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“Even in the 1970s, houses served their owners remarkably well” Not falling, but definitely decelerating. That’s the story on UK house prices. Look at the headline number and you will see an annualised rise of 10.5% – or 74% over the last decade. Look more closely and you will see that while the monthly number is up for the 11th consecutive month, it’s by a mere 1%. Mortgage approvals are falling – now slightly below their pre-pandemic average. Mortgage rates are rising. The average two-year fixed mortgage is up 0.69 percentage points since December, says Hargreaves Lansdown, and is now just over 3% for the first time in seven years. Finally, data from Zoopla suggests that 5% of properties saw a price cut in May (by an average of 9%).…

A live-streaming show by Chinese influencer Li Jiaqi was abruptly taken offline last Friday immediately after showing a cake that resembled a tank on the eve of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, says the BBC. Li, known as the Lipstick King, has more than 64 million followers on the Taobao e-commerce site and sold $1.9bn of goods in one day last November. Two US tourists are suing DK Oyster bar in Mykonos, Greece, saying they were charged €598.92 for two cocktails and two crab legs, says the Daily Mail. Brenda Moulton and her daughter Kaylea say that they paid the bill after the bar threatened to call the police. Online reviews from other guests also complain of bills totalling hundreds of euros. The bar denies any wrongdoing.…

“While international markets plunge, stockmarkets in the Gulf region are in insolent health,” says Laura-Maï Gaveriaux in Les Echos. Abu Dhabi’s ADX has climbed 15% so far this year. The Saudi Tadawul, the biggest bourse in the region by far, is up 13%. High oil prices are powering rapid growth: Saudi GDP expanded at an annualised rate of 9.6% in the first quarter, the fastest pace since 2011. Oil activity is up more than 20%. Fundraising and new listings are multiplying. Saudi Aramco is mulling a listing of its trading unit at a valuation of roughly $30bn, while Abu Dhabi is now home to the Middle East’s first special purpose acquisition company (Spac) listing. Saudi stocks still suffered a painful reverse last month, plunging 10%, says Craig Mellow in Barron’s.…

The UK was once the world’s second-biggest carmaking base, but in recent years it has fallen outside the top 15, says Bloomberg. Output trended lower in the years following the Brexit vote and then “collapsed amid the pandemic”. Now Britain risks being left behind in the race for battery-powered vehicles. “Carmakers are reluctant to build new factories… without a battery facility onsite or nearby. Battery manufacturers in turn are generally unwilling to invest billions of dollars to set up a plant without reliable customers within short range.” Battery makers are also hesitant to invest in the UK because of a “scarce supply of raw materials, expensive energy, meagre government incentives” and the threat of trade tariffs.…

• Given that FirstGroup “has faced its share of shareholder rebellions over the years”, it’s surprising “to hear the sound of loyalty in the ranks”, with its largest investor, Schroders, dismissing a tentative approach from private-equity firm I Squared Capital, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. What makes the £1.2bn offer particularly “miserable” is that only around two-thirds is in cash. The rest would depend on eventual payouts from First’s two disposals in the US last year. A clean £1.2bn with no strings attached would be better, but “even then there’s a fair argument that investors would be better off seeing what [it] can do in slimmed-down form as a pure UK bus and rail operator”. • For years American cigarette companies “have been fighting themselves more than each other”,…

Banco BAI, Angola’s biggest bank, has raised AOA40.1bn (£74m) in the country’s first-ever initial public offering (IPO) this week, says Bloomberg. BAI floated 10% of its stock in the IPO, with the shares coming from two of the biggest investors, state-owned oil company Sonangol and national diamond producer Endiama. Angola began setting up a stock exchange in 2014, but a prolonged economic crisis – it only exited a five-year recession last year – has delayed the start of trading. The government is planning a privatisation programme and hopes that a successful start to stock trading will attract foreign investment to help diversify the economy away from oil.…

• Just 56% of shareholders backed Amazon’s executive pay plan in a non-binding vote – unusually close, given 81% of investors consented last year, says Bloomberg. Proxy advisers Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis had recommended shareholders reject the pay package for chief executive Andy Jassy (pictured), valued at $212m, and almost entirely made up of stock grants vesting over ten years. Adam Selipsky, who took over from Jassy as head of the Amazon Web Services, got around $81m. • Simon Roberts, boss of Sainsbury’s, has almost tripled his pay, says the Retail Gazette. He received £3.8m, including annual bonus and long-term incentive plan, up from a total of £1.3m in 2021. However, had Roberts not waived his bonus that year due to the pandemic, his pay would have…

