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“To hear it from Singapore, the global economy is a glass half full. The central bank’s latest assessment [strikes an upbeat tone]… If this hub for trade and capital is right, then the global expansion will live to fight another day… After a strong recovery from the pandemic, Singapore entered 2023 fearing a [slump]. The island’s economy shrank in the first quarter… [its] leaders warned of tough times ahead… [But] the feared recession hasn’t happened… Inflation is retreating… The electronics cycle, so critical to southeast Asia, is poised for better days… GDP increased 1% in July to September… Not that Singapore is remotely cheap. Scars linger from huge increases in rent… Even the country’s beloved chicken rice… is becoming dearer… [Still] that a small country so intimately tied to the…

In a “mood-defying move”, private equity firm CVC, with €161bn under management, is preparing to float in Amsterdam, say Kaye Wiggins and Will Louch in the Financial Times. The initial public offering (IPO), likely to involve as little as 10% of its shares, “would enable CVC shareholders — including Singapore’s GIC, Kuwait Investment Authority, Hong Kong Monetary Authority and US asset manager Blue Owl Capital – to sell down their stakes”. But the move comes at time “geopolitical uncertainty, and just as rising interest rates are bringing an end to a more than decade-long boom in leveraged buyouts”. It seems “a pretty peculiar time to attempt an IPO”, agrees Pamela Barbaglia on Breakingviews. After all, proceeds raised from European listings so far this year are 40% below last year’s figure,…

Switzerland’s pharmaceutical giant Novartis has become leaner and meaner. It has just spun off its generics division Sandoz to focus on its core business of new drugs, says WirtschaftsWoche. These offer higher margins than knock-offs and boost the valuation investors are willing to assign to a drug firm. Novartis makes treatments for therapeutic sectors including oncology, immunology, and cardiovascular diseases. The group has 12 drugs set to achieve more than $1bn in sales this year, and a pipeline that is probably the industry’s best, with no fewer than 51 treatments and projects in relatively advanced stages of development.…

Politics & economics Wednesday 25 October marked Rishi Sunak’s first year in office. With his “uninspiring attempt” at an autumn “reset”, he has managed to “alienate both One Nation moderates and the Tory right”, says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Moderates are displeased by the government’s “ever more hard-line rhetoric on immigration and U-turns over net zero”. Free-marketeers want tax cuts that chancellor Jeremy Hunt “insists will not be forthcoming”. Both are “fed up”. A year on, Labour’s poll lead is still as high as 20 points and the two recent by-elections in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth have “exposed the reality that even MPs with majorities of 15,000-20,000 are at risk of losing their seats”. Sunak’s personal poll ratings are “brutal”, but they also reflect disillusion with 13…

The disastrous Conservative performance at the two by-elections in Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth seems to have pushed punters further in the direction of Labour. With £1.5m matched on Betfair, the odds of Labour getting an overall majority at the next election are now just 1.35 (74.1%). By contrast, the odds on none of the parties getting an overall majority have lengthened to 5.2 (19.2%), while the odds of a Conservative majority are now 13.5 (7.5%). I’ve already tipped Labour getting a majority, and see no reason to change my view, though as always don’t bet any more money if you’ve already taken my advice. One interesting bet is on Rishi Sunak’s future. A year on from becoming PM, Ladbrokes is offering 2/7 (77.8%) on Sunak being Conservative leader at the next…

On a visit to the Tata Steel plant in Wales this week, Keir Starmer dropped any pretence of fiscal responsibility, boasting instead about how much money a Labour government would offer it. The firm has already collected £500m to help it transition to carbon-neutral manufacturing, but Starmer said he would “be much more ambitious”. At least £3bn might be on offer. That’s just for starters. Over last weekend, the party briefed on plans to raise subsidies for electric cars and a huge expansion of an environmentally driven industrial strategy. Add it all up, and Labour is planning a more interventionist approach to industry than anything we have seen for over 30 years. Backing the wrong horse Big business will of course rally around that. Lots of business leaders have come…

