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History is full of misattributed quotations. Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake”, while Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince does not contain the sentence “The end justifies the means”. It is also important to realise that Humphrey Bogart’s last words were not in fact “I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis” (after all, how much difference could it really have made?). Much of the financial media, meanwhile, reports that John Maynard Keynes dismissed gold as a barbarous relic, but he didn’t: he said that about the gold standard, the monetary system prevalent at the time. Gold itself, he said, retained “magical properties” as an asset and a store of value, as Giovanni Faresi, a professor of Economic History at the European University of Rome, points out in a…

“Monopolies are generally deemed to be bad for society... they tend to create higher prices for consumers... [But in] the mid-20th century, AT&T had a monopoly in the US consumer telecoms market... It also ran its own research laboratory, called Bell Labs... Using AT&T’s excess profits, it invented the transistor, communication satellites, fibre-optic cables and solar photovoltaics... Bell Labs could do this because it wasn’t worried about losing a few million dollars on failed innovation... [Today’s tech giants] Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have been the largest investors in AI servers... ChatGPT could only be created because Microsoft let OpenAI train it on a $250m supercomputer. For better or worse, AI is now changing the world around us... inventions that require significant investment [often] come from... monopolies with cash to…

EU regulators have broken from their counterparts in the UK and US by clearing Microsoft’s $75bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, say Javier Espinoza and Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. Competition authorities in Brussels said Microsoft had made enough concessions to allay their doubts, including allowing all Europeans purchasing an existing or future Activision game to stream it on all cloud game-streaming providers for a decade. The EU’s decision “removes an important hurdle” for the two firms, which would jointly create the third-biggest gaming company by sales behind China’s Tencent and Japan’s Sony. The two agencies’ reasoning “couldn’t be farther apart”, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. While Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) vetoed the deal “in the belief that it would give Microsoft too much power…

“Thai voters have delivered a stunning verdict in favour of an opposition party that is calling for radical reform,” says Jonathan Head on the BBC. Early results from Sunday’s elections show Pita Limjaroenrat’s progressive Move Forward Party has won 151 of the 500 seats in the lower house, ten seats ahead of the previous frontrunner, Pheu Thai. The result is a “clear repudiation of the two military-aligned parties of the current governing coalition, which won only 15% of the seats, and prime minister Prayuth Chanocha. Pheu Thai has agreed to join Move Forward and four smaller parties, giving them more than 60% of seats. Young Thais have rallied behind Move Forward’s reformist platform, which wants to amend strict lèsemajesté laws forbidding the insult of the royal family, says Kocha Olarn…

In a few days’ time, Greece will go to the polls to decide who will govern the country for the next four years. While both Betfair and Smarkets have markets on the outcome, sadly neither of them are liquid enough to be useful. The good news is that the bookmaker Bet365 is offering odds, and it has the incumbent centre-right New Democracy as the favourite to get most votes at 1/7 (85.7%), with the left-wing Syriza at 4/1 (20%) in second place. The centre-left PASOK-Kinkal are way out in third place at 500/1 (0.019%). Since the last elections in 2019, New Democracy has had a big lead in every opinion poll that has been published. Indeed, during the early part of the pandemic, the party was nearly 30 points ahead,…

In the 1970s, the last time the UK was in this much of an economic mess, a popular analysis described the country as having “too few producers”. There were simply not enough productive workers to pay the taxes needed to support all the people on the public payroll. We have gone right back to that situation. Mainstream measures of the numbers of people working in the public sector put the figure at around 5.7 million. But according to new research by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), that underestimates the real total. Instead, if you add up all the people working in health and social care, public administration, defence and security, all of which are paid for by public money, the real total is 10.6 million people.…

