Innehållsförteckning för 1064 från MoneyWeek

“Why did the US come off the gold standard? Because it wanted to, and because it could” This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of a momentous occasion in financial and monetary history. On 15 August, 1971, then-US president Richard Nixon “temporarily” suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold bullion. Less than two years later, the US had entirely abandoned the gold standard. The global monetary system was no longer backed by gold in any shape or form. I look at what happened in more detail – and whether our current “US dollar standard” system can survive on page 13. But there’s a key lesson for investors worth emphasising. Gold felt like an essential component of the monetary system until it wasn’t. In my experience, a surprising number of…

High street chains are charging in-branch shoppers up to double the price for products that they also sell online, says Louise Eccles in The Times. For example, Nadiya Bakes, a cookbook by celebrity chef Nadiya Hussain (pictured), costs £22 in WHSmith shops, versus £11 online. Retail experts argue that shops have to compete with Amazon online. McDonald’s is being sued in Russia by a devout Christian woman who claims she was “seduced by an advert for a cheeseburger” into breaking her fast over lent, says Tom Williams in Metro. Ksenia Ovchinnikova is seeking compensation of 1,000 roubles (around £10), claiming that the fast food chain’s marketing violated her “consumer rights”.…

Aim, the London Stock exchange’s junior market for small caps, is blossoming, says Claer Barrett in the Financial Times. The FTSE Aim 100 index is up by 107% since last year’s low, “nearly two-and-a-half times the recovery achieved by the FTSE 100 over the same period.” Tax advantages explain part of the boom: some Aim shares offer inheritance-tax exemptions. But more significant is the fact that smaller businesses enjoy better growth prospects: Aim contains online fashion retailers Asos and Boohoo, two rare British technology success stories. As Alex Davies of the Wealth Club puts it, Aim is “the nearest thing we have to a British Nasdaq”. Aim played host to 13 listings that raised £664m during the second quarter, says Adam Holden of EY, a consultancy. Total equity capital raised…

The US trade deficit hit a record $75.7bn in June, says Jeffry Bartash on MarketWatch. Shoppers are “snapping up more foreign cars, computers, cell phones, clothes, alcohol and other goods... Oil imports have also risen sharply as Americans get back on the road”. The rising deficit largely reflects the fact that the country’s economy has recovered more quickly than many others, causing it to suck in imports. But it is also a reminder that “the US simply doesn’t produce many of the goods that Americans clamour for.” The US has not run a trade surplus since 1975. The US ran a goods and services deficit of $678.7bn for 2020 as a whole, equivalent to 3.2% of GDP. That was the highest annual shortfall since 2008.…

Pakistan is gearing up for its largest initial public offering (IPO) by a non-state firm, says Faseeh Mangi on Bloomberg. Air Link Communication, a mobile-phone distributor and retailer, plans to raise at least 5.85bn rupees (£26m). Air Link was founded ten years ago and has since become one of the largest firms in its sector. Sales rose by 50% to 3.6 million units in the year ending to July 2021. Pakistan has seen a flurry of flotations this year. There were ten in the year to June 2021 after a 17-month hiatus. The firm plans to use funds from the IPO to expand its network: it intends to have 150 outlets by 2026, up from 14 today.…

Saudi Arabia’s giant state oil company “almost quadrupled” its profits in the second quarter, says Emily Gosden in The Times. Saudi Aramco’s net income of $25.5bn is not only more than the $6.6bn earned in the same period last year, but also larger than 2019’s $24.7bn. Aramco has benefited from the rebound in global oil demand. Oil averaged $69 a barrel in the second quarter of the year, compared with less than $30 in the spring of 2020. The surge in profits is good news for Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, says George Hay on Breakingviews. He is obliged to contribute $80bn a year towards projects promoting diversification in the oil-dependent Saudi economy, while paying a $75bn dividend and allotting $30bn in capital spending. Since Aramco made only $76bn last year,…

Fifty years ago this month, US president Richard Nixon effectively ended the Bretton Woods regime that had governed the international monetary system since World War II by taking the US off the gold standard. Until then, the US dollar had been backed by gold – foreign governments could buy gold from the US at $35 an ounce – while the rest of the world’s currencies traded against the dollar at fixed exchange rates. (For more on the “Nixon shock”, see the box below). Since then, our monetary system has been one in which national currencies are largely free-floating, within a system dominated by the US dollar, the global “reserve” currency. But with global debt soaring and inflation rising (just as in 1971), the key question now is: can our current…

