Innehållsförteckning för Issue 966 från MoneyWeek

Still use cash? You’re a dinosaur. Last year in the UK, a mere £1 in every £5 was spent in cash. Most people now use debit or credit cards (or some other kind of digital money) for everything. It might seem to you that this doesn’t matter much – or perhaps that it is a good thing. Cash is grubby; it’s a bore to get hold of (the number of ATMs in the UK is falling) and impossible to replace when lost. Its absence also makes life easier for honest traders. With no cash to deal with, VAT returns practically calculate themselves, tills don’t need reconciling and those trying trips to the bank to deposit takings disappear forever (as do the robberies that come with having cash). The lack of…

Krones lost €3m in the second quarter of 2019, notes Wirtschaftswoche: high labour and material costs were key culprits. But the long-term outlook for the group, which notched up sales of €3.85bn last year, is auspicious. It provides beverage bottlers and food groups with individual machines and entire production lines to make and fill food packages and drinks containers. Global population growth and rising demand for food and drink imply steady revenue growth for years to come. A new factory in Hungary, due to open next year, should provide a near-term fillip. The stock looks reasonably priced on a 2020 price/ earnings ratio of 11 and a yield of just over 2%.…

Tour operator Thomas Cook, the world’s oldest travel group, has declared bankruptcy, triggering a “bitter blame game” over who was responsible, say Alice Hancock and Daniel Thomas in the Financial Times. The company’s banks, bondholders, largest shareholder (China’s Fosun) and managers “all came in for criticism”. Following the news that bosses had amassed £47m in pay and perks since 2007, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reflected on “whether the directors of these companies are properly incentivised to sort these matters out”. For its part, the government has been attacked for refusing to “step in” and help secure its future over the next few months by guaranteeing loans. The 178-year-old tour operator was always going to struggle given the change in the way people take (and book) holidays, says Patrick Collinson in…

The role of the opposition is to shadow what the government is doing, to “give voters some idea of what they would do in government”, says Matt Chorley in The Times. Labour seems to have taken one look at the “chaos enveloping” Boris Johnson’s government “and decided to upstage them. “On policy, personnel and politics”, the party is “in a mess”. Brexit dominated Labour’s annual conference, and there is still no sign that Jeremy Corbyn will “budge on his position of not having a position”. Instead, he wants to head into an election promising a referendum in which voters would be given a choice between a new Brexit deal and remaining, and later hold a “special conference” to decide how Labour would campaign in this referendum. At the same time,…

Until this week, Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats “had largely held the reins against impeachment”, despite repeated calls within their own party for them to take action, says Nate Silver on 538.com. This is because polls suggest that impeachment has remained “soundly unpopular”. The Ukraine scandal may be different from all the previous ones and warrant action, but Democrats would be wise to take public opinion seriously as there may well be consequences for going against it. Indeed, Trump may secretly have welcomed the news, says Ross Douthat in The New York Times. With the Democrats leading in the polls, anything that puts them on the wrong side of public opinion “may look better, through Trump’s eyes, than the status quo”. A fight over impeachment may also force the…

A recent spike in the interest rates on overnight loans between financial institutions (known as the “repo” market) has forced the Federal Reserve to inject billions into US money markets this month. It doesn’t spell “imminent disaster”, says Jeff Gundlach (sometimes known as “the bond king”), the founder and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital. However, it does suggest that the Fed might eventually start expanding its balance sheet again – “QE lite” as Gundlach puts it (QE is short for quantitative easing, whereby the Fed prints money to buy bonds or other assets). Gundlach made the comments in a webcast for his $54bn DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund earlier this month, reported on Bloomberg. Despite his relative calm about the situation in repo markets, Gundlach is anything but bullish.…