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…

“[My] first job was for Mossad when I was 13 years old... [an agent] would disappear for a few weeks to an Arabic country and send me letters. I had to jump on my bike, cycle down to the Israeli consulate in Nicosia and hand over the letters. I was paid in albums of stamps. This was because I wasn’t allowed to remove the amazing stamps from the envelopes he sent.” Illusionist Uri Geller (pictured), quoted in The Telegraph “[People] will cut their own grandmother’s throat for one dollar off an airline ticket.” Former president and chairman of American Airlines, Robert Crandall, commenting in the 1990s on the emerging threat to the established carriers from no-frills airline Southwest, quoted in The Times “What took the enjoyment, the personality, the humour…

bbc.com/worklife Following a “passion-based career” – long hours in a tough field you genuinely love – can be exhilarating, says Sophia Epstein. But there are also major downsides. “Passion jobs” can easily become unsustainable, because truly “dedicated workers are often undervalued and overworked”. Yet they put up with poor pay or conditions because their sense of self depends on their work. In South Korea, young workers have coined the phrase “passion wages” to describe the phenomenon whereby employers use passionate commitment as an excuse to underpay. What should you do if you’re thinking of leaving your passion job? Firstly, take a cool, hard look at whether the status quo is sustainable. Are you being fairly rewarded, or is your passion being exploited? Are you getting enough time to recuperate from…

Elliott Investment Management is once again calling for change at utility NRG Energy, says Bloomberg. In a letter to NRG’s board this week, the hedge fund decried “the single worst deal” in the utility sector: NRG’s acquisition of Vivint Smart Home, which sells security and automation systems, for $2.8bn in December. According to Elliott, the firm has become “unfocused” and is calling for the board to add new, independent directors, undertake a full strategic review and commit to returning 80% of free cash flow to investors, a plan the fund believes could create $5bn of value. Elliott’s first tussle with NRG in 2017 ended with the American power producer agreeing to offload $2.8bn of assets.…

Most retail-rewards schemes are not very useful unless you are a regular customer with sound reasons for being loyal. You typically accumulate tiny numbers of points that can only be used at the company that issues them. If you allow collecting points to influence your shopping decisions instead of going with the best price or service, you’re likely to end up spending more overall. But there are a couple of schemes – or more accurately, two pairs of linked schemes – that can be a lot more useful. A slick two-way system The slickest is Nectar, run by supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, and Avios air miles run by IAG, the parent of British Airways. These are closely linked: Avios can be swapped into Nectar at a rate of 300 Avios to…

Could ChatGPT save your small business time and money? With some caveats, the answer is probably yes. While some of the hype around the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) is overblown, ChatGPT is a free resource that can help your business complete certain tasks more efficiently and productively. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a language model developed by the American technology group OpenAI. It uses natural-language processing tools to mine a huge universe of information with the aim of producing text that feels very human. This process is sometimes described as generative AI. For small businesses, this offers all sorts of opportunities to automate work that you currently do manually. Most obviously, if your business has to create content of any type – from marketing emails to articles on your…

Ever since the release of the chatbot and generative artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT last year, AI has been in the spotlight. It’s impossible to open a newspaper without seeing someone worry about the impact of AI on everything from the future of work to dating. Even if humanity may not be doomed just yet, AI is clearly a revolutionary technology that has finally reached a tipping point and is set to transform our lives. But, as many of those who invested in the first wave of internet firms found out the hard way, creating a world-changing technology and making money from it are two very different things. A case in point is C3.ai (NYSE: AI). C3.ai sells a software platform, which it claims companies can use to develop AI-applications…

“RWS’s translation services are used by 90 of the world’s top 100 brands” With inflation and interest-rate hikes expected to moderate in the UK, many investors now wonder whether Britain is headed for a deep recession after all. However, the more relevant question is whether the new economic regime of elevated inflation and higher rates will force businesses and consumers to tighten their purse strings over the coming months. As Britons have already cut discretionary spending, it seems prudent to assume this will be the case. In this environment, only the most resilient companies can deliver consistent income streams. We look at three such businesses available to savvy UK investors at attractive discounts. Co-bots – not robots RWS Holdings (Aim: RWS) is a world-leading provider of technology-enabled language translation services…

The ten-year performance award Elon Musk (pictured) received from the electric-car giant he heads in 2018 lost $9.7bn in value last year. He is in good company, says Inti Pacheco in The Wall Street Journal. Two-thirds of CEOs at big-cap US S&P 500 firms ended 2022 with compensation packages worth less than when they were awarded. The details have come to light under new rules that require US companies to track the changing values of stock awards, which tend to make up the lion’s share of executive compensation packages, over the years since they were given. Peter Kern, CEO of Expedia, suffered a $237m decline in the value of his awards, and Amazon boss Andy Jassy lost $149m. The leaders of energy companies fared better, however, as the stock in…

