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Bonds have often played a pivotal part in history. They financed the Duke of Wellington’s troops in the Napoleonic Wars. Cottonbacked bonds paid for the Confederacy’s army during the American Civil War. Once the South lost New Orleans, it could no longer export the crop, which undermined the market for cotton bonds. To make up for the lost revenue, it printed money, causing a ruinous rise in inflation, says historian Niall Ferguson. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville, who coined the dictum “it’s the economy, stupid”, had a run-in with the bond markets. After a jump in yields prompted by fears that the new president’s ambitious spending plans could boost inflation and add to America’s debt pile, he said he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond…

Annual US core inflation hit 6.6% in September, its highest rate since August 1982. While headline inflation slipped to 8.2% in September, its lowest reading in seven months, the high core reading, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, suggests that underlying inflation pressure in the US remains strong. The data means the central bank is set to raise interest rates by another 0.75% next month, with a faster pace of rate rises next year. It’s striking that “services inflation now exceeds goods inflation”, says John Authers on Bloomberg. Pandemic-driven demand for goods set off inflation, but now services are in the driving seat. Sadly, this suggests that “the initial extreme price spikes caused by the pandemic” have given way to “broader price rises as inflation psychology took hold”.…

Global equities are not as richly priced as they once were following this year’s selloff, says Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank. Does that mean now is the time to buy? Perhaps not. Stocks “may not be as cheap” as they appear: US profit margins are still historically high as a percentage of GDP, and trends such as deglobalisation, inflation, higher wages and environmental costs look likely to “erode” them over the next few years, undermining earnings and valuations. What’s more, a US recession is likely to hit earnings soon, says The Economist. Goldman Sachs says that since 1945 earnings per share have fallen by an average of 13% “around recessions”. Taxes also look poised to rise.…

Shares in Hargreaves Lansdown fell by 4% after its CEO Chris Hill announced on Monday that he will depart after running the UK’s largest investment platform for six years, says Joshua Oliver in the Financial Times. Hill’s exit “comes at a challenging time for Hargreaves”, with volatile markets deterring people from investing. What’s more, Hargreaves faces a £100m lawsuit, filed this week, relating to its promotion of Neil Woodford’s fund before it collapsed in 2019. The Woodford debacle has caused Hargreaves Lansdown major embarrassment, and may leave it with a large legal bill, says Ben Marlow in the Telegraph. But until this year it has been “almost a sideshow” thanks to macroeconomic tailwinds. The company has benefited greatly from the “super-benign market conditions of the last decade”, with “ultra-low interest…

Pertamina Geothermal Energy, a subsidiary of Indonesia’s state-run oil company, Pertamina, is planning an initial public offering (IPO) that could be worth $2bn, says the Financial Times. Pertamina Geothermal Energy uses seismic heat to generate electricity; Indonesia has plenty of volcanoes to produce it. This is the first of Pertamina’s subsidiaries to pursue a listing. The government is trying to make the state sector, which owns assets worth roughly half the country’s $1.2trn GDP in sectors ranging from telecoms to hotels, more efficient and stimulate foreign investment. It is also consolidating state firms to help them develop global scale.…

Given this week of turmoil (see left), it’s little surprise punters are assuming that Liz Truss’s departure from Downing street is a given. With £32,868 matched on Betfair, the PM is now out at 9.8 (10.2%) to be leader at the next election, with her not being leader at 1.11 (90.9%). Bettors are, however, a bit more divided about the exact date of her departure. With £520,756 matched on Betfair, Truss is at 1.68 (59.5%) to leave this year and 2.86 (34.9%) to go next year. There is a far greater degree of uncertainty about who will follow her. With £186,595 matched, former chancellor Rishi Sunak (pictured) is favourite at 3.1 (32.2%) to be the next prime minister; Penny Mordaunt is at 4.8 (20.8%) and Jeremy Hunt at…

