Innehållsförteckning för Issue 992 från MoneyWeek

“Scary as it seems, you probably need to keep holding equities – and gold” Welcome to the second issue of MoneyWeek published entirely from our homes. None of us have been to the office since Monday last week – and our very odd new world is beginning to feel less odd than it was even a week ago. We are all getting to grips with long-distance IT problems, home schooling and staying up until midnight every night to try and get supermarket delivery slots. It’s fine. We are also getting used to the insane volatility of stocks (see page 4). And, while we aren’t remotely close to being bullish on the immediate future (and Bill never will be – see page 42), we are starting to look through some of…

Prolific shoplifter and mother of two Sophie Ingram has had £37,000 worth of personal possessions confiscated, says Suzy Gibson in Leicestershire Live. Ingram, 30, was jailed for two years in October after being caught with a kilo of drugs in her back garden as well as £11,642-worth of stolen Mulberry designer handbags. Ingram’s assets included around £10,000 of designer clothes, a Rolex worth around £14,320 and a £10,600 Cartier bangle. The US’s near-total cinema shutdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic has left the US box office with zero revenue for the first time ever, says Andrew Pulver in The Guardian. Data agency Comscore did not issue its weekly report after Hollywood’s main players, led by Disney, declined to issue any figures.…

Gold bounced back with a vengeance early this week. On Tuesday, April futures jumped by 6%, their biggest daily rise in 11 years, according to MarketWatch. Spot prices jumped by 4% on both Monday and Tuesday. This followed a two-week price decline. Experienced gold bugs weren’t fazed by the pullback. The gold price also fell sharply during the early stages of the 2008 crisis, says Caroline Bain of Capital Economics. Investors tend to sell gold to cover losses or urgent cash needs elsewhere. One of the attractions of gold is that it is a “quick and seamless way to raise cash in times of need”. It was only when the markets digested the implications of massive quantitative easing (QE) that gold went on a bull run from late 2008 that…

Three to buy Boku The Mail on Sunday This technology business helps consumers to pay for music, video games and films via their mobile-phone number. Boku’s one-tap bill service is used by 18 million people in the UK, Germany, Japan, South Korea and emerging economies in Southeast Asia. The global coronavirus lockdown is likely to see even more people spending time online, which will give e-commerce a boost. For those brave enough to invest during the current turmoil, “these shares look like a bargain”. 59p Barratt Developments The Sunday Times This housebuilder almost went bust during the last crisis, but is much better placed to withstand the coronavirus storm. Construction shares have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic sell-off, with Barratt losing more than half of its market value…

British airlines and airports have been told they “will not receive an industry-wide bailout”, says Gwyn Topham in The Guardian. This has prompted warnings from British airports that they may have to “shut down temporarily”. While Chancellor Rishi Sunak said there could be discussions with individual firms “as a last resort”, these would only take place “if all commercial avenues have been fully explored”. There would also have to be “equitable and fair treatment” of businesses across the sector – a problem given that British Airways owner IAG has already “distanced itself” from calls by Virgin Atlantic and easyJet for a bailout. Quite right too, says Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator. There’s no reason why airlines should be “front of the queue” for support. People will still need to…

Last week I wrote about the rules that help protect your account with a stockbroker in the unlikely event that the firm fails. To recap: your stocks, bonds or funds will usually be registered in the name of your broker’s nominee company, but the rights to them lie with you, not your broker or their creditors. If it goes bust, they should be returned to you, although this may take months or more to sort out. If anything is missing, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) will cover any shortfall up to £85,000 per customer (not per account). Several readers have since written in with questions that are worth adding to the original article. Can I hold stock in my own name instead? “Very few brokers still offer Crest accounts…

If you need to while away some time while on lockdown, here’s a quiz question. What do the following businesses have in common: IBM, Disney, Uber? The answer is simple. They were all founded during a deep recession. For a long time, economic historians have noticed that even when business conditions are at their toughest, a few smart entrepreneurs can still find a way to launch a new company. As the world goes into what may easily turn into the deepest downturn for 100 years or more, could that be true this time too? Inspiration in adversity The American economy was stuck in a deep slump when, in 1896, Herman Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company, which went on to become IBM – today it’s still a giant of the…

