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People are their own worst enemy. During the pandemic, a few weeks after the vaccines arrived, many people took to Twitter, now X, to proclaim that they would never have AstraZeneca’s vaccine because something awful had happened to a friend or relative of theirs after the injection. Someone satirised this outlook by claiming they wouldn’t have the jab because a friend of theirs got trampled by cows after receiving it – an example, perhaps, of herd immunity. Confusing correlation and causation is an error investors must always be aware of, too. Evolution has trained us to look for patterns. Recognising when, say, a mammoth was in a bad mood and what it would then do would have kept our cave-dwelling forebears alive. “Only two things can make a stockmarket fall…

Last year was one to forget for initial public offerings (IPOs), says Michael Hytha on Bloomberg: $138bn was raised by flotations across the world’s 15 biggest exchanges last year, barely a fifth of the $669bn figure reached during the 2021 IPO boom. High interest rates and sluggish equity markets dissuaded technology firms from floating, with a “spine-crumpling” 94% fall in listing volumes on the US Nasdaq market compared to 2021. London managed just over $1bn in IPO volume, also down 95% from the 2021 figure. Hong Kong’s $5.9bn in 2023 listings was the city’s lowest total in more than 20 years, say Dave Sebastian and Rebecca Feng in The Wall Street Journal. Long the preferred venue for Chinese companies raising capital internationally, the city did $51bn in IPO volume as…

Last September JD Sports CEO Régis Schultz was “full of confidence about the future”, says Joanne Hart in This is Money. He said profits for the year to February 2024 would eclipse £1bn. But last Thursday “a very different picture emerged”. Warm weather and stiff competition prompted the group to issue a profit warning, wiping almost 25% off the stock. While some shareholders may hope that this profit warning is “just a blip”, others are already wondering whether it shows that management has taken its “eye off the ball”, or even if this is “part of a broader slowdown in the so-called athleisure market”. If the problems at JD Sports are indeed a sign that the athleisure industry is in trouble, then it has only itself to blame, says Nils…

Germany is on the brink of a “winter of discontent”, with farmers and lorry drivers blocking cities and motorways in protest against plans to end tax breaks on diesel, says David Crossland in The Times. The blockades and rallies of “tens of thousands” are already being described as one of the biggest protests in Germany since World War II and coincide with strikes by train drivers and doctors. Farmers argue that the end of the tax breaks, worth about €900m a year, will “drive them out of business” and that concessions by the government of a phased introduction don’t go far enough. On the face of it, the farmers really don’t have much to complain about, says Ralph Schoellhammer on Unherd. The German agricultural sector is in “surprisingly good economic…

There are many dilemmas for stock investors, from the heavy concentration in highly valued tech stocks in the US to the question of whether emerging markets will start earning their place again after a dire decade. But one that gives me relatively little trouble when it comes to our asset-allocation portfolio is the role of European large caps, including the UK. That’s not because I am certain that these will do especially well over the next few years – although there is a reasonable chance – but because the price we pay is fair. There’s a tendency to talk about European stocks as if they’ve performed very poorly for a long time. The reality is that they have merely been a bit disappointing. The MSCI Europe has had an annualised…

We’re losing faith in the NHS cult Daniel HannanThe Telegraph “There is a bizarre contradiction in what junior doctors’ leaders tell us,” says Daniel Hannan. They point out that stressed medics are emigrating in their thousands, but “hit the roof” at any suggestion that the NHS might be “brought into line” with the systems of the countries they are emigrating to. British medics are at the upper end of global salary leagues, and although clinicians in places such as Germany and Australia are paid more, it “remains taboo to point out” that these countries have mixed systems, with public and private healthcare provision. In Switzerland, which spent 11.3% of its GDP on healthcare in 2022, the same as us, I was recently seen in an A&E department whose 15-minute waiting-time…

newyorker.com The British Library in London has been all but incapacitated since a cyberattack last October, says Sam Knight. The public Wi-Fi isn’t working, nor is the online catalogue. The phone lines are down, as is the website and all online services, including the electronic nervous system that unified the library’s connections and shared them with the world. Deliveries of items offsite have been on hold. That has ramifications that are dire for many more than the John Donne scholar who can’t order up his desired manuscript. The library is “the nation’s main wellspring of knowledge”, and the drought will have knock-on effects for sectors of importance to the British economy. The library has been the victim of a cyberhacking group, known as Rhysida, which hacks into systems, steals the…

