Innehållsförteckning för 1139 från MoneyWeek

Monday was Blue Monday. The third Monday in January is supposedly the most depressing day of the year owing to a combination of the cold, the post-Christmas blues and one’s failure to stick to New Year’s resolutions. I was even more depressed when Cris told me it was a PR stunt: years ago, a travel company that has since gone out of business highlighted the miserable third Monday in January as the best day to book a holiday. So it is perhaps fitting that the news has been perversely good this week. We may have avoided recession (see page 11) – for now, at least – and the blue-chip FTSE 100 index is close to a new record peak as I write, the first time in four years that it…

“It’s Forecast Season... when everyone tells us what to expect for the new year... Forecasters don’t know, investors know they don’t know, yet we all go through this exercise anyway... much of it is about confirmation bias. We want to find a forecast that matches what we’re already doing… [The real purpose of forecasts is to act as] a baseline, a reference point to guide our decisions. Investing is about risk. How much risk should we take and in what direction is a continuum, not a yes/no decision... In other words, forecasts can be useful even if they aren’t right… [Predictions are a] watch list [enabling the investor] to go away knowing where to look… even if we don’t yet know what [we’ll] see. [My forecast?] This year will be…

Shares in online retailer Asos have soared, jumping by as much as 18% at one stage last week after the struggling fast-fashion company said it was “making headway in its plans to turn around its performance”, say Katie Linsell and Sabah Meddings on Bloomberg. CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte has led an “extensive overhaul” since taking over in June, “reducing stock... and cutting spending”. The shares have risen by a third since the start of the year following a 75% slump last year. Nevertheless, Asos also warned that “free cash flow this fiscal year would be zero at best, with the business generating cash again in the second half”. Asos may “now be heading in the right direction”, says Charlie Huggins, head of equities at the Wealth Club. However, “disappointing”…

The outlook is auspicious for Sweden’s Pricer, says Der Aktionär. A chronic lack of retail staff and the overall shift towards digitisation bodes well for the group’s electronic price labels and associated products, such as electronic displays, cameras and wireless technology. Inflation, which implies regular price hikes, is another reason to let a machine update the labels in a shop, while it also becomes easier to coordinate online and offline offerings. The group’s president and CEO Magnus Larsson notes that some of Germany’s biggest retail chains are trying the products out, and he hopes that the market will gain momentum over the next few years.…

Politics & economics China “ventured back onto the global stage” at Davos on Tuesday, sending a delegation led by vice-premier Liu He to the World Economic Forum to “assure foreign investors” that life was “back to normal” after three years of harsh Covid restrictions, say Mark Landler and Keith Bradsher in The New York Times. The Chinese faced a “wary audience”, not just because of the changed geopolitical landscape in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also because of two concerning data points: China’s population is shrinking for the first time in 61 years and economic growth slowed to 3% last year, its second weakest performance since 1976. Xi Jinping’s choice of messenger, the Westerneducated moderniser Liu, is “lost on nobody”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. China…

Czech voters go to the polls next weekend in the second round of voting to elect a new president. Punters clearly think retired general Petr Pavel is a firm favourite over billionaire businessman Andrej Babiš, who was prime minister between 2017 and 2021. With £10,464 matched on Smarkets, Pavel is at 1.11 (90.9%) to win the runoff, while Babiš is way out at 8.4 (11.9%). Pavel and Babiš were virtually neck and neck in the first round, with Pavel getting 35.4% of the vote, compared with 34.99% for Babiš. However, polls have Pavel winning the run-off convincingly over his opponent, who has been repeatedly compared to the former Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi for his involvement in various scandals (although he was recently cleared of misusing EU subsidies). Indeed, one poll…

The short-lived experiment by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to turbocharge the economy and take on the “anti-growth coalition” is already starting to seem like a distant, and admittedly not very fond, memory. In their place, we have Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, who have made stability their only priority. In fairness, they have calmed the markets, brought long-term interest rates back under control, restored sterling closer to its long-run averages, and made the UK look like a credible country again. That is an achievement of sorts. But what they have not managed to do is set out any kind of a vision for getting the economy growing again. That matters. The vision thing As Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, said in a speech…