India will struggle in a lockdown Andy Mukherjee Bloomberg In a “highly informal economy” such as India’s, authorities can’t easily “reach the pain points” by providing liquidity, credit or salary supplements during the coronavirus crisis, says Andy Mukherjee. The country has more than 100 million microfinance accounts, serviced in cash weekly by gig-economy workers. Shutdowns will make it hard for them to repay loans totalling $28.5bn. Banks and shadow financiers are already suffering a “crisis of confidence”. Microlenders have only just recovered from a non-performing loan crisis sparked by the 2016 overnight ban on 86% of the cash in circulation. Against a lacklustre economic backdrop, a “freeze in unsecured lending to the urban poor would make the situation a lot worse”. Some microfinance specialists are profitable enough to deal with…

fee.org Consumers around the world are panic-buying essentials and supermarkets are running out of stock, says Mitchell Harvey. In other words, there has been an increase in demand for staple goods. Without outside intervention, that would lead to a short-run rise in prices. It doesn’t always happen, however, because it is considered to be “price gouging” –the practice of pushing up prices in a manner deemed exploitative. And what constitutes exploitative? That is in the eye of the beholding regulator, but raising prices in an emergency is generally seen as “morally reprehensible”. That’s a mistake. The “sheer brilliance” of the price system is that it is a self-regulating resource-management system. Higher prices encourage supermarkets to increase deliveries and ensure stock is replenished and reward them, and the businesses providing the…

Investment trusts have been caught in the crossfire of the market panic. Because they are easy to sell instantly, many investors have bailed out of even defensive versions of these funds, eager to pocket cash. Take the infrastructure sector, a traditional safe haven. Here we have government-backed assets and stable cash flows that should survive any recession. Yet the four big core infrastructure funds have seen their share price fall by around a fifth over the last month, while the average renewable energy infrastructure fund has fallen by more than 19%. Ignoring recent progress Some were probably overpriced, trading on chunky premiums to net asset value (NAV) before this crisis, but investors seem not to be differentiating. Take the JP Morgan Global Core Real Assets (LSE: JARA) fund, highlighted here…

The language commonly used to describe speculative manias is borrowed from epidemiology, writes Edward Chancellor. A new technology sparks a “contagion”, investors are “infected” with greed and speculative “fever” breaks out. Today, the world is faced with another epidemic. Our response to the coronavirus pandemic resembles the inverse of a speculative mania, with fear replacing greed, and errors of pessimism potentially replacing those of optimism. In his new book, The Rules of Contagion, Adam Kurcharski observes that bubbles and diseases have similar growth phases. Both see periods of exponential growth. Eventually the spread peaks, the bubble bursts and the number of infections falls sharply. Atypical outbreak chart resembles an inverted “V”; bubbles follow a similar trajectory. Financial bubbles and epidemics are both prone to cross national borders. Bubbles are a…

■ NHS workers will henceforth be able to access their wages as soon as their shift finishes so they can deal with unexpected expenses caused by the crisis. Wagestream is an income streaming provider that gives employees access to their cash as soon as they’ve earned it, so they needn’t wait until the end of the month. It has made its technology available to NHS trusts for free.They will be able to use it within 24 hours, rather than the usual three weeks the app takes to become integrated with payroll software. ■ If you are a British expat stuck in the UK owing to the lockdown, rest assured that HMRC are relaxing the rules to help you avoid an unexpected tax bill. UHY Hacker Young warned earlier this week…

An unprecedented government support package is available for small businesses suffering from the Covid-19 crisis. There is a combination of loans, grants and tax breaks to help as many as possible to avoid bankruptcy. The state will also subsidise heavily the cost of employing people over the next few months. Subsidising employment On the latter, the plan is that all businesses will be able to ask the government to cover up to 80% of their wage bill, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month for each employee. The scheme is aimed at staff temporarily laid off from work, but not dismissed – “furloughed” in the jargon. Staff already let go can also be covered if they’re rehired and then furloughed. HM Revenue & Customs is still working on the…

Jack Clark was born in Oklahoma City in the United States in 1927. He started out working in the nearby oilfields, before spending a brief time as a milkman. He then moved into the building trade, first selling building materials between the years 1954 and 1958, and then running his own development company, Fashion Built Homes. In 1964 his half-brother Thomas Clark, who operated a nursing home, persuaded Jack to found Four Seasons Nursing Centers of America Inc, which was designed to cash in on the boom in nursing homes by both building and financing them. • What was the scam? Four Season’s annual reports indicated that its revenues were growing at a furious pace. In reality, most of this revenue was fictitious, based on sales that had never taken…