The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), an activist hedge fund run by billionaire Christopher Hohn, surged by 32.7% last year thanks to gains from Alphabet and Moody’s, says the Financial Times. Stock in the Google parent climbed 58% in 2023 on the back of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, while shares in the US credit-rating agency rose 40%. The fund easily eclipsed the 24.2% rise of the S&P 500 index and the FTSE 100’s 3.8% gain. TCI, which manages more than $49bn in assets, bounced back from an 18% loss in 2022 following a global market sell-off. Last year, Hohn persuaded Airbus to abandon its attempt to buy a stake in French IT firm Atos and tried to oust three members from the board of telecoms infrastructure group Cellnex.…

Some pundits believe that they will be able to tell whether this will be a good or bad year for shares by the end of the month. This is because of the so-called January Barometer: the idea that the performance of the stockmarket in January foreshadows its annual showing. An even more radical version of this indicator argues that you can determine the stockmarket’s overall direction just from the first five days of trading in each year. There seems to be some evidence behind it, at least superficially. Christian Galipeau of Putnam Investments notes that between 1950 and 2020, the S&P 500 returned an average of 17.6% during the entire year when it rose in January, compared with an average yearly return of 12.96% for the whole period. Similarly, when…

Looking for ways to cut your insurance premiums? Many of the things you might think would cut your premium may in fact cost you more money. If you have a car you must have car insurance, but there are different levels to choose from. The bare minimum is third-party. This policy will cover damage you cause to other vehicles, but not your own. “You might assume that a lower level of cover would mean a lower premium,” but no, says George Nixon in The Times. Data from Confused.com shows that the average third-party policy cost £3,462 last year, whereas the average fully comprehensive policy was £1,443. “This is because insurers think third-party only drivers are riskier.” Also think twice before putting your car into the garage to cut your premiums.…

While the government is scrapping the lifetime allowance, it is sticking with an annual allowance (AA) on pension contributions. But the rules are now far more generous. For those filling in their 2022-2023 self-assessment tax returns, the AA for the year was £40,000. This was the total amount you could pay into all your pension schemes combined, including both tax relief and employers’ contributions. A formula applies for converting final-salary pension benefits into a cash sum for AA purposes. For the current tax year, by contrast, the AA is £60,000. There are two exceptions here. Firstly, you can’t pay more in pension contributions than you earn in income – so if your income over the year is less than the AA, this effectively reduces your income. Secondly, higher earners receive…

A Picasso painting topped the list of the most expensive works sold at auction over the past 12 months for the second time in three years – Femme à la montre (pictured) fetched $139.4m at Sotheby’s in New York in November. Otherwise, it was a rather unsettled year for the major auction houses, which perhaps isn’t surprising when set against a background of rising interest rates tempting money away from riskier assets and the 91% rise in the art market over the past decade, according to Knight Frank Research. It may be that the market in collectables is finally running out of steam. Still, Sotheby’s more or less managed to keep the show on the road with total sales of around $8bn in 2023, “on par”, it said, with 2022.…

The bosses of Britain’s biggest companies made more on average in the first four days of 2024 than the £34,963 that a typical worker makes in a year, according to the High Pay Centre think tank. But “the truth is that this pay gap is an obvious feature of a free market where top pay in business is associated with great responsibilities and considerable stress”, says Len Shackleton in The Spectator. FTSE 100 CEOs are paid in line with their French and German counterparts, but considerably less than US peers. The pay gap is also negligible compared with other top earners, such as footballer Jack Grealish (pictured), who earns £30,000 a week for “dribbling around in circles [and] hoofing the ball over the bar”. The top 1% of earners pay…

Shares in Boeing have slipped amid further concern over the safety of the aircraft manufacturer’s 737 Max planes, says Gwyn Topham in The Guardian. An Alaska Airlines flight was forced into an emergency landing after the door plug (a section of the plane replacing an emergency exit) tore away from the airframe, leading a hole in the fuselage “as wide as a refrigerator” that “sucked the shirt off a teenage boy sitting nearby” soon after take-off from Portland. While no one was killed or seriously injured, US regulators have ordered the temporary grounding of all Max 9 models with door plugs. Five years ago, a pair of crashes involving the 737 Max “blackened the company’s reputation and cost it tens of billions of dollars in damages, government fines and lost…