The Bank of England is “now the rare messenger of good news”, says Mehreen Khan in The Times. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has ditched its forecast of the longest recession since 1945 and now predicts “modest growth over the next three years”, largely thanks to a “sharp drop in wholesale energy prices”. Last week the MPC raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.5%, the 12th consecutive hike. Yet with annual inflation still running at 10.1% in March, the Bank’s job is far from done. The MPC may now adopt a wait-and- see attitude while it evaluates the impact of previous hikes, says Paul Dales of Capital Economics. It thinks that only about one-third of its interest-rate hikes have yet been felt by households in…

US markets have come off last year’s highs, but they are still far from cheap, says Justin Lahart in The Wall Street Journal. The benchmark S&P 500 index has fallen back from a forward price/earnings (p/e) multiple of 21.6 at the start of 2022 to 18.3 now, but that is still above its 16.9 average for the five years that ended in 2019. The so-called “Buffett indicator” (pictured), which shows the ratio of the value of publicly traded firms to US GDP, tells a similar story. As of the final quarter of last year the measure stood at 179% of annualised output. Excluding the start of the pandemic, that is “as high as it has ever been”. No measure of stock valuations is perfect, “but when so many of them…

This week the CEO of Rolls-Royce was forced to defend his previous description of Britain’s flagship engineer as a “burning platform”, says Sylvia Pfeifer in the Financial Times. Tufan Erginbilgic said his “bleak assessment” of Rolls-Royce, made after he took over in January, was “based on facts and on previous experiences of managing transformations”. The shares have been among the best-performing in the blue-chip index this year, but are still below the 337p-level they reached before Covid halted air travel. This in turn “severely dented” the group’s civil aerospace business, which still comprises 40% of the firm’s underlying sales. Erginbilgic has certainly been “making waves” since he took over at Rolls-Royce, says Benjamin Katz in The Wall Street Journal. In the five months he has been running the company he…

● The extradition of Autonomy founder Mike Lynch (pictured) to the US “sets a dangerous precedent”, says Maggie Pagano in the Daily Mail. Lynch faces charges that he “duped” HP into overpaying for Autonomy by inflating its accounts prior to an $11bn takeover in 2011. Yet Lynch is a British national, Autonomy was a British company and the deal was subject to UK takeover rules. “The case should be tried here.“ His extradition – which came after a High Court ruling refused him permission to appeal the decision – shows serious flaws in the “increasingly one way” agreement between the UK and US. It will worry other bosses, who fear that “any fall-out from future trans-Atlantic business deals could land them in the US courts many years later”. ● Apollo…

Sushil Wadhwani, chief investment officer, PGIM Wadhwani The Bank of England would be “unwise” to lift interest rates as high as 5%, says Sushil Wadhwani, the hedge-fund manager who served on the central bank’s monetary policy committee between 1999 and 2002. “I was on record as saying rates would get to 5% or higher,” he tells Bloomberg. “In recent weeks I’ve been wobbling about this because I’ve become more worried about the US economy.” Among other threats to global growth, the risk that America defaults on its debts due to the debt ceiling impasse (see page 5 and page 10) are greater than they were during a previous debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, reckons Wadhwani. Back then, agreement to increase the ceiling was reached just two days before the Treasury estimated…

taxpolicy.org.uk Leftist campaigners for tax reform often fall into a self-defeating trap, says Dan Neidle. They believe so strongly in the “righteousness” of their ideas “that all of their time and focus is spent on advocacy, and none on analysis” – meaning their proposals lack all practicality. Take, for example, the egregiously silly proposals recently set out by the European Greens. Their idea is for a 40% minimum on capital gains, and for listed shares this would be on gains whether realised or unrealised. But this would create a powerful incentive not to hold shares or float businesses on public markets. Avoidance tactics would blossom, and the tax yield would be massively lower than expected. The Greens have also cherry-picked four oil majors to conclude wrongly that their tax could…

