipped by 28% in a year.…

2020 Lirac Blanc, La Fermade, Domaine Maby, Southern Rhône, France £14.50, yapp.co.uk  The wine-tasting invitations are flooding in and, when Yapp sounded the trumpet announcing a specialist Rhône extravaganza, I dropped everything to attend. Yapp has been the most famous Rhône specialist in the UK for all of my 35 years in this wonderful business, and so you will forgive me for writing you a shopping list of essential purchases this week, starting with this heavenly and extremely keenly priced white Lirac. Exotic, smooth, detailed and refreshing, give white Burgundy the heave-ho for a week or so and invite this wine into your repertoire. In addition, 2020 Argiles Blanc St Gayan (£9.95) is a crazy bargain and a lovely light-white glugger for all-purpose entertaining. The 2020 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc…

A senior fund manager at Union Investment, one of Germany’s top asset managers, admitted to going on an insider trading spree as he felt “offended” after getting a smaller-than-expected pay rise, and suffering large losses from his investments in disgraced payments processor Wirecard, reports the Financial Times. The 45-year-old, who oversaw equity funds with €31bn in assets, was arrested by police a year ago. He used his insider knowledge to bet on shares using options (a type of derivative) just before the bank bought them (known as “front-running”). He banked €8.1m in total from 55 transactions between April and September 2020, telling judges at Frankfurt district court that it was easy to do, “as everyone else was working from home”. In one instance he bet €913,000 on Deutsche Post seconds…

Brent crude oil prices have broken through $80 a barrel for the first time in almost three years. Oil’s rally comes as soaring European gas and coal prices presage a winter energy crisis. In September 2020 “in Europe it cost €119… to buy enough gas to heat the average home for a year”, says The Economist. “Today that figure is €738.” A cold European spring and a hot Asian summer, combined with a post-pandemic industrial rebound, have kept demand high. Imports of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) on ships will help ease the pressure a little, but global gas markets depend mainly on pipelines and are only “imperfectly linked”. Denting the global recovery “Gas storage tanks in Europe are only 72% full ahead of the winter season, compared with the…

“Evergrande, a huge, heavily indebted real-estate company... appears on the edge of default... [This is reminiscent of] the Japanese bubble economy... of the late 1980s... prices of many assets, above all commercial real-estate, went completely crazy. At one point it was widely claimed that the land under the Imperial Palace [in Tokyo] was worth more than... California. Then everything crashed... the bursting of the Japanese bubble didn’t lead to a financial meltdown. But it was followed by a prolonged period of economic weakness [that] in some ways continues to this day... The days when economic experts... predicted Japanese domination... are far behind us... Chinese demography is looking remarkably Japanese. The working-age population peaked in 2015... China might paper over this current episode, as it has in the past. But... something…

Three to buy Harworth The Sunday Times Property-regeneration group Harworth is “regularly overlooked by investors”. But three directors recently bought £100,000 worth of stock. And Harworth’s emphasis on warehouses bodes well amid the rise in online shopping. The group intends to double its overall portfolio in seven years, building more warehouses while growing its property bank. The shares are still on a discount to the predicted value of the developments, so it might be worth following the insiders and buying. 178p Equals Shares Equals’ half-year numbers for the six months to 30 June exceeded expectations. The payment-services group’s sales increased by 23% to £16.9m, and adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) jumped by 128% to £1.6m. A “key factor” in its outperformance is Equals Solutions, a new…

• Shares in Go-Ahead have plunged after the government announced that Govia, in which Go-ahead owns a two-thirds stake, will lose the right to run Southeastern railways, say Gwyn Topham and Julia Kollewe in The Guardian. The government claims that “since 2014 Southeastern had not declared more than £25m of historical taxpayer funding that should have been returned”, a “serious breach of the franchise agreement’s good faith obligation”. The matter is likely to be referred to the Serious Fraud Office. • Having previously suggested that it won’t bail out “embattled” property group Evergrande, Beijing seems to be “prodding government-owned firms and state-backed property developers” to purchase some of the group’s assets, say Clare Jim and Jing Xu for Reuters. The hope is that this “will ward off... any social unrest”…