Conventional bonds have a fixed principal – also known as the face value or the par value – that the holder will receive when the bond matures. When inflation is high and maturity is a long way in the future, the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the principal will be much less when the bondholder gets paid than it is today. Assume that you hold a bond that will pay £100 in ten years’ time, but inflation over the next decade averages 5% per year. Then the £100 you get in ten years is worth just £61 in today’s terms. Investors can take into account how high they expect inflation to be when deciding what price they are willing to pay for the bond. But inflation forecasts are not very accurate,…

“I have often… agreed to a low revenue for social projects that interested me. I have never lived to accumulate assets. I don’t possess any, and not an art collection either. I am not an American-style artist whose success involves success in business. That is not the woman I am.” French actress Isabelle Adjani (pictured), who is on trial for tax evasion, quoted in The Independent “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” American novelist Upton Sinclair, quoted on Twitter “I’m still hustling at my age… When you don’t have a Condé Nast contract, it’s sink or swim, baby. There are days when I live on $1 pizza. And there are days when I have a friend who…

spectator.co.uk There was not much Rishi Sunak could have done to salvage HS2, says Rory Sutherland. But there’s no reason why the bits that remain couldn’t still be made into a great railway. “All you need to do is redefine what a railway is for.” HS2 was dreamt up by “econometricians and other nerds” to solve a problem that no longer exists. But like the Millennium Dome, which was hopeless for the task it was designed for but is now an asset to London, perhaps HS2 “can be the right answer to a different question”. Forget about speed, journey time, capacity, and levelling up provincial economies, and instead watch Strangers on a Train or Brief Encounter. Then you’ll see how far train journeys have regressed from being delightful events to…

Shares in Digital 9 Infrastructure, the embattled infrastructure fund, jumped last week after its board appointed Goldman Sachs to develop strategies “focused on maximising shareholder value,” says Citywire. The appointment has ignited speculation the investment bank will be charged with overseeing an orderly wind-down of the trust, which is struggling under £545m of debt and trades at a 65% discount to net asset value (NAV). The appointment follows a consultation with investors who own three-quarters of the shares. The fund recently scrapped its second-quarter dividend in an attempt to reduce its leverage. It is also hoping to sell a stake in its prime asset, Icelandic data-centre operator Verne Global.…

● The government has increased its air-source heat pump grants for homeowners in England and Wales. The size of the grant rose by 50% on Monday to £7,500 “amid criticism about slow adoption of the low-carbon technology,” says Sarah Butler in The Guardian. “The £2,500 in extra support – on top of the £5,000 offered – aims to take the cost of installing an air-source heat pump below that of the average gas boiler.” Grants for installing ground-source heat pumps, meanwhile, have also increased, from £6,000 to £7,500. ● Record numbers of savers are opening fixed-rate bonds “as they try to grab 6% deals before they disappear”, says George Nixon in The Sunday Times. Around £17.3bn was deposited into fixed-rate bonds in July, up from £11.6bn in June, according to…

Investing in biotechnology companies before they become profitable is a risky business. It becomes less so, however, when the firm boasts a proprietary technology, growing sales of products on the market, a promising pipeline and collaboration agreements with big pharmaceutical companies. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: ALNY), a biotech with a market value of $20bn, fulfils these conditions, and should become profitable in 2025. ALNY is the world’s leading specialist in RNAi technology (ribonucleic acid interference) and is the only company with RNAi medicines approved and marketed (five approved therapies are on the market, with others to follow). RNAi medicines disable the production of the genes that cause specific diseases and thereby combat the root cause of disease rather than its symptoms. This Nobelprize-winning technology facilitates the development of new treatments for…

While tax rises are never popular with the public, their impact on the stockmarket is more complex. The conventional wisdom is that they are bad for share prices for two main reasons. Firstly, all else being equal, raising taxes reduces demand in the economy, resulting in slower economic growth, which would reduce sales and profits. What’s more, increasing corporate taxes can directly reduce the amount of money that firms make, while increasing capital gains tax makes equities less attractive. However, various US studies suggest that the relationship is a little more complicated. Investment platform Fidelity found that returns for the S&P 500 during the 13 individual years from 1950 to 2020 when taxes were hiked by large amounts were actually above the average for the entire 50-year period. Similarly, a…