■ The UK’s leading asset managers are working on a proposal to set up a fund to back Britain’s start-ups, says Reuters. A risk-averse attitude among the country’s fund managers has been cited as one of the reasons why companies are fleeing the country (see page 26). Now Nicholas Lyons, a veteran banker and the current lord mayor of London, is reportedly working on proposals to build a £50bn ‘Future Growth Fund’ to back fast-growing tech and biotech firms. Lyons has been canvassing blue-chip asset managers for contributions to the fund, which would be modelled on the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Australian superannuation funds. The goal would be to support firms through the “cliff edge” between being a mature private business and a public enterprise. “At the moment…

Using a loyalty card scheme such as Nectar means that the scheme has some data on your shopping habits – that was one of the reasons why the supermarkets originally launched them. There are other rewards schemes that can pay you a lot of extra points – but at the cost of giving companies a lot more insight into your habits. These are Nectar Connect (part of Nectar) and Airtime Rewards. These two schemes work in a similar way. You link your bank account or credit card to them using the Open Banking protocol. They get to read your transactions and track where you spend money. You’ll be offered time-limited promotions from a range of retailers that pay you rewards or cashback when you shop. With Nectar Connect, that comes…

Small businesses locked into expensive fixed-rate energy deals should see if they can “blend and extend” their deals with suppliers. There is growing concern about many firms’ ability to continue paying high energy bills. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the lobbying group for small- and medium-sized businesses, has warned that more than 90,000 small companies could have to lay off staff or even close because the energy prices they signed up to at the height of the market last year are so expensive. With wholesale energy prices having since fallen back significantly in recent months, the FSB says that businesses should be able to renegotiate such contracts. While energy suppliers are reluctant to promise that they will renegotiate such deals en masse, there is growing evidence that some are…

Flotations tend to be highly anticipated events. No wonder: those who buy into initial public offerings (IPOs) during the subscription phase tend to do well, at least initially. One study by Jay Ritter of the University of Florida, covering 9,126 newly listed US companies going public between the start of 1980 and end of 2022 showed that they rose on average by 20.5% during their first day of trading. Even though 2022 was generally a poor year for the stockmarket (with tech stocks doing particularly badly) the 38 US IPOs last year still returned an average of 14.2%. One reason for this is that the way that companies are taken public, with investment banks agreeing to buy any unsubscribed shares, creates a clear incentive for them to keep the price…

2018 Barbaresco, Rabajà, Giuseppe Cortese, Piemonte, Italy £44.68 each, sold by the case of six bottles, Decorum Vintners, 020-8969 6581, wine@decvin.com, Decvin.com It is admittedly rather lazy to state that I have a favourite vineyard in any wine region that I prize above all others. Still, in Barbaresco, in the heart of Piemonte, it is Rabajà. There, I have done it. There are loads of superbly smart plots of nebbiolo in this heavenly, hilly wine region, and I am confident that every Barbaresco lover will have their private desert island paddock of vines. But given that I have blurted this out and that Cortese is one of my favourite winemakers in the region, it seems rather extraordinary that his glorious 2018 vintage, which is starting to drink deliciously already, slips…

Going… The bar from the classic 1980s sitcom Cheers! (pictured) is on sale with Texas-based Heritage Auctions on 2-4 June. It was made from luan wood panels and brass panels and can come apart in three sections, so that cameras could shoot scenes from various angles. The bar comes with six burgundy leatherette bar stools, but not the cash register and upright piano, which are being sold separately in the same auction. Bidding has already risen above $100,000. The sale includes 1,000 props, sets and costumes from Bewitched to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, from the collection of James Comisar, who had hoped to open a museum of television history. Gone… The bright yellow Triumph TR7 sports car from the BBC television comedy Detectorists, which first aired in 2014, sold…

Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have prompted growing talk of the need to “friend-shore” supply chains to countries such as India or Mexico, says James Crabtree in the Financial Times. Yet semiconductors aside, “so far decoupling has barely begun to happen”. Western policymakers instead seem to have concluded that a great decoupling from China’s vast manufacturing base is not practical given the costs involved. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen now talks of “de-risking”, a more targeted approach focused on building Western resilience in key sectors such as chips, batteries and critical minerals. The US has followed suit, says Shawn Donnan on Bloomberg. Washington has drastically reduced Beijing’s access to high-end semiconductors, “blacklisted Chinese companies for their ties to the military”, and is now preparing new curbs on…

The online retailer Asos has “suffered a fresh setback”, says John Abiona on This is Money. City analysts have warned of another decline in revenue just days after the fast-fashion group reported a first-half loss of £209m. JPMorgan and Credit Suisse have slashed their price targets for the company, warning that a return to profit looks unlikely in the next half-year. As a result, the shares fell by more than a fifth to a 13-year low. It’s not just the short-term losses that have spooked the market, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. The City is also worried about the state of Asos’s balance sheet. While Asos has secured an extension to its credit facility, net debt hit £432m at the end of February. And management expects an additional £100m…

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi (pictured) has experienced “a rare political setback” after his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost control of the southern state of Karnataka, says John Reed in the Financial Times. The BJP only took 66 of the 224 seats in state elections, less than half the 135 that the rival Indian National Congress won. Karnataka, which is India’s wealthiest state and home to the Bangalore tech hub, was the only state the BJP governed in the country’s south. Congress had called the Karnataka vote “a stepping stone to rebuilding its base” ahead of national elections next year. The BJP had “banked on Modi’s popularity” and “accused its opponent of disregarding Hindu values”, tactics that up until now have brought it a huge amount of success, says Astha…

It has not been a strong year for commodities. Since peaking in June 2022, the Dow Jones Commodity Index – which tracks a basket of energy, metals and agricultural commodities futures – is down by almost 25%. Shares in many commodity producers have held up better, since today’s prices are still higher than those we saw in the past decade: oil majors can produce plenty of cash with crude at $70-$80 per barrel. But for those who expect inflation to head back to a steady 2% in the years ahead – in line with central banks’ targets – this looks like a helpful tailwind. Yet commodity prices are always volatile and cyclical, even when they are trending upwards. Take oil: in 1999, it bottomed at around $10 per barrel (prompting…

UK must up its growth game Robert Colvile The Sunday Times If Kemi Badenoch’s defence of the U-turn on retained EU laws has angered Brexiteers, the broader issue is that when it comes to our competitiveness in business and innovation, “Britain is simply not at the races”, says Robert Colvile. Since 2011, the ratio of regulators to financial services workers has increased from 1:300 to roughly 1:75. More onerous reporting requirements helps explains why so few firms are listing here. Instead of making ourselves “more competitive to compensate” for the post-Brexit economic hit, corporation tax has risen “sharply”. The government urged objectors to look beyond headline figures. “But look where?” Our “agile, accommodating planning” system? Our affordable housing? Our world-class transport infrastructure? Our world-beating investment incentives? Rishi Sunak makes ambitious…

unherd.com During the first Covid lockdown, several households on my street acquired chickens to keep us supplied with fresh eggs, said Mary Harrington. Covid “scrambled” many of the food-supply chains we depend on, and some of our neighbours “did a roaring trade” selling off their excess produce. There was even a broader sense that the pandemic might signal “the end for free-trade absolutism more generally, and prompt a return to more bounded and local networks”. But three years on, the chickens have mostly gone. Instead, the iron logic of the market means that many of the eggs now supplying UK shops are imported from Italy. This “drift back to the impersonal market” is probably inevitable: local networks create webs of reciprocal obligations that bring unwanted complexity to everyday life. But…

It has been five years since Stuart Widdowson and Ed Wielechowski launched Odyssean Investment Trust, backed by Christopher Mills’ Harwood Capital, and a year since Richard Staveley moved what is now Rockwood Strategic there. Despite very difficult market conditions for UK equities and especially for smaller companies, the results have been outstanding. Since its inception, Odyssean has returned 10.7% per annum against just 0.9% for the broader Numis smaller companies index, while Rockwood returned 21.4% in the year to the end of March against a benchmark index return of -15.7%. Rockwood, with £51m of assets, now trades on a discount to net asset value (NAV) of just 2% while Odyssean, with £184m of assets, trades on a small premium. Odyssean has had “a frustrating start to 2023” thanks to a…