It’s been a “bruising” few days for Keir Starmer at the Labour conference, says Katy Balls in The Spectator. The party leader has been engaged in “internal warfare” – he had to scrap plans to use an electoral college to choose the next leader in favour of more modest reforms and his shadow employment secretary Andy McDonald resigned in a row over the minimum wage. But Starmer’s team remain in a “rather upbeat mood”. They believe they have won some important battles that will allow them to “marginalise the left” and have made it clear in both the rhetoric and the policies announced so far that the party is moving back to the centre. Starmer “deserves credit” for attempting to root out the “worst excesses” of Corbynism, says Madeleine Grant…

• Lucian Grainge, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group, is in line for one of the largest corporate payouts in history, says The Guardian. Under the terms of the company’s flotation in Amsterdam last week, Grainge (pictured) will receive a “transaction bonus” of $90m, and a further bonus of $55m triggered due to the market capitalisation going over $30bn. Grainge, who earned €50m last year, will also receive up to $40m relating to the sale of a 10% stake in Universal to Chinese tech group Tencent and Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square hedge fund. • The BBC’s director-general Tim Davie has been given a pay rise of £75,000 after just one year in the role, says The Daily Telegraph. When he took over from Lord Hall of Birkenhead in…

Board decisions in Middle Eastern firms “rarely meet dissent”, says Bloomberg. Instead, “shareholders work out their differences behind closed doors”. But the Gulf “may be the next frontier for activists” as more companies go public and compete for foreign capital. Dubai-based Sancta Capital, which has $160m in assets under management, claims to be the only firm in the Middle East and North Africa currently focusing on “special situations investing” and “hasn’t shied away from corporate showdowns”. It recently played a role in scuttling a proposal by Emirates Reit to swap $400m of sukuk (bonds complying with Islamic law) for new ones that would have deferred interest payments for a year and repayment of capital for two years.…

“I don’t believe in passing on huge amounts of money. I don’t know what I’ll have. I’m not that interested in money, but I don’t intend to have some sort of pot of gold for my son. I’ll go with what my parents said: ’College will be paid for, and then you gotta get on it.’” US television news anchor Anderson Cooper (pictured) on why he’s not leaving his son an inheritance when he dies, quoted on Air Mail’s Morning Meeting podcast “What are the four most useless words in the English language? Please don’t panic buy.” Columnist Jan Moir in the Daily Mail “In this business you have to know why you’re doing everything. Because once you start to be successful, you start to make money. I don’t want…

fee.org Plastic pollution is a huge problem and people look increasingly to government to regulate it out of existence, says Jon Hersey. Yet even the countries with the harshest rules are still drowning in the stuff. And bans come with unintended consequences. Paper bags have a higher carbon footprint than plastic, for example. Cloth bags are more energy-intensive to make and production takes up more water than any vegetable and most meats. We buy plastic bags to use instead of the single-use variety, but they are thicker and take longer to break down. “Real, lasting and powerful solutions” to the problem will need more creative thinking. Fionn Ferreira, a student at the University of Groningen, for example, has come up with a method for removing microplastics from water. He is…

The closest most of us get to cybersecurity is using online passwords or anti-virus software. But the term encompasses a widening variety of ways that people, organisations and even countries use the web to exploit or attack us. An increasingly digital world means more, not less, criminal cyberactivity. Cybersecurity therefore focuses on trying to protect often vital systems and data from digital attack. Successful cybersecurity policies and practices are a defence, but often against vulnerabilities created by poor planning and limited IT security know-how in the first place, which make the lives of criminals easier. There are several different types of cyberattack, but they all tend to involve the theft of assets, including cash, while restoring what has been disrupted or lost is usually very expensive – as is the…

Well-known investment strategies include “value” investing (buying stocks that are cheap) or “growth at a reasonable price” (buying solid, fast-growing companies at whatever valuation the manager feels they can justify without too many blushes). But another term you’ll sometimes hear bandied about in the fund world is “special situations”. So what is a “special situation”? Different fund managers will spin the definition to suit their own particular style (and often, marketing pitch). But technically speaking, a special situation is an investment thesis driven by a one-off or unusual event that is likely to have (or in some cases, has already had) a significant impact on the price of a stock. This may be the restructuring of a fragile balance sheet; or a “turnaround” plan by new management; or the spinning-out…