Five to buy Ashtead The Sunday TimesA quiet US hurricane and wildfire season dented performance last year at this FTSE 100 industrial-equipment rental specialist, but fickle City investors should take a long-term view. The US-focused group is a major winner from Joe Biden’s infrastructure splurge, with exposure to 499 projects collectively worth $620bn. Managers of “mega-projects” (think new solar and wind farms) prefer to work with established businesses like Ashtead, which bring “scale and financial muscle” to the table. On 14 times earnings the shares still trade at a discount to historic averages. 5,108p BYD Barron’sWhile there are many electric-vehicle (EV) firms, arguably only two globally are viable, investable businesses at present. Tesla is well known, but on 64 times earnings the shares are alarmingly dear. That leaves this Chinese…

Politics & economics A federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday gave Donald Trump’s argument that former presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution a “highly sceptical reception”, says David Charter in The Times. The question has never been tested in courts because Trump is the “first former president to have been charged with any crimes more serious than a speeding ticket”. Trump is accused of trying to undermine the 2020 election, leading to the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. His lawyer, John Lauro, said that unless the three-judge panel ruled in his favour, they would open a “Pandora’s box of tit-for-tat prosecutions by political rivals”. Trump said there would be “bedlam”. The court hearing, just days before the beginning of the presidential primary process…

This is set to be the year of elections, almost certainly including a general election here in the UK (although it could in theory take place as late as January 2025) and they don’t come bigger than the battle for the White House. By the time this magazine reaches your hands, we will be only a few days away from the Iowa caucuses, which mark the start of the presidential primaries, at least for the Republican side (the Democrats have a different schedule). Donald Trump is still the strong favourite to become the Republican nominee. With £4.3m matched on Betfair (and £562,000 matched on Smarkets), the former president is at 1.27 (78.7%) to win the Republican nomination. Trump’s national security adviser and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is in…

Tech stocks did well. So did luxury-goods companies, and even some of the emerging markets. But China was a graveyard for investors over the last year. A mere $6bn of Chinese stocks were bought by foreigners in 2023, compared with more than $50bn in 2021. It is even more unpopular than London’s FTSE 100. No one wants anything to do with the Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong markets. The CSI index, which covers the 300 largest firms traded in Shanghai and Shenzhen, fell by 11% last year, following losses of 22% in 2022, and 5% in 2021. Three straight years of declines is a record for the Chinese market. The new year didn’t start any better, with Chinese stocks recording their worst opening week for 21 years. Emerging markets are…

A cash-flow statement is divided into three sections. Cash flow from operating activities (often referred to as operating cash flow or cash from operations) is the amount of cash a firm generates from the sales it makes in the course of its regular business. Cash flow from investing activities is cash spent on or generated from long-term assets. This typically includes buying or selling fixed assets (and investments in securities), as well as capital expenditure on maintaining and improving fixed assets. Cash flow from financing activities is payments to the company’s creditors and owners. This includes proceeds from taking out loans or issuing bonds, interest paid on debt, and the repayment of existing debt, as well as money returned to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends. The combined change in…

“I’d never play the Stock Exchange; too much like gambling. And I’ve never been a gambler.” Sharon Osbourne (right) repeats a common misconception, quoted in The Telegraph “It’s a different risk calculation for a 20-year-old college student than for a 47-year-old with kids and a mortgage. So I’d say, don’t wait. You can’t learn the theory of entrepreneurship; you’ve just got to go and do it.” Harry Gestetner, entrepreneur who became a millionaire at 22, quoted in The Times “In the short run the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long run it is a weighing machine.” Legendary value investor Benjamin Graham, quoted on X “We had zero money before. I couldn’t…

bloomberg.com The average American business closes after about 21 years, says Angela Serratore. Some, though, last a lot longer. What are the secrets to their longevity? 1. Find a niche and hold on to it. Kongo Gumi, which restores Buddhist temples, is the world’s oldest continuously operating company, having been established in 578AD. It has made itself indispensable to the preservation of Japanese architecture. 2. Develop a signature product and stick with it. Santa Maria Novella was established as a pharmacy in 1542, and the brand’s “most enduring fragrance” is inextricably linked to its most famous patron, Catherine de’ Medici. Her perfumier created his greatest perfume yet for her marriage, and it has “enchanted” buyers ever since. 3. Focus on your core customer. Brooks Brothers was established as a small…