Liz Truss’s government is a doomsday cult, according to the investment bank UBS. Investors were being forced to pay a “moron risk premium”, argued City research firm TS Lombard. John Allen, the chairman of Tesco, popped up to argue that Labour now had by far the best policies for the economy, and he was quickly joined by major businesses complaining about the chaos in the markets that had been unleashed. Over the last week the City, along with big business, have turned on the prime minister, Liz Truss, and her former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, with unprecedented ferocity. If anyone in the City or industry thought their tax cuts or supply-side reforms were a good idea, they were keeping it to themselves. By the start of this week, Jeremy Hunt had…

Money is an essential life skill, yet most of us left school with no financial knowledge at all. Unfortunately, the next generation is likely to get very little formal education in core principles like managing money, investing, or how to look after your financial health. That’s why the MoneyWeek team will bring you a dedicated newsletter every Sunday, starting from next month. The new MoneyWeek Money Masterclass will help you learn about how money works, with explanations of the key concepts and terms in finance to help you save more, spend smarter and start investing to grow long-term wealth. From the importance of knowing why you should protect your credit score, what ETFs are, what a gilt is, or you just want to know more about pensions, we will bring…

“I had no money – not one dollar – to my name. He controlled everything. It never occurred to me before that moment in this dark time that I had no power. Later in life, I would decide it was a situation I would never be in again.” Celebrity Kris Jenner (pictured), now thought to have a net worth of $200m, on her marriage to lawyer Robert Kardashian, quoted in Forbes “I was bought 50 shares in Eurotunnel when I was seven. Presumably I still own them. When they rose to £11 a share I said: ‘Ooh, shouldn’t we sell them?’ Everyone said: ‘What are you talking about? You’re seven.’ I also remember getting a child’s savings account because my older brother had one and a smart folder and vintage…

theprepared.org Just how do rocks become the objects familiar in our everyday lives? This question fascinated Thomas Thwaites so much that he set out to make a toaster from scratch, says Hillary Predko. He documented his journey in The Toaster Project, and it was an “extremely difficult” one. He had to make the mica, the plastic, everything. Making the metal was probably the hardest bit, says Thwaites. Learning how to make iron gave Thwaites “the first hint”, he says, “that, ‘OK, things are more difficult than I could have imagined’”. Remarkably, though, he did it. The end result was lumpy, but it worked – “sort of”. What we end up with is not just a household gadget, though, but a lesson about the division of labour in modern industry, the…

Cevian Capital, Europe’s largest activist investor, has sold the majority of its stake in Vodafone as “scepticism grows that the… telecoms group will be able to reverse its sluggish performance amid a challenging economic backdrop”, says the Financial Times. Cevian built a “significant but undisclosed” position in Vodafone last year and was pushing for the group to simplify its structure and sell underperforming international divisions. However, the activist has concluded that rising interest rates make it less likely that Vodafone will achieve favourable prices on disposals, sources told the FT. Vodafone is now in talks to merge its UK business with rival Three, but some investors doubt whether the deal will be approved by regulators.…

Tesco (LSE:TSCO), the UK’s largest retailer with a market value of £15.4bn, has around 4,750 stores in the UK, Ireland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. It owns Booker, the UK’s leading food and drink wholesaler that serves caterers and independent retailers. The Budgens, Londis and Premier brands also belong to it. Tesco’s turnover (mainly food and groceries, but ex-VAT and fuel) for the year to 26 February 2022 was almost £55bn; adjusted operating profit was £2.8bn and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) totalled 21.86p. The annual dividend per share was set at 10.9p. In its interim results for the 26 weeks ended 27 August 2022, Tesco rang up sales of £28.2bn (again excluding VAT and fuel), with like-for-like revenues up 3.2%. Adjusted EPS dipped 5%, however. This was mainly due…

Ageing societies and rising life expectancy presage a rosy future for medical-device makers that help injured or chronically ill patients live a more normal life and keep older people active. These are defensive stocks paying useful dividends and providing safe havens in uncertain times. I favour those companies with a strong market position. One of these is Medtronic (NYSE: MDT), a global leader in sophisticated devices enabling patients to live with chronic diseases. MDT has a strong record in heart devices, where it has a market share of around 50%. Heart devices include MRI-safe pacemakers, transcatheter heart valves, stents (which keep arteries open) and defibrillators, which stop irregular heartbeats. Medtronic’s product range extends to spinal devices, diabetes control, nerve treatment for diabetic peripheral neuropathy (numbness) and renal denervation to control…

