Indholdsfortegnelse for 1109 i MoneyWeek

“The celebrity crypto ads remind me a little too much of the sub-prime crisis” If you have lost a lot of money on cryptocurrencies in the last few months, I wonder how you feel about the rich celebrities (mostly in the US) who encouraged you to get in. Reese Witherspoon has marketed crypto. So have Gwyneth Paltrow, Larry David (his ad has the benefit of being a tiny bit funny), Paris Hilton (not funny) Matt Damon (funny but not supposed to be funny) and Kim Kardashian – among many others. But the bit of marketing I have found most irritating so far comes from Gisele and Tom Brady (I’m classifying it as not funny at all on any level). In an ad for FTX, Brady is seen calling a variety…

Chinese internet firm NetEase saw its shares drop 8% on Monday after one of its social-media accounts made a mocking reference to Chinese president Xi Jinping, says the Financial Times. A post on the Weibo account for the Diablo Immortal game read “Why hasn’t the bear stepped down”. Xi is often parodied as Winnie the Pooh, who is consequently censored from the Chinese internet. A filling station manager in California was fired after costing his employee $16,000 by putting a decimal point in the wrong place, says CBS Sacramento. John Szczecina entered the price of petrol at $0.69 per gallon rather than $6.99. The mistake was not fixed for three hours, during which customers spread the word about ultra-cheap fuel and long queues formed to take advantage.…

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has raised interest rates for the first time since 2007. The 0.5% increase – which took rates from -0.75% to -0.25% – surprised traders last week, sending the currency up 3% against the dollar, its biggest one-day gain in almost seven years. It is also approaching parity with the euro, trading as high as CHF1.01 on 17 June. The SNB has spent much of the last 15 years trying to stop the franc from rising, say Sam Jones and Tommy Stubbington in the Financial Times. The franc tends to strengthen at times of global crisis, but a strong currency hurts Swiss exporters. As well as negative interest rates, the SNB has also engaged in vast quantitative easing, such that it now holds assets worth CHF1.056trn…

US mortgage rates have surged to their highest level since November 2008, says The Wall Street Journal. While US interest rates have risen by 1.5 percentage points so far this year, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage is up even more, rising by 2.7 percentage points to hit 5.78%. While the Fed doesn’t directly set mortgage rates, they are heavily influenced by its monetary policy and conditions in bond markets. The end of quantitative easing is also having an impact as the Fed winds down purchases of mortgage-backed securities – home loans that are bundled up and sold on to investors. The resulting rise in mortgage costs is already starting to cool the booming post-pandemic US property market.…

“Fast fashion is a throwaway business. But aren’t the shares meant to be more durable than the clothes? Asos seems hell-bent on testing that theory. Its market value is unravelling even faster than its togs,” says Alistair Obsorne in The Times. Shares in the online clothing retailer slumped by 32% to 783p after a profits warning from new CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte. They were trading at more than 5,000p a year ago. Asos now expects to make £20m-£60m in pre-tax profit this year, down from the already-trimmed guidance of £110m-£140m it offered in October. Part of the problem is that “customers are sending more clobber back” as inflationary pressures change shopping behaviour. Rising rates of return are a warning signal for consumer discretionary demand, says Lex in the Financial…

The value of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the US and Europe is down 90% from last year, says the Financial Times. A total of 628 companies raised $192bn in the first five months of 2021, while only 157 firms have raised $17.9bn in the same period this year. Worldwide, the value of IPOs has fallen by 71%. The war in Ukraine, higher market volatility and the threat of recession has reduced demand for new listings from investors. The US market has also been particularly affected by fewer debuts of special purpose acquisition companies (Spacs), following disappointing share-price performance, closer scrutiny by regulators and banks being less willing to underwrite them.…