“In the Z50, Nikon has produced an almost unbeatable camera” Until recently, if you wanted to buy a serious camera, you’d get a Nikon or a Canon, brands that dominated the market with a wide range of options for every budget. Competition from Fuji and Sony, however, as well as the fact that many people are now abandoning dedicated cameras in favour of smartphones, has forced Nikon to revamp its lineup. The result is its Z range of mirrorless cameras. The first two models, the Z6 and Z7, both released in 2018, were aimed at professionals; this Z50 is a budget version priced to appeal to more casual users. The Z50 has many advantages over the previous generation of models (known as DSLRs). The biggest is that you can now…

In a crisis people panic and become more susceptible to fraud than they normally would be. So it’s no wonder there has been a surge in scams since the crisis erupted. Action Fraud, the reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, has seen a 400% rise in scams linked to coronavirus in March. Victims have lost nearly £1m so far. “We have already seen fraudsters using the Covid-19 pandemic to scam people looking to buy medical supplies online, sending emails offering fake medical support and targeting people who may be vulnerable or increasingly isolated at home,” Graeme Biggar of the National Economic Crime Centre tells the Daily Express. People are receiving text messages claiming to be from HMRC offering a “goodwill payment” as a result of the outbreak, while emails saying…

Talk about doped to the gills. This week rattled and liquidity-addicted equity markets received the biggest monetary and fiscal stimuli on record. So it’s no wonder they went nuts – at first. Tuesday saw the S&P 500 gain 9.4%, the biggest daily jump since 2008. The FTSE 100’s 9.1% rise was its second-best daily showing on record. Congress delivered a $2trn stimulus on Tuesday, while the “Federal Reserve has gone nuclear”, as Robert Guy puts it in the Australian Financial Review. The world’s most powerful central bank’s embrace of unlimited quantitative easing, or money printing – dubbed “QE Infinity” – will be remembered as a “defining moment” not only in this crisis, but in “the history of central banking”. Fixing the world’s financial plumbing The Federal Reserve had already slashed…

The grim backdrop obscured some encouraging news early this week. Pantheon Macroeconomics notes that the number of new Covid-19 cases and deaths in Italy fell for two days in a row, while the growth rate of infections has slowed across Europe if total cases are measured in terms of the last seven days compared with the previous week. And there were further glimmers of hope for an eventual global rebound in corporate earnings calls. FedEx executive vice president Brie Carere said the group reckons more than 90% of China’s large manufacturers “are back to work in some capacity”.…

American pet ownership has been climbing for decades. Younger people are putting off starting a family and often have a pet first; ageing baby-boomers like their furry friends too There are now 180 million cats and dogs in the US. No wonder, then, says WirtschaftsWoche, that “pills for pets” is a growth business. The veterinary industry, which ranges from prescribed drugs to food supplements, is worth $5bn a year. PetMed Express is the biggest online supplier of such products. It has 2.3 million customers and notched up record sales of around $275m last year. Both margins and the average order size are rising. The stock has a healthy balance sheet and yields 4%.…

Lord Wolfson, Next’s CEO, has said that the retail industry “is facing the toughest time since the oil crisis of 1973”, says Ashley Armstrong in The Times. This crisis will cost the group up to £1bn. This week it announced that it will be closing all its shops for now. However, Wolfson is confident that it will be able to survive thanks to a strong balance sheet; it also has options such as suspending its share-buyback programme and dividend, and delaying capital spending. Good idea, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. While there is “no way of predicting what effect Covid-19 will have on the industry”, Lord Wolfson has “been wargaming for years” to prepare his company for the “multiple doomsday scenarios” facing the high street. He has produced…

Italy’s plight has “become a test of European solidarity”, says the Financial Times. There are signs of “increasing unilateralism”, with member states going their own way on border controls, school closures, policing and financial assistance. National self-interest is understandable – under EU treaties, Brussels also has limited powers to act – but “without cooperation and burden-sharing, the principles of an ever-closer union are meaningless”. In the end it was China, and more recently Russia, which finally responded to Italy’s pleas for help with deliveries of critical equipment. At least the European Central Bank (ECB) has now done its bit, says The Economist. On 18 March, it launched a €750bn bond-buying programme which, notes the FT, had an “immediate impact” on markets. Unlike earlier ECB schemes, Greece’s debt is now eligible…

A futures contract is an agreement to buy or sell something at a pre-arranged price on a pre-arranged date (known as the delivery date). Futures were developed for agricultural goods such as grain and later for other commodities such as oil, gas and metals. Since the 1970s, financial futures have been widely used for trading in stocks, bonds, currencies and other assets. Futures may be physically settled (by delivering the asset in exchange for payment) or cash settled (meaning that one party to the contract must make a payment to the other party that reflects the difference between the contract price and the current price of the asset). Physical delivery is common with commodities, while financial futures are almost always cash settled. Futures contracts are traded on exchanges, such as…