It isn’t really a claim you can make of the economy. Or of our diplomacy. Or, indeed, with the possible exception of music or education, of many fields of endeavour. Yet, at the Olympics, the UK punches well above its weight. For the third Games in arow, the UK is the most successful of the mid-sized nations, and far more successful than some sigificantly bigger ones such as Germany or Russia. Lessons can never be directly drawn from the tracks and fields, of course, but there is a lot we could learn from that when it comes to managing the economy as well. 1. Plan for the long term Britain did very badly at the 1996 Games, winning just one gold medal and ranking 36th in the world. The big…

The investment world has reacted with horror to the idea that Chinese communist policy makers and regulators might not be enthusiastic about large private companies with too much pricing power. The regulatory clampdown on online education platforms and tech giants such as Tencent and Alibaba has had an inevitable knock-on impact on the price of the leading UKlisted China funds. The good news, however, is that all of the China-focused funds are underweight the tech giants compared with the weighting of over 30% in the MSCI China on 30 June. In particular, Numis analysts note the “approach of Stewart Investors, manager of Pacific Assets, means that it has no exposure to the tech giants, which have not typically met the manager’s definition of quality”. Rotating away from tech Perhaps the…

iea.org.uk The UK education secretary, Gavin Williamson, recently announced an expansion in the teaching of Latin, says Kristian Niemietz. A fierce debate followed – one notable for its repeating of some popular economic fallacies. First of all, Latin aficionados usually ignore opportunity costs. Of course, all other things being equal, it would be better to know Latin than not know it. But learning it takes time and effort – time and effort that could instead be spent on maths, modern history, or modern languages. Is learning Latin worth that loss? Another common argument is to do with economies of scope – that having mastered Latin, many other things will come more easily to you. This is true, but is not a feature specific to Latin, and a more direct route…

More and more people are being obliged to pay inheritance tax (IHT). The number of families liable rose by almost a third last year, says Harry Brennan in The Daily Telegraph. “Designed for the rich”, the charge is increasingly hitting “middle-class families”, especially in the southeast of England, where house prices have soared. IHT is levied at a rate of 40% on estates worth more than £325,000, a threshold frozen until 2026. In 2017 the government introduced the “main residence nil-rate band”. This additional band exempts all or part of the value of the family home from IHT provided the beneficiary is a child or grandchild. In practice, that means that an individual can usually bequeath up to £500,000 and acouple up to £1m before the taxman comes knocking. You…

• More than 100 savers who received compensation because they were wrongly given advice to transfer out of a final-salary pension scheme have been awarded additional redress following a review by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). In March, the FSCS said it would review payouts it had made after 1 January this year, following changes in the method used to calculate redress; that review resulted in an average £11,700 additional compensation payment for savers affected. So far, savers who received FSCS payments before 1 January have not been offered reviews, but advisers are pushing for this to happen. • Four in ten older people entitled to Pension Credit do not claim it. The benefit is potentially available to pensioners with a weekly income of less than £177.10 (or £270.30…

In early February, I argued that you should go long on US homebuilder DR Horton owing to the strong American housing boom. Six months on, the boom shows no signs of letting up, with both house prices and sales still climbing. The latest Case-Shiller house price index suggests that the average house price in the US has risen by 16% in a year. While some argue that the market is overheating, and that a slowdown or even a 2009-style slump is just around the corner, I think it’s time to double down on homebuilding stocks. Part of the boom in the US housing market is clearly down to the combination of a recovering economy, rock-bottom interest rates and the various stimulus packages. This is pushing up demand. However, there is…

In the next three decades, the world will have an extra 1.5 billion mouths to feed. That is a big challenge with current resources within the context of two simultaneous crises – one environmental, the other a so-called “double burden of malnutrition”, in which some two billion people are obese or overweight while a similar number suffer from insufficient access to nutrition. There is growing demand for food to be healthy and nutritious, as well as for production methods to be sustainable. These trends have been accelerated by the pandemic. From farm to fork, there are opportunities for investors to tap into companies providing solutions to our fraught food systems – the best way of addressing global environmental and health challenges simultaneously. Boosting crop yields “DSM’s Clean-Cow supplement cuts the…