EasyJet wants to depict its problems with last-minute cancellations and delays as an industry-wide issue, but the firm “has handled things especially badly”, says Cat Rutter Pooley in the Financial Times: last week, it cancelled 146 UK departures. “You might think that flirting with a reputation for chaos and cancellations would hurt an airline… But all that seems to be outweighed by consumers’ desperation to get away.” CEO Johan Lundgren reckons the disruption has had no impact on demand. Meanwhile analysts are looking through the short-term financial impact to next year. “Decent fuel and US dollar hedging” should leave it well placed, while low-cost airlines tend to hold up in a downturn. “Passengers lack many better options. So too do airline investors.” • Halma is a “FTSE 100 achiever easily…

“The liquidity-led stock market boom... peaked over a year ago in February 2021, with the start in the fall of ‘meme’ stocks… Central bankers are now, belatedly, attempting to remove the punch bowl by raising interest rates from record low levels,” notes Sebastian Lyon in the annual report for Personal Assets Trust, the investment trust he manages. “This is proving highly problematic for the valuations of asset prices, which had been predicated on (almost) free money”. With inflation at its highest levels in 40 years, investors are having to navigate a new regime – and it’s not all down to the impact of the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. Long-standing “deflationary influences” such as an appetite for ongoing globalisation are waning. “The pendulum that swung towards free trade for…

unherd.com/thepost Investors are starting to wake up to the reality of slumping stockmarkets, economic recession, rising interest rates and permanently impaired supply chains, says Philip Pilkington. An overlooked consequence is that we are heading for a pensions crisis. Investment analyst John Hussman has calculated that, if markets are as overvalued as he believes and then crash, capital allocated to the standard pension fund portfolio in 2021 would return –2% every year for 12 years. That means £100 invested in 2021 would be worth around £80 at the end of the period. And this doesn’t even factor in higher levels of inflation. The typical assumption pension-fund managers work with is that a fund should be growing around 6% a year if it is to meet its obligations. What we are facing…

■ Investors in some funds might be losing out on revenues the funds make from lending out securities to short-sellers, says the Financial Times. Securities lending, where an institution temporarily loans stocks, bonds, or exchange-traded funds for a fee, was an $11bn business in 2021. A report by the European Securities and Markets Authority has found that many fund groups return only half to two-thirds of the gross revenues generated via securities lending to their investors, while other managers return closer to 90%. The regulator believes all revenues from these transactions should be returned to investors, after fees. BlackRock’s in-house lending agent retains 37.5% of gross revenues from securities lending transactions in Europe, for example, while Vanguard pays its third-party agent, Better Finance, about 8%. Better Finance suggests the maximum…

It is unlikely that Barbados, Lebanon or Sri Lanka ever enters your investment thinking. Perhaps now they should. For although all are minnows in a sea of whales in financial terms, they are – to mix animal metaphors – dead canaries in the coal mine. In the last four years, each has gone bankrupt. Barbados defaulted on its foreign debt when a new government took office in 2018, Lebanon stopped paying after a series of economic crisis in 2020 and Sri Lanka did the same amid an economic meltdown last month. All three went bust for what are effectively identical reasons, as did Argentina – which in 2020 defaulted for the ninth time in its history – and others. Economists would vigorously disagree, citing various theories instead, but the core…

■ Savers looking to generate extra pension income should consider delaying their retirement. New data from insurer Aegon shows a delay of just a single year could offer a boost of over 16%. The figure is based on the example of a 60-year-old man with a £200,000 pension fund, who could today buy an annual annuity income of around £4,900 with these savings. Waiting a year to retire and continuing to contribute could mean the pension fund grows to £211,000, assuming investment growth of 4.25%, after charges. Factor in the higher annuity rate available to a slightly older saver, and this could provide an annual income of around £5,700 – a 16.3% increase. The potential to secure higher pension income grows larger the longer you are prepared to defer claiming…