Investors in stocks can follow a number of distinctively different approaches – often referred to as styles – when deciding which companies to buy. The two styles that are most frequently used to classify investors are growth and value. Growth investors look for companies that are expected to grow their earnings faster than their sector or the wider market. They will often be willing to buy shares on valuations that appear quite high compared with other firms if they believe that these may be justified by future profits. This approach places more emphasis on the firm’s potential, as opposed to its current financial situation. Value investing is the opposite. Value investors focus on companies that appear to be cheap today (or sometimes stocks that should be cheap in the very…

“Am I happier now than before I had money? No. I’m sadder, I think, because I’ve got less to fight for. Don’t get me wrong, it’s made my life easier, but it’s not necessarily made it happier, because I think my happiness was struggling and fighting.” Dancer Louie Spence (pictured), quoted in The Sunday Times “I see that the newsstand cover price of a printed edition of The Economist in Britain has increased from £6.99 to £7.99 over the new year, a rise of 14.3%. This is clearly inappropriate at a time of fiscal and monetary prudence. A price rise of this measure will fuel inflation further as readers seek higher wages to compensate.” Letter writer Stephen Lacey seeks to avoid a wage-price spiral, quoted in The Economist “I’ve heard…

vice.com Getting a “fancy new position” at work used to be thought of as a good thing, says Maxwell Strachan – a sign of progression up the career ladder. But a new study by Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School and co-authors shows that firms of all types and sizes in the US are giving workers “phoney managerial titles” in order to avoid paying them overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set overtime pay rules to discourage overwork and encourage hiring, but it allowed firms to avoid paying overtime to salaried managers whose pay exceeds a set threshold. Today that threshold is just under $24,000 a year. Job listings in the 2010s showed a 485% increase in “fancy-sounding job titles” among people earning slightly over that amount. So…

Shares in Swiss banking-software group Temenos rose 6% after the firm said that CEO Max Chuard has stepped down, says the Financial Times. Chuard’s exit had been demanded by activist investor Petrus Advisers, which said in October that it has built up a stake of under 3% in the group. Temenos has struggled to shift from selling software on up-front licences to a software-as-a-service model where users pay recurring fees. The shares have fallen by 65% since 2019 and a profit warning in October cut forecast operating earnings by one-quarter. Chair Andreas Andreades will take over as interim CEO, but will step down from the board in June. Petrus is demanding that he “not be involved in the search for a new CEO”.…

● Parcel-delivery firms are “selling worthless add-on insurance covering damaged or lost goods even though customers are already covered by consumer-rights laws,” says Ali Hussain in The Times. These add-ons aren’t worth bothering with, according to Hussain, because three separate county court cases have ordered firms to pay full refunds after parcels were lost or damaged in transit. None of the people involved paid for separate protection. The courts ruled that you are covered under the 2015 Consumer Rights Act if your package goes astray. ● “You could save nearly £1,000 a year by fixing a ten-year mortgage rate instead of taking a two-year deal,” reports George Nixon in The Sunday Times. Ten-year fixes are currently cheap, reflecting lenders’ expectation that interest rates will fall back over the next few…

● Leading banks are embarking on a new drive to recoup emergency loans paid out during the Covid-19 crisis under the government’s Bounce Back Loan Scheme for small businesses. The scheme saw banks pay out £46bn worth of zero-interest loans of up to £50,000, with the money repayable over six years, but many firms are struggling to come up with the cash. However, with the taxpayer standing behind the loans, banks are coming under pressure to be tougher with late payers. Barclays, for example, has just signed a deal with a specialist insolvency firm to chase debts. ● Do you need key man insurance? New research suggests only a fifth of small businesses have purchased this cover, which pays out if one or more named individuals at the firm is…

