Indholdsfortegnelse for 1141 i MoneyWeek

Last week a friend whom I had always considered fairly sensible told me he needed a side hustle, and had decided to start day trading as it looked easy. After expelling half a double espresso through my nose, I asked where he had got that impression from. He explained that he had seen several videos explaining the process on Instagram and YouTube, and there was clearly nothing to it. Two days later, he told me that he had been on a dating website and exchanged phone numbers with someone. The person soon tried to persuade him to sign up to a trading platform, and suggested that cryptocurrencies were looking especially promising. The bitcoin has now finally dropped, and he promised me he would be more careful in future. But his…

“For years, crypto boosters pointed to the fact that Bitcoin had never crashed below the previous cycle’s all-time high... But Bitcoin prices have spent... six months well under the $20,000 highs of... 2017... Bitcoin’s annual ROI [return on investment] has been trending down since its inception... every bull run since at least 2013 has produced lower returns than the previous one... Those calling the end of Bitcoin or crypto have so far been proven wrong or – more likely – simply premature... Fraud... finds a way. But if the price manipulation driving recent crypto bubbles is no longer financially viable or politically tenable, then crypto may well have entered a new era of diminished future prospects... The falling valuation of better-regulated crypto companies...suggests a poor outlook for even the ‘legitimate’…

LVMH, a bellwether for the luxury-goods industry, has profited from a “splurge” by shoppers in the US and Europe, says Isabella Fish in the Times. This helped it “offset Covid disruptions in China”, which have reduced revenue in Asia, to report an overall 9% rise in sales in the fourth quarter. Sales at the luxury goods group, which owns Louis Vuitton and Dior, reached €22.7bn in the fourth quarter of 2022. The 9% organic increase exceeded expectations. Founder Bernard Arnault (pictured) believes that the two-year luxury boom, which has made LVMH the largest listed company in Europe, will endure, says Leila Abboud in the Financial Times. Indeed, he is so confident that he is hiking the dividend to €12 per share from €10 in 2021 . However, with the global…

Texas-based Sterling Infrastructure does site clearance, pours concrete foundations and rehabilitates highways and roads, says Scott Black of Delphi Management. The group offers strong free cash flow and a way to play higher US state infrastructure spending ($31.98). Zurich-headquartered global insurer Chubb is a high-quality business that is trading on a reasonable 12.6 times earnings ($228.86). The weak yen makes this a good time for foreign investors to go shopping in Japan, says Abby Joseph Cohen, professor of business at Columbia University. Heat pumps-to air-conditioning specialist Daikin Industries is well placed to benefit when a cyclical upswing in industrial demand eventually materialises (Tokyo, ¥20,250). Toyota Motor’s slow move into electric vehicles (EVs) has made it unfashionable with investors, but the apparent caution reflects a “nuanced” strategy that recognises charging-infrastructure…

● Until last month, Direct Line’s CEO Penny James (pictured) was seen as a potential successor to Amanda Blanc at Aviva, says Oliver Shah in The Times. Now she’s stepping down, and it was “a resilient trading update from Aviva last Wednesday that appeared to seal James’s fate”. She is “carrying the can for a profit warning – self-inflicted, as Aviva’s results indicated” – that blew up the dividend. But Aviva will now be on alert for the possibility that Direct Line’s board will try to poach Adam Winslow, who heads its general insurance business, as a replacement. “Things can change quickly.” ● Tufan Erginbilgic, the new CEO of Rolls-Royce, has launched an “utterly scathing assessment of the company’s current form and direction”, says Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. Erginbilgic…

The popping of the bubble in US stocks is far from over, says Jeremy Grantham, the veteran investor who co-founded asset manager GMO . By the end of 2023, the true long-term value of US S&P 500 should be around 3,200 – or about 20% below current levels – and the index is likely to drop below that at some point this year. “The range of problems is greater than it usually is — maybe as great as I’ve ever seen,” he tells Bloomberg. “There are more things that can go wrong than there are that can go right. There’s a definite chance that things could go wrong and that we could have basically the system start to go completely wrong on a global basis”. Any crisis is likely to…

snowdon.substack.com Just before Britain’s sugar tax was introduced in April 2018, various advocates of the policy were handed £1.5m of taxpayers’ money to evaluate it, says Christopher Snowdon. “Marking your own homework is considered perfectly normal in ‘public health’.” They had their work cut out: what the government classifies as child obesity (but really isn’t –the statistics are dodgy) rose in 2018/2019, rose again in 2019/2020, and spiked dramatically in 2020/2021, doubtless due to lockdowns. So childhood obesity didn’t decline after the tax was introduced. Unfazed, the researchers created a model seeking to show what would have happened based on trends between 2013 and 2016, and detected a dampening of the rate of increase in obesity among girls in year six. (A similar model that failed to repeat the finding…