Hundreds of thousands of teenagers are missing out on money sitting in savings accounts in their name. The first Child Trust Funds (CTFs) matured in 2020 but 175,000 accounts remain unclaimed. There is £374m in these accounts: an average of £2,142 each. CTFs were introduced in 2002 with the aim of instilling good savings habits from day one. The government automatically opened accounts for children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011. All these accounts received £250 when they were opened, rising to £500 for lower-income families (however, the bonus paid at age seven was stopped for those who had reached that age after 1 August 2010). The money couldn’t be accessed until the child turned 18. Over that time the balance grew, either in investments or as…

There are worrying signs that larger companies are seeking to ease their cashflow problems by exploiting smaller firms. New research from data provider Dun & Bradstreet reveals that the average small and medium-sized enterprise is now owed £147,141 in late payments – up from £130,445 a year ago, and just £63,881 in 2017. The warning follows a study from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) estimating that late payments cost small business owners £684m a year. The typical payment is now 5.8 days late. Separate work by PwC concludes that small companies’ average “days sales outstanding” – the length of time taken for invoices to be paid – has now reached a five-year-high. Even small businesses yet to experience the problem need to be on their…

Most investors buy a share in the hope that it will rise and let them sell at a profit. By contrast, short-sellers borrow a share and sell it, hoping that it will fall in price so they can buy it back cheaper. This is controversial: some people see shorting as profiting from the failure of a company. However, short-sellers argue that they play a crucial role by acting as a check on hype and frauds. The extent to which a share is being sold short is measured by the short interest, which is the number of open short positions over the total number of shares. So if a company has a short interest of 20%, it means that short positions are equal to a fifth of its total shares. A…

Education publisher company Pearson (LSE: PSON) has benefited greatly from going digital, says The Motley Fool. Once a supplier of traditional school textbooks, Pearson now sells e-textbooks through a subscription service, Pearson+. For $14.99 a month, students can access 1,500 titles on up to two devices. The firm has also acquired digital-credentials group Credly, which helps students enter the workplace with digital “badges” that collate their qualifications. US investors have been impressed with Credly’s platform. Pearson’s stock has gained 24% in 12 months.…

George Ross-Goobey was born in London in 1911 and won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital public school. He proved himself to be a talented mathematician, but his family were unable to afford a university education so in 1928 he joined the British Equitable Assurance Company as an actuarial trainee. He later moved to the Southern Life Assurance company before becoming a fellow of the Institute of Actuaries two years later. In 1947 he was appointed as the first in-house investment manager of Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund, which was valued at £12m. What was the trade? The government’s policy of “financial repression” meant that gilts (UK government bonds) at the time were yielding only 2.5%, less than the rate of inflation. The Imperial pension fund was thus losing money in real…

$1 .3m The average difference in lifetime pay between men in the US who are members of trade unions compared with those who are not, according to a recent study from Cornell University. The union members made about $3.4m from ages 20 to 64, compared with $2.1m for those who had never been in a union. £316,041 What former prime minister Boris Johnson earned for a speech and Q&A session in the US last week. Johnson was paid more than double his total prime ministerial salary of £157,372 to speak about his continued belief in Brexit, British support for Ukraine and his conversion from climate scepticism. £15.5m The value of a record-breaking drugs haul secured by the Royal Navy. The bust was HMS Montrose’s fifth this year; it seized 870kg…

When Dr. No was released 60 years ago, it was shot on a “poverty-stricken budget”, starred a “relative unknown” (Sean Connery, pictured) as super-spy James Bond and received a “mixed critical response”, says Ben Schott on Bloomberg. Author Ian Fleming left a screening “looking sad and distracted as he tried to summon enthusiasm for the carefree, gun-toting character he had created”. Yet it was an instant hit, taking more than 16 times its $1m cost, and ushered in one of the most valuable franchises in cinema. The 25 official Bond films have made billions at the box office, but have also earned vast amounts from brand placement (more than 30 appear in No Time to Die, the latest film). Mid-market brands such as Heineken and Dell rub shoulders with luxury…