When investors buy shares or other financial assets, they might borrow money with the aim of boosting their returns. This is known as “leverage” or “gearing”, because using borrowed money amplifies movements in the underlying asset price, making both gains and losses far greater. You can view it as being similar to buying a house with a mortgage. If you put down a 20% deposit on a £100,000 house, and the price rises by 10%, you’ve made £10,000, or a 50% return on your £20,000 deposit. If instead you had only put down a 10% deposit, you’d have made 100% – doubling your original £10,000. When an investor borrows to bet on markets rather than houses, they also put down a deposit. In this case, it’s known as “margin”. Margin…

“God bless the Queen… I’ve got no animosity against any one of the royal family. Never did. It’s the institution of it that bothers me and the assumption that I’m to pay for that.There’s where I draw the line. It’s like: “No, you’re not getting ski holidays on my tax.’” Former punk John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon (pictured), quoted in The Times “It’s here today, gone tomorrow.Try and preserve it when you need to, but be confident spending it when you have to.” Roger Saul, founder of Mulberry, on the most important lesson he’s learned about money, quoted in The Sunday Times “I’m extremely fortunate that I do high-profile events around the world – on private yachts in the Middle East, for example. The most I was ever paid was for…

unherd.com Every year the churches remind us of the “true meaning of Christmas”, says Peter Franklin. This year, they should have done the same for the jubilee. The Biblical concept of the sabbath – that is, a day of rest – still “governs modern life, though not as much as it used to”. The idea of taking a “sabbatical” is also familiar to us, a notion that also derives from the Hebrew scriptures – this is the idea that every seventh year should be set aside as a time of rest. Then, after seven cycles of seven years would come the jubilee. According to Leviticus, this was to be a time of liberation as well as rest – debts were to be cancelled and slaves freed. The aim was that…

Two of Toshiba’s external directors are feuding publicly over the future of the conglomerate, reports Reuters. Mariko Watahiki has accused her colleague Raymond Zage, head of the nomination committee, of damaging shareholder confidence by breaking with the wider Toshiba board in backing a proposal to solicit private-equity bids for the company. Watahiki also objected to candidates from US activist funds Elliott Management and Farallon Capital Management being appointed to the board, on the basis that Zage is a former managing director and current adviser to Farallon, which “makes the board appear skewed... to a specific shareholder”. Zage said Watahiki’s claims are misleading, citing “positive shareholder feedback” in his defence.…

“From 2002 to 2012, Australian equities returned 11.8% per year in sterling terms” On 21 May, Australia went to the polls. The incumbent prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal Party Scott Morrison sought to win a consecutive fourth term in office. Late on election night, Morrison conceded and on 23 May Anthony Albanese, leader of the centre-left Labor Party, was sworn in as prime minister. But Albanese’s victory may be a Pyrrhic one. Labor’s election looks very much like a decision to kick out the other guy. Much of the debate was thin on policy discussion and heavy on personalised attacks on the likeability of the incumbent prime minister. Labor enters government with a narrow outright majority, but more of a wish list than a strategy. For example,…

The half-term holidays were blighted by travel chaos as package-holiday firms, airlines and airports struggled to cope with the surge in post-pandemic demand. Hundreds of flights were cancelled and many more were severely delayed. If you were caught up in the chaos, you can claim some cash to ease the pain. “You are entitled to compensation independently of the refund, and hotel and dinner and so on,” Jan-Frederik Arnold, chief executive of Flightright, told The Guardian. “Airlines sometimes try to accept only one or the other because consumers don’t know their rights.” Anyone whose flight out of or into a UK airport is cancelled within 14 days of departure can claim. How much depends on the length of your flight and how much later your new departure and arrival times…

• The £85,000 limit on compensation for savers and investors who need to make a claim from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) should be raised for pension cases, the scheme itself believes. The FSCS, which pays out if a regulated firm goes bust and customers’ losses are not recoverable elsewhere, says the cap of £85,000 means many victims of poor pensions advice or mis-selling are not getting the redress they deserve, because losses in these cases can sometimes be very large. In the past 12 months alone, more than 3,600 people would have received more than £85,000 were it not for the cap. • Should you consolidate your pension saving by moving different pots of retirement cash into a single plan? Simplifying your arrangements in this way can reduce…