We aim to look beyond the economic and political noise and focus on companies that we believe can grow their dividends consistently, as history shows us that this characteristic is a marker of quality that can help to identify stocks likely to outperform the market. Given the uncertain economic backdrop, balance-sheet strength and pricing power are two key elements that we are concentrating on this year, with a particular focus on the underlying fundamentals of a business and the ability to weather a weaker demand environment. Lock in growth with Assa Abloy Sweden’s Assa Abloy (Stockholm: ASSA-B) is a global leader in security and automated doors, and the most recent addition to the Fidelity European Trust. The company has good fundamentals, including a strong balance sheet, is cash generative and…

£4.7bn The total value of video gaming sales in Britain last year – higher than for film, television and music. Digital downloads accounted for 89.5% of sales, according to the digital entertainment and retail association (ERA). 6,000 How many Taiwanese dollars (£162) each of Taiwan’s 23 million citizens received in a one-off payment at the start of the year, due to the government having collected more tax revenue than expected, according to the island’s premier Su Tseng-chang. $11,748 The average hourly rate of a prepaid rented private jet last month – a 21% increase on the same month in 2021, according to Private Jet Card Comparisons, an advisory service. The boom in private jet use may now be reaching a plateau, owing to costs, says the Financial Times. £105 The…

Fans of the popular fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons are in uproar over fears that its publisher wants to tighten the rules that let them sell products based on the game, says The Guardian. Dungeons and Dragons has an extensive community of users and smaller companies who produce booklets and materials to add new story lines. This is permitted under an open game licence (OGL) that has been in place since the early 2000s. However, a leaked agreement from Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns Dungeons & Dragons, would have granted the firm the right to make money off these without paying the creator, and force companies that make over $750,000 to pay Hasbro a 25% cut of their earnings. Hasbro’s D&D Beyond site has now…

The Bank of England has sold off the £19.3bn in government bonds that it bought to calm markets during the autumn crisis in UK gilts. The Bank was forced to intervene after UK 30-year gilt yields soared towards 5% in the wake of Kwasi Kwarteng’s 23 September “mini-Budget”, says Richard Partington in The Guardian. The spike in yields was creating a vicious spiral of forced selling that threatened to drive pension funds to the wall. The Bank pledged to buy up to £65bn of bonds with printed money to calm markets, prompting accusations that Threadneedle Street had restarted quantitative easing (QE) by the backdoor. In the event, the Bank’s final purchases didn’t exceed £20bn and calmer trading allowed it to start selling off those bonds on 29 November, finishing on…

Housing markets everywhere are heading for a difficult year, but the outlook is worst in Canada, Australia and Sweden, says Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank. High household debt levels and the prevalence of variable-rate mortgages mean that debt-service burdens in Sweden are set to rise to levels not seen since the country’s real-estate crash of the early 1990s. Swedish house prices have already fallen by 14% from their peak, says Melissa Lawford in The Telegraph. Negative interest rates before the pandemic prompted many Swedes to take on heavy debt burdens, but interest rates have jumped by 2.5 percentage points since April. The Swedish sell-off shows how fast “high rates [can] take the floor out of a housing market”.…

Last week Europe’s most valuable company, the luxury group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, announced that it is embarking “on one of its biggest management shake-ups in years”, says Nick Kostov in The Wall Street Journal. As part of the reshuffle, owner and CEO Bernard Arnault, who recently overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, announced that his daughter Delphine will run Christian Dior. Dior is the group’s largest brand and, along with Louis Vuitton, has been “instrumental in helping LVMH become the world’s biggest purveyor of luxury goods”. Delphine Arnault’s elevation “will be closely watched in Paris business circles, where monitoring the progress of Arnault’s children with a view to potential succession is a favourite pastime”. Dismissing Delphine Arnault as just “another heir ushered up the ranks by…

Last year was one to forget for London listings, says Investment Week. The stockmarket recorded just 45 initial public offerings (IPOs), 62% fewer than in 2021; they raised a mere £1.6bn, compared with £16.3bn the previous year, according to figures from accountancy giant Ernst & Young. The deteriorating macroeconomic backdrop and the war in Ukraine rattled global markets, denting confidence in new listings. There were 1,333 IPOs worldwide last year, a 45% fall from the year before. They mustered just $179.5bn, a 61% decline from 2021. Inflation, the uncertain interest-rate outlook, energy prices and supply-chain issues may continue to hamper equities this year.…