Shares in online-trading provider CMC Markets (LSE: CMCX) dropped by more than 10% after it announced a sharp fall in profits, says the Financial Times. The company said that pre-tax profits for the financial year to March 2022 had more than halved from the year before, from £224m to £92m, due to lower user activity after an “unsustainably strong” increase in spread-betting and online stock trading during the pandemic. CMC has previously said it may split its business into a traditional stockbroking platform and a riskier leveraged trading service. Shares in the company are down 40% over the last year.…

€8m The amount raised so far by Israeli art historian David Landau to restore three 16th-century synagogues in Venice’s old Jewish ghetto. The site once housed up to 5,000 Jewish people, offering relative safety from persecution across Europe throughout the middle ages. £4bn The cost of personal protection equipment (PPE) bought by the government during the Covid-19 pandemic that was found to be “unusable”. “Significant volumes” are to be burned, according to the parliamentary spending watchdog. $13bn How much Americans are predicted to spend on mezcal and tequila – Mexican spirits made from agave plants – in 2023, supplanting the popularity of vodka sales ($12.5bn) and US whiskey ($12.3bn), according to research by market analysts IWSR. $118m How much Google has agreed to pay to settle a lawsuit claiming the…

A 314-year-old Spanish galleon known as the “mother of all shipwrecks” has become the “mother of all legal battles”, says Joshua Keating on Grid. The San José sank off the coast of what is now Colombia after a battle with a British fleet, carrying treasure worth as much as $20bn today. Now new footage of the wreck has brought fresh attention to a long-running dispute about who owns it. Colombia says the ship is in its waters. Spain claims it as a former “ship of state” under international law. The Qhara Qhara, a Bolivian indigenous group, say the treasure was stolen from their ancestors. And Sea Search Armada, a salvage company, says it found the wreck 34 years before the discovery was announced in 2015.…

“The central-banking playbook of the 2010s is failing,” says The Economist. Policymaking that was designed for an era of low global inflation is leaving central banks “slow on their feet” and behind the curve on inflation. Now they are racing to catch up. Last week, America’s Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 0.75%, the biggest hike since 1994. The Fed wants investors to believe it will act decisively to tame inflation, “yet it is loath to admit that doing so will probably require a recession”. The historical record is not encouraging, agrees Jon Sindreu in The Wall Street Journal. “‘Soft landings’ are easier to find in the legendarium of central banks than in historical reality.” Of the 12 times since the 1950s that the Fed has embarked on a major…

“The average stock in the Nasdaq… is down 40%-50% from peak levels, with many down much more than that. The fever dreams of many investors have already been completely decimated… Despite these stock price declines, I do not believe that equity markets have yet hit bottom for this cycle… I expect another leg down in equity markets… as ramifications of monetary and fiscal policy withdrawal become clearer and as corporate earnings and capital spending decline. We are witnessing the first hint of stagflation since the 1970s, which is not yet priced in: almost two-thirds of the Nasdaq by market cap still trades with a price to sales [ratio] above four… there are signs that core inflation may be cooling a little bit… but tight supplies in oil and gas markets…

“Wall Street can only apply so much cover-up and blush to a broken capital structure”, says Lex in the Financial Times. American cosmetics group Revlon is now past that point. The firm has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a prolonged period of underperformance, made worse by supply-chain issues and ongoing inflation (Chapter 11 filings let a company restructure, rather than go into liquidation). The filing is a long-overdue reckoning that had been “delayed by acquiescent capital markets”. Revlon has “not kept up with beauty trends” and “upstart brands” that have won over younger generations of cosmetics users. Now monetary policy is getting tighter, markets were no longer willing to prop the struggling business up. “It would have been better off taking a hard look at itself in the mirror years…

Six to buy Adidas Investors’ Chronicle Adidas trades at a discount to its main rival Nike, despite growing its annual net income faster for most of the past decade. Its strong brand identity could position it well in a recession. Prolonged lockdowns in China are hurting demand in Asia, but growth in the country “looks delayed rather than over”. Management has listened to investors and learnt from past mistakes, leaving it well positioned in the athleisure market. €169.68 AEX Gold The Mail on Sunday Greenland has large reserves of metals and minerals. “The case for digging them out of the ground has taken on a new urgency”, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s “growing antagonism towards the West” spur governments to think about supply chains. AEX’s Nalunaq gold mine…

Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser Christopher Geidt quit last week over concerns that the prime minister intended to deliberately breach the ministerial code, says Jim Pickard in the Financial Times. Geidt’s “surprise” exit came after only 14 months on the job. He claims he had already been on the brink of resigning over Johnson’s Covid rule-breaking and partying. The final straw came when the PM asked for advice on his intention to maintain tariffs on a “crucial industry” – which officials say was steel – a move that risked breaching international law. That Johnson planned to go ahead with them anyway put the adviser in an “odious and impossible position”, he said. This whole episode should have been a “political sensation”, says David Allen Green on Al Jazeera. The PM commands…

Private equity has grown ever more popular in recent years. But its touted benefits are set to be tested John Stepek Executive editor Private equity – put simply, investing in companies that aren’t publicly listed – has grown in popularity as an asset class over the last few years. Advocates point to the fact that private equity returns are simultaneously at least as attractive but less volatile than stockmarket returns (in other words, investors endure fewer ups and downs). Detractors note that this is purely down to the use of borrowed money, a lack of liquidity, and the absence of “mark-to-market” accounting (see below), not to mention a more recent trend towards certain funds effectively re-selling assets to themselves at favourable terms and prices. Cutting through the debate, however, one…

Who will foot the bill for Ukraine? Editorial The Economist Russian missiles and artillery have destroyed Ukrainian towns, smashed stations, ports and telecoms towers, hit more than 1,000 schools and damaged roads and agricultural land, says The Economist. The cost of rebuilding the country has been put at $200bn-$500bn. How will such sums be raised and how will aid be organised to avoid “running foul of institutional rules or political sensitivities”? And can Ukraine, notorious for corruption, “handle the cash”? The EU has talked of borrowing the money collectively, but Germany and Holland are baulking. Though all agree that the EU should have a “leading role” – not least as Ukraine aims to “join the club” – the involvement of countries such as the US, Britain and Japan alongside global…

glineq.blogspot.com If you measure success by the extent to which stated objectives have been realised, Russia’s war with Ukraine has been a failure, says Branko Milanovic. But what if the stated objectives weren’t the real ones? Countries and their leaders aspire to two goods: sovereignty and wealth. There is a trade-off between the two: countries can only become rich if they become less sovereign, that is, more integrated with global trade. North Korea is more sovereign than Belgium, for example, if massively poorer. In the case of Russia, it is quite possible that Putin and his advisers are willing to pay the price of being poorer for the prize of gaining greater sovereignty. Russia’s attempts to Westernise since Peter the Great have been a failure. Russia failed to catch up…

Up until two years ago European Opportunities Trust (LSE: EOT), managed by Alex Darwall, was the star performer of the European sector. However, the collapse of Wirecard, its largest holding at 13% of the portfolio, was a devastating blow to the trust and to Darwall’s reputation. What made the fiasco worse was not just the size of the holding, but also that Darwall ignored repeated dire warnings in the Financial Times of corporate misfeasance following a detailed investigation. Although he extricated some value by bailing out at the last minute, Darwall’s reputation suffered a devastating blow. BlackRock Greater Europe (LSE: BRGE) moved up to pole position in the performance table and has remained there. The £550m trust has returned 63% over the last five years and trades at a 7%…

The Bretton Woods agreement was born out of the need to have a more open and better regulated financial world after the end of World War II, avoiding the economic rivalries and protectionism that resulted from, and worsened, the Great Depression. In July 1944, 730 delegates from 44 countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss how best to go about achieving their aims. The key outcomes of the conference included: establishing a system of fixed exchange rates, under which all currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was convertible into gold; setting up the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and setting up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which later became the World Bank. The IMF was intended to be a forum for international economic…