Vintage groups, from The Monkees to The Spice Girls, bear witness to the power of the manufactured pop band. Mix it up with K-pop, bang it out on TikTok and YouTube, sit back and take the profits. That, at any rate, is the hope of South Korean music mogul Bang Si-hyuk, who for the past two years has been sifting through more than 120,000 applications to form a new girl group in partnership with one of the world’s largest record labels, IGA. The hype surrounding the joint-venture – dubbed “The Debut: Dream Academy” – is so intense that a documentary charting its twists and turns is already slated to air on Netflix next year. Bang’s proposed formula, says Billboard, is “to form an international group based on the K-pop methodology”…

The revolution in laboratory-grown diamonds suffered its first casualty earlier this month. WD Lab Grown Diamonds, the second-biggest producer in the US, filed for bankruptcy protection. Meanwhile, diamond giant De Beers, having surprised the industry in 2018 when it surrendered to an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude, said in September that it had changed its mind yet again and would no longer sell synthetic diamonds for its engagement rings. As with most things, the problem is price. Prices for polished one-carat natural diamonds have fallen by a quarter from their 2022 peak of $5,185, diamond analyst Paul Zimnisky tells the Financial Times. That is bad enough for the likes of De Beers and others. But prices for lab-grown stones have fallen by even more – from around…

Former Italian prime minister and billionaire Silvio Berlusconi (pictured) had collected over 25,000 paintings before his death in June. That inheritance has now become a hassle for his heirs, says Ido Vock on BBC News. Berlusconi “liked to buy portraits of women [which] he gave as gifts to friends”, according to Cesare Lampronti, a London-based art dealer and long-time friend of the late prime minister. These he bought from galleries and, later, late-night telesales programmes. “He knew what he was buying was worthless.” The entire collection is estimated to be worth around €20m, but with an average of just €800 per painting. Vittorio Sgarbi, an Italian art critic, described the majority of the works as “croste” – poor works of little to no value. That would not be so bad…

Global markets have so far largely shrugged off the Israel-Hamas war, but regional bourses are feeling the strain. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index, the Middle East’s biggest market, has fallen by 5% since the start of October on fears of a wider conflagration. Likewise, Abu Dhabi’s FTSE ADX General Index is off 4.5% so far this month. Israeli stocks have been hardest hit, with the TA-35 index tumbling by 13% since the start of the month. The shekel has fallen to an eight-year low against the dollar in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October, says Bloomberg. Currency traders have been piling up short bets, prompting the Bank of Israel, the central bank, to announce a “$45bn package of measures” to keep exchange rate volatility under…

Yields on the US ten-year Treasury bond have topped 5% for the first time since 2007. The ten-year yield hit 5.02% on Monday before falling back. The US ten-year is one of the world’s crucial assets thanks to its liquidity; its price is used as a baseline for a wide range of other asset prices. The ten-year yield fell as low as 0.5% in the pandemic, but has soared since. Bond yields move inversely to prices, so the spike means US bondholders are on course for a third year of losses. Higher yields reflect expectations that interest rates will stay elevated and concern about “surging US government debt”, says Russ Mould of AJ Bell. Treasuries are supposed to be the “ultimate haven asset” but even war in the Middle East…

The “stars aligned” for streaming service Netflix last week, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal, after it added 8.8 million net new paid subscribers in the third quarter. That is the highest number added in a single quarter since early 2020. What’s more the company said it “expects a similar jump in the fourth quarter”, as well as a further revenue boost from a “new price hike – its first major one since early 2022”. The surge, which appears to show that “the company’s effort to crack down on password-sharing has helped bring in new subscribers”, sent its shares up by more than 10%. The success of the crackdown means that Netflix is now trading on 25 times forward earnings, more than rival Disney, says Lex in the…