■ Troubled asset manager Jupiter has suffered two further blows. It revealed this week that investors withdrew £2.2bn from its funds in 2023, a larger sum than had been anticipated. Meanwhile, Ben Whitmore, who has been at the group since 2006 and is in charge of a fifth of its assets under management (his funds include the £2.1bn Jupiter Special Situations Fund and the Jupiter Income Trust) is leaving to set up his own operation. UK equity comprises two-thirds of the company’s asset base. The news wiped 12% off the share price. Numis analyst David McCann says there will be “some attrition” from Whitmore’s departure, and his exit prompts further concern over whether “Jupiter is an attractive place to work”. Jupiter’s CEO Matthew Beesley has embarked on a cost-cutting programme…

The Christmas and New Year period has been a mixed bag for my eight long tips, with three rising and five falling. Computerservices firm Computacenter rose from 2,654p to 2,742p, kitchen supplier Howden Joinery advanced from 760p to 781p and budget airline easyJet increased from 476p to 509p. However, luxury retailer Watches of Switzerland declined from 686p to 660p, discount retailer B&M European Value Retail slipped from 607p to 559p and outsourcing and energy-services company Mitie dipped from 99p to 97p. Recruitment specialist SThree also dropped, from 422p to 399p, while Moonpig, which sells greeting cards and gifts online, depreciated from 157p to 152p. My long tips are making a total profit of £1,175, slightly down from £1,188. My short tips are suffering from a festive hangover, with four out…

● “Parents can now claim child benefit online for the first time,” says Ali Hussain in The Sunday Times. Until now you had to claim with a paper form and it could take up to 16 weeks before you received your first payment. But now you can apply for child benefit through gov.uk and payments can come through in three days. Child benefit pays £24 a week for the first child and £15.90 for other children. Campaigners hope that this move to make the system simpler will be followed with action on the child-benefit charge. This sees anyone earning over £50,000 forced to pay back some, or all, of the child benefit they receive. “Child benefit going digital is an opportunity for the complex collection of the high-income charge to…

● Does your employer offer pension benefits through a small self-administered scheme (SSAS)? If so, a wave of consolidation sweeping across this niche of the pensions sector could affect your pension scheme in 2024, with experts predicting further deals to come following several high-profile mergers of SSAS providers. In that case read the small print of any proposal carefully. SSASs are complex arrangements, typically aimed at company directors and other high earners, which makes them demanding to run. Providers looking to exit the firm may be selling to consolidators keen to raise charges or find efficiencies that don’t always suit members. ● Thousands of pensioners underpaid state pension benefits because of errors at the Department for Work and Pensions going back decades should receive their first compensation benefits in the…

With her “colourful outfits and trademark headdresses”, Camila Batmanghelidjh (pictured) dominated and brightened the “customarily grey UK charity sector for well over a decade”, says the Financial Times. She died on New Year’s Day aged 61, but disappeared from public view before that when allegations of abuse and financial wrongdoing at her charity for disadvantaged youth, Kids Company, made her a “byword for mismanagement”. Kids Company collapsed in 2015. The “Angel of Peckham” was born in Tehran in 1963 to a wealthy family, and ended up in Britain after fleeing the Islamic revolution, studying at the University of Warwick and going on to train in counselling and psychotherapy. She started her first charity in the early 1990s before founding Kids Company in 1996. The Guardian’s Libby Brooks visited in 2004…

2022 Emil Bauer, Roter Veltliner, Wagram, Austria approx. £19.95, vineandbine.co.uk, dalexwine.co.uk, The Wine Yard Farnham 01252-717557, Grape & Grain 01363 -77719, Field & Fawcett 01904-489073 Last week’s wine was a one-off, bargain-priced cheapie, so it is back to business this week with a spectacular find that will realign your senses and set the scene for another year of fascinating wine discoveries. This is my first time writing up wine made from the rare roter veltliner grape. This variety is mainly found in Austria, and despite its name, it is not a relative of the more well-known Austrian stalwart grüner veltliner. Roter veltliner possesses rather attractive rose-coloured berries, and Emil Bauer’s is at the top of the pile. This is a haunting, textural and seductive wine, and this newly released 2022…