Soaring energy prices are hitting small businesses hard: a fifth are considering raising prices because of the effect of higher bills on their bottom line. One key problem is that small businesses are not covered by the price cap that provides a safety net in the consumer sector. As a result, if you are not currently locked into a fixed-price deal with your energy supplier, there are no constraints forcing it to keep your bills at a certain level. Also, if you have run up a credit balance with your current supplier only for it to go bust, there is no guarantee you will recoup this loss. While Ofgem, the industry regulator, is required to ensure your contract is transferred to a new supplier, it may not be able to…

Venture capital trusts (VCTs) are delivering on their promise. They were introduced by the government in 1995 to support small, innovative, fast-growing businesses. Today, six VCT-backed firms have become “unicorns” (private companies worth more than $1bn). More are growing at a double- or triple-digit rate, often doubling or tripling sales year-on-year. Very few, if any, of the companies listed on the main stockmarket can match that. VCTs are becoming the UK’s growth asset class: £109m has been invested in VCTs this tax year, nearly seven times as much as at the same stage in 2020-2021. Generous tax relief “Many VCT-backed firms are growing at double- and triple-digit rates” The opportunity to back some of Britain’s most exciting companies is increasingly appealing to investors. So are the generous tax reliefs VCTs…

• You can’t blame TV presenter Holly Willoughby (pictured) for launching lifestyle website Wylde Moon, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. From Amanda Holden’s cushions to Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candles to Rita Ora’s pillowcases, everyone wants to be a living brand these days. There’s big money to be made in “basically rich women flogging stuff to poorer women”. But is there a bigger waste of money than buying crystals? “We have barely moved on from the times of Norse mythology, when acorns were exchanged between two witches as a sign they were in safe company. In fact, give or take 30 quid and a chakra spray, nothing has changed.” Willoughby, 40, says she is still finding out who she really is. “In the meantime, please buy her calming candle,…

Euan Blair, son of former prime minister Tony Blair, is now worth over £160m – “almost certainly wealthier than his father”, says The Daily Telegraph – after his education technology start-up was valued at $875m (£646m) following a $130m funding round. The 37-year-old holds a 25% stake in Multiverse, which aims to connect companies with apprentices and school leavers. James Bond fans were finally treated to the last outing with Daniel Craig (pictured) asthe spy this week, after its release was delayed for 18 months by the pandemic. No Time To Die has a rumoured budget of $250m-$300m. “All eyes in the industry will be trained on Bond’s box office come October,” says the Evening Standard, although the record $1bn made by Skyfall in 2012 is probably “out of reach”.…

There are several hidden gems in Germany’s small-cap index, the SDAX, says Focus Money. One to consider is Eckert & Ziegler, a producer of radioactive components used in medicine and industry. It is one of only two companies that provide the radioisotope Gallium-68, which is used to treat tumours, so it enjoys considerable pricing power in this area. The group also has other products that benefit from the rapidly growing global demand for cancer treatments. Radiopharmaceuticals comprise almost 50% of group sales, which should total €180m this year, while profits should expand by a fifth to around €35m. The stock has soared in recent years but has further to go.…

Rolls-Royce’s shares have hit an 18-month high, says Francesca Washtell in the Daily Mail. Chalk it up to a “triple whammy” of good news. It “finally” sold its Spanish business ITP Aero, an aeronautical engine and gas turbine maker, for £1.5bn; clinched a £1.9bn contract to supply parts for the US Air Force’s fleet of B-52 bombers; and looks set to benefit from government plans to “plough more cash into its project to build mini nuclear reactors”. The sale of ITP Aero to a private-equity consortium will help Rolls-Royce take a “big step forward in repairing its battered balance sheet”, says Sylvia Pfeifer in the Financial Times. The deal comes as Rolls has “sold a number of smaller assets”, including a “stake in the company that owns the RAF’s fleet…

In electing Fumio Kishida, a moderate conservative, Japan’s political establishment has picked a “safe pair of hands” to lead the ruling Liberal Democrat Party (LDP) into a general election next month, says Rurika Imahashi in the Nikkei Asian Review. Kishida, 64, who will be officially named prime minister on Monday, defeated his main rival, Taro Kono, by 257 votes to 170 in a second round run-off, after none of the four first-round candidates won an absolute majority. The son and grandson of MPs, Kishida is an experienced politician whose most high-profile position to date was as foreign minister under Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. He has “no track record of major failure”, says Masato Kamikabo of Ritsumeikan University, “but there’s no track record of any major success in policymaking…