Bosses of failed travel company Thomas Cook have paid themselves more than £35m in the last 12 years, says The Guardian. Manny Fontenla-Novoa took £17m over four years before leaving in 2011, having cut 2,800 jobs after merging the firm with Mytravel and saddling the firm with £1bn of debt. He was succeeded by Harriet Green, who was paid £4.7m for less than three years’ work, plus a bonus of £5.6m. Green closed 370 shops and got rid of 2,500 jobs. She also claimed £80,000 travel and hotel expenses, including for stays at the five-star Browns hotel in Mayfair, where she stayed four nights a week. When she left, she got six month’s pay. Next up was Peter Frankenhauser who has made £8.3m, of which £4.3m is bonuses, since taking…

bloomberg.com/opinion Populism, which embraces a narrative of victimhood and grievance, has become a defining feature of public life, says Michael Strain. But it won’t last for ever. In a 2016 paper, economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch showed that such populist upheavals are normal following a financial crisis. Ten years later, everything settles down to the pre-crisis norm. Of course, it has now been more than ten years since the last crisis, and politics still seems far from normal. Perhaps this is because the 2008 crisis was more severe than usual. Or it may be that for many people the crisis didn’t really end for quite a few years after its start. But as it becomes increasingly obvious that populist policies don’t work, their popularity will fade –…

Peter Hargreaves (pictured) has joined the attack on the cosy relationship between Neil Woodford and Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), the fund management platform he established with Stephen Lansdown in 1981. Woodford’s Equity Income fund was suspended in June after a series of collapses at unquoted companies; HL had kept it as one of its top picks despite a poor run of form. Woodford seems not to have told HL the truth about his fund’s position, says Hargreaves, but “it’s also annoyed me that they let it go on so long”. Hargreaves still owns 32% of the company, which earned him a £64m dividend for the year to June.…

The evidence of this century is that gold itself is a much better investment than a mining company. But buy the right miner and you can do very well. There are many ways to buy gold. Pop into a dealer such as Bairds or Sharps Pixley, and purchase sovereigns as every discerning citizen should. Or you can give the good folk at Goldcore a bell and have it delivered to your door. You can also buy your gold online or via an app and have it stored for you in the safest vaults that vault-makers have yet to create, via Goldcore, Bullion Vault, and Goldmoney. The latter also offers payment services in gold. You can use your gold to pay for things via a credit card. Sounds convoluted but it…

• What does your company do? We design and make products for babies to help them sleep. Our pioneering baby rocker Rockit attaches to any pram or pushchair and gently rocks it when the stroller comes to a halt. We aim to make useful, functional and innovative products with a bit of personality. • What’s been your greatest achievement? Within just 18 months of being launched, Rockit was being exported to 40 countries around the world. We launched at Kind + Jugend 2017 in Germany thanks to tradeshow access programme (TAP) funding from the Department for International Trade (DIT). From there we received large orders from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Taiwan. We have also won over 20 design and consumer awards and we were recently selected to be an…

■ The collapse of Thomas Cook means that around 13,500 people are going to have their pensions moved into the Pension Protection Fund (PPF). “This industry-funded lifeboat offers protection for the members of final salary pension schemes of failed companies,” as Alex Ralph notes in The Times. Retired Thomas Cook workers should see no change to their payments as PPF rules mean they will still receive their “benefits in full”. But pension holders who have yet to retire could “face a cut of 10% to their entitlements”. On the plus side, however, the four Thomas Cook pension schemes have a surplus of around £100m. That may be enough for the PPF and the pension trustees to secure a buyout by an insurer, which would then take over the schemes’ payments.…

Restaurant Group (LSE: RTN) operates over 650 pubs and restaurants in the UK. Brands include Frankie & Benny’s, Chiquito, and Garfunkel’s. The carnage in the casual dining sector has forced it to announce the closure of 150 outlets after reporting a £87.7m pre-tax loss for the first half of the year; it had been forced to write down the value of its property holdings by £115m. The group spent £559m on the Wagamama brand in 2018, which has outperformed the market. The company is pinning its hopes on that continuing. The stock has slid by 36% in the last year.…

Kochland The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America By Christopher Leonard Simon and Schuster, £25 Donald Trump aside, there is “arguably no bigger villain” for the liberal left in America than Charles Koch, says Suzanne Goldenberg in The Washington Post. Over half a century, the “notoriously secretive multibillionaire from Wichita” – alongside his brother David, who died recently – transformed Koch Industries “from a midsize Midwestern company” into a conglomerate exercising “enormous influence” over public life, bankrolling lawmakers and lobbying efforts to block action on climate change and roll back government regulations. This book is the “definitive account” of how the brothers amassed their fortune and then used it to become a “largely unseen and entirely unaccountable force” in American politics. Leonard’s book is far from…