● ”Loyal Marks & Spencer’s investors have been waiting a long time for a turnaround,” says Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. Now, Christmas trading figures suggest that changes overseen by chair Archie Norman (pictured) are finally paying off. “Food has always been a great strength,” but M&S outperformed the market, with sales up 10%. More surprisingly, clothing – “long regarded as dowdy” – is also doing much better, thanks to a focus on working with brands such as Jaeger. The £700m joint venture with Ocado revolutionised its food-delivery service. The company is investing up to £500m in new, modern stores and food halls across Britain, while closing struggling branches. Yet the shares languish on a price/earnings ratio of under ten. “It still has work to do to convince doubters.…

“I don’t see any end in sight to the inflation spiral, that’s only now just getting started… The vast majority of people are going to get eviscerated,” says Peter Schiff, a long-standing bear on the US economy. In 2023, America could see a recession, and possibly a crisis in financial markets following on from the collapse in cryptocurrencies last year. The 2008 financial crisis began in sub-prime mortgage bonds, and then spread to the rest of the mortgage market. Crypto could be just the first stage in a wider sell-off. As higher interest rates work their way through the economy “you’re going to see more companies in credit markets blow up”. The US Federal Reserve is going to lose the fight with inflation and focus attention on boosting the US…

reason.com I was neither a strong supporter nor opponent of Covid-19 lockdowns, says Eugene Volokh. Whether or not they work is an empirical question that deserves study. But preliminary data from the natural experiment created when Sweden bucked the global trend and refused to lockdown are suggestive. Sweden did have a higher Covid-19 mortality rate than many other European countries, including neighbouring Norway, Denmark and Finland. But all-cause excess mortality – which captures the costs lockdown imposed in other areas, such as through rising deaths by suicide or by cancers not caught early as screenings were missed, and so on – tells a different story. A recent report from the UK’s Office for National Statistics shows that Sweden did better on this measure (excess mortality up 2.7%) than did Denmark…

■ “Investment trust Temple Bar has been under new management since October 2020, and so far so good,” says Jeff Prestridge in The Mail on Sunday. Co-managers Ian Lance and Nick Purvis of Redwheel have delivered a 76% return since they took over from the previous managers, Ninety One, after a period of disappointing returns. The FTSE All-Share index has returned 42% over the same time. The value-focused portfolio features three broad groups of “big bets” – energy, financials and retailers – with “great investment potential”. The trust’s biggest positions are in BP and Shell, which account for 16%. These should “continue to generate a rich stream of dividends from strong revenues… and a reluctance to divert a big chunk of these earnings into capital expenditure as a result of…

The cost-of-living crisis may be stretching our budgets, but one thing has got cheaper over the past year: the price of a basic funeral. You’ll now pay an average of £3,953 for a simple sendoff, 2.5% less than in 2021. “It’s surprising to see, at a time when everything else is going up in price, that funeral costs have fallen for a second consecutive year,” says Mark Screeton, CEO of SunLife, which conducted the research into the cost of dying. “With UK inflation hitting its highest rate in 40 years, this feels like a rare piece of financially positive news among all the other gloomy economic headlines.” The price decline is due partly to action by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). In 2022 it ordered funeral directors to display…

Small-business owners and managers are suffering as a wave of industrial action across the UK continues. Strikes appear to have hit household spending in the run-up to Christmas as customers stayed at home. And now many small companies are worried that their employees may not even be able to come into work. Bus strikes this week, in addition to the ongoing rail dispute and the threat of action from teachers, could all make it difficult for staff to get in. Such disruption leaves employers facing some difficult decisions. Many will want to be sympathetic to staff who can’t come in because their train isn’t running, say, or because a school closure requires them to look after children. But staff absence causes real difficulties, including additional costs as working hours are…