■ 3i’s investment in Dutch household-goods retailer Action is on track to be the UK’s best private-equity (PE) deal ever, says The Sunday Times. The London-listed buyout firm invested €279m in 2011; today its 52.7% stake is valued at £10.28bn, an 88-fold gain. And Action’s growth rate “suggests the eventual spoils could be even greater”. Last year, sales rose 30% to €8.86bn and underlying profits increased 46% to €1.21bn, as the firm expands in France, Germany, Poland and six other European countries. Still, “while Action’s returns dwarf other buyouts, 3i’s 11-year holding means it has ceased to be a typical [PE] deal”, where holding periods of five years are common. Some critics argue that “the longer 3i holds on to Action, the more it risks exhausting its potential for growth…

● In 2020 only around 45.6% of pensioners were getting the full state pension. To receive the full amount you need 35 years of National Insurance Contributions (NICs). If you’ve taken a career break, been on a low income or worked abroad, you may have gaps in your National Insurance record. You can “fill in historic gaps in your national insurance record to boost your pension entitlement”, says Lily Russell-Jones in The Times, “but the window for doing so is closing”. The system allows you to purchase voluntary NICs to fill gaps in your record. Normally you can only fill in gaps dating back six years, “but until 5 April those who reached or will reach state pension age after April 2016 can fill in gaps dating back to 2006-2007,…

● Businesses sitting on stockpiles of old stamps won’t be able to use them on outgoing mail from this week onwards. Stamps without a barcode stopped being legal tender for business postage on 1 February; all stamps used by businesses must now carry a barcode. However, all is not lost for businesses (and individuals) with costly stamps still to use up. They can be exchanged with the Royal Mail for valid replacements. But you’ll need to apply by post, rather than taking your old stamps to the Post Office. ● New data reveals that in the 2021/2022 tax year, HM Revenue & Customs raised £5.7bn following investigations into tax returns, 54% more than in the previous year. Much of the cash came from businesses found to have filed incorrect tax…

Online gambling group 888 Holdings (LSE: 888) has seen its share price crash by 25% after it announced an internal investigation into suspected money laundering by VIP customers, says PA Media. The legal probe has led to several Middle Eastern accounts (worth £50m, or 3% of annual sales) being suspended. CEO Itai Pazner has resigned. The probe comes after 888 Holdings was fined £9.4m by the UK’s Gambling Commission for compliance failings in 2022. The company is also grappling with a debt load of £1.8bn, five times its current market value. The stock has slumped by 71% in a year.…

Confidence Man The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America Maggie Haberman Mudlark, £25 Despite damaging revelations over his behaviour during the 6 January Capitol riots, ongoing legal woes and defeats for his handpicked candidates in the mid-term election a few months ago, several recent opinion polls suggest that former US president Donald Trump is still the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the forthcoming presidential elections in 2024. This raises the question of why “a man who lies so transparently and exhibits such incompetence” can nevertheless end up being “so successful”, says The Economist. The argument of this book is that the answer is to be found in the “annealing interplay of politics and commerce in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s”. This…

”America’s last washboard factory isn’t ready to throw in the towel,” says The Wall Street Journal. Columbus Washboard was founded 128 years ago and sold more than one million boards per year in its heyday in the 1940s. Then electric washing machines revolutionised laundry and led to a collapse in the number of people using the wood- and steel boards to scrub clothing and linens by hand. The firm almost failed in 1999, before a group of four new owners invested to save it and upgraded the materials and production process to make it more efficient. Today, annual production is around 11,000 boards, made by four employees in a former discount store in Ohio, with a typical model selling for $27.49. Sales jumped 57% in 2020 “goosed by pandemic fears…

“There are few assets as likely to make a mug of investors… as oil,” says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. The price of the fuel “swings all over the place, thanks to the complex dynamics of supply, geopolitics and also the influence of Opec”, the cartel that controls one-third of global production. In recent months the bulls have been left looking foolish, with Brent crude tumbling by more than 25% since the start of June last year. At $85 a barrel this week, prices have been treading water since 1 January. Oil prices soared in after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but then fell “as Russian supply held up and an economic slowdown crimped demand”, says Tom Wilson in the Financial Times. Yet 2023 may set the bulls running again. The…