• David Solomon, chief executive of US investment bank Goldman Sachs, received a 19% pay rise for 2019, “a message likely to resonate poorly among traders and bankers who saw their own bonuses cut and who are facing a long period of economic uncertainty”, says The Wall Street Journal. Solomon (pictured) was paid $24.7m, including a $7.7m cash bonus and almost $15m in stock, which makes him the best-paid CEO “since Lloyd Blankfein took home $41m in 2008”. • Spanish bank Santander, the eurozone’s largest lender, has slashed pay for senior management due to the fallout from the spread of coronavirus, says City AM. Chairwoman Ana Botín and chief executive José Antonio Alvarez will take 50% cuts to their total pay for this year to support a €25m fund for…

“When I started out there were very few movies that were interesting because the industry was run by wealthy white people. But it’s changing. Supply and demand. People want to turn on the TV and see people who look like them.” Film star Thandie Newton (pictured) on the arrival of Netflix and other streaming services creating new opportunities, quoted in The Sunday Times “My daughter just said to me, ‘Daddy, the stockmarket looks so scary, I’m afraid.’ I didn’t know what to say. I finally said, ‘You’re 27. Stop talking like that.’” Eddy Elfenbein, US investor and editor of the blog Crossing Wall Street “That’s like selling your soul, to be with somebody because they have money. You can’t be happy.” Model Tyra Banks on marrying for money, quoted in…

collaborativefund.com/blog When the pace of change picks up, it makes no sense for investors constantly to update their outlook as new information comes in, says Morgan Housel. You won’t be able to keep up. Instead, focus on “the few things we know with high confidence” that will stay true whatever happens. One is that “necessity is the mother of invention, so our willingness to solve problems is about to surge”. The “excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates”, as Nassim Taleb says. The years of the Great Depression, for example, were the most technologically productive of any comparable period in US history, bringing us supermarkets, microwaves, jets, nylon, helicopters, colour TV and countless other discoveries. World War II, likewise, led to the most rapid invention of any…

Property funds have suffered sharp falls in the sudden equity bear market. The average share price of a real estate investment trust (Reit) has slid by 38% in the past three months, says Katherine Denham in The Times. The UK commercial property sector is on a 39% discount to NAV, compared with 3% in January. Retailers grappling with online commerce are now having to factor in social isolation. The BMO Commercial Property trust fell by 55% in the past three months. Still, those who hold shares in an investment trust can at least get their money out when they like by selling on the stockmarket. Investors in property through unit trusts are not so lucky, as this week has reminded us. Eleven halted trading last week, trapping around £15bn of…

The government’s lockdown announcement on Monday included advice “that all holidays and non-essential travel within the UK should now be off limits to slow the spread of coronavirus”, says Helen Coffey in The Independent. “Essential travel does not include visits to second homes, campsites, caravan parks or similar, whether for isolation purposes or holidays. People should remain in their primary residence.” So, what does that mean if you have a trip booked in the next few weeks? Generally speaking, insurers and holiday firms take their cue from official government advice, which means that trips within this country should now be treated the same as foreign holidays. You should be offered new dates for your trip or a refund. The first thing to do is contact your accommodation or travel provider…

Most of us now have to work from home. For thousands of small enterprises, this will mean working out how to harness technology to make sure they can continue functioning with a workforce that is operating remotely. The good news is that there are lots of straightforward and low-cost options for ensuring your teams can stay in touch, co-ordinate work and maintain their productivity. Slack, known as “WhatsApp for business”, offers a suite of popular office communication tools, and will provide many of its resources for free during the crisis. Staff simply need to download the platform on to their home computers. Zoom, the video-conferencing platform, also offers a free service. The big technology companies have followed suit. Microsoft has made many of its small business productivity tools free for…

I can remember sitting next to the venerable Madame Gatinois at a Bollinger Vins Clairs Assemblage lunch many, many years ago. This prestigious, annual event is held to thank those grape growers who contribute to Bollinger’s own harvest and it forms the basis for blending the wines that will appear on the market in years to come. Gatinois is based in the great village of Aÿ, just down the road from Bolly, and it owns 7.5 hectares of epic pinot noir vines, most of which they sell to Bollinger. Madame Gatinois was seated to the right of Ghislain de Montgolfier, the Bollinger boss at the time, so she was clearly the most important person in the room, underlining the calibre of her fruit. Gatinois keeps a small proportion of its…

MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman By Ben Hubbard William Collins, £20 In the three years since Mohammed bin Salman became crown prince and de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, he has “upended” the country, says Louise Callaghan in The Sunday Times. The prince, widely known as “MbS”, has imprisoned hundreds of the kingdom’s most prominent figures, “won and lost” the admiration of the international community, “obliterated” centuries-old cultural and economic norms, and put himself within a “hair’s breadth” of a throne that he “could hold into the 2060s”. In this book, New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard examines how the young reformer rose to prominence. It does not purport to be a “comprehensive biography”, instead focusing on MbS’s “accretion and exercise of power”, says Lloyd Green in…

• “Some celebrities, millionaires and members of the business class seem to believe that their wealth can be used as a form of vaccination while the rest of us face the deadly risk of infection,” says Leo McKinstry in The Sun. A growing number are forking out for private coronavirus kits, costing up to £395. More than 2,000 wealthy Britons are reported to have ordered such kits. Lanserhof, a private medical facility at the London Arts Club, reported an 18% rise in enquiries for its £300 Immune Plus Support Infusion. Meanwhile, designer face masks have been turned into fashion statements worthy of the catwalk or social media. It’s the same story in the US. When President Trump was asked whether “the well-connected go to the front of the line”, he…

17,000 The number of roubles (£180) Russians need to earn in one month to be considered middle class, Russian president Vladimir Putin has said. According to Russian government statistics, families need 58,450 roubles a month to afford basic necessities. $17bn How much US space agency Nasa will have spent on developing its next generation of rockets as part of its Space Launch System (SLS) programme by the end of the 2020 fiscal year. Project costs are estimated to have already overrun by a third. $100m The value of Chad’s debt to Angola, which the country in central Africa is repaying in cattle, according to Angolan newspaper Jornal de Angola. Angola will receive 75,000 head of cattle over ten years, valuing each animal at $1,333. ¥1,400 The price in Japanese yen…

Fitness freaks rejoice, your gym’s closure doesn’t mean you have to stop working out. Gyms and several streaming fitness companies are offering online workouts for free. Beachbody, one of the largest streaming fitness companies behind programmes including P90X and Insanity, is offering its fitness programs free for 14 days. Peloton is offering 90-days free on its app, and you don’t even need a bike. Live class offerings include floor workouts, yoga and meditation classes. The coronavirus spells good news for the planet as industrial activity shutdowns have temporarily slashed air pollution levels around the world, say Jonathan Watts and Niko Kommenda in The Guardian. Levels of nitrogen dioxide over the past six weeks were markedly lower than at the same time last year. This year could see the first reduction…

Hong Kong’s stock exchange welcomed its latest flotation with a virtual gong-banging ceremony, says Kiuyan Wong on Bloomberg. The financial hub is hoping to keep the stock exchange going despite a partial lockdown that has lasted nearly two months as the territory tries to contain the spread of coronavirus. InnoCare Pharma Ltd, a Chinese biotech firm, became the first initial public offering (IPO) to launch online; it is raising $288m. The shares rose by 11.2% to HK$9.95 on Monday even as the benchmark Hang Seng index dropped by nearly 3.3%. This IPO follows two “cloud listings” in Shanghai and Shenzhen in the past three weeks.…

• People confined to their homes “will be making much more frequent use of social networks”, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. But while Facebook and Co. may be enjoying user numbers “well beyond” levels associated with New Year’s Eve, advertising dollars “are unlikely to follow this time”. Sectors such as travel, which accounts for 6% of Facebook’s revenue, are “slashing” marketing spend, while entertainment-related marketing has “collapsed” as concerts and theatres have closed. Given that Wall Street’s targets for social-media stocks have “barely budged”, the sector’s stocks could be in danger of “further slippage” once analysts redo their numbers. • Sports Direct has had its warehouses compared to “Victorian sweatshops”, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. So it’s not surprising that Sports Direct has been forced…

The number of coronavirus cases is “still surging” in the US, yet President Donald Trump has indicated that he wants to get the US economy “opened up and raring to go by Easter”, says Ben Riley-Smith in The Daily Telegraph. He argues that “our country is not built to shut down” and is considering changing the guidance that tells people to work at home and not eat in restaurants as early as next week. Experts have warned that easing nationwide restrictions too early to protect the economy could “inadvertently help spread the virus”, but Trump counters that it is possible both to stop the virus’s spread and allow some people to return to their jobs. Too far, or not far enough? Quite right too, says The Wall Street Journal. Some…