Three to buy Diageo The Telegraph Spirits giant Diageo “offers rare resilience in a troubled market”. Despite “promising” full-year results released in July, when the group said pre-tax profits were up by 18.4%, the shares have fallen of late, so this is a good time to buy. In an inflationary environment “a favourite tipple” is an “affordable luxury”. Profits have risen by 50% in five years, and a strong US presence is giving them an additional fillip thanks to the strong dollar. 3,662p DS Smith The Mail on Sunday DS Smith is a “pioneering packaging company” helping businesses transition towards eco-friendly cardboard containers. Inflation has pushed up the price of raw materials but the firm’s latest update was positive. Performance is “ahead of expectations”, and investors should be taking note.…

Pittsburgh Nuclear energy firm snapped up: Four years after it recovered from bankruptcy, US nuclear power company Westinghouse Electric is being bought by a private-equity backed group for $7.9bn, say Antoine Gara and Myles McCormick in the Financial Times. Brookfield Renewable Partners, one of the world’s largest clean energy investors, has teamed up with uranium fuel supplier Cameco to buy the company “in a bet that climate and energy security concerns will revive the nuclear sector’s fortunes”. Westinghouse makes technology used in about half of the 440 nuclear reactors around the world. The consortium is buying it from a separate division of Brookfield Asset Management that runs the group’s private equity investments. Brookfield Renewable Partners will buy 51% of Westinghouse for $2.3bn while Cameco will buy 49% for $2.2bn. To…

● Royal Mail is “in a deep and deepening financial hole”, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The latest six-month results show a loss of £219m. So the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which is ”screaming blue murder” after CEO Simon Thompson (pictured) unveiled plans to cut 10,000 job, needs to face reality. “A major round of redundancies is not the most dramatic manoeuvre at the board’s disposal.” Spinning off the profitable international parcels business would leave Royal Mail’s stability even shakier, but investors “would probably applaud a break up”. So while it’s true that the offer of a 2% pay rise plus a conditional 3.5% was “miserable” – especially given the firm paid a £400m special dividend last year – at this stage “the practical question is how to get…

Gary Shilling, founder and president, A. Gary Shilling & Co The bear market’s “puke point” is a long way off yet, says economist and investment adviser Gary Shilling. Before markets can reach a bottom,“you’ve got to run out of sellers”: investors must be so fed up of setbacks that they “want to regurgitate their last stock and swear they’ll never buy another one”. Yet at present, many still believe that the current downturn is a short-term phenomenon. “We’ve had a long run in stocks to the upside,” Shilling tells ThinkAdvisor: even the Covid-19 setback was quickly regained, thanks to government stimulus payments and the US Federal Reserve pumping money into the economy. Too many investors still think that they can’t lose in stocks. Until that changes, we won’t get the…

theconversation.com More than half of the digital data that firms generate is collected, processed and stored, say Tom Jackson and Ian Hodgkinson. Often it is never reused – think of the multiple near-identical images held on Google Photos or iCloud, a business’s outdated spreadsheets, or data from sensors that have no purpose. This “dark data” takes up space on servers – typically huge banks of computers in warehouses that devour electricity. This energy cost is hidden in most organisations. It’s also a cost to the planet. The processing of digital data already produces carbon emissions comparable to that of the automotive, aviation and energy industries, and the production of digital data is growing fast. A typical data-driven business, such as insurance, retail or banking, with 100 employees, might generate around…

■ Old songs have become an asset class, says Andrew Orlowski in The Telegraph. Bob Dylan’s back catalogue sold for $330m, before Bruce Springsteen topped that with a $550m deal. This was “unthinkable” ten years ago “when the music industry was on its knees”. London-listed investment trust Hipgnosis, which helped ignite “the back catalogue feeding frenzy”, now owns $2.5bn worth of songs. But trouble looms in the form of rising interest rates: many of its assets were acquired “at the peak of cheap money” and may not look like good value now. Hence its share price has fallen from a peak of 130p to 86p. Some also question whether financial investors such as Hipgnosis can exploit music assets as well as more “creative and innovative” people in the music business.…