Finding investments that have both a reasonable yield and the ability to increase it by growing their earnings can be tricky for income fund managers. While these opportunities certainly exist, they tend to be less obvious than the “fad stocks” of the day, such as technology stocks, which regularly have eye-watering valuations. However, undiscovered growing stocks with good yields can sometimes be found in sectors that may have been under pressure for years. Consolidation through mergers, failures and companies withdrawing from the market can create conditions for very substantial margin improvement and growth when even a relatively small amount of demand comes back and a little pricing power returns. These capital-cycle investments tend to be higher yield, under-researched, have low valuations, support growing dividends and can produce market-beating total returns.…

• “Die-hard Remainiacs” are up in arms at government plans to legalise imperial measures, says Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. No one is suggesting the metric system be banned. Under-50s would be outraged if an alien system were foisted upon them – but that is what happened to me. A pub lunch that had cost 2/6d was suddenly 26p – over twice as expensive. “They simply dropped the slash and the ‘d’. And took the ‘p’. Unscrupulous businesses exploited the confusion to increase their profits. A large section of the population had no idea how much anything cost anymore.” Same with petrol. A £1.67 litre sounds a lot cheaper than a £7.50 gallon. “The introduction of metric measures in supermarkets allowed shops to shortchange customers and launched the widespread…

Morbius– a film starring Jared Leto as a doctor who accidentally turns into a vampire supervillain while trying to cure himself of a rare disease – has pulled off the rare distinction of bombing twice, says Kotaku. The film earned dire reviews from critics and was unpopular with audiences when it was released in March, making $163m at the box office worldwide against a budget of $75m (meaning it probably would have lost money when all costs were taken into account). However, a steady stream of social-media mentions and online memes seems to have convinced Sony Pictures that it was slowly building an audience for ”gleefully ironic viewings, the kind where you laugh along with just how bad the movie is”. So last week the studio released Morbius in US…

“The eurozone is on the brink of stagflation,” says Eric Albert in Le Monde. Annual inflation hit 8.1% last month, a level unprecedented since the creation of the single currency. Energy prices, which rose at an annual rate of 39% in the past year, were the main cause, but “gradually the phenomenon is spreading to the entire economy”. At the same time, growth was just 0.3% in the first quarter. Industry is holding up reasonably well for now, but households are being “strangled by the sudden rise in the cost of living”. Few economists “expect an outright recession” in the year ahead, says The Economist. “Many services firms are still reaping the rewards from reopening,” especially in the euro area’s tourism-reliant south. A cushion of pandemic savings and “plentiful” jobs…

“The World Economic Forum’s first meeting in more than two years was markedly different… a forum traditionally committed to championing globalisation was primarily concerned with globalisation’s failures: broken supply chains, food and energy price inflation… Gone are the days when everyone seemed to be working for a world without borders; suddenly, everyone recognises that at least some national borders are key to economic development and security… After four decades of championing globalisation, it is clear that the Davos crowd mismanaged things… while corporate giants… grew rich, processes that could have made everyone better off instead made enemies everywhere… Now that globalisation has peaked, we can only hope that we do better at managing its decline than we did at managing its rise.” Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate…

Elon Musk has taken Tesla’s staff and investors “on a roller-coaster ride with conflicting messages about potential job cuts”, says Angus Whitley on Bloomberg. On Thursday he sent a memo to executives that “cuts would be made across the company”, then changed this message on Friday to 10% of salaried workers losing their jobs, before finally tweeting on Saturday that “Tesla’s total workforce will increase over the next 12 months, with its salaried ranks remaining relatively unchanged”. The moves have left shareholders confused and many observers “bracing for signs of an electric car slowdown”, especially since his original memo said that he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy. If Musk is correct in his prediction that the US is “headed toward recession that could last 12 months to…