For growth investors, a positive theme this year has been artificial intelligence (AI): computers thinking and solving problems just like people do, allowing them to play bigger roles in everyday life. Many commentators see this as a transformative and profitable “mega-trend” in society, so stock prices of anything involved in AI have been soaring. The sector has gained nearly 17% in 2023, more than double US stocks overall, as measured by the near 70 AI-related stocks in the ROBO Global AI Index. A catalyst is ChatGPT – a new app that accepts requests in everyday language and responds helpfully in a conversational, “human” style. It draws us closer to the internet because it uses the greatest human interaction device that we have: our ordinary language. This brought AI to a…

● There’s a little-known tax break that could let you use a former home to reduce your inheritance tax (IHT) liability even after you’ve sold it, says tax expert Mike Warburton in The Telegraph. Downsizing relief lets you offset the value of a previous home against IHT, so long as your total estate is not valued at more than £2.7m. Under the current IHT rules, everybody has a nil-rate band of £325,000 on their estate. Any unused portion of this relief can be transferred to a surviving spouse within two years of their death. They also get an additional £175,000 residence nil-rate band (RNRB) when they pass their home onto direct descendants, and this can also be transferred to a surviving spouse. Thus a couple can have combined relief of…

● Risk-averse banks are increasingly reluctant to lend money to small businesses, new research warns, just as demand for loans is increasing. In a survey conducted by the alternative-finance provider Iwoca, 77% of brokers said high-street banks had become less keen to lend to small businesses in recent months, while 45% said they had seen an increase in the number of businesses looking to borrow. Small companies may have to look beyond banks to secure funding, says Iwoca. ● The Small Business Commissioner should be given more powers to take action against large companies that pay invoices late, according to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). The ACCA also called for companies to be required to make more public disclosures on their payment practices. The suggestions form part of…

Over the last month three of my long tips rose while five fell. Builder DR Horton advanced from $98.15 to $110.29, Gamma Communications increased from 1,112p to 1.153p and Computacenter climbed from 2,264p to 2,442p. However, luxury-clothing retailer Burberry slipped from 2,587p to 2,541p, discount chain B&M Value Retail declined from 496p to 495p and brick and tile manufacturer Ibstock Brick dipped from 173p to 131p. Estate agent Savills fell from 955p to 935p, while online retailer Asos collapsed from 741p to 421p, triggering the stop-loss at 525p. Counting Asos, my long tips are making total net profits of £981. As for my short tips, real-estate investment trust Digital Realty rose from $93.25 to $98.53, AST SpaceMobile increased from $4.44 to $4.97, while ticketing firm Live Nation Entertainment went up…

Bank of America has its origins in the Bank of Italy, founded in San Francisco in 1904. Originally aimed at Italian immigrants to the US, it rapidly expanded across California and was renamed Bank of America in 1930. In 1998 it merged with NationsBank of Charlotte, with the new company becoming one of the largest banks in the US. Under CEO Ken Lewis, who took over in 2001, it would pursue an aggressive policy of expanding through acquisitions. What was the idea? Between 1982 and 2007, the mortgage lender Countrywide Financial made a lot of money from providing mortgage financing, at one point being involved with around a fifth of American mortgages. Because many of them were riskier subprime mortgages, it relied on quickly repackaging them as mortgage-backed securities and…

For collectors of spirits, it’s not always just about what lies within. The bottle can also add significant value. Colombia’s Dictador rum is known for its beautifully crafted bottle collections, as Simon Aron showed me with his hand-painted examples when I visited the Cask Trade office in London. Last year, the distillery unveiled its M-City Golden Cities series, for sale by invitation only. Each of the one-litre bottles, which are created by Polish artist M-City and fashioned from 24-carat gold, is unique and costs upwards of $1.5m. Once sales of the bottles reach $1bn in total, the series will be brought to an end. Other bottles in its recent Totem series use patterns by Colombian artists. The artsy movement is not confined to rum. Bottles of Macallan 1926 Fine And…