The roaring 1920s only gained their reputation from the perspective of the depressionary 1930s that followed, says economic consultant Gary Shilling. Similarly, the coming recession means that “the 2010s will look like a golden age of slow but steady economic growth with rising employment and declining interest rates”. The economy will be very different when life returns to “normal”. People will remain cautious long after the crisis subsides. “The attitude of use it up, wear it out, make do or do without may prevail for years, weighing on consumer spending and retail sales.” The drift away from global free trade will accelerate, partly because the crisis has exposed the vulnerability of global supply chains. But any hope that this will boost domestic jobs and income “will be dashed as, like…

For more than a decade, chief executives have ridden a “bull market to a string of record pay days”, says Inti Pacheco in The Wall Street Journal. Now, “the stockmarket’s coronavirus swoon could wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars from executive pay packages and prompt a recalibration of how CEOs’ compensation is set”. That is the flip side of basing pay rewards on stockmarket performance. Median total pay for 143 CEOs of America’s benchmark S&P 500 index had risen to an all-time high of $13m in 2019, up from $11.2m the previous year. Equity awards tend to form the biggest chunk of pay packages. So with stockmarkets falling, expect the formula to be fiddled so bosses don’t lose out. “They’re going to rely a lot more on discretion at…

theconversation.com Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged a £5bn boost for buses and cycling. That is welcome, says Stephen Potter. There’s no doubt bus services need improvement –the elderly and disabled increasingly rely on “ad-hoc charity and volunteer services” and the number of people using buses in England has dropped by 10% since 2010. But making buses more frequent and cutting fares, as Johnson has promised, will not be enough. Buses are only really suited for commutes on “intense urban corridors” from suburbs to city centres. Modern living has made them less useful for other journeys. What we need is something like an Uber for buses. Enter ViaVan, a service being trialled in Milton Keynes. You book and pay by an app, then go to a nearby pickup point, where…

Last week, politicians across the world promised to do “whatever it takes” to tackle the economic fallout from the coronavirus epidemic. Since then, they’ve gone above and beyond to meet that promise. In the US – still the world’s most important economy and the one from which global markets take their lead –on Monday the Federal Reserve promised to spend as much as was required to buy an ever-widening range of assets in order to prevent financial markets from breaking down (see page 4). ByWednesday morning politicians in the US had agreed a vast spending bill, worth more than $2trn, with various measures aimed at cushioning the blow for both workers and for shareholders. Meanwhile, in the UK late last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak promised to pay 80% of the…

We’re officially in lockdown and many of us are seeing the coronavirus crisis take its toll on our income. So, what happens about paying your mortgage? Here we answer all the big questions. Can I stop paying my mortgage? The government has announced that homeowners should be offered three-month payment holidays if they are struggling to make their mortgage repayments as a result of the coronavirus. But this doesn’t mean you can simply cancel your direct debit. “Homeowners are unknowingly putting themselves into arrears by cancelling their mortgage payments without speaking to lenders first,” says Will Kirkman on ThisisMoney.co.uk. This can have an impact on your credit score. If you need to take a mortgage holiday, contact your lender before you stop repayments, but don’t rush to the phone. “Amid…

As MoneyWeek went to press, government insiders were letting it be known that more help would soon be announced for self-employed and freelance workers. It looks increasingly as though self-employed workers who lose their incomes will be able to access a package providing them with a guaranteed 80% of their average earnings over the past three years, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month. That would be broadly equivalent to the support offered for employees. However, freelancers and the self-employed should check what other help they may already be eligible for. Those who are registered for VAT will benefit from the right to defer their latest bill until the end of June. If you’re covered by the self-assessment income tax system, you can also defer the payment due at…

Stocks have been lurching downwards, recovering a bit, then continuing their downward trend. But you knew that. Everyone knows that. Everyone is watching… and wondering what comes next. Trillions of dollars have already been lost on Wall Street. But who lost it? Why? Longtime readers of this column will remember one of our most important dictum: markets don’t always give you what you want or what you need; they give you what you deserve. Markets are moral. That is, moral in the sense of the “moral of the story”. “A pox has been put on our houses. A pestilence loosed on our finances” The baby-boomers took over the US government when Bill Clinton was elected in 1993. Then, the federal government owed $4.4trn. Since then, boomers have added nearly $20trn…