• New rules from the Financial Conduct Authority, effective from 1 June, will require both individual pension providers and employer-sponsored schemes to “nudge“ savers to get a free appointment with the Pension Wise service when they access their funds for the first time. The government-backed scheme does not offer personalised financial advice, but can help savers work through their options. The service has been available since April 2015, but only one in 33 of those eligible have taken up an appointment, says James Jones-Tinsley in FT Adviser. The aim of getting more people to do so is “laudable”, but the new regulations fall short. It would be better for savers to speak to Pension Wise earlier – eg, at age 50 – rather than when taking benefits, as this would…

At Sanford DeLand, we manage our flagship CFP SDL UK Buffettology Fund and its smaller cousin, the CFP SDL Free Spirit Fund, in line with the business-perspective investing philosophy as championed by Warren Buffett, among others. We look for only the best businesses available to invest in and, believe me, there aren’t that many out there. We want businesses that have an economic moat, meaning competitors find it hard to muscle in on their franchises. We like steady growth, favourable operating margins, superior returns on equity, copious free cash flow and robust balance sheets. We also look for managers who act with the owner’s eye as well as being competent stewards of the shareholders’ capital. Not surprisingly, a lot of our investee companies, especially the smaller ones, have owner-managers with…

Media rights for the Indian Premier League cricket competition have sold for $6.2bn for five years, says Variety. Disney paid $3.01bn for TV rights, billionaire Mukesh Ambani paid $3.05bn for streaming rights, and rights outside India sold for $135m. The price per match of $15m is second only to the US National Football League ($35m) among major sporting events. The auction of a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov has raised $103.5m for Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, says The Guardian. The proceeds of the auction – which was won by an unidentified phone bidder – will go to help Ukrainian refugees. Muratov, the editor of the now-closed Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was awarded the prize last October.…

A mooted £1.6bn private equity bid for Euromoney is “more proof there’s value in Britain’s stockmarkets”, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. The business media, data and events group had previously rejected four offers from Astorg and Epiris at between £11.75 and £13.50. However, a new approach of £14.61 is only slightly beyond the firm’s pre-pandemic share-price high. “A proper bid from the buyout duo may prove hard to resist.” “Investors will be tempted to accept,” agrees Lex in the Financial Times. The implied valuation is a 50% premium to Euromoney’s long-term average and comes despite a recent rough patch. Underlying revenue shrunk by an average of 2% per year between 2014 and 2021. That said, the group looks well placed for recovery now. Events, which account for roughly a…

A world powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels needs a large and resilient power grid, says Avi Salzman in Barron’s. Building this will require hundreds of billions of dollars in investment – and that’s a great opportunity for Eaton, which makes everything from transformers to circuit breakers. Demand is strong – its order backlog rose 76% in the last quarter. Earnings are set to grow 14% this year and forecasts have been going up since the start of the year, unlike those for most companies. Yet the shares are still down by almost 20% this year and on a price/ earnings (p/e) ratio of 17.5 times forecast earnings, the company is trading at a discount to rivals such as Quanta and ABB.…

The World Trade Organisation “looks to be back in business” after agreeing a package of deals last week, including a partial waiver on Covid vaccine patents and cuts to fishing subsidies, say Markus Wagner and Welhuan Zhou in The Conversation. It was the first meeting of the WTO’s highest-decision making body since 2017. Its “rule-making function” has been “largely comatose” for the past 20 years. What matters is whether the deals are actually implemented, says the Financial Times. In many respects, the WTO remains “on life support”. But keeping it alive is important. Although globalisation has stalled thanks to the global financial crash and ensuing populist backlash against open borders, Donald Trump’s trade war with China, and the pandemic which “gummed up global trade” and cast doubt on the “wisdom…