“She has a nose for picking great stories with ‘hot-button social themes’” Growing up in Nashville in the 1980s, Reece Witherspoon considered herself “a big dork who read loads of books”. That love of stories – and a willingness to bet on herself when the roles dried up – is paying off richly, says Forbes. Last week, Witherspoon scooped a personal $400m after selling a majority stake in her production company, Hello Sunshine, to a Blackstone-backed media entity run by two former Disney executives. The buyout valued the business at $900m. After a 30-year-long career as an actress and producer, the deal seals her reputation as “one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars” and one of the most powerful players in the entertainment industry. It marks “an astonishing turnaround” for the…

If there’s one rule in La La Land, it’s “don’t mess with the Mouse”. Scarlett Johansson (pictured) has disregarded the received wisdom. She is suing the Walt Disney Company, claiming that the company breached her contract when it released Black Widow on its Disney+ streaming platform at the same time that the film in which she stars debuted in cinemas, says Nina Lloyd in TheTimes. Her argument is that the move, which went against an explicit agreement to release it only in cinemas, undermined box-office revenue, costing her an estimated $50m in bonuses, which were linked to cinema receipts. “Settling for a measly $20m doesn’t seem like much of a hardship given Covid-19” Rules are rules Come on, says Mark Beaumont in NME. Having to settle for “a measly…

The ex-lover of Tiger Woods is being sued by the golfer after she broke an $8m non-disclosure agreement that prevented her from speaking publicly about him, says Alistair Dawber in The Times. Rachel Uchitel signed the 30-page agreement in 2009 after she had an affair with the then-married Woods (pictured). The deal was worth around £4.8m, to be paid in instalments over three years. However, she took part in the HBO documentary Tiger, about the golfer’s life, and filed for bankruptcy shortly after, having spent what she received from Woods on an Upper East Side apartment in New York, lawyers, and other fees. Woods’ lawyers are challenging her bankruptcy to take her to court for her violation of the deal.…

American companies are posting “stellar results”, but the stockmarket has reacted with a shrug, says Patrick Mathurin in the Financial Times. Most have now reported their second-quarter earnings. The April-to-June quarter marked the peak of the reopening boom; the world’s biggest economy grew at an annualised rate of 6.5% as restrictions were lifted and consumers spent their government-funded stimulus cheques. Corporate America counts its cash Profits at 87% of firms have beaten analysts’ forecasts so far, says Karen Langley in The Wall Street Journal. That is the highest level of “earnings beats” in more than a decade. At the start of April, Wall Street analysts thought that second-quarter earnings would grow by 53% compared with a year before. That figure now looks closer to 90%. Companies have proven adept at…

“[In China] coronavirus infections... have risen to their highest level since January, caused by the spread of the Delta variant... [Delta] calls into question China’s ‘zero-Covid’ approach... Whereas most governments are now starting to acknowledge that we are likely to have to live with the coronavirus for the long term, China’s ambition remains to keep it out of the country altogether... this suggests that China will have to continue with occasional local lockdowns... This in turn will prevent a full return to pre-pandemic norms of consumer and business behaviour, and... restrictions on foreign travel... Chinese equities will deliver lower returns than equities in other major markets over the next two years... A combination of slowing growth, deepening policy concerns and recurrent flare-ups in the virus is likely to make for…

Three to buy Shaftesbury The Daily Telegraph There is likely to be a gradual shift back to old shopping and working practices as restrictions ease. That is not reflected in Shaftesbury’s share price. The real-estate investment trust has a concentrated portfolio of high-quality office, retail and leisure properties in London’s West End. It has been “ravaged” by the pandemic, but the company reported in May that footfall and demand were increasing. The trend could persist and accelerate. Consumer confidence is rising and savings built during lockdown could boost demand. Improving returns should mean “significant long-term rewards” for investors. 599p BAE Systems Investors’ Chronicle Defence contractor BAE Systems reported a 20% increase in underlying profits at its half-year results. Shareholders in the firm also benefited from a 5% rise in the…

• Deliveroo’s rival, Delivery Hero, has scooped up 6% of the food-delivery app’s stock, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. It’s not clear why, but a positive view is that it is a “vote of confidence” in Deliveroo. The worry is that the industry’s recent “profit bonanza” is the result of a “one-off pandemic takeaway boom that won’t be repeated”, so Deliveroo is working hard to find “new sources of revenue”. This includes a tie-up to deliver groceries for Waitrose, which has been “so successful that it has already been expanded to 110 out of 345 stores”. • It’s a pity Mike Ashley has stepped down as CEO of Sports Direct’s parent company, says Ross Clark in The Spectator. He has been vilified as an “oaf” who “exploited his…