Swedish electric car-battery maker Northvolt is planning to list its shares in Stockholm, says the Financial Times. It is reportedly preparing an initial public offering (IPO) in 2024 that could value the group at $20bn, which would constitute one of Europe’s largest listings in recent years. Founded in 2017 by two former Tesla executives, Northvolt is Europe’s largest battery manufacturer. It has raised €1.2bn in convertible bonds this year, will soon unveil more than $5bn in debt financing, and also intends to construct four gigafactories and several battery recycling facilities across Europe and North America.…

● It has not been a vintage year for housebuilders, says Jonathan Prynn in the Evening Standard. The latest in a series of profit warnings came from Vistry, which expects a £40m hit to profits as it closes its private housebuilding arm and focuses solely on affordable housing. Sales by the seven biggest-volume players look set to fall by an average of 27% this year. Higher interest rates and the withdrawal of the Help to Buy scheme lie behind the slump, so it’s no surprise that the government is hinting at measures to prop up the market. But the state of the public finances suggests this will be limited to small-scale tinkering. “It seems unlikely that Jeremy Hunt’s proposals will significantly move the dial, either for housebuilders’ prospects, or the…

The resilience in the global economy is remarkable, says Michael Cembalest, the veteran investment strategist at JPMorgan. “Despite 400-500 basis points of rapid policy tightening in the US and Europe… and despite a very tepid Chinese recovery, global Q3 GDP growth is still projected to be around 2%.” One obvious explanation for this is the improvement in inflation, but there are other factors. Central banks have only removed around one-third of the total stimulus they injected into the system 2020 and 2021. “There’s still plenty of liquidity in the system and the cost of money is not prohibitive.” Rising interest rates are taking some time to feed through both for businesses and households in the US and Europe, since many took advantage of the period of low rates to fix…

capx.co The Institute for Fiscal Studies gives the impression that the UK government’s spendthrift ways is a result of long-term underlying demographic processes. It isn’t, says Andrew Lilico. The rise in spending happened very quickly. In 2019, we were spending 39.5% of GDP. This year it’s more than 46%. That’s a 17% rise in the role of the state in just a few years. It is the result of “political choices, not demographics”. The UK is in a bind. With spending unlikely to fall below 45% of GDP, taxes unlikely to rise above 40% of GDP, and government-debt interest rates of 4%-5%, then GDP would need to be growing at getting on for 3% per year for the debt-to-GDP ratio not to spiral ever upwards (assuming inflation continues to be…

■ Vanguard has become tangled in a dispute about how the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) enforces rules for fund managers, says Bloomberg. The US money manager’s LifeStrategy range of funds, which collectively oversee £40bn, appear to have breached the regulator’s rules concerning concentration. The FCA’s rule book says collective investment funds are allowed to own 25% of the units of another collective investment vehicle, and when a fund range is structured as an umbrella, as the case with LifeStrategy funds, the limit applies to all of the funds. In total, LifeStrategy funds own 40% of another Vanguard fund, the £12bn Vanguard FTSE UK All Share index fund. That suggests the FCA should be taking more of an interest, but it isn’t. What’s more, according to the regulator’s latest waiver-and-modification list,…

Have you thought about who receives what after you die? If you have, and you’ve written a will to arrange it, you are in the minority. Research by Canada Life has found that half of UK adults don’t have a will. Only one in three over-55s have one. “Everyone should do a will the minute they get married or have children,” says Hunter Davies in The Sunday Times. There are many advantages to having a will and keeping it up to date. Firstly, it avoids any unsightly fights at your graveside. Secondly, it ensures you get your final wishes, and your family are cared for as you would want. Thirdly, it has significant tax benefits. The research by Canada Life found that the main reason people haven’t bothered with a…

Four in ten pension savers check their progress in retirement planning less than once a year, new data suggests. But while the People’s Partnership, the financial-services firm behind the survey, urges people to take more interest in their savings, it can be hard to know what to look for when you check your pension statement. In fact, behind the headline numbers, there are at least five key factors to consider. Firstly, your pension provider will give you a forecast of the annual pension income you are currently on target to receive at your chosen date of retirement. This will be quoted in today’s money, to give you a reasonable idea of how far your pension is set to stretch – though remember to add the figure to your projected state…