Battle Creek, Michigan Not so grrreat: “Kellogg is joining the corporate vogue for splitting itself in three,” says Dasha Afanasieva on Breakingviews. The US food company plans to spin off its North American cereals business and its plant-based foods arm as two separate companies, leaving it with faster-growing, higher-margin biscuits, snacks and international cereals. Management claims this will let each business focus on its own objectives, but “the financial rationale for the carve-up looks underwhelming”. The sum of the parts might be worth 20% more than Kellogg’s $24bn market cap, based on peer-group valuations, but that takes no account of the “transaction costs, market risk and additional overheads involved in turning one company into three”. It looks like Kellogg has a case of “Mondelez envy”, says Aaron Back in The…

The British economy looks in dire trouble right now. We have already seen two consecutive months of falling output, and there is no reason to expect that trend to be reversed any time soon. Inflation is running at 9%, pushing down real wages at the fastest rate in living memory. The Bank of England has already started raising interest rates, and will no doubt push them higher before the cycle is finished. The government is raising taxes, both on individuals and on companies, which will depress demand and investment. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine is sending Europe into a downturn, hitting trade with what remains our most important market. Combine that with our economic woes and the UK looks certain to face a recession this year. The only real question…

“Marking to market” simply means updating the value of an asset or a portfolio of assets to reflect the latest available prices for said assets. This is easy to do when assets are publicly listed, highly liquid (easily bought and sold) and fungible (substitutable for one another). For example, FTSE 100 shares trade in huge quantities on a daily basis, so you can be very confident of the value of any shares in your portfolio simply by referring to the market price at any given moment. It’s harder when transactions are less frequent, assets are not fungible, and the sales process is more involved, however. For example, you might have a rough idea of what your house is worth – and estate agents and surveyors will certainly give you an…

“When I left school I set out to get a job and earn good money if I could. I’m no different from anyone else. Some people think making all this money is uncool. I don’t. I’m trying to do what I do to the very best of my ability. I’m not embarrassed if that means I earn loads.” Paul McCartney (pictured), quoted in the Daily Mirror “[Inflation] is how a society reconciles inconsistent and overambitious claims on resources.” Former Tory minister David Willetts, writing on Conservative Home “The best place for my capital is in companies that I’m running. I could put £5m into a property in London and probably get a 15% yield, or I could build a really great business and sell it for several multiples more in…

bigthink.com Nineteenth-century Russian writers were “obsessed” with the idea of utopia, says Tim Brinkhof. They wrote stories and treatises imagining how their own increasingly dysfunctional society could be replaced by one “devoid of suffering or conflict”. Fyodor Dostoevsky was not impressed. Give a man every earthly blessing, every happiness, give him economic prosperity, and in return he will spit in your face, if only to prove himself a man and not a machine. Human nature is such, he argued, that people would always prefer to be free in an imperfect world than unfree in a perfect one, and that planning a utopia could only ever end in dictatorship. Earlier utopian writers were doing thought experiments, but in 19th-century Russia, utopian tracts were written with real-world aspirations in mind, and gave…

US package delivery firm FedEx’s share price had its biggest one-day gain in around 36 years after the company announced it was increasing its quarterly dividend by 53% as part of a deal with activist investor D.E. Shaw, says MarketWatch. The D.E. Shaw deal will also see a shake-up of its long-term incentive compensation plan for shareholders, while three new directors will be appointed. FedEx will also cut its capital spending in a move that should lower its capital intensity and boost returns. The deal comes just weeks after the appointment of new chief executive Raj Subramaniam, who replaced founder Fred Smith and is looking to take advantage of the post-pandemic boom in parcel delivery volumes.…

Despite the bearish sentiment in both the lumber industry and the US stockmarket, stocks within the sector have generally held up well. Of course, this could mean that most are due for a pullback. So here are two stock selections to cover both the potential downside and upside in lumber prices. LL Flooring (NYSE: LL) is one of America’s leading speciality retailers of hard-surface flooring, with more than 430 stores nationwide. The company sells more than 500 varieties of hard-surface floors, plus a range of flooring enhancements and accessories. The fact that it requires lumber as an input to many of its products means it should benefit from lower prices. At a current price of $9.80, the shares have fallen 70% since they peaked at about $33.70 towards the end…