American corporate debt is close to all-time highs, says Daniel Bergstresser on PBS. The total value of non-financial company debt is now almost $10trn, equivalent to half of America’s GDP. The debt problem has been aggravated by corporations borrowing in order to boost shareholder returns, typically through share buybacks, says The Economist. If management declines to “optimise” its balance sheet with extra debt then “a band of capital-rich buyout firms stand ready to do the job”. Now the median credit rating for US company paper is BBB, one grade above “junk”. As long as corporate profits remained strong nobody thought that the debt was anything to worry about, writes Justin Lahart in The Wall Street Journal. Yet recent revisions to profit figures have made the “debt-to-income” tabulations look a whole…

The US economy “has become a lot less competitive” in recent years, says Jonathan Tepper in his book The Myth of Capitalism. Following decades of mergers and acquisitions, four airlines dominate commercial aviation and two firms control 90% of the beer Americans drink. In 1995 the top 100 companies accounted for 53% of the income from publicly traded firms; in 2015 the figure was 84%. No wonder The Economist has detected a slump in the number of times the words “competition” and “competitor” have been mentioned in annual reports over the past few years. The dearth of competition raises prices for consumers. It also crimps wage growth as firms don’t have to bid for labour against rivals so much.…

Home and room rental platform Airbnb has confirmed that it will file for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US next year, making it the latest tech unicorn (a private company worth over $1bn) to go public. The flotation is set “to be a blockbuster”, says Danielle Abril in Fortune. Airbnb’s valuation when it last raised money privately was $31bn. Unlike Lyft, Uber or WeWork, which are heavily loss-making, Airbnb looks in solid shape. It says it was profitable on an Ebitda basis in 2018 while its sales totalled $1bn in the third quarter of last year. The company offers more than six million places to stay in 191 countries The first listing was an inflatable mattress in the founders’ flat in San Francisco in 2008.…

Thomas Cook began in 1841 when Derbyshire cabinetmaker Thomas Cook arranged for 500 people to be taken 12 miles by train from Leicester to a temperance meeting in Loughborough, says Zoe Wood in The Guardian. Four years later Cook officially entered the tourist business, arranging train trips from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby to Liverpool for profit. By 1873 it was marketing its first round-the-globe tour “for 200 guineas” (£17,400). After a sale to the owners of the Orient Express, it was nationalised in 1948. Returned to the private sector in 1972, Thomas Cook was bought and sold by a series of owners, including the group that owned the German airline Lufthansa. However, the “seeds of the company’s downfall” were ultimately sown by the decision to merge with MyTravel in 2007,…

With impeachment of the US president firmly on the table (see right), now is a good time to take a look at the latest betting markets related to American politics. With £5.4m wagered, Betfair still has Donald Trump as the favourite to win the 2020 election at 2.34 (42.7%). Elizabeth Warren (pictured) is the leading Democrat at 4 (25%), more than double the implied chances of Joe Biden at 9.6 (10.4%). Interestingly, Betfair puts the Republicans’ chances of winning the White House at nearly even at 2.06 (48.5%). Betfair punters also remain sceptical about the idea of Trump being prematurely forced out of office. You can still get 4.7 (21.2%) on him leaving before his first term ends and 1.27 (78.7%) against. They also think it very unlikely that he…

One informal indicator market watchers like to keep an eye on is “director dealings”. When a director buys or sells a significant chunk of shares in the company they work for, it always draws attention. After all, who is better placed to know a company’s prospects than those who run it? This is why “insiders” are only allowed to buy and sell shares in their own firms at certain times – eg, a CEO can’t buy or sell in the run-up to their annual results coming out (this is known as a “closed period”). Big buys by an insider are obviously bullish. Big sales don’t look so good – yes, they might be needed to resolve a divorce or a tax bill, but it’s rarely good news to see top…