When a share has cratered for reasons other than pure fundamentals, it can enjoy a major rebound. German multinational pharma and biotech firm Bayer (Frankfurt: BAYN) could be a classic case in point. Founded 160 years ago as a manufacturer and seller of synthetic dyes, Bayer is now one of the largest drugmakers in the world. The pharmaceuticals division is divided into three areas: prescription products, especially for cardiology and women’s healthcare; therapeutics for oncology, haematology and ophthalmology; and radiology, notably diagnostic-imaging equipment. The consumer health portfolio contains mainly non-prescription products for dermatology, digestive health, allergy treatment and cardiovascular risk prevention. The crop-science arm focuses on high-value seeds, and chemical and biological pest-management solutions. It was part of the latter area, however, that landed Bayer in hot water. The company’s…

Avacta Group (Aim: AVCT), a small oncology-drug specialist, has seen its share price jump despite having made an operating loss in the first half of 2022. Encouraging results in a phase I clinical trial (the first of three stages of clinical trials) last year suggests that Avacta’s treatment, known as AAV6000, can eliminate some harmful side effects of chemotherapy treatment, says Asktraders. The drug limits the exposure of patients’ healthy cells to the harmful compounds used to kill tumours. The upshot is that Avacta could earn billions. The share price has gained 88% in a year.…

In 1996 Louis Borders, the founder of Borders bookshop, believed that traditional supermarkets were ripe for disruption. So he set up Webvan, an online supermarket where people could do their shopping online and have the items delivered the same day. Borders believed that automated fulfilment centres could sort goods quickly and efficiently, doing away with the need for both physical premises and supermarket workers. This would give his firm room to offer a wider range of groceries than its rivals at a cheaper price, and appeal to customers by removing the need for a time-consuming trip to the shop. What was the trade? To raise the capital needed to fund the infrastructure required, Borders turned to venture capitalists. The first round of financing in 1997 raised a modest $7m from…

Land Rover’s new Range Rover Sport is the third generation of an iconic SUV model and comes in petrol, diesel and hybrid versions. “Yep, diesel soldiers firmly on here,” says Top Gear. “It’s very cleanly designed, well executed and desirable… There’s evolution and revolution all at once here,” from the engineering to the aesthetics. “Land Rover knows how to nod back to its tradition… And in a world of increasingly gnarly performance SUVs, the comparatively plusher edge of the latest Sport does exactly that.” Getting behind the wheel is superb. “You get 523 horsepower, which means you can get from zero to 62mph in less than five seconds, and then keep on going all the way to 155mph”, says Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times. “Handling? Amazing, really. You can…

Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Dreschsler and Erkki Karo Yale University Press, £28 There has in recent years been a surge in interest in the role of the state in promoting innovation. In the US, Joe Biden has driven efforts to encourage the US to become more technologically self-sufficient. Last year the UK government set up the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, explicitly modelled on Darpa, the US agency set up in the Cold War to keep the US ahead of the USSR in the arms and space race. The authors of this book set out what they think is the best way to achieve such state-led innovation. There have been big battles between those who want policy managed by a hierarchical government ministry staffed by career civil…

Annual US inflation fell to 6.5% in December, down from 7.1% in November. Prices slipped by 0.1% compared with the month before, the first month of deflation since May 2020. Soaring inflation has “firmly established” the monthly publication of the US consumer price index “as the world’s most important economic data point”, says John Authers on Bloomberg. The latest “release was as good as it was reasonable for anyone to hope”. Annual core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, was 5.7% in December, also down from the previous month. On current trends, US inflation seems to have peaked in June last year at 9.1%. The latest decline was helped by a 9.4% month-on-month fall in petrol prices, say Colby Smith and Kate Duguid in the Financial Times.…

Activist investor Nelson Peltz has triggered “one of the biggest proxy fights in the US in years”, says the Financial Times. He has launched a campaign to “force his way onto the board of Walt Disney after the company declined to nominate him as a director”. The move pits him against CEO Bob Iger just months after Iger “returned for a second stint” at Disney. Peltz’s fund Trian Partners, which owns a $900m stake in the Magic Kingdom, released a report criticising Disney’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy, cost inefficiencies in Disney’s streaming business, and its “broken” succession planning process. Peltz wants “a successor for Iger within two years”. Peltz is especially critical of Disney’s decision to buy most of 21st Century Fox in 2019 for $71.3bn, says Dade Hayes…