Six to buy Dr. Martens The Times Consumer goods and retailing have come under pressure from inflation and supply-chain issues. But Dr. Martens still sold 14.1 million pairs of boots, shoes and sandals last year for the 12 months to the end of March, up by 1.4 million from the year before. This translated into a 43% increase in pre-tax profit and an 18% increase in sales. There’s scope for more growth, especially in Asia. Longer-term investors might want to be wary of the brand losing momentum, but right now it’s undervalued and worth buying. 271p Games Workshop The Sunday Times Games Workshop’s 400 branches stand out “amid the carcasses of failed retailers” on the high street, not just because they’re packed with thousands of miniature figurines, but because they…

Railway workers are set to bring the network to a halt after they voted to call “the biggest strike in a generation”, says Ben Clatworthy, in The Times. About 40,000 workers in Network Rail as well as 13 out of 15 train operating companies are set to walk out on three days, timed for “maximum disruption”, later this month. They will be joined by 10,000 Tube workers, making it “the largest strike on the railways since 1989”. In addition to the disruption to passenger services, the inclusion of signallers and maintenance staff has even prompted fears that “rail freight could be hit, resulting in empty shelves and a petrol shortage”. The railway unions argue that they have been left with little alternative given that the rail companies have “given no…

Around 3,000 employees at 70-odd companies across Britain are receiving 100% of their pay for 80% of the hours they would normally have spent working as part of a global trial into a four-day working week, says Emma Simpson on BBC News. The experiment, organised by campaign group 4 Day Week Global in collaboration with academics, will measure productivity, workers’ wellbeing, and the effects on the environment and gender equality. Software developers, recruitment agencies and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk are some of the companies taking part. Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank is sceptical that workers generally will be able to become 25% more productive per day, which would be necessary for the economy to come out evens. GPs are struggling as it…

“We’re in a radically different world. We’re approaching a slowdown,” Greg Jensen, a chief investment officer at hedge fund giant Bridgewater, warns the Financial Times. The US Federal Reserve, led by Jerome Powell (pictured), and other global central banks now see inflation as the biggest threat to the economy, and so are tightening monetary policy by raising interest rates and reversing quantitative easing (QE – printing money to buy bonds and other assets). This is the opposite to the much more forgiving world investors grew used to in the decade after the financial crisis, notes Jensen, when fear of deflation led central banks to step in rapidly to prop up asset prices at the first sign of distress. Now, he says, “you want to be on the other side of…

aier.org Obi-Wan Kenobi is not only one of the great Jedi masters, but also an important teacher of political economy, says Byron Carson. In the Star Wars film Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan warns Anakin Skywalker that politicians are “not to be trusted”. But his comments should not be misinterpreted as nihilistic. When Obi-Wan is told that the politician in question is not like the others in the Galactic Senate, he responds: “It is my experience that senators focus only on pleasing those who fund their campaigns.” In other words, Obi-Wan understands public-choice theory, which states that to understand politics we should not focus on particular persons or their motives, but on the incentives they face. Whether people are “angels or knaves, jedi or sith”, incentives take precedence in explaining…

■ The offices of asset manager DWS and its majority owner Deutsche Bank were raided by police in Germany last week as part of an investigation into allegations of “greenwashing” at DWS, reports the Financial Times. German financial regulator BaFin launched a probe following claims from Desiree Fixler, who served as head of sustainability at DWS until she was fired in March last year. Fixler said that in its 2020 annual report, DWS made misleading statements that more than half of its $900bn assets were invested using environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Following Fixler’s complaints, DWS changed its ESG criteria. In its 2021 report, its ESG holdings came to €115bn, about 75% less than the €459bn it had claimed were “ESG integrated” in the 2020 report. Asoka Woehrmann has…

Individual savings accounts (Isas) might seem like an obvious place to store your savings. However, interest rates on these accounts lag far behind standard savings products. Banks are paying as much as six times more interest on their standard savings accounts than their tax-free Isa equivalents, according to financial-comparison service Moneyfacts. The top rate for a one-year fixed-rate account is 2.4%, compared with 1.86% for the equivalent Isa. Moneyfacts found that 57% of one-year fixed rate cash Isas pay less than the same non-Isa accounts, and a further 34% paid the same rate. Only 9% paid higher rates on Isas. “It is a clear indication of how the personal savings allowance introduced in 2016 has killed off competition in the cash Isa market as more people opt for higher-paying non-tax…