A four-day working week. Lots of extra bank holidays. Billions of extra public spending on a green new deal, and possibly even a universal basic income paid to everyone regardless of whether they ever get around to doing any work or not. As the Labour Party conference rolled out its manifesto pledges, it seemed to have left all sense of reality behind. A form of fantasy economics is moving into the mainstream. It is getting hard for even the most diligent critics of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell to keep track of all the weird and wacky promises he has made. Another one pops up every few minutes. This week he unveiled plans for a 32-hour week, with no loss of pay. Admittedly that is only a goal – a report…

Eco-anxiety: a first-world problem Marian Tupy The Conversation Why is it that environmental concerns are “most keenly felt” by those living in rich regions, namely Western Europe and the US, asks Marian Tupy, even though these citizens typically enjoy the best-quality environment? Poor people are preoccupied with meeting their basic needs (and can therefore, ironically, “more easily find meaning” in their lives), while the rich have the leisure to think about self-fulfilment and the search for meaning. Scholars have linked “eco-anxiety” to a decline of traditional religion. Economists have “long suspected” that there is a link between prosperity and environmental concerns. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve, environmental damage (such as deforestation and pollution) worsens with economic growth until a certain threshold, at which point, money starts flowing into environmental…

stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com When presented with any statistic, it’s always a good idea to ask, “is that a big number?” One that seems huge when presented as a boost for the NHS, say, may just be a tiny drop in the vast ocean of its total budget. Similarly, says Chris Dillow, when presented with any new policy, it’s good to ask whether what is proposed is “the end or the start”. The nationalisation of a utility, for example, as an end, is just a way for the state to seize dividends. But for the left, it should be seen as just the start of a process where businesses are transformed to be run in the public interest. Labour’s plan to give workers a 10% stake in the business they work for is…

Press coverage of the office property market focuses on eye-catching new-builds. But the main market is “secondary”: the purchase, refurbishment, re-letting and management of existing buildings. This is the focus of real estate investment trust Regional Reit (LSE: RGL). It floated four years ago. RGL’s commitment to a progressive 8% yield plus a bit of capital return was treated with scepticism at first but the target for this year, 8.25p a share, is 8% ahead of the initial dividend. The total return of 10% per annum since launch makes its performance among the best in the sector. This impressive record has facilitated two fundraisings and resulted in a company with a £450m market value and £720m of assets. Some of that success is the result of a strong in-house team,…

■ Following revelations about its advisers getting lavish cruises for reaching sales targets, St. James’s Place (SJP) is back in the spotlight. A study suggests that its customers are paying a lot more to invest with its bespoke funds than they would for almost identical funds run by the same managers elsewhere. For instance, notes Ali Hussain in The Sunday Times, the SJP UK and International Income fund costs 1.88% a year (including the price of advice and using the SJP platform); but manager Adrian Frost runs a virtually identical fund with the same top ten holdings for Artemis. Throw in the cost of advice and an investment platform such as AJ Bell and the overall charge is 1.55% a year. This sort of discrepancy can make a huge difference…

The flotation of WeWork, the flexible working space company, may or may not eventually go ahead, but the $10bn-plus valuation of the business underlines the size of the flexible working marketplace worldwide. One vital factor in its growth has been the growing realisation, by companies small and large, that maintaining big office spaces makes little economic sense. This is partly because companies – particularly younger enterprises – need flexibility to increase their workforces as they grow; this is challenging with a fixed amount of accommodation, unless you’re prepared to pay for space you’re not yet using. But there are other factors too. The rise of home-working and work-on-the-move, powered by new technologies, means many businesses operate with far fewer people in the office. A drive to reduce the business’s environmental…

Miton Global Opportunities seeks to exploit mispricings in the investment trust world. We look for good assets trading at a discount where we have identified a catalyst for the value to be realised. Over recent months we have seen value building as progress is being made at the net asset value (NAV) level but share prices have failed to keep up. Digging for treasure “The fall in sterling has boosted high-end manufacturing exports” Baker Steel Resources Trust (LSE: BSRT) is a small mining trust. The team seeks to identify promising deposits and fulfil planning requirements to establish rights to operate. Typically, they sell these to a multinational company, which will turn the prospect into a mine while Baker Steel retains equity or a royalty. The trust is at an interesting…