Five to buy Next The Telegraph This high-street stalwart has defied the gloomy economic news to deliver robust Christmas trading data. The year ahead is likely to be a bumpy one for retailers as the cost-of-living crisis bites, but Next is in a strong long-term position. It has successfully shifted to an “omnichannel” strategy to head off the online threat and has the financial firepower to snap up struggling peers – witness its recent purchase of fashion retailer Joules out of administration. A price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 12.6 “significantly undervalues” the firm’s long-term prospects. 6,584p Premier Miton The Telegraph This Aim-listed asset manager is valued at just 1.5% of the £11.3bn in funds that it manages. The market’s reticence reflects the fact that small companies, Premier Miton’s speciality, have just…

The Biden administration was forced last week to appoint a special counsel to investigate why the president had moved secret information relating to his time as vice-president between 2009 and 2017 from “secure government facilities” to “highly insecure” locations, including his own garage, says Gerard Baker in The Times. The revelations are “awkward” given that Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, is under criminal investigation by a special prosecutor for having classified documents from his presidency at his home in Florida, behaviour Biden (pictured) deemed outrageous. The two cases are “like chalk and cheese”, says David Smith in The Guardian. Biden’s conduct seems to have been merely “neglectful”, while Trump’s was “cavalier”. Biden is accused of withholding a small number of documents; 48 boxes full have been recovered from Trump in…

My new year’s resolution for my portfolio is to review each of the four different strategies I use (issue 1137). So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been considering the “buy and hold” portfolio. My strategy here is to invest in a group of stable multinational companies, keeping turnover as low as possible. I’m indifferent as to whether gains come through rising dividends or an increase in the value of the shares. The portfolio holds 30-40 stocks – enough to diversify away the risks arising from any one stock, without becoming unwieldy. I try to focus on sectors that have the most attractive traits, avoiding ones that are too cyclical, capital-intensive or hard to understand. There’s a bias towards consumer goods and healthcare, but with some technology and high-tech…

Japan’s start-ups will thrive Neil Seeman Nikkei Asia The collapse of FTX has “taken some of the shine off start-up culture in the US”, but the outlook for Japan is bright, says Neil Seeman. The number of start-ups there receiving funding fell 17% in 2021, but this reflects a conservative, mature approach that is likely to yield long-term prosperity. Whereas much cash in the US has gone to ventures with “nebulous strategies”, Japan’s most valued start-ups come from diverse sectors ranging from deep learning to synthetic materials. They tend to be capital-intensive firms that benefit from the fruits of research and development rather than “blitz” advertising and contract labour. Founders tend to be older and more experienced than their US peers. It’s easy to “pick holes” in the theory of…

conversableeconomist.com The idea that society as a whole benefits if it invests in its children has a “powerful intuitive” appeal, says Timothy Taylor. But is there any hard evidence? There is. Families with children born in December in the US are eligible for an additional tax deduction and a higher earned income-tax credit the following year than those with children born in January. The additional benefits average about 10% of household income. This quirk creates a “natural experiment” to test what this extra investment in young children leads to. The answer, according to a paper by Andrew Barr and co-authors, who examined the data going back to 1979, is that the children born in December earned more as 26 to 28 year olds, and hence generated income-tax revenues large enough…

The rise in bond yields in December took the yield on ten-year gilts to nearly 3.7%, but it will take a yield of well over 4% to make them attractive. The Bank of England’s inflation target remains 2% but it will probably settle for 2.5%-3%. Investors should expect a real return of 1%, plus a margin of safety. Corporate bonds offer a higher yield depending on the rating of the borrower. The yield on investment-grade exchange traded funds is around 5.7% but that includes a lot of BBB bonds. Credit quality usually worsens in a recession, turning many low-grade issues into junk. Excluding BBB bonds will result in a much lower yield. However, this is not a normal recession: it is the public sector that is in crisis, not the…