● Half of us keep our savings with the same bank as our current account, research by Hargreaves Lansdown has found. “Despite savings rates rising to the highest levels in a decade and the best fixed-rate deal now paying 5%, some savers seemingly favour convenience over returns – despite the far juicier rates now on offer compared to previous years,” says Ed Magnus on This Is Money. When asked if they shop around for competitive savings rates, only a fifth said interest rates were their top priority when looking for a savings account. People were more interested in how easy it would be to open an account and access their money. “High street banks are cashing in on our fear of faff,” says Sarah Coles of Hargreaves Lansdown. “It’s not…

● Think carefully about how you name your new business. Since 2019, Companies House has rejected almost 57,000 proposed names for new ventures, a freedom of information request filed by Simply Business, a business insurer, reveals. Almost half the rejections were made because Companies House regarded the proposed name as offensive. The rest fell foul of rules such as those that prohibit an implied connection between a business and government or royalty, or of restrictions around specialist terms such as “building society” or “physician”. ● Is your business following regulation on “Right to Work” checks? At the height of the pandemic the Home Office announced that such checks, designed to ensure employers do not take on people with no legal right to work in the UK, could be conducted remotely.…

It has been a good fortnight for my long tips with five out of the six rising. Industrial and construction rental company Ashtead rose from 4,267p to 4,382p while home-furnishings retailer Dunelm rose from 804p to 820p. Hays Recruitment increased from 106p to 112p, Pets at Home climbed from 280p to 287p and online streaming service Netflix increased from $239 to $245. The only exception was fashion group Burberry, which dipped from 1,900p to 1881p. Overall, my long tips are making a combined loss of £452. My six short tips also mostly moved in my favour, with four out of the six falling in value. Remote medicine firm Teladoc fell from $25.57 to $24.61, Chinese property company KE Holdings declined from $17.12 to $12.68 and DWAC, the holding company for…

Used car retailer Motorpoint (LSE: MOTR) has seen its share price slump, says Shares. Pre-tax profits in the half-year to September fell by 80% year-on-year to £3m as the previous year’s record margins shrank, investment rose and interest costs climbed. Demand was robust for much of the period, with sales up by 30%, but sales volumes fell by 9% in September and the firm warned that dwindling consumer confidence would reduce revenue “for the foreseeable future”. Rising inflation and supply-chain difficulties are further headaches. The shares have lost 57% in the past year.…

2021 Lirac Blanc, La Fermade, Domaine Maby, Southern Rhône, France (£15.50, yapp.co.uk) The annual Yapp Autumn Tasting is a veritable cornucopia of oft-unexpected delights among old favourites, and I have both for you this week. Like last year, the standout wine was this epic, and I mean epic, white Lirac. It obliterated a flight of well-meaning Yapp Burgundies and countless other try-hard whites I have tasted this season with its sensational perfume, mesmeric verve and sheer class. Do anything you can to secure a case of this wine. In addition, 2018 Busi-Jacobsohn Cuvée Rosé (£39) was a powerful and expressive style with great density of wild cherry and strawberry flavour and a stunningly long, dry, tangy finish. This English sparkler will find aperitif duties a doddle with even the most…

Britain “is about to sustain the biggest shock to its housing market” since 2008, says Josh Mitchell in The Wall Street Journal. Average interest rates for new two- and five-year fixed mortgages have topped 6% for the first time in over a decade and have “more than doubled over the past year”. Many households are heading for a nasty shock: of the 8.4 million mortgages in Britain, “fixed interest rates expire on about 2.4 million… in the second half of this year and through next year”, according to data from UK Finance, a financial services trade association. Mortgage rates had already been climbing this year, but then surged in the wake of the now junked mini-budget. The average rate on a two-year fix has risen from 4.74% on 23 September…