Alnylam’s 2022 results show total sales up by 23% to $1.04bn (comprising product revenues of $0.89bn plus collaboration and royalty revenues) with research and development (R&D) investment of $0.88bn, an operating loss of $0.785bn and a net loss of $1.13bn. The balance sheet revealed cash and securities of $2.2bn and convertible debt of $1.02bn. In February, ALNY said it expected 2023’s product revenues to rise from $1.20bn to $1.285bn, with collaboration and royalty revenues of $100m to $175m. August’s second-quarter results reiterated the February guidance. The share price is $159.60 and analysts’ average one-year target for the shares is $229. There is no dividend yet. The risks include the possibility of clinical trial failures of the drugs in the pipeline, competitors launching new treatments for diseases targeted by ALNY and…

Five of my seven long tips have declined over the past fortnight. Broker Clarksons slipped from 2,635p to 2,530p, while discount retailer B&M fell from 565p to 545p. Kitchen supplier Howden Joinery decreased from 695p to 637p; luxury brand Watches of Switzerland dropped from 500p to 495p; and recruitment agency SThree dipped from 348p to 340p. The only exceptions were outsourcer Mitie, which stayed unchanged at 97p, and IT-services group Computacenter, which advanced from 2,472p to 2,562p. Overall, my long tips are making net losses of £879. All six of my short tips moved in my favour. Space-based broadband network builder AST SpaceMobile plunged from $3.72 to $2.74, while video game retailer GameStop went down from $14.92 to $13.49. Electric-car charging-station company EVgo also dropped, from $3.13 to $2.32. At…

John Legend (pictured) had already long lived up to his (stage) name in the music business, and has enjoyed a “near endless array of hit songs, movie credits and TV shows”, says Daphne Bugler in GQ. Having started out playing piano and singing in nightclubs after working the day job for Boston Consulting Group and self-producing albums, Legend is now the first black man to have attained “EGOT status” – he has won all four of the major US arts awards: the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. In 2019, he was made singing coach for reality TV show The Voice. His life beyond music has long “stirred chatter”, too, and he has a “roster of businesses” to his name, from his own wine label to a skincare brand and a…

£29.50, yapp.co.uk I have followed the wines from Domaine Saint Gayan for over 30 years, and if you surf the Yapp website, you will find a Côtes du Rhône at £14.25, a Sablet at £15.75, a Rasteau at £16.95 and a Gigondas at £22.25. These lusty red wines are all superb autumn/winter classics, and their prices have barely moved over the passage of time. This hardworking estate makes grenache-based, spicy, ripe wines, and they deliver everything you could wish for from the southern Rhône without breaking the bank. So, imagine my delight when the Yapp team poured me a glass of the top-flight, super-elite Fontmaria cuvée from the excellent 2015 vintage at a recent tasting. I had never tasted this wine before, so I asked for the lowdown. It comes…

Going… A fibreglass costume head of C-3PO, the iconic robot from Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), is the star lot of the Propstore’s film memorabilia auction on 9 November in London. It features carefully crafted dents on the forehead, chin and left eyebrow – the result of an attack on C-3PO, Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 by Tusken Raiders in the film. Anthony Daniels, who played and voiced C-3PO, is the first to speak in the franchise, and he is the only actor to have featured in all Star Wars theatrical releases, according to the auction house. The British actor kept the head after filming, which he used to promote the film. The original surface has since been restored. It is expected to fetch up to £1m. Gone… A model…

London is Europe’s stockmarket champion again, say Joe Easton and Michael Msika on Bloomberg. The combined market capitalisation of primary listings in London is now $2,888.4bn, edging ahead of the $2.887.5bn figure for previous top dog Paris. Valuations on the Paris bourse have been hit by sliding luxury share prices. London has been helped by its greater weighting towards energy as oil prices have spiked. The FTSE has also been boosted by the Bank of England’s decision to hold interest rates steady last month. That weakened the pound, which flatters the overseas earnings of multinational British blue-chip firms in sterling terms. France’s CAC 40 has fallen by 9% since its April peak, although the index remains up by 4% this year. That compares with a 2.5% fall on the FTSE…