“The Gym Group achieves a return of 31p for every pound it invests” Health and fitness can be a great business to be in – especially at this time of year. Many people are trying to lose weight and get fitter. Sadly for the health and fitness industry, this resolve tends not to last. Around mid-January, New Year’s resolutions start slipping. According to IHRSA, the Global Health and Fitness Association, 4% of people who sign up for a gym at the start of each year have quit by the end of January; 14% have left by February and 50% have disappeared after six months. But if a gym can convince a customer to stay, the returns can be impressive. IHRSA’s research shows that the average member stays for at least…

In January 2022 the Financial Conduct Authority brought in a ban on insurers charging loyal customers more than new customers. The idea was to stop firms profiting from customers auto-renewing. Sadly, this attempt to tackle the “loyalty charge” hasn’t really changed a thing, says Martyn James in The Sunday Times. “We all seem to be paying more for our premiums now. Frankly, it’s outrageous that the industry profited from people staying loyal for decades, then passed the costs on to all their customers when they were told to stop.” Costs are on the rise for new and old customers, says David Byers in The Sunday Times. Data from Consumer Intelligence shows that car insurance premiums for new customers rose by 30% last year, while home insurance costs are up 17%.…

Small-business groups have reacted angrily to plans to cut back the financial assistance with energy bills available to small firms. Ministers announced last week that the current scheme, which caps the gas and electricity bills paid by small companies, will close on 31 March. In its place, a one-year scheme will offer discounts on bills, but no ceiling on prices. The new arrangements are far less generous. The government estimates that the cost of supporting businesses under the current scheme will be £18bn over the six months to the end of March. By contrast, it expects the new arrangements to cost only £5.5bn for the full 12 months to the end of March next year. That implies the support available will be worth less than a sixth of what is…

Newspaper group Reach (LSE: RCH), the publisher of the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror and around 130 other regional and national brands, continues to struggle. Its share price fell last week after it warned that operating profits for 2022 would undershoot expectations owing to disappointing advertising sales, says Proactive Investor. Printadvertising revenue slipped by an annual 20% in the fourth quarter. The uncertain macroeconomic backdrop is likely to keep hampering advertising, reckons the group, so it plans to cut costs further. The stock has fallen by 68% over the past 12 months.…

NV Poirot, Cuvée Roland, Extra Brut, Premier Cru, Blanc de Blancs, Champagne, France £34, Shoreditch Wine House, 020-3146 9606; shoreditchwinehouse.co.uk It’s probably too early to announce that I have found the best value Champagne of the year, but I feel very confident about this week’s featured wine. Its story is one you will not forget, and while you can order it over the phone, I insist you visit Shoreditch Wine House for an incredible “shopping experience”. Top sommeliers Ben Van de Meutter and Andrea Barsottini are restaurateurs who operate on a different plane. Service, ambience, chatter, wine, food, the whole caboodle is bang on at Shoreditch Wine House – a little wine bar situated in a neat little alleyway off Shoreditch High Street. Please keep your eyes peeled for the…

Invasion Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival Luke Harding Faber, £20 The “wheels of European history turned decisively” in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine”, says Michael Clarke in The Guardian. Until then, most people regarded Russia as no more than “a damned nuisance to European security”, and regarded its president, Vladimir Putin, as “a natural bully whose threats and bluster had nevertheless always been rather carefully calibrated”. Then he invaded a country of 44 million people with fewer than 190,000 troops and, when the initial attack failed to give the expected results, settled in for “an escalating, open-ended war in Europe”. In Invasion, Luke Harding provides a “first historical draft” of the war and examines how the Kremlin “got itself into this mess”. Harding is “uniquely…

Consider politics and economics today, and the half-word “cluster” comes to mind. It describes the motley crew of incompetent jackasses and interlaced calamities coming our way. Readers might notice that the word ”cluster” is usually joined with another word that begins with an “f”. But the use of the f-word is just another, minor part of the phenomenon. The coarsening of vernacular speech is connected – like a sewer line to a septic tank-to the degeneration of the whole cluster complex. We used to rely on conservatives to block the growth of government and hold down spending. But then, in the 21st century, the need disappeared. Why limit spending when money is practically free? The Fed pushed down interest rates so much that Congress could add 500% to federal debt…