When charts of credit-default swap prices [appear] it is invariably a bad sign... But... the swaps have an important role to play. They insure the buyer against the default of a bond, or an index of bonds [and] protect portfolios and counterparties from volatility... The role swaps played in the financial crisis did not help their reputation... Yet the market today is unrecognisable from the one 15 years ago. Back then it was roughly the same size as the market for foreign-exchange swaps. Today it is not even a tenth as big... The standardisation of credit-default-swap coupons has made it easier for the assets to be traded through clearing houses... This reduces counterparty risk, where investors fear that a dealer of derivatives might collapse and fail to honour their obligations...…

Shares in Goldman Sachs rose by 3% after it said it would “pull back from... retail banking to focus more on its traditional strengths of serving big corporations and wealthy investors”, says Joshua Franklin in the Financial Times. A revamp set to shrink the overall group from four into three divisions will“reduce the prominence of its push into consumer banking through online retail lender Marcus”. Launched in 2016, Marcus has come under scrutiny after years of losses and rising costs. This marks an “about face” for Goldman, says Carleton English in Barron’s. Only three years ago it outlined bold plans to “diversify its offerings from the volatile trading business to more consistent areas such as wealth management and consumer banking”. However, Goldman’s retail banking operations “have yet to make a…

Investors have tended to shun Austrian banks this year as many of them have extensive operations in eastern Europe or Russia, says WirtschaftsWoche. But one Austrian lender largely insulated from the Ukraine war is Bawag, which is focused mostly on its home market, though it also has a presence in Germany, Switzerland and the US. Bawag concentrates on retail banking, with offerings including savings, loans, insurance and mortgages. It is a cautious lender, while a cost-income ratio of just below 40% also bodes well. Recent cost cuts should help boost net income from €480m to €500m this year. There is scope for a rise in the dividend this year, too, which would imply a 2022 yield of 7%.…

The week-long congress of China’s Communist Party, which opened on Sunday, “is arguably the most important in decades”, says Helen Ann-Smith for Sky News. According to “decades of precedent”, Xi Jinping should have stepped down as leader, having completed two terms and been in power for ten years. Instead, it looks like he will be staying in command. He had already scrapped term limits in 2018, and his speech to the congress “felt like a consolidation, an enshrining of sorts, of Xi’s vision, Xi’s path and Xi’s China”. Xi’s decision to break with precedent on term limits wasn’t the only “watershed moment”, says the Financial Times. Xi is also pursuing policies that will reshape China and its relations with the rest of the world. It is seeking the “securitisation of…

One simple investment strategy has been far more successful than any other over the past decade: just buying US stocks. Putting your money into a S&P 500 tracker fund would have given you around 15% per year in sterling terms (including dividends, before fees). Holding the MSCI World ex USA would have given you just 7%. Virtually nothing else would have come close. Among developed economies, only Denmark returned around the same and that’s a tiny market driven by the success of insulin maker Novo Nordisk (50% of the index). Among major emerging markets, only Taiwan (powered by chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing) and India even got into double-digit annual returns. Very few international investors would have been solely invested in US stocks. Yet at least tracking the MSCI World index,…

The woke will eat your lunch Janan Ganesh Financial Times Tesla founder Elon Musk’s apparent attempt to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is another reminder that “business people are all at sea in politics”, says Janan Ganesh. The reason? “They don’t understand fanaticism” – that ideas can in some people prompt “extreme deeds”. Business folk think there must always be “negotiable grievances under all that mystical bluster” because, as far as they are concerned, problems can be “bargained away” by discussions between “good-faith parties, or at least rational ones”. When you’re dealing with ideologues, that is not the case. The culture clash between business and politics is also evident in the spread of woke ideas through companies. Many CEOs are happy to embrace the trend because they…

wsj.com The Nobel prize in economics this year went to former Federal Reserve banker Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip Dybvig of Washington University in St Louis for doing work “of great practical importance in regulating financial markets and dealing with financial crises”. Yet many monetary economists would disagree with their work, says Econlib blogger David Henderson. Bernanke, for example, took issue with the view of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz that the Great Depression could have been avoided if the Federal Reserve had simply acted as lender of last resort and expanded the money supply instead of letting it contract. Bernanke, in his academic work, thought that wasn’t enough, and emphasised the importance of rescuing particular financial intermediaries. That academic work was “deep and…