Britain needs to raise its productivity game, says David Smith in The Sunday Times. On an output-per-hour-worked basis, the UK does slightly better than Italy and Canada, but lags French and German workers by 18%-19% and the US by 25%. As the chart shows, in output-per-worker terms things are even worse: “The UK is behind every other G7 country except Japan.” Japan has an efficient manufacturing sector, but a combination of overemployment from a culture of lifetime employment and a weak services sector has long made it the “G7 productivity laggard”. To boost its rating Britain must address acute skills shortages, raise weak business investment and develop a “proper infrastructure strategy”.…

Unilever has often been accused of being “tin-eared to the concerns of its largest shareholders”, says Patrick Hosking in The Times. So it is surprising that it has chosen the “virtually unknown” Hein Schumacher to replace CEO Alan Jope, who is due to step down in July. Although Schumacher has been a non-executive director of Unilever since the autumn, his main job is leading a dairy co-operative owned by 15,000 farmers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and he is unfamiliar with “the institutional shareholding world”. Fear not, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. While a “cooperatively-minded Dutch milkman” may seem “an unlikely appointment for a £100bn stockmarket colossus”, remember that the company Schumacher is leaving has annual sales of €11bn (£9.6bn) and branches in 34 countries. Schumacher also knows…

Few governments approach the end of their first 100 days in power in such good shape as Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition, says The Economist. The Italian PM (pictured) ”successfully framed and steered through parliament” a budget for 2023 and the markets “scarcely flinched” at the rise of a government “spearheaded by a party that traces its origins to neo-fascism”. Indeed, the spread on Italian and German ten-year government bonds has shrunk from 2.33 percentage points to around 1.8 points. Her Brothers of Italy party has also gained in popularity, while support for the main opposition Democratic Party has fallen. The immediate concerns over Meloni have “largely melted away” as she has chosen “caution over confrontation at home and abroad”, says Crispian Balmer on Reuters. Her “softly-softly” approach is due to…

When I said a few weeks ago that I’d be reviewing not just my holdings but all of my investment strategies this year and reflecting on the main risks and lessons, I wasn’t expecting a solid start to the year for my underperforming “capital gains” portfolio. That’s helped it look a bit better over the short term and it’s up about 10% over three months. So it’s a relief that I didn’t rush to sell any holdings. Still, medium-term returns are miserable: it lost 5% per year between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2022. This portfolio is mostly invested in mid-cap and small-cap stocks. It’s pretty concentrated, with 10-15 positions (currently 13), and many of those are in Asia and emerging markets . Before that, performance was…

Putin scores own goal on energy Julian Lee Bloomberg Russia spent almost 50 years building its energy market in Europe, says Julian Lee. Vladimir Putin has “destroyed it in under 50 weeks”. While Russia has found new markets for its crude oil, mostly in India and only at huge discounts, switching sales of refined products and natural gas could prove “almost impossible”. Even if Moscow salvages some kind of deal with Europe, the EU is unlikely ever to revert to pre-war levels of dependency. The war has also “spurred” investment in renewables. And even if some countries are willing to snap up cheap Russian diesel at a discount (another cost to be borne by Russia), natural gas requires huge pipelines. The Yamal gas fields that used to supply Europe are…

unherd.com/thepost British Indians are an “inspirational national success story”, but they are not the only ones, says Rakib Ehsan. The Census shows that in 2021 there were 445,000 people of Chinese origin living in England and Wales, 0.7% of the population. Compared with other larger ethnic minorities, they are more geographically dispersed and have a “proven ...record of high academic and socio-economic achievement”. They bring home the second-highest pay cheques of all ethnic groups, earning a median hourly rate at £15.38 compared with £12.49 for the white British. Children of Chinese origin are also the least likely to live in poverty – only 12% do compared with 26% for whites and 52% for blacks. Why do they do so well? British Chinese families place a high value on education, including…

The £11bn Scottish Mortgage Trust (SMT) was one of the worst performers in the market in 2022, with an investment return of -42%. The shares, which reached £15 in November 2021, halved by June and now trade at a 9% discount to net asset value. There is no shortage of pundits writing it off. Yet the strategy hasn’t changed. “We seek to invest in the world’s greatest growth companies, whether they are public or private,” says Tom Slater, the lead manager. Over 20 years, in which the share price has risen 15-fold, “we have owned 700 companies, but less than 5% of them have driven all our returns. That is what we expect – an exceptional impact from a small number of companies… Our companies are relatively early in exploiting…