America has already started gearing up for the mid-term elections in 2022, which are now less than 15 months away, but there are still a few interesting elections this year. In a few weeks, Virginia is due to go to the polls to elect a new governor to replace Ralph Northam, who is constitutionally barred from seeking immediate re-election. With £3,632 matched on Betfair, former governor Terry McAuliffe is the clear favourite to win in Virgina, with odds of 1.15 (87%), and his opponent Glenn Youngkin at odds of 4.5 (22.2%). In theory McAuliffe should do well since Virginia has moved towards the Democrats over the past two decades, winning four out of the last five gubernatorial elections and voting for Biden by a margin of more than 10% last…

The British division of Elliott Advisors, one of the leading activist hedge funds in the US, paid its staff in London £113.3m last year despite racking up a pre-tax loss of £4.5m, says James Hurley in The Times. The salaries of just over 100 employees rose by around 20% in 2020; three directors got £17.8m, up from £11.4m in 2019. Turnover rose by 17.5% in 2020 from the previous year, but Elliott’s latest accounts recorded a £13.5m fine paid to the French banking regulator for filing inaccurate and late reports related to a takeover battle between two transport businesses. Elliott had also been found to have obstructed the regulator’s investigation. The company has appealed. In 2019, Elliott made a £6.4m profit. The highest-paid director at the firm, who has not…

■ Baillie Gifford has cut the annual management fee for its UK Equity Alpha fund after a difficult 12 months, from 0.55% to 0.47%, says Citywire. The £1bn fund returned 11.1% in the 12 months to the end of August, compared to a sector average of 32.2%. The weaker spell has slashed its cumulative three-year return to 17.1%, just ahead of the average of 16.8%. Last week, Baillie Gifford also announced a reduction in fees for its US Growth Trust, which has passed £1bn after a 133% gain in 2020 made it the top-performing trust of the year. It will now charge 0.7% on the first £100m of assets, 0.55% on the next £900m, and 0.5% over £1bn. Previously, it charged 0.7% on the first £100m and 0.55% above that.…

Bloomberg.com Economics has a reputation for being pessimistic (the dismal science), but most economists I know are pretty optimistic, says Tyler Cowen, and tend to see most systems as being robust. In part this is because they have some understanding of the size of gross domestic product (GDP). Knowing that keeps things in perspective. Say there is some social or economic trend you dislike or think dangerous. Visualise it as a share of GDP and your worry will shrink to a more appropriate size. Consider climate change. A recent study showed that four in ten people are so worried about it that they are thinking twice about having children. Almost half said it caused them stress and anxiety in their daily life. Economics helps to put these worries in perspective.…

Some cybersecurity stocks have had a strong year, but the industry has lagged the overall technology sector. Some stocks should outperform the broader market in future, however, as the drive for cybersecurity services becomes an increasingly prominent theme. A leader in the field is the $45bn Palo Alto Networks (Nasdaq: PANW). It specialises in keeping intruders out using “firewalls”. It makes money, is growing quickly, has a strong product offering and is reasonably valued. Over recent years it has made many acquisitions to build its cloud-based capabilities. The evidence suggests that the company is starting to reap the benefit of its shopping spree; the latest results exceeded expectations, while it also said profits would be higher this year than initially anticipated. Most of the 37 analysts covering this stock are…

Nouriel Roubini, the economist who earned the nickname “Dr Doom” for (correctly) predicting the 2007 housing market crash, believes the global economy is heading for another period of turbulence, but this time with inflation rather than deflation as the biggest threat. “My concern is that we are in a debt trap,” he tells Bloomberg TV. Global debt (both private and public) currently stands at more than 360% of GDP, compared to about 200% 20 years ago. As a result, “when central banks are going to want to... phase out unconventional monetary policy... there is the risk of a crash in the bond market, in the credit market, in the stockmarket, and in the economy”. In short, central bankers, such as the Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey (pictured), won’t be able…