All retirees drawing an income from their savings face the same dilemma: how much can they safely take out each year without having to worry their money will run out? For many years, the 4% rule devised by US financial-planning guru William Bengen has been used as a benchmark. This says that if you set your spending as 4% of your savings in your first year of retirement and increase that amount each year to keep pace with inflation, your money should last for as long as you’re likely to need it. However, Bengen – who is now retired himself – has recently changed his mind. Having reviewed the work that he did in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of the current market environment, he now thinks 4%…

In a Royal Albert Hall speech to the Institute of Directors just over 30 years ago, Gerald Ratner – then head of the world’s biggest jewellery group, with more than 2,500 stores – made a few ill-advised jokes about some of his firm’s products. He even called one “total crap”. The net result was a dramatic plunge in the group’s share price, a slump in sales and the departure of Ratner the next year. The consistent backing for one-time superstar fund manager Neil Woodford by Bristol-based investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown (LSE: HL.) didn’t appear likely to rival Ratner’s faux pas. Quite the contrary: Woodford had forged a reputation as a top UK stockpicker during his 25 years at Invesco Perpetual. When he left in April 2014 to set up his…

British American Tobacco (LSE: BATS) has been one of the top ten performers in the FTSE 100 this year, says The Telegraph. The company should serve as a solid inflation hedge as consumers will continue to pay higher prices for its products, meaning that it should make strong profits despite campaigns against smoking by health authorities and a forecasted 3% decrease in sales due to its withdrawal from Russia. The company should return £7bn to shareholders through dividends and buybacks in 2022, while also having spare cash to pay down debts. The shares are up 24% in the last year.…

Michael Price was born in 1951 in Glen Cove, New York. After graduating, he took a job with legendary value investor Max Heine, who was his father’s broker. By the early 1980s Price had so impressed Heine that he was earning a share of the profits generated by Heine Securities, taking over day-today running of the company in 1986. By the early 1990s the company was managing around $5bn in assets. What was the investment? Like his mentor, Price was an activist value investor, buying the bonds and shares of companies that were trading at a deep discount to their book value, and in many cases using this stake to get them to make changes to the company. In early 1994 he turned his attention to Chase Manhattan, a bank…

Geography Is Destiny Britain and the World, a 10,000-Year History Ian Morris Profile Books, £25 Six years after Britain “lurched into terra incognita” by voting to quit the European Union, Brexit “continues to vex the country’s pundits and politicians”, says Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall  Street Journal. There’s been a “mound of books” published on the reasons for the vote. Most focus on the seven years between the announcement of the vote and the formal departure. Some trace the causes back to UK membership of the then EEC in 1973; a handful even start with the Reformation or the Spanish Armada. Ian Morris, however, argues that Britain’s fractious relationship with Europe was determined by its physical separation from the mainland 10,000 years ago. Morris’s overarching belief is that the big…

When the feds cut supply (shutting down the economy in the Covid-19 panic), and then boosted demand (printing up new money and passing out cheques), what would happen next was almost a foregone conclusion – prices would rise. This is not rocket science – just the most basic and obvious observation. The only people who couldn’t see it were those who were paid to be blind – those at the Fed, the Treasury Department, and on Wall Street. Enter Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, who has now admitted she got it wrong last year in predicting inflation would prove transitory. “An economy never recovers from the damage inflicted by the feds” There were, she said, things going on in the economy she didn’t “fully understand”. It took Yellen many years of…

£7.7m How much the £12-a-bottle Prosecco rosé from Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue (pictured) generated in sales last year, a third more than its nearest competitor and making up around a sixth of the growing Prosecco rosé market in Britain, according to market analysts Nielsen. The wine is made in the foothills of Italy’s Lessini Mountains. €47 How much the Dutch government wants a packet of cigarettes to cost after research by Maastricht University revealed the “giving up” price per packet for smokers is €60. Around a fifth of Dutch people smoke, which the government wants to reduce to 5% by 2040. £10.9m How much has been spent on plans to move peers out of the House of Lords and into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre opposite while repairs…

Pop star Harry Styles (pictured) set a new record for the most copies of an album sold on vinyl in its first week as the format continues to make a comeback, says Billboard. Harry’s House sold 182,000 vinyl copies worth $4.49m in the US last week, the most since researchers began tracking sales in 1991. In total, Styles sold 521,500 copies across all formats, grossing around $7.26m. Top Gun: Maverick has become Tom Cruise’s biggest-ever hit in America, says the Hollywood Reporter. The sequel to 1986’s Top Gun earned $90m in its second weekend, taking total sales to $295.6m. It has also earned $261.6m outside the US, but is unlikely to pass the $791.1m that Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout made globally as it’s not being released in China or…