Annuities have been largely ignored since the pension freedom reforms of 2015. However, a near 30% rise in some annuity rates so far this year is turning heads. For many savers approaching retirement, an annuity now looks a more attractive way to convert pension fund cash into regular income than an income drawdown arrangement. Annuities, which are sold by life insurers, offer a guaranteed income for the rest of your life. The plans vary, but the underlying principle remains the same. You hand over your pension fund and the insurer promises to keep paying your pension for as long as you live. With income drawdown plans, you must manage your savings with great care, balancing the need to generate growth against the risk of depleting your funds and working out…

No board of a FTSE 100 company wants to hire a below-average chief executive. Hence boards pay above-average rewards to CEOs who they believe are above average. Yet, mathematically not all CEOs can be above average. One way to judge the real talent of a CEO is to see what they go on to achieve after they’ve left their position at the top of a major company. Since he resigned over the Libor rigging scandal, the record of Bob Diamond, former CEO of Barclays, has been mixed, to say the least. In the mid-2010s, Diamond raised close to $1bn through his cash shell Atlas Mara, to invest in the banking sector in Africa. The shares dropped like a stone and eventually Atlas Mara was delisted at the end of last…

UK oil and gas production company Capricorn Energy (LSE: CNE) has announced an all-stock merger with Tullow Oil, says Reuters. The merged company, which will have reserves of 343 million barrels, will focus on Africa. Tullow will contribute the greater share of reserves and production, through its offshore fields in Ghana, while Capricorn’s cash reserves will allow the group to invest more in expanding production beyond the current combined 100,000 barrels a day. Both firms have seen their shares rise along with the oil price. Capricorn’s share price is up by 34% over the past 12 months.…

Michel David-Weill, who died last week aged 89, headed investment bank Lazard for nearly three decades from 1977. He was often described as ruthless, says The Telegraph. “Colleagues who won his trust knew him differently,” however – as a man who liked to talk about art and philosophy, and enjoyed good food, wine, cigars, and female company, but who always put the family firm he headed first. He worked far harder than he needed to, said one colleague, to “ensure that Lazard remained a force in a changing financial world”. Known as the “Sun King” for his “monarchical ascendance and grip on power”, the heir to the Lazard banking dynasty “revelled in old fashioned autocracy” and required partners in the bank he ran to “plead on bended knee” for the…

2020 Cadet de la Bégude, Provence, France £20.00, vinoteca.co.uk; £19.50, Moreton Wine Merchants, 01608-651800 I have never written up a Bandol on this page, which is surprising given how much I love this historical style of wine. The 2019 Bégude, Bandol Rouge (£42, mustandlees.co.uk) is a delicious incarnation of this lusty, brooding and malevolent style of red wine and yet, in common with many wines from this region, it needs a couple of years to soften before you pull the cork. So, imagine my surprise when I tasted its little brother, Cadet, the other day, and it was ripe, forward, engaging and downright delicious. The classic Bandol hallmarks of sanguineous minerality, wild fauna and decadent black fruit are all here, but they are delivered gracefully and without any interference from…

Even in a world chock-a-block with messiahs, MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor deserves special mention. Most Pied Pipers only take the children once. He’s done it twice. Our first encounter with Saylor came more than 20 years ago when we were relatively new to the trade of making fun of people in print. We needed an easy target. And there he was. MicroStrategy had developed software that helped businesses figure out who was buying their products. “We’re purging ignorance from the planet,” Saylor said, grandly. He was on a “crusade for intelligence”. He wanted to make information “free… running like water.” “Never before had anyone lost so much money in such a short time” Shares were offered to the public on 11 June 1998 at $12. Nearly two years later, the…