Britain’s blue-chip share index celebrated its 40th birthday on 3 January. But after more than two decades of “stagnating” prices, investors are praying for a bit of mid-life vigour, says David Brenchley in The Sunday Times. The index is unglamorous, as reliant on “oil firms, banks, tobacco companies and miners” today as it was at its inception in 1984. With less than 1% of the FTSE 100 related to tech firms, the London market has been left behind by the defining innovations of our times. Smartphone behemoth Apple has grown to become more valuable alone than all FTSE 100 firms combined. Youthful disrupter The FTSE launched on 3 January 1984 at a starting value of 1,000 points, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Before the FTSE, investors relied on the…

“In US dollar terms, the MSCI India Index is roughly 55% above its early-2020 level… the MSCI China Index is more than 35% below [it]… sentiment towards China has deteriorated due… to the disappointing post-Covid economic rebound… meanwhile, equities in India have benefited from strong economic growth… We see some scope for equities in China to catch up… in the near term. China’s economy has regained some strength… given how much pessimism seems to be priced in… Chinese equities could recover somewhat… [But] the outlook remains brighter for equities in India… We doubt that the ‘China risk premium’ will disappear anytime soon… By contrast, India’s growth potential is still very strong… in part due to the country’s demographics [and because] in a fracturing global economy, India is a prime candidate…

Shares in oil and gas giant Shell fell by 3% on Monday after weakening demand forced it to write down the value of refining and chemicals facilities in Singapore by $4.5bn. The decline in demand seems to have hit the wider chemicals business, which has “underperformed more broadly” in the last few months, says Emma Powell in The Times. Around 60%-64% of its plants are being used worldwide, compared with 75% a year ago. The poor news on chemicals has outweighed improvements in the gas-trading arm, which has done well amid rising volatility in wholesale prices. It also comes as investors have been concerned about Shell’s ability to keep up the current pace of buybacks. Shell has profited from higher raw materials prices over the past two years, says AJ…

Defence contractor Babcock International has long been hampered by low-margin legacy contracts, but management is turning this “FTSE frigate” around, recently reinstating the dividend after a four-year hiatus, says Investors’ Chronicle. Net debt has fallen rapidly and on less than ten times forecast earnings, the valuation is 33% cheaper than some UK defence peers (440p). Just 3% of revenue at the London Stock Exchange Group today comes from stock trading. Instead, it become a “financial data powerhouse”, with information services now accounting for more than 70% of revenue. Financial technology companies command higher valuations than more traditional exchanges, while a burgeoning partnership with Microsoft could prove “transformational” (9,274p). Shares in AI-semiconductor specialist Nvidia tripled last year, but it’s not too late to get on board. On 25 times forward earnings,…

● NatWest’s chairman Howard Davies (pictured) has come under fire after telling the BBC it is not currently “that difficult” to get on the property ladder and that people have always had to save for a deposit, says Maggie Pagano in the Daily Mail. That might be “fine and dandy” for Davies, who earns more than £750,000 a year, but house prices are at least ten times the average salary in the southeast of England, “where most youngsters want to live”. “What planet is Davies on?”. ● The competition to offer customers “something for nothing” is “hotting up” among fintechs, says Lex in the Financial Times. HSBC is “going after the technology disruptors” with its own fee-free app for international money transfers. But incumbent Wise should be able to see…

“We have a mini bull market into probably the first quarter of 2024, when I expect the market to top,” says Felix Zulauf, the veteran global macro trader. “We are in for roller-coaster years in the markets… and we will get more of that with extreme moves.” There is likely to be a sharp fall in US stocks in 2024, which might be “one of the few years in history that sees an important high and an important low in the same year”, Zulauf tells Financial Sense. Investors’ focus on the Magnificent Seven group of US tech firms – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla – makes them especially risky, since a downturn in the market could lead to a heavy sell-off in these stocks. “The Magnificent Seven…

branko2f7.substack.com China is considered to be the first country to have invented paper, says Branko Milanovic. It looks like it will be the first to “deinvent” it too. Visit China today and you’ll be hard pressed to see a scrap of it anywhere. Money, train tickets, newspapers, official documents, books – all of it has gone digital. This is often celebrated, but the downsides are ignored (see story left). A major one is that the information, including records of our current thinking, may not be conveyed to the future. “This is not a trivial issue.” The electronic system of storage is already old enough for us to have noticed that the digital realm is ephemeral. Old websites are broken, deleted or moved. Reams of official data are stored on obsolete…