At 9pm on Sunday August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon delayed the US viewing public from watching that evening’s repeat of cowboy show Bonanza. Nixon had spent the previous three days at Camp David with a team of advisors, to finalise details of a speech that would transform the global monetary system, even though that arguably wasn’t his main aim. US inflation was rising by more than 5% a year while the unemployment rate was above 6%. The Vietnam war was also dragging on. Nixon – with an eye on an election in 1972 – was keen to avoid a recession, so he didn’t want to raise interest rates. But nor did he want to be seen as going easy on inflation. So he instituted a freeze on prices and wages.…

• Mike Ashley (pictured), founder of House of Fraser-owner Frasers Group, has been accused of nepotism after confirming his future son-in-law, 31-year-old Michael Murray, will succeed him as chief executive, says This Is Money. As a property consultant to the business, Murray earned £17.5m over six years; last year, the group signed a separate deal with another firm controlled by Murray to pay him £100,000 a year for “elevation strategy services”. • Gene-sequencing start-up Oxford Nanopore is handing a £160m jackpot to company bosses ahead of a blockbuster stockmarket listing later this year, says The Sunday Times. Chief executive Gordon Sanghera is to receive up to 6.5% of the equity, along with three other senior executives. Spun out of Oxford University 16 years ago, Nanopore develops technology to read long…

Biden’s tribute to Trump Nouriel Roubini Project Syndicate “The neo-populist doctrine that emerged under Trump is now taking full form under Biden, marking a sharp break from the neoliberal creed followed by every president from Clinton to Obama,” says Nouriel Roubini. Donald Trump ran his campaign for US president as a populist and his time as president did contain “some genuinely populist elements”, overturning the consensus of decades that what was needed was trade liberalisation, a strong dollar, cosy relations with big business and a moderate fiscal policy. Biden has continued Trump’s agenda, pursuing “nationalist, inward-looking trade policies”, browbeating the Federal Reserve into financing the large budget deficits created by his policies, hence giving up on a strong dollar, and moving into a“de facto state of permanent debt monetisation”. The…

theness.com/neurologicablog Self-driving cars will be everywhere by 2021, said a US transport secretary in 2016, echoing a widely held belief. So where are they? The revolution seems to have been delayed, says Steven Novella. We are still stuck in the “driver assist” stage – we have technology that can help drivers park and avoid accidents, but not take over at the wheel. What happened? The trouble is that technological progress is not always linear. We are familiar with Moore’s law – that computers rapidly get ever-more powerful. But sometimes the problems we are trying to solve with a technology grow at the same rapid rate. So it has been possible to make cars that can deal with increasingly less likely and unusual circumstances, events and conditions. But even the best…

Income drawdown, whereby you draw an income from your savings while keeping them invested, has become the overwhelmingly favoured choice for pension savers managing their money in retirement. But the downside of drawdown plans compared to annuities, which used to be most people’s default option for turning pension fund cash into regular income, is that you have to manage your resources with great care. Take out too much of your income and you’ll run out of money before your time is up, particularly if investment returns disappoint. Many financial advisers have now abandoned the traditional approach to managing this problem. For many years, the standard advice to drawdown savers was to aim for a “safe withdrawal rate”. Savers who withdrew less than a certain percentage of their pension fund as…

Many hope that Covid-19 lockdowns will lead to a permanent shift to more working from home. In fact, people have been opting for different ways of working for years. Hordes of entrepreneurs didn’t need a pandemic to ditch the daily grind and set out to work where, when and how they wanted. They just got on with it. A kitchen-table start-up The success of growing numbers of small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and the self-employed provide a tailwind for Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU), which sells tax and accounting software. It is worth $146bn today, but in the early 1980s it was a kitchen-table start-up in San Francisco. It designed its first software package – Quicken – to help US taxpayers with their official returns. This was before Windows was even launched. Quicken…

Can the weather affect the stockmarket? A 2001 study by the University of Michigan’s business school found that higher-than-average morning sunshine was positively associated with daily equity returns for 26 cities between 1982 and 1997. However, other studies seem to suggest that the amount of sunshine isn’t the only type of weather that can move markets; temperature also has an effect. Intuitively you might expect higher temperatures to make people happier, and more eager to invest. However, a 2005 study by Toronto’s York University and the University of Toronto found that there was a negative relationship between maximum temperature and stockmarket returns in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Japan and Taiwan between 1982 and 1997. In other words, the warmer the temperature the worse the market did…