Anthony Bolton, one of Britain’s most famous stockpickers, delivered market-beating returns for 25 years as the manager of the Fidelity Special Situations Fund. He claimed that “all you need to outperform is a few winners and to avoid the losers – try to win by not losing too often. A hit rate of 60% is good”. This article describes a set of five criteria that, if met, should greatly reduce companies’ chances of becoming losers and raise the percentage of winners in your portfolio. We will examine each of them in turn, giving examples. A company meeting these criteria is said to have solid fundamentals. Past performance is revealing Sound past performance is important since it bolsters confidence that a company can continue to do well. By sound performance we…

Interest rates are still far below inflation, but the good news is that banks have boosted the rates on regular savings accounts, with the highest on offer now 7%. Regular savers come with more restrictions than easy-access or fixed-term savings accounts. Most run for a fixed term and pay interest yearly, although some pay monthly. They usually require a minimum monthly payment and always have a limit on the sum you can pay in each month. Some allow unlimited withdrawals; others require you to close the account to get your money back. Most banks offer the best rates to their existing customers, so the income you can earn will depend on which current accounts you hold. In some cases, if you do not have a current account with a bank…

Is your business heading for an expensive data failure? In 2022, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued record fines to businesses for failing to safeguard data properly. That record could be eclipsed again in 2023, as the ICO continues to respond to Britons’ anxiety about their data. One recent survey it conducted found that 91% of people were worried their information might be sold on to other companies without their consent. The UK is in the process of developing its own data-protection laws, which will eventually supersede the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For now, though, the GDPR’s provisions continue to apply to British companies – and replacement legislation is unlikely to be any less demanding. For smaller businesses, data protection can feel daunting. Most firms collect people’s…

Europe has fallen out of favour with investors. After an anaemic recovery from the global financial crisis, sentiment towards the region soured further as war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, leading to higher energy prices and lower economic growth. So what next for European equities? In the short term, the reduction in energy costs and China reopening are both helpful, but there are two other major changes to which investors need to pay attention. The first is investment regime change. In the last decade investors prioritised stocks that could benefit from low interest rates. Valuation was therefore less influential. Those days look to be over. The second change is the emergence of new secular themes, such as the energy transition and digitalisation. Our approach is to find companies with…

2021 Pinot Blanc, Reserve, Domaine Weinbach, Alsace, France £25.68, justerinis.com I have previously recommended three Weinbach wines on this page over the past 17 years, featuring a gewürztraminer, a riesling and a pinot gris. But this is the first time I have drawn your attention to their glorious interpretation of the pinot blanc grape. Weinbach is my favourite estate in the whole of Alsace, and the wines taste like they are made from equal parts epic-quality grapes and mesmerising magical spells. The 2021 was a challenging vintage across France, yet the entire ’21 portfolio at Weinbach is sensational. This beautiful PB is one of the cornerstones of the range, and you cannot put a foot wrong with any wine in the collection, so if you want to gather together a…

Chinese equities look poised to “hop ahead in the year of the rabbit”, says Dale Nicholls of Fidelity China Special Situations. The rapid reversal of zero-Covid policies and “attractive” valuations mean 2023 is shaping up to be a good year for the country’s stocks. China’s CSI 300 index has gained 18% since the end of October amid investors’ enthusiasm about the reopening of the world’s second-biggest economy. The easing of pandemic-era restrictions is part of a broader effort to stoke growth, says The Economist. Beijing has rolled back a two-year long campaign to reduce leverage in the property sector, suspending limits on the amount some developers can borrow and ordering banks to bail out incomplete housing projects. The results are already apparent: “Sales of existing homes rose by more than…

In an attempt to resolve “longstanding frictions” in its long alliance with Nissan, Renault has agreed to cut its ownership of the Japanese car giant to 15%, says Albertina Torsoli on Bloomberg. The rest of its 43% stake will be moved into a non-voting French trust with the aim of selling the $4bn worth of shares “in a coordinated and orderly process likely to play out over several years”. The plan will also “allow Renault to push on with carving out its electric-vehicle and software business called Ampere”, which the firm wants to list in 2023. The deal, which must still be approved by the Nissan board, is the latest twist in an alliance “borne out of adversity and necessity at the turn of the century, when Renault rescued Nissan…