Shares in Unilever rose 7% after activist investor Nelson Peltz (pictured) joined its board of directors last week, sparking hopes that he will force a “major overhaul of the company”, says Hannah Boland in The Daily Telegraph. Peltz’s fund Trian Fund Management holds a 1.5% stake, making it Unilever’s fourth-largest shareholder. The move comes as Unilever faces pressure from some investors over its focus on “social purpose”, while others argue that CEO Alan Jope should “carve up the business”. Peltz has previously pushed for companies that Trian invests in “to break up or sell off divisions”, says Sabah Meddings in the Sunday Times. In Unilever’s case, this might involve a sale or demerger of its £50bn food and refreshments division. He’s also likely to encourage a “focus on costs, and…

Airline Lufthansa needed a multibillion-euro state bailout to survive the pandemic, says WirtschaftWoche. Now it’s repaid all that aid and the recovery is gaining momentum. “Holiday bookings for the summer are at a record level, business trips are increasing again... the demand for freight services is unbroken.” Rising fuel costs and higher airport fees are a headwind, yet Lufthansa “could be back in the black this year for the first time after a net loss of €2.2bn last year”. The company is no longer burning money: cash flow from operations was €1.5bn in the first quarter. “With a market capitalisation of a little more than €8bn, the shares of Europe’s largest airline are favourably valued.”…

Cracks are being exposed in Chinese president Xi Jinping’s power, says Lingling Wei in The Wall Street Journal. Xi’s zero-Covid strategy is complicating premier Li Keqiang’s assigned task of “fixing” the Chinese economy, and although Xi has dominated decision-making for much of the past decade, Li is “tapping into” Communist Party concerns about flagging growth and rising unemployment. While Li hasn’t stated his views on zero-Covid, state media has mentioned his economic agenda, signalling an “unusual endorsement” of both his and Xi’s objectives. With Li apparently overcoming a “decade in political purgatory”, the “commentariat” is busy saying Xi is in trouble, with “reformers”, “elites” and “angry entrepreneurs” eager to “weaken or expel him” when he seeks an unprecedented third term as leader of the party this autumn, says Christopher Johnson,…

After the prime minister won a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons, the betting markets think that Boris Johnson’s future should be secure for the next few months. With £99,952 matched on Betfair, for example, they have him at 1.02 (98%) not to resign as PM by the end of 30 June. Similarly, with £701,440 matched, they think he is very likely to still be in place by the time the Conservative Party conference begins, currently scheduled for 2 October, putting his odds at 1.27 (78.7%). However, while punters may think that he will be safe in the very short term, they are much more sceptical about his prospects in the long, or even medium term. Indeed, with £973,232 matched, they put the odds of him quitting…

We may not ever know exactly why Sheryl Sandberg quit Facebook, now Meta. But there’s no question that Sandberg is one of the most talented corporate executives of her generation. When she joined Facebook from Google in 2008, hired by the site’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, the business had revenues of just $272m and was making losses of $56m. It had no real business model, nor much idea how to create one. After taking over as COO, Sandberg turned it into a brutally effective advertising machine, monetising all those hundreds of millions of eyeballs to brilliant effect. A class act By last year, Meta had revenues of $118bn and profits of $39bn. At its peak, it had a market value of more than $1trn, one of only a tiny handful of…

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of companies have suspended or pulled out of operations in the country, including fast food giant McDonald’s, oil major BP and hotel chain Marriott, often incurring significant costs in the process. And yet, according to research from US professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team at Yale School of Management, the one-off costs are worth it, as far as markets are concerned. Looking at the share price performance of more than 1,200 firms with business interests in Russia, it turns out, says Sonnenfeld, that “equity markets are actually rewarding companies for leaving Russia while punishing those that remain behind, with divergent stock performance generally corresponding with the degree of Russian exit”. “Companies that left Russia have trounced those who dug in” The team split the…