FirstGroup (LSE: FGP) is Britain’s biggest rail operator and number two bus company. The shares have bounced following the sale of two North American businesses, says Aberdeen’s The Press and Journal. The proceeds were higher than expected at £3.3bn, and the assets brought in £2.2bn after the deduction of insurance liabilities. Investors will receive a cash payout worth £500m, or 41p per share, a marked increase from the £365m previously predicted. The Greyhound coach brand is now Firstgroup’s only business overseas. The stock has jumped by 137% in the last 12 months.…

Bermuda-registered company Crown Corporation International was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2003. It claimed that it would use cash raised from investors, which would be held in a Brazilian bank account, to buy struggling companies cheaply, turning them around and then reselling them at a profit. After claiming to have conducted several deals, including securing several valuable waste-management and construction contracts in Argentina, Crown Corporation merged with consultancy Langbar Capital in 2005. It changed its name to Langbar International, appointing the smaller company’s CEO, former accountant and financier Stuart Pearson, as head of the combined group. How did the scam work? Apart from the merger with Langbar Capital, none of the deals it announced, the contracts it supposedly won or the $633m cash that it said it had…

“For those seeking the fastest and most exciting Huracán, this is definitely it” The 2021 Lamborghini Huracán STO is the road-going sister to the existing Huracán Super Trofeo track racer, says Mike Duff on Piston Heads. And like the competition version, it has been stripped down to make it as light as possible. The bodywork is mostly carbon fibre to reduce the dry weight to just 1,339kg. Inside, the carpets have been replaced with rubberised matting. “Even the windscreen is thinner.” It also uses rear-wheel drive rather than the weighti all-wheel-drive system of other Huracáns. The STO is even reckoned to be faster around the track than the “not-exactly-tardy” AWD Huracán Performante – the one that set a track record on the famous Nürburgring Nordschleife in 2017. The STO packs…

Going… Two handwritten setlists from the early days of The Beatles are going under the hammer with Bonhams on 28 October, says David James Young in NME. Among only eight known to still exist, they are from gigs the band played in 1960 and 1963. Both are written by Paul McCartney, with the first dating from when the band played at Liscard’s Grosvenor Ballroom shortly before changing their name from The Silver Beetles to simply The Beatles. At that time, McCartney was the band’s drummer. The second playlist is from the gig the classic line-up played at the Majestic Ballroom in Luton. They are expected to fetch $150,000-$250,000. Gone… Damien Hirst isn’t the only one exploring the relative value of physical and digital items (see above). “An online auction pitting…

• For young footballers this summer, “Monopoly money figures… have become their alternative identities”, says Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. “Their name is money and money is their name and we hang their transfer fees around their necks like dog tags that can be ripped off one day as the evidence of what their worth to us once was.” Jack Grealish goes to Manchester City for £100m, Ben White to Arsenal for £50m and Jadon Sancho to Manchester United for £73m. Harry Kane might leave Spurs for up to £160m and Romelu Lukaku go to Chelsea for around £100m. It is exasperating that, after the recent financial missteps, hardships and bitter internecine warfare over the European Super League, English football should “slip back into its old recklessness so…

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has admitted that “inflation could be higher and more persistent than we expected”. New inflation readings suggest that this time he is right. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has hit its highest level in three decades. The core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, excluding volatile food and energy, rose by 0.4% in June, the largest gain since December 1991. The overall PCE price index, with food and energy included, rose 0.5% in May for an annual gain of 4%, the fastest rate since 2008. “Inflation takes money from earners and savers, and moves it along” Already, over the last 12 months, inflation has cut into wages. According to the National Review, the average loss is 1.9%. But of course, that’s the whole idea.…

Latvian worker Albina Sokolova was awarded £10,800 in compensation after her employer demanded she only speak English to her Eastern European colleagues instead of her native language, says Richard Percival in the Daily Express. Sokolova took fruit and nut supplier Humdinger to an employment tribunal and won on the grounds the request was a form of discrimination. She had worked there for over ten years. North Devon Hospice looks set to receive a huge donation thanks to an 11-year-old boy who has been camping in his garden for more than 500 nights since last March, writes Steven Morris in The Guardian. Max Woosey’s fund-raising marathon began when he realised how much the hospice had helped people in his community. He has raised £640,000, more than half of what the hospice…