US oil major Chevron has decided to “double down on fossil fuels”, says Emily Gosden in The Times. It has bought Hess, a smaller rival, in a $53bn all-share deal. The purchase is “the second blockbuster oil and gas takeover this month” following ExxonMobil’s $60bn acquisition of Pioneer, the fracking group. This year has now seen oil and gas mergers worth $254bn, the highest total for this stage in a year since 2014. Chevron, valued at more than $300bn, said the deal would strengthen its long-term prospects by adding “world-class assets”, including “significant fracking assets in America’s Bakken shale region in North Dakota, as well as interests in the Gulf of Mexico and southeast Asia”. The “jewel of the deal” is Hess’s investment in offshore Guyana, say Clifford Krauss and…

Four to buy Diploma The Telegraph The miserable ratings applied to many UK shares bode well for this “acquisitive” firm. A distributor of kit such as “gaskets, wiring and seals”, Diploma has snapped up 15 smaller firms in two years. Recent trading has been robust given the global economic backdrop. The 1.8% dividend yield may not seem exciting, but the payout has risen by 79% in two years and further “substantial” rises look likely. A valuation of 24 times earnings is reasonable valuation in view of strong earnings growth. 2,942p Frasers Group The Sunday Times The owner of Sports Direct is well on the way to becoming Europe’s top sports retailer following the takeover of German chain SportScheck. Sports Direct has moved on from the days of “cluttered branches with…

The US House of Representatives continues to be effectively “paralysed” by the inability of Republicans to unite behind a constitutionally required replacement for Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, says Lauren Fedor in the Financial Times. Earlier this month, a group of eight rebel Republicans took advantage of their party’s small majority to push through a vote of no confidence in McCarthy, forcing his resignation. All subsequent replacement candidates chosen by the Republican caucus have all decided to quit due to internal opposition. Trump ally Mike Johnson (pictured) is the latest candidate to be selected by the House GOP, but it is doubtful his candidacy can “go the distance”. The whole saga “has exposed the dynamics that have made the House GOP nearly impossible to govern”, says Luke Broadwater in The…

Last week, I said that even though conventional bond yields have risen a long way from their lows, we’re not yet tempted by them for our asset-allocation portfolio, except perhaps very short-dated bonds. We’re not forecasting that rates are going much higher in the short term (we forecast as little as possible), but it seems clear that yields don’t offer much compensation for the risk that they do. They seem pretty much at the lower end of where you’d expect them to be. Inflation-linked bonds (see below) are rather different. At present, ten-year US Treasury inflation protected securities (Tips) pay a real yield of about 2.5%, which is almost as high as they’ve been for 20 years (see chart). When they were first issued in the late 1990s, enthusiasm was…

The plan to save the NHS EditorialThe Economist By the end of 2024, the Our Future Health research study will be the largest of its kind in the world, says The Economist. The plan is to recruit five million people and get them “weighed, measured, quizzed, genotyped and phenotyped”, and then “put the data to work to see who gets sick, with what and when, and why,” with a simple aim: to “save them – and the NHS”. As John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the study’s chair, says, the NHS is “not sustainable in its current form”. When Winston Churchill promised Britain a health service “from the cradle to the grave”, no one dreamt that Britons “would spend so long with one foot in that…

bondvigilantes.com/blog “Everyone knows that the best way to kill a zombie is to smash its brain,” says Robert Burrows. “For zombie firms, that killer blow is higher interest rates.” So-called zombie companies have long existed on borrowed time: they struggle to generate enough profits to cover their debt obligations, yet have managed to stay afloat since the 2008 financial crisis thanks to ultra-low interest rates. As central banks have raised rates, we might have expected to see a purge. But the zombies lumber on. Why? A look at the US market yields some counter-intuitive insights. As interest rates have risen, corporate net interest payments have actually come down as companies have managed to borrow long, take the proceeds and invest them in short-dated government bonds or money-market funds. “Not ideal…