Six to buy Antofagasta The Telegraph The price of copper has soared and structural undersupply is likely to keep prices buoyant in the longer term. Shares in this Chile-focused FTSE 100 miner have followed the metal higher, but there could be much more to come. The firm expects to produce between 670,000 and 710,000 tonnes of copper this year, and that figure could hit 900,000 tonnes by 2026 if it expands production at its operation in northern Chile. With “solid finances” and a reasonable valuation, the shares are a buy. 1,765p Assura The Sunday Times Shares in this GP-surgery landlord tumbled by a fifth last year amid gloom about the property market. However, the FTSE-250 firm’s focus on primary healthcare makes it “more resilient than other property stocks”, especially at…

Politics & economics 31 January is Brexit Day, an anniversary marking three years of “political mayhem and economic calamity” since our formal exit from the EU, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Although Labour says there is to be “no rejoining” (so as to deny Tories a “re-run of Brexit” in 2024 to “distract from the economy, the cost-of-living crisis and collapsed public services”), pollster John Curtice says polls now show that 57% would vote to rejoin the EU, a swing in part accounted for by so-called “Bregretters”. Brexit is predicted to lead to a 4% long-run loss in productivity while inflation and energy prices are higher relative to the EU. It’s hard to disentangle how much of Britain’s economic performance is down to Brexit, and how much is down…

With the Conservatives continuing to trail Labour in national opinion polls by between 17% and 29%, attention is turning to the date of Rishi Sunak’s departure from Downing Street. With £25,552 matched on Smarkets, punters have him at 4.3 (23.2%) to be replaced as PM this year, 1.9 (52.6%) to leave in 2024 and 2.9 (34.5%) to depart in 2025 or later. Betfair doesn’t have a market on when he will leave as PM, but it does have a slightly different one on when he will be replaced as Conservative leader. With £9,388 matched, he is at 5 (20%) to be replaced this year, 2 (50%) in 2024 and 2.62 (38.2%) to be replaced in 2025 or later. I don’t think either of the bets offer much value at the…

People have been talking about the potential for artificial intelligence to spark the next big wave of technological and industrial disruption for at least a decade now. But ChatGPT represents the first practical demonstration of its power most of us have yet seen. It is a simple, well-designed web tool, and you can ask it questions and get it to perform tasks that even two or three years ago would have seemed beyond a computer. And it performs pretty well. It may not be a genius, but it may be smarter than many of your colleagues, and that is quite something. When Microsoft invested $10bn in the not-for-profit OpenAI that created it, and in which the Tesla founder Elon Musk was an early investor, it became clear that something of…

Market timing refers to any strategy that involves trying to predict future price movements and shifting between different investments to take advantage of them. To take a simple example, if you believe that shares are likely to fall and bonds to rise over the next month, you would buy bonds and sell shares. You would only intend to hold these positions for as long as you think bonds will keep beating shares: as soon as you think the trend will reverse, you would buy shares and sell bonds. These predictions and trading decisions may be based on economic data: in the example above, you might believe that GDP growth will be much worse than expected and investors will dump shares because they fear a recession is coming. They could be…

“No one can ever take me away from me. I’m always going to be OK. No matter what happens, I’ve proven that theory. I know that I can live with nothing. I know I can live with something. I can live in an apartment. I can live in a trailer. I can live in a mansion. I can live in a castle. I’m just OK right here where I’m at.” Model and actress Pamela Anderson (pictured), quoted in Variety “Cars. Always a bad investment, although I’ve never regretted buying one. I lost about £20,000 on a Mercedes C63 AMG. I had it for about two years, but I loved it every day I got in it, so that’s just the price you pay for that pleasure.” Former soldier and bodyguard…

ft.com There are many reasons to hate a job, says Grace Lordan. Perhaps the tasks are arduous or boring, the pay low. Perhaps you feel you’re wasting your best years. Whatever the reason, it can’t go on: hating your job will harm your mental and physical health if you don’t do something about it. But what? First, recognise that you alone are responsible for resolving the problem – no one’s going to swoop in and rescue you. And don’t quit in a moment of despair – “no big life decisions should be made in misery”. Then seek greater clarity about why you hate your job. Are there aspects of it you like? Could you concentrate more on these and reorganise the job to shed the more hateful tasks, or work…

Cevian Capital, Europe’s largest activist investor, has dumped its entire stake in UK telecoms firm Vodafone, says the Daily Mail. Cevian had become one of Vodafone’s top-ten shareholders and was pushing the company to slim down and sell off poorly performing divisions to boost a share price that has fallen 60% in the last five years. However, the activist substantially reduced the size of its holding during the summer due to concerns that rising interest rates would prevent Vodafone from getting a favourable deal for assets. The sale of the firm’s Hungarian arm for £1.6bn seemed not to have helped matters, but the exit may also suggest that “Cevian has little faith in whoever replaces ex-boss Nick Read”, who was ousted last month.…