Governments are starting to throw serious money at improving cycling infrastructure. Paris intends to construct 700 kilometres of cycle routes over the next few years; Ggermany will be spending €1.5bn on similar projects to promote cycling as a green way to go to work and get around. Growing awareness of the health benefits of cycling may also fuel demand. All this bodes well for Japan’s Shimano, says Wirtschaftswoche. It is the world’s biggest producer of bicycle parts. Around 70% of bikes sold worldwide are equipped with its gears, chains and electric motors. Not only should the stock benefit from structural growth, but its robust balance sheet, with €2.4bn of cash, bodes well too.…

Philip Morris International, the world’s biggest cigarette company, has “thrown down the gauntlet” says Oliver Gill in The Daily Telegraph. It has trumped private-equity firm Carlyle with a new 165p-a-share offer for Vectura, a FTSE 250 firm that specialises in inhalers for respiratory diseases. The bid is more than the 155p-per-share offer by Carlyle, tabled last Friday. What’s more, Philip Morris, which has been “heavily criticised” by anti-smoking campaigners for trying to buy Vectura, issued a “thinly veiled” attack on its rival, arguing that its approach is driven by a “long-term commitment” to the transformation of its business. Stung by the “inevitable backlash” from lung cancer, asthma and health bodies over their decision to recommend an earlier offer from Philip Morris, Vectura’s board has decided not to recommend the tobacco…

“Yes, it’s Exam Fiasco 2,” says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. “And the remake turns out to be even worse than the original.” Last year, an algorithm was used to predict the grades of GCSE and A-level students prevented by the government from sitting exams – an exercise that proved every bit as successful as a prediction from Neil Ferguson. This year, the government instead went for the method that was rejected last time for fear of grade inflation – going with teachers’ predicted marks. The result? Grade inflation. A-level A grades were awarded to 44.8% of pupils and around a fifth got an A*. Almost 13,000 achieved three A*s, four times the number of 2019, the last year externally marked exams were taken. The overall pass rate was…

James Henderson, director of UK investment trusts, Janus Henderson Investors Since the country voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the UK stock market’s track record has been “shocking”, value fund manager James Henderson tells Citywire. The FTSE All-Share has lagged behind even European stocks over the last five years or so. The good news is that this has left plenty of scope for the UK to catch up. That seems to be happening now, reckons Henderson, who among other funds, runs Law Debenture (LSE: LWDB) with Laura Foll. The investment trust returned just under 20% in the first six months of this year, against 11.1% for the All-Share. “It’s been a really nice results season... the reverse of last year,” Henderson says. Notable winners from the trust’s portfolio…

“Europe’s banks are stashing cash to pay bumper bonuses to top performers amid a deal frenzy driven by pent-up demand from the Covid-19 pandemic and rebounding bank profits,” says Lawrence WhiteIain Withers for Reuters. Barclays has increased its bonus pool by 46% to £1.1bn, up from £749m a year earlier; HSBC has topped up its bonus pool by $900m in the first half of 2021. Standard Chartered’s “normalisation of performance-related pay” during the first half drove an 8% jump in costs. UBS boosted pay for advisers by $242m in the second quarter and Deutsche Bank has upped pay by 6% from the same quarter a year ago. Even the traditionally more conservative Lloyds says it will spend an extra £100m on bonuses this year. While still modest by Wall Street…

“It wasn’t important to me to know the amount of money I’d get. All I wanted was to sing any song I wanted to.” Barbra Streisand (pictured) on her record deal at the age of 21, quoted on the BBC. She took less money to retain creative control “Junior bankers are paid very well… ask a young entrepreneur drawing no salary how they would like to make $100,000 (£70,000)- plus straight out of college. Or a single working mother-of-three working herself to death to put kids through school.” Xavier Rolet, CEO of asset manager CQS, on junior bankers bemoaning their 100-hour working weeks, quoted on This is Money “Money can’t buy happiness, but it’s more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle.” Joke attributed to John Wayne,…

oliverburkeman.com There aren’t many hard and fast rules that apply to everyone, says Oliver Burkeman. But there might be one: “You almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.” This seems to be the rule for the “famously creative” – Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens (pictured), for example. The lesson here is not necessarily that you should down-tools after that time – a luxury not many of us could afford – but to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule to “ringfence three or four hours a day for undisturbed focus”, ideally when your energy levels are highest. This is better than trying to work for longer and can help prevent the…