Clean-energy funds and related equities have taken a hammering this year. The Global Clean Energy ETF (exchange-traded fund) with $3.5bn in assets is the biggest, most liquid green-energy ETF. It has fallen by 26% since 1 January 2023. UK-focused investors will have noticed an echo of this pain in the investment-trust sector. The battery-storage industry has been especially badly hit. The three listed funds in this area have suffered huge falls in their share prices: Harmony Energy Income Trust (LSE: HEIT) is down by 40% to 75p; the Gore Street Energy Storage Fund (LSE: GSF) has fallen by 40% to 68p; and the Gresham House Energy Storage Fund (LSE: GRID) has declined by nearly 50% to 88p. (I am a non-executive director at GRID.) This sector had been a market…

Britons with forgotten workplace pensions or individual plans have lost touch with £26bn worth of pension savings, writes David Prosser. The latest data from the Pension Policy Institute reveals that the figure has risen by £7bn over the past four years, despite a series of initiatives aimed at reuniting people with their money. If you think you might be owed a share of that money, then make it a priority to investigate. Start by making a list of all your previous employers, focusing in particular on those that you don’t have any current pension entitlement details from. You should also add to the list any private pension providers with which you think you may have saved money in the past. The onus is on you to get in touch with…

● Thousands of women – and some men – should soon start receiving letters saying they are owed compensation because past failures of administration at the Department for Work and Pension mean they are not receiving their full state-pension entitlement. The largest group affected by the errors – people who took time off work between 1978 and 2010 to care for a child or someone in ill-health – should automatically be contacted. But those in other groups, including married women whose husbands turned 65 before March 2008, may need to make a claim. ● Growing numbers of British citizens who have retired to European Union countries are struggling to access their pensions. The problem has grown as British banks have become more reluctant to offer UK accounts to those living…

With governments around the world seeking to phase out the internal combustion engine, all the major car companies are investing billions in developing electric vehicles. The key emblem of this shift is Tesla, which despite analysts’ widespread scepticism still commands a valuation of more than $650bn. This prompts the question of whether the aviation sector is also destined to go the electric route, given that it is criticised for its contribution to climate change. One company that seeks to benefit from this potential trend is Joby Aviation (NYSE: JOBY). You can’t fault Joby’s ambition. It intends to develop and manufacture thousands of electric vertical-take-off-and-landing (EVTOL) planes (essentially helicopters with wings). And it also wants to them to form the basis of an air-taxi service, which it will operate. Joby claims…

Japan’s delayed reopening and the return of tourists are supporting growth in consumption and demand for services. The economy is also transitioning to a moderately inflationary state as companies are increasing wages and finding it easier to raise prices. There is growing pressure on firms to enhance their corporate value and use excess cash to increase investments and shareholders’ returns. We are also seeing the rationalisation of corporate structures and reductions in cross-shareholdings. While signs of weakness in China’s recovery and the risk of a US recession are potential headwinds, this accumulation of positive factors is supportive of the mid-to-long-term outlook for the Japanese market. In terms of investment opportunities, Japan’s technology and materials sectors hold promise. Globally competitive companies in semiconductor equipment and electronic components are trading on compelling…

While fine-wine prices have soured a little this year – down 9.5% in the year to the start of October, according to the Liv-ex Fine Wine 1000 index – that has done little to deter fraudsters, says Mike Sheen on This Is Money. Previously, wine fraud had mainly been about passing off inferior wine as Grand Crus, but now a new ruse has arisen, as law firm Selachii warns. It says that criminals are increasingly setting up fake firms impersonating legitimate businesses then cold-calling unsuspecting wine owners with offers to buy their wine above the market price. Fake documents, such as purchase agreements, are drawn up, and instructions given on where to transfer the wine before payment can be made. “’Once the victim’s wine has been transferred into storage the…