Tom Ford’s biography reads like that of a Boy’s Own comic hero – 21st century-style. In The Times’ somewhat breathless account: “He reinvented Gucci and built his own billion-dollar brand. He made critically acclaimed films. Then he took on the beauty industry. First, he created make-up for men, now he’s launching ‘dual gender’ skincare. Is there anything Tom Ford can’t do?” “The King of Glamour” has certainly mastered the art of seducing his interviewers. When Ford met up with The Sunday Times’ late inquisitor, AA Gill, he suggested they conduct the conversation naked. Indeed, “his tenure at Gucci reached its apex with an advert in which the brand’s logo was shaved into the model’s pubic hair”, says The Guardian. Ford made his name in the 1990s pushing the mantra “sex…

NV Veuve Monsigny, Grand Reserve, Champagne, France £16.99, Aldi Bargain basement Champagne is a dire category of wine that I force myself to taste because it is my job (and someone has to do it). Imagine my surprise when I sipped “ordinary” Veuve Monsigny (£12.49) – a fish-tank-scented sparkler which, incredibly, wins occasional awards – and then traded up to its black-label sibling, expecting an even more dismal experience and yet finding a wine which made me gasp with joy. This rather well-packaged Champagne, with its insultingly low price point, is a genuine revelation. I went one further and tasted the 2010 Vintage Veuve Monsigny (£19.99) and regretted it. The vintage wine is a monster with clumsy, yeasty, burpy fruit, but the Grand Reserve, which by now looked like it…

What’s that sound? They say they don’t ring a bell at the top of a bull market, but we hear something ringing. The demise of WeWork, an office rental company, certainly seems to signal something – maybe that the whole herd of “unicorns” that has been destroying American capital by the hundreds of billions of dollars per year is being driven off a cliff. WeWork wasn’t worth a fraction of its intended $47bn IPO price tag. In the last few days alone it has been marked down by $37bn, which is a lot of money, even for tech companies. One of our associates rents space from the company in Dublin. And when we went for a visit, it took only five minutes to see that the company was doomed. “The…

“Alison Rose’s elevation to the top job at RBS, where she will succeed Ross McEwan as chief executive, is cause for celebration. Never before has the UK had a woman running one of its big four banks... her elevation comes after a series of high-profile campaigns that have failed to improve women’s lamentably slow climb up the corporate ladder... McKinsey research has shown that companies with the greatest gender diversity in the boardroom are 21% more likely to be more profitable than their peers and 27% more likely to create superior value. These figures are quoted in a recent report for the government by Rose, who was asked to review how banks could better serve women who want to start a new business. To illustrate how sexism is endemic in…

Three to buy Midwich The Mail on Sunday From concerts and sports arenas to festivals and high streets, LED screens are now “pervasive in the business and entertainment worlds”. Midwich, the largest independent audio-visual company in the world, sits at the centre of this global growth industry. It installs display screens for Ferrari showrooms and is working on the audio equipment for Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium. The business is expanding at a “fair clip”, having grown sales every year since 2006. Buy. 526p Triple Point Social Housing Reit The Daily Telegraph With ten-year gilts yielding 0.7%, rental yields above 5% look highly appealing. This real estate investment trust (Reit) owns social housing, renting out buildings to state-backed housing associations. Its specialism – supported housing for vulnerable adults – is “well…

• Ex-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn has decided to pay the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $1m to settle allegations that he concealed more than $140m of his pay package, say Leo Lewis and Kana Inagaki in the Financial Times. Ghosn is “surely correct” to decide that fighting both the SEC and Japanese prosecutors would have been “too time-consuming and expensive”. But this is the first time since his arrest that authorities outside Japan “laid out why they think Mr Ghosn was involved in something unlawful”. It’s now harder for him to claim that the Japanese charges were a plot to bring down a famous foreigner. • Thanks to a share price fall, a “painfully ill-advised” Nazi joke and “a potential criminal charge of market manipulation” hanging over him, Volkswagen’s…