The past few months has been the perfect storm for emerging-market (EM) equities. The pandemic and rising commodity prices due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have hurt EM economies. Higher US interest rates have led to a strong dollar – an environment in which EM stocks usually struggle. And as the developed world now slides into recession, we should expect trade volumes to decline sharply, affecting export-orientated economies especially. Yet on some measures EM equities are holding up well, down just under 10% year to date. Many major developed markets are down by 20%-30%. EM currencies have also outperformed those of G9 countries – largely because EM central banks started raising rates last year, ahead of the developed world, reckon analysts at Goldman Sachs. Still, the handful of listed EM…

There are many tax-allowance thresholds that haven’t changed for years, meaning they have been “ravaged by inflation and in the worst cases are now worth less than a sixth of what they were in real terms when they were last set”, says Rachel Rickard Straus in The Mail on Sunday. The worst-affected allowance is inheritance tax (IHT). The nil-rate band has been frozen at £325,000 since 2009-2010. “Had it risen in line with inflation it would be £427,951 now – a difference of £102,951,” says Charles Calkin in the Financial Times. Yet it will remain frozen until at least 2026. Add in the residence nil-rate IHT band, which has been frozen at £175,000 since 2020-2021 and the situation gets worse. “For a couple dying today and leaving a qualifying estate…

There weren’t many survivors of last month’s mini-Budget in this week’s remarkable reversals. But the promise of an extension to the enterprise investment scheme (EIS) is one of them. The EIS had been due to close in 2025, but is now set to continue. And that could prove hugely valuable to early-stage businesses raising capital. In 2020-2021, the most recent tax year for which official data is available, 3,775 companies raised almost £1.7bn using the EIS, and that was a relatively quiet year for the scheme, with activity disrupted by Covid-19. The scheme offers generous tax breaks to investors prepared to put their money into early-stage companies; the allowances provide a cushion against the increased risk posed by such businesses. Using the EIS, qualifying firms can raise up to £5m…

One of the biggest trends in the car industry is the demise of the internal combustion engine. Manufacturers are responding to various regulatory carrots and sticks by pouring billions into developing mass-market electric vehicles (EVs). Still, this leaves another major problem: the lack of charging infrastructure, which is a particularly pressing problem given the limited range of many electric cars. As a result, there has been a big rise in interest in companies such as EVgo (Nasdaq: EVGO), which runs a network of 850 electric fast charging stations in 30 states in the US, mostly on the east and west coasts. Like many technology companies over the past two years, EVgo has experienced a roller-coaster rise, with the shares doubling shortly after it went public through a merger with a…

This has been a painful year for investors. The question of when a market bottom might be reached draws a lot of column inches, but with the uncertainty about inflation, recession, monetary and fiscal policy and even geopolitics, making such a call would tax Nostradamus himself. Despite this, investors should not lose hope. Calling a wider market bottom is a challenge, but focusing on individual stocks offers more opportunity. We believe the selloff in the UK has become indiscriminate and has left some shares offering interesting medium-term value for those prepared to look beyond short-term volatility. We have seen the market undervaluing high-quality, global companies exposed to secular growth drivers where this growth is “hidden”. These firms are active in markets well placed to prosper even in tough times, while…

American Congressman Alex Mooney last week introduced the “Gold Standard Restoration Act”, which calls on the US Treasury and Federal Reserve to publicly disclose all gold holdings and transactions within 30 months, after which time the Fed would peg the dollar to a fixed weight of gold at its then market price. This return to the gold standard would “protect against Washington’s irresponsible spending habits and the creation of money out of thin air”, says Mooney. “Prices would be shaped by economics rather than the instincts of bureaucrats. No longer would our economy be at the mercy of the Federal Reserve and reckless Washington spenders.” Our favourite causes on the back page are lost causes. Our favorite dogs are underdogs. So Mooney’s proposal appeals. Without the discipline of real money,…