I take the view that fears about the future of offices and retail are overdone – people will work from home more and many weak retail companies will go bust, but good-quality space will still remain in demand. Rents may drop in some cases, but Reit share prices fell by enough during the panic to reflect that. So I was a keen buyer of Land Securities (LSE: LAND) and British Land (LSE: BLND) and I think they remain solid recovery plays even though I am not especially optimistic for the UK economy. I also bought Boston Properties (NYSE: BXP), the largest US office Reit, which has rebounded more but remains below its highs. In Europe, I hold Aroundtown (Frankfurt: AT1), which predominantly owns offices in Germany. This is not a…

■ Fewer than half of those who have retired since state-pension reforms were introduced in 2016 have qualified for the full pension introduced at the time, government data suggests. While more than one million people have begun claiming their pension over the past five years, fewer than 500,000 are receiving the maximum amount possible, which is £179.60 a week in the current year. That largely reflects the way the state pension now works. While it is significantly more generous – this year’s weekly pension for those who retired before 2016 is £137.60 a week – it is also harder to qualify for. To get the full amount, you will need to have made national insurance contributions for at least 35 years, up from 30 years under the previous system, when…

My long tips have struggled over the past month, with three falling and two rising. Media group ITV fell from 125p to 114p and spread betting firm Plus500 declined from 1,407p to 1,389p. Cruise ship operator Norwegian Cruise Line dropped from $27.28 to $24.66, falling below the stop-loss level of $25, which means that the position is automatically closed. US homebuilder DR Horton rose from $89.03 to $94.21 while construction firm Morgan Sindall increased from 2,275p to 2,324p. Counting Norwegian Cruise Line, my long tips are making a net profit of £3,755, down from £4,022. My short tips have also put in a mixed performance. Electric-car company Plug Power went down from $29.02 to $28.18 while cinema chain AMC fell from $42.61 to $33.80. However, cloud-computing specialist Snowflake rose from…

Metro Bank’s (LSE: MTRO) share price has dropped by 17.2% over the past year but by 50% since early 2020. Compared to other lenders, the group has “substantially underperformed” in recent years, says Rupert Hargreaves on Motley Fool. In 2019 it revealed that it had classified millons of pounds of loans wrongly, making them seem less risky than they were. Then the pandemic struck. The group lost £311m last year, and £131m in 2019. Analysts expect the bank to make losses for the next two years. It hardly helps that it is most active in retail and corporate banking, where competition is especially intense.…

2020 Briccotondo, Langhe Arneis, Fontanafredda, Piemonte, Italy £14.75, greatwine.co.uk Even though I have been writing about wine for well over two decades, I still think of myself as being of the wine trade as opposed to a journalist. I still consult for a few companies in the hospitality industry and food and wine-matching has always been a cornerstone of my métier. Every month I select a handful of wines for recipes created by some of the finest chefs for a business called Wild Radish. The idea is that you can learn to cook like an expert and then enjoy your creation with world-class wine. This arneis is one of the bottles I picked recently and it is so spectacular that I wanted to highlight it for you this week. Arneis…

An Olympic medal, be it gold, silver or bronze, is “pretty much priceless”, says Jack Guy on CNN. But they do have value. This year’s medals from this year’s Tokyo Olympics are 85mm in diameter and range in thickness from 7.7mm to 12.1mm. Only six of the total 556 grams of the gold medals are actually gold, with silver making up the rest. That gives them a metal value of around $800. The 550g silver medals are pure silver and they are worth around $450. The bronze medals are, in fact, red brass, containing 95% copper and 5% zinc. They are worth only around $5. Athletes do not of course have the value of the medals uppermost in their minds, but many do later sell them, says Neil Vigdor in…

£70.2m The value of the “constructive loss” written off by the House of Commons in the form of wasted work on a temporary chamber to rehouse MPs while restoration on the Palace of Westminster took place. MPs have been working from home instead. €4,098 The bill for a lunch for eight in Marbella, paid by day trader Enrique Moris, which included two magnums of Dom Pérignon champagne. Moris posted a photo of the receipt on social media, complaining about the €372 service charge. He found little sympathy. €250,000 How much a German pensioner has been fined after World War II-era weaponry, including a Panther tank, was found at his home in the northern German town of Heikendorf in 2015. The army had to be called in to help remove the…