Goodwill is an intangible asset, which means it can be found on a company’s balance sheet in its annual accounts. It is generated as the result of an acquisition. When one company buys another, it will typically pay a premium to the “fair value” (which is essentially an adjusted version of book value – the value of a company’s assets minus its liabilities). Goodwill is the difference between the acquired company’s fair value and the actual price paid. Say Company A buys Company B for £10m. The fair value of Company B’s assets is £8m. The “excess” £2m paid is then listed in Company A’s balance sheet as “goodwill”. What does this difference represent? The value of certain intangible assets such as patents or intellectual property can be estimated, and…

• RBS has named Alison Rose as its new chief executive; the first female head of any of the big four high-street banks and one of only six women at the head of a FTSE 100 company, says The Times. Rose will get a basic salary of £1.1m – 10% more than outgoing CEO Ross McEwan, says the FT – plus £1.1m in shares and a performance-related share bonus of £1.93m. Her pension allowance will be capped at £110,000. • Ryanair shareholders narrowly approved a €99m bonus package for group CEO Michael O’Leary, in what Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times called “one of the most egregious indulgences of sheer greed ever seen in Ireland”. To get his money, O’Leary must double the share price to €21 and keep it…

“I think the majority of the films that I’ve made wouldn’t get made today. I just don’t think the business model is there to support it any more… I don’t mind that it’s different. We’re minstrels. We play for our supper.” Actress Renée Zellweger (pictured) on the rise of streaming and the shift to television, quoted in The Times “In my final months, I came to the sad reality that my life really did have a fourth quarter.” Texan oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, who died last week aged 91, in his farewell letter, on boonepickens.com “Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.” Value-investing pioneer Benjamin Graham, quoted on Twitter “First thing I ever did when I moved to London was…

spectator.co.uk In 1891, a 29-year-old man with only $32 set up as a soap salesman, says Rory Sutherland. Hoping to boost sales, he gave away small packets of baking powder with every purchase. Soon he found the powder was more popular than the soap, so he switched, and started selling that, giving away free chewing gum instead. Then he found the gum was most popular, so he switched again. His name? William Wrigley. This is the magic of business. “It’s the only area of human activity where you get paid to change your mind.” In politics, in punditry, in academia, even in science, consistency is valued. No one gets invited onto Newsnight to say, “I’m not really sure”, and, “It’s kind of complicated”. But business actively rewards free thinking. The…

The last year has been dismal for emerging market stocks, with the corresponding MSCI index returning 2%. Investors in investment trusts, however, have fared well: the JPMorgan trust (LSE: JMG) has returned 13%, Genesis (LSE: GSS) 14% and Utilico Emerging Markets (LSE: UEM) 19% over 12 months. UEM, moreover, has had no help from the Chinese internet stocks that have bolstered emerging markets’ performance in recent years. UEM, with a market value of £540m and assets of £600m, invests mostly in the infrastructure, utility and related sectors. Manager Charles Jillings points out that “delivering GDP growth requires investment in infrastructure assets. [Those] we invest in should continue to deliver... sustainable income streams, resulting in rising dividends... Moreover, one of the strengths of infrastructure investment is high operating leverage”: additional volumes…

Gold was one of the go-to investments of the 2000s. From $250 an ounce back in 2001 it rose between 10% and 20% each year, seemingly without fail, until it eventually peaked in September 2011 at $1,920/oz. Mining companies went up ten, 20, in some cases even 100 times. There was a lot of noise and furore. Gold bugs got so excited that they were sure fiat money was going to collapse. No such thing happened. For the next few years, gold was a disaster. It slid as consistently as it had risen before it eventually bottomed in December 2015 at $1,045/oz. All in all the decline lasted four years and three months, and the overall fall from top to bottom was 45%. That’s better than some commodities, worse than…