Caledonia Investments (LSE: CLDN) is a unique investment trust. The company can trace its roots back to 1878 when Sir Charles Cayzer founded Clan Line, a shipping firm specialising in transporting cargo. While Clan Line could claim the title of the world’s largest cargo business in the 1930s, by the 1970s, it was falling behind as container ships replaced cargo vessels. The company, which had by then become British & Commonwealth Shipping, slipped slowly into obsolescence as it struggled to keep up with the new breed of competitors. In 1987, the fourth generation of the Cayzer family sold its remaining stake in British & Commonwealth to focus on Caledonia Investments, the family holding company. Just two years later, British and Commonwealth went into receivership. Diverse trust Today, Caledonia is 48%…

Following a brutal 2020 and 2021, when travel all but stopped due to the pandemic, the last two years have been kind to the airline industry. Despite the rise in the cost of living, people’s appetite for going on holiday appears robust. The latest projections from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) suggest that the number of airline passengers globally will not only rise again this year, but also finally eclipse pre-Covid levels. Unsurprisingly, this has had a knock-on impact on the airline industry: several carriers have resumed paying dividends, or at least promised to do so. However, they aren’t the only part of the industry to benefit from the rebound. SSP (LSE: SSPG) is a classic example of a company that will do well from the recovery in air…

A series of interest-rate hikes by the Bank of England has made saving a rewarding habit again. But what have the next 12 months got in store? In December 2022 you could have an average rate of 1.44% on an instant-access savings account. That yield had risen to 3.17% by last month. There have been some great deals on fixed-rate accounts too; witness NS&I’s 6.2% one-year fixed rate bond. However, with the base rate on hold and inflation falling, 2024 could be the year we see interest rates flatline. That doesn’t mean you can’t improve your returns, though. The average instant-access account may pay 3.17%, but the best buy from Metro Bank offers a 5.22% return. The best you can get on a fixed-rate account is 5.5% on a 12-month…

Legislation published in the run-up to Christmas finally spells out the detail of the government’s plans to abolish the lifetime allowance (LTA) on pension savings. But while ministers are sticking with the promise they made to dump the high tax charges previously payable on large sums, savers may still need to consider their plans for the future carefully. The LTA currently stands at £1,073,100. This is the total amount of savings you are allowed to build up across all your private pension plans with no tax liability. This includes defined-benefit pension schemes, where a special formula applies to convert the value of your guaranteed pension into a cash amount used in the LTA calculation. In previous tax years, anyone with pension savings above the LTA faced tax penalties of up…

“Telecom Plus is Britain’s only multi-service utility provider” UK mid-caps have historically delivered significant outperformance over the long term, not only against their large-cap counterparts in the UK, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, against other big international markets, such as the Stoxx Europe 600 and even the mighty S&P 500 in the US. Outperformance has typically been driven by superior profit growth over time, rather than UK mid-caps simply being accorded high valuations by investors. The UK mid-market is very dynamic, with a huge array of businesses at various stages of maturity, combined with a multitude of industrial and geographic exposures, offering excellent medium-term growth prospects. More recently, mid-caps have suffered a serious bout of underperformance, driven in part by persistent fears of impending recession and the impact that may…

Sri Lanka has had a tough few years. It suffered a series of hideous terrorist attacks in 2019, which, fast followed by global travel restrictions, led to the collapse of its tourist industry (once 10% of GDP). Mismanagement, corruption and too much borrowing from the Chinese for infrastructure projects (19% of its $35bn-worth of foreign debt is now owed to China) then combined to create a financial crisis and a harvest failure (everyone was forced to go organic when there was no foreign exchange to buy fertiliser). Shortages and protests duly followed. It doesn’t sound like much of a place to go on holiday, does it? It is. The IMF is working to help get things back on track with a new $3bn loan, various other loans are being restructured,…

Going… A first edition, first issue copy of Euclid’s Elementa Geometriae (pictured) is heading for auction with Christie’s in a sale that runs from next Wednesday to 2 February in New York. This compendium of facts about space and its properties, such as lines and shapes, numbers and ratios, was originally written by the ancient Greek mathematician in around 300BC. Since that time, the Elements has been required reading by mathematicians in training down to the present day, and as such it is considered the “oldest textbook in the history of science”. This edition was translated from Arabic into Latin by Adelard of Bath and Robert of Chester and printed in 1482. It is expected to fetch up to $400,000. Gone… Mathematician Alan Turing is “considered the father of computer…