Chemicals companies aren’t popular investments. Some see them as fossil fuel-dependent, energy-intensive polluters threatened by environmental regulations. Others see their profitability driven mainly by the economic cycle. But we simply cannot do without chemicals. They turn raw materials – oil, natural gas, water and metals – into essential products. By far the biggest firm in the sector is BASF (Frankfurt: BAS), owner of the world’s largest integrated chemical plant at Ludwigshafen in Germany. BASF’s chemicals division supplies basic petrochemicals: ethylene, propylene, benzene and polystyrene. The materials arm of the company is a supplier of specialised products for the plastics industry. The industrial solutions division, meanwhile, develops ingredients for fuel and lubricants, resins and antioxidants. Another branch of BASF, surface technologies, supplies automotive and battery materials manufacturers. Nutrition and care customers…

If you’ve been paying your energy bills by direct debit for years, have you checked to see if you’ve built up any credit? asks Ruth Jackson-Kirby. Figures from Ofgem show that in November 2021 energy suppliers were sitting on £1.8bn of credit belonging to customers. Some people have built up over £1,000 of credit, and want it back. But that is easier said than done. “While suppliers have to refund your credit if you ask, there is no set time within which they have to do it,” says The Sunday Times. “Guidelines say only that firms need to refund customers ‘promptly’.” “I would support the introduction of a time limit on credit balance repayments,” Christine Farnish, a former director of energy regulator Ofgem, told The Times. “Accrued credit balances should…

As the cost-of-living crisis bites, many businesses could find that their staff are struggling to stay on top of their finances. One way to help could be to introduce a salary-advance scheme. The idea is to give employees access to a proportion of their pay before the day they are paid, helping them overcome short-term financial pressures without having to take out expensive credit from firms such as payday lenders. The cash could be used in an emergency – when an unexpected bill arrives, for instance. Supermarket giant Tesco launched a scheme of this kind at the end of last year, but the arrangements aren’t only for large companies. Working with a third-party provider that manages the scheme on their behalf, small businesses may be able to offer similar benefits.…

The stock of Digi International (Nasdaq: DGII), which specialises in software and hardware related to the “internet of things” (IoT), is enjoying rising demand for its products. Digi International sells networking devices such as routers and gateways that act as a hub for an IoT network, says The Motley Fool. These devices allow customers to track products, which has proved a boon during the Covid-induced supply-chain problems. This explains why the stock has shrugged off the recent slump in the technology sector. The shares have jumped by 62% in the last 12 months.…

Blockbuster was set up in 1985 by David Cook following a dispute with the video chain Video Works. His idea of setting up a chain of video stores that featured a wide range of titles, didn’t stock adult movies and displayed the videos on the shelves (rather than behind the counter) proved a hit with customers. Fuelled by the acquisition of rivals, Blockbuster would reach 3,400 stores by 1993, and was purchased by media company Viacom for $8.3bn the same year. The deal was not a success, but Blockbuster was still worth $2.5bn when it was returned to the stock exchange in 1999. What was the idea? In 2000 Blockbuster received an offer from an upstart DVD-rental-by-post service called Netflix – ironically founded out of anger at Blockbuster’s fees for…

Investors are still hesitating, wobbling, not sure which direction to take. Like passengers lost in the Paris metro, they turn left, they turn right, first paralysed by choice, later befuddled and fatigued by wrong choices. We don’t know which direction markets will take either, but we suspect the smart money is on “down”. If not now, then soon enough. There are just too many banana peels on the ground. The US federal government has bumped up against its debt ceiling again. Janet Yellen, previously in charge of the Fed’s misguided monetary policy, and now messing things up on the fiscal policy front, says she can use “extraordinary measures” to keep the heat on in the Capitol building. But those measures won’t last forever. In June, push will come to shove…

€79bn The total value of sales in vintage and pre-owned watches by 2033, triple the €25bn the market made last year, according to forecasts by LuxeConsult. Pre-owned watch sales rose 20% in value to €52bn; sales for new watches rose 12%. £422,000 How much the government paid “towards the costs and damages incurred” by the Ever Given when the container ship blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, according to a an official filing. It is not known what cargo the government was shipping. 700 The price in Filipino pesos (£10.40) for a kilo of onions in the Philippines last month – more than the cost of meat and the country’s minimum daily wage, says BBC News. Rising demand post-pandemic and bad weather affecting crops are driving…