Good news for self-employed workers and small businesses worried about HM Revenue & Customs’s move to digital systems. Ministers have announced that the next stage of HMRC’s Making Tax Digital programme is to be postponed for 12 months. HMRC had planned that from 2023, some 4.3 million self-employed workers and small businesses would need to keep digital records and use these to report their income quarterly, rather than annually as is currently the case. But in recent months, accountancy groups have warned increasingly vocally that many self-employed people and small businesses would struggle to hit that deadline. The warnings appear to have been heeded. The government announced last week that this stage of Making Tax Digital will not now be introduced until April 2024. It is also postponing plans to…

Sthree (LSE: STEM) is a specialist recruiter for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics sectors. The company posted a strong set of numbers for the three months to 31 August. The order book increased by 41% year-on-year thanks to continued robust demand for skilled contractors, while contract-fee income jumped by 27% year-on-year. Net cash rose to £51m from £39m in the same period of 2020. The company expects profit before tax for the 12 months to the end of November to be “significantly above” initial forecasts. The shares have gained 140% in 12 months.…

Artur Virgílio Alves Reis was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1896. He went on to study engineering at university before dropping out and emigrating to Portuguese Angola. He took a job as chief engineer on Angola’s railways, forging a degree certificate from the “Polytechnic School of Engineering at Oxford University”. After making a modest fortune, he returned to Portugal and became a car dealer. He could not for long resist repeating his old tricks, and ended up in jail for his role in a later fraud. What was the scam? Reis realised that Portuguese notaries were willing to certify almost any document without checking that it was genuine. So he forged a letter from the governor of the Bank of Portugal supposedly giving him the rights to print alarge amount…

“The Seven 170 has the power-to-weight g ratio of a daddy-long-legs and feels frantic and chaotic, but never slow” British car marque Caterham has introduced its lightest model yet. That’s no mean feat given that “these titchy two-seat sports cars have never been ripe for fat shaming”, says Rowan Horncastle on Top Gear. The new Seven 170 is “edging on anorexic”. It weighs just a little over 440kg, “which is about two times as heavy as the heart of a blue whale” or half that of an Alpine A110, a car held in high regard by automotive weight watchers. It is “ridiculously light” and this at a time when cars tend to be getting ever heavier. The Seven 170 follows in the tracks of the simple Caterham 160 of a…

The Radical Potter Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain Tristram Hunt Allen Lane, £25 Josiah Wedgwood’s life was a “David and Goliath story”, says John Carey in The Times. Although the youngest of 12 children and unable, through illness, to use a potter’s wheel, the entrepreneur, from a “small, muddy Midlands town”, developed an elegant ceramic that would supplant porcelain for most people and help launch the early industrial revolution. Wedgwood would also become one of the most prominent early slave-trade abolitionists, and a major force behind the building of the Trent and Mersey canal. Wedgwood’s “remarkable story” has been told in many biographies over the years, says Richard Lambert in the Financial Times. What sets Hunt’s book apart from the rest, and makes it a “great contribution” to…

What we were looking for in the Evergrande story, the ongoing debt crisis of the giant Chinese property company, was a hint, a clue, an advance warning of things to come. What happens when you can’t pay your debts? How does it end? With abang of inflation or a whimper of deflation? Our prediction: both. Every bubble blows up. Every excess has to be resolved. And every debt gets settled – one way or another. Typically, a bubble brings on a case of “irrational exuberance”. The irrationally exuberant investor pays too much for his assets. The irrationally exuberant businessman stretches too far, borrows too much, and overextends himself. The irrationally exuberant empire invades Afghanistan. “No one and nothing is evergrande, of course. The occasion passes” But no one and nothing…

£1.1bn How much in total the government has underpaid around 134,000 pensioners, according to the National Audit Office (NAO) spending watchdog. On average, each pensioner is owed £8,900, but the NAO has warned that the bill to the government could be even higher. $2.1bn The price online search giant Google is paying for a 1.3 million square-foot waterfront office block on Manhattan’s West Side, making it one of the priciest single office-block sales in American history, according to data firm Real Capital Analytics. £26m How much The Roald Dahl Story Company, which owns the rights to the late author’s classic children’s books, made in revenue in 2019, according to the latest accounts. Netflix has bought the company, run by Dahl’s grandson Luke Kelly, for an undisclosed sum. £355.3m The total…