The rise of corporate spying Editorial The Economist As the recent court case between Appian and Pegasystems illustrates, corporate espionage now extends way beyond “sensitive” industries such as defence to sectors including education and agriculture, says The Economist. Blame the “inexorable” growth of the intangible economy and the “growing sophistication” of hackers. Keeping unpatented intellectual property or “trade secrets” (anything from algorithms to chemical processes) “safely locked in the digital vault” is difficult, and as traditional industries increasingly rely on software, they too have more “bytes worth stealing”. Start-ups are especially vulnerable because they combine new tech and “mobile employees”. And although legal protections are getting stronger – the US has “cracked down with China in mind” – the trade “secret” has to be “clearly articulated” in order to…

conservativehome.com Many conservatives back ending the ban on new grammar schools because the era of selective education coincided with economic growth and social mobility. What this misses is that “the era of selective education never ended”, says Georgia Gilholy. Access to the better schools just became more dependent on one’s wealth (ie, the ability to afford a move close to the best schools or to go private) than on academic attainment. Most working-class British children have “no choice but to attend mediocre schools”. The reality is that the destruction of grammar schooling was never about equalising opportunity, but was an “emotionalist, utopian move to ‘equalise’ the classroom at any cost”. The “aptly named” Graham Savage, the civil servant who spearheaded the change, admitted that he favoured a more “democratic” school…

Small, esoteric trusts with a chequered corporate record are generally best avoided. Rockwood Strategic (LSE: RKW), a trust with market value of just £35m which is trading on a 12% discount to net asset value, is an exception to this rule. Until six months ago, the trust was called Gresham House Strategic. It had been managed by Richard Staveley, who built a strong investment record, including a return of 59% in the year to March 2021 and 82% over three years. This was despite an extremely generous performance fee of £2.3m (4.4% of net assets) paid to Gresham House for the year and an annual management fee of 1.5% of net assets. Staveley left Gresham House in May 2021 to join Christopher Mills’ Harwood Capital, which also manages North Atlantic…

• Make sure you read the fine print when shopping around for a new energy tariff. Utility Warehouse has introduced a new 12-month fixed tariff for £2,250 – £230 less than the next cheapest deal on the market and £625 less than the average, according to uSwitch. However, “the deal is only available in a ‘package’ form, meaning customers must also take out two of either a broadband, mobile or insurance contract with the provider”, says The Telegraph. Utility Warehouse’s cheapest superfast broadband deal is £21.60 a month, slightly below the UK average of £24. Its lowest SIM-only mobile offer is £12 a month, which is higher than the £8.80 average. Make sure you shop around for each element of a package deal before signing up to ensure you will…

■ UK government debt is meant to be a safe-haven investment during periods of volatility – gilts investors know the British state is highly unlikely to default on its debts, so their capital is safe. But it appears someone forgot to remind the gilts market of this rule. Investors have seen their holdings fall by 7% this year in the worst sell-off that the gilts market has seen since the 1980s. The explanation for this rout lies in the sudden change of priorities seen at the Bank of England and other central banks in recent months. Policymakers previously thought rapidly climbing inflation was a very temporary phenomenon, brought on by Covid-19 disruptions. They now think it will be far more persistent and so they’re raising interest rates at speed. Ten-year…

Industrial software company Aveva (LSE: AVV) put out a profit warning in April, saying that growth and profitability would be affected by the invasion of Ukraine and by rising staff costs, says the Financial Times. The firm has stopped new business in Russia, which accounted for 2% of its revenue in the last financial year, although it still supports non-sanctioned clients. Meanwhile, “wage inflation due to very competitive software labour market conditions” is expected to weigh on margins, before growth resumes in the 2024 financial year. The shares have fallen 39% in the past 12 months.…

2020 Swinney, Mourvèdre Grenache Syrah, Frankland River, Western Australia £33, currently on offer for £25.66, greatwine.co.uk I trumpeted the inaugural 2018 releases of the spectacular Farvie wines on this page a couple of years ago. This week sees the launch of 2020 Swinney Farvie Syrah (£99.50) and 2020 Swinney Farvie Grenache (£99.50), and they are both near-perfect wines, scoring identical 19.5/20 in my notes. The entire suite of the 2020s is truly magnificent, and in addition to these two groundbreaking icon reds, the quality of the Swinney estate range has gone through the roof. Before I move to the trio of reds, 2021 Swinney Riesling (£26) is the vinous equivalent of a citrus-fuelled electrical shock. Masochistic and heavenly in equal measure, while 2020 Swinney Grenache (£33) and 2020 Swinney Syrah…