Would you face serious personal financial hardship if your business went bust? Many entrepreneurs assume not. After all, one argument for setting up a business as a limited company, rather than operating as a sole trader, is that you separate your affairs from the company’s. However, while this is true in theory, it may not pan out in practice. If your business needs to borrow, lenders often expect owners to stand behind the loan. They ask for a personal guarantee that the debt will be repaid. These guarantees aren’t secured – they’re not tied to a particular asset, such as your home – but they do give lenders a legal right to come after your personal wealth in the event your business defaults. Personal guarantees are a common feature of…

Thomas Cook, Britain’s oldest travel firm, collapsed on Monday stranding 150,000 travellers abroad and leaving millions more with future holidays hanging in the balance. Here’s what you need to know if you’ve been affected. Firstly, any Thomas Cook customers who were on holiday with the firm when it collapsed will be brought home. Package holidays booked with Thomas Cook are covered by Atol (Air Travel Organiser’s Licence) protection. Atol is a state-run financial protection scheme operated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and funded by a levy paid by all Atol holders. The fund is then used to refund, repatriate or reimburse travellers when a tour agency goes bust. So the CAA will pay for your hotel if you are abroad and arrange flights to bring you home. The CAA…

X5 Retail Group (LSE: FIVE) is Russia’s largest food retailer. It opened its first shop in 1995 (as Perekrestok) and now operates three brands with over 14,000 corner shops, 785 supermarkets and 90 hypermarkets. It is expanding rapidly: 2018 saw a 19% increase in the number of shops, which has given it a 10.7% share of the market. Revenue rose by 18% to a record $24.4bn, with net profit of $457m. The company listed in London in 2005 and has had a rocky ride since then. Still, the share price has risen by 46% in the last year. In 2018 the group listed on the Moscow exchange.…

Prescott Jernegan was born in December 1866 and as a toddler spent a few years on his father’s whaling ship before his family settled in Edgartown, Massachusetts. Jernegan later graduated from Brown University and briefly worked as a schoolteacher before attending Newton Theological Seminary and becoming a Baptist preacher. His preaching proved controversial and he struggled to earn enough money. One day, while recovering from typhoid fever, he had a dream about seawater turning into gold. Hooking up with childhood friend Charles Fisher, he later claimed to have found a way to extract gold from seawater at a reasonable cost. (Seawater does in fact contain gold, but in such low concentrations that extraction is uneconomic.) The pair set up the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company in 1897 and raised $900,000 ($28m…

Book of the week For The Record By David Cameron William Collins, £25 Political memoirs are usually quite dull affairs. Politicians (or their ghostwriters) justify their actions and seize the moral high ground by being polite about everyone, including their rivals. For the Record, by former prime minister David Cameron, is just like all the others in that it is full of self-justification, but is unusual in that it doesn’t hold back when it comes to recriminations. Cameron feels he was let down by Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, and has particular venom for both his predecessor and the current occupant of Downing Street, missing no opportunity to point out what he sees as Gordon Brown’s pettiness and Boris Johnson’s opportunism. Cameron’s account of his political journey also has plenty…

• After years of partying with the rich and famous, socialite interior designer Nicky Haslam, “the darling old bean”, has “barely got a bean to his name”, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. But he doesn’t seem to care. “I worry that I should worry about money more than I do,” Haslam (pictured) tells Moir. One suspects that, for Nicky, “worrying about one’s financial situation is on one of his famous lists of Things He Finds Common; a hilarious snobalogue that currently includes coloured Wellingtons, wine collecting, self-pity, cufflinks, box sets, jazz, Uber taxis, bottled water, glass fruit in a bowl, vodka tonic, swans and exclamation marks.” Scant surprise he “quails” at the thought of his upcoming 80th birthday party and “the ghastly intrusion of other people’s taste via…

10,000 The number of tonnes of pork China auctioned off last Thursday from its state reserves. African swine flu has wiped out a third of the pigs in the country and the government is concerned that the rising price of pork, which accounts for 60% of China’s meat consumption, will mar the country’s 70th birthday celebrations on 1 October. £9,900 How much on average women could lose in lost pensions earnings if they fail to update their planned retirement age in their workplace pension from the old state pension age of 60 to the current one of 65, according to pension provider Aviva. The lost earnings would be a result of the fact that, as the retirement age nears, schemes tend to shift into less risky assets. £216.4bn The total…