Innehållsförteckning för 1219 från MoneyWeek

Over the past two decades, US consumers have propped up the world economy by buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have. But have they now run out of steam? In the last few weeks they have used up the excess savings stemming from the Covid era (see page 5) and it now appears that years of dearer money and price rises are taking their toll. At the top end of the income spectrum, demand for a key necessity is softening. Luxury group LVMH said this week that it was grappling with a “severe demand issue in Champagne”, apparently because the world is in a dismal state and nobody feels like celebrating. But American consumers becoming more cautious have also contributed to a dip in sales at drinks…

“The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) [will allow] issuers with multiple share classes to list on UK exchanges more easily… [but] when the next IPO lands, investors can no longer be sure that one share will equal one vote… How did we get here? The short answer is fear… that London’s exchanges are losing the battle for tomorrow’s companies… We may only be weeks from [the first] dual-class structured company signalling its intention to float. Here are three questions to ask… One, how does the issuer justify its use of enhanced voting rights? Two, why the UK? …There are deeper pools of capital elsewhere. If London’s embrace of [looser governance standards] seems to have been the decider, then pass… Three, who else is invested? ...With retail investors’ power over corporate decision-making…

Shares in oil giant BP bounced this week after it promised to “shower its shareholders with higher dividends and share buybacks”, says Jillian Ambrose in The Guardian. Thanks to unexpectedly high profits of $2.76bn for the three months to 30 June, BP will lift its dividend payments while buying back stock worth $1.75bn over the next quarter. This will bring its total buybacks for the first half of the year to $3.5bn, and $7bn for 2024 as whole. BP has paid out a total of $14.8bn to shareholders since June 2023. All this good news is certainly a much-needed “boost” for BP’s CEO Murray Auchincloss as he “attempts to rebuild... confidence following the abrupt resignation of Bernard Looney”, says Emma Powell in The Times. Auchincloss hopes to deliver “a simpler,…

Bermuda-based reinsurer RenaissanceRe looks a bargain, says WirtschaftsWoche. The stock is on just six times earnings and a price-to-book value ratio of one. It focuses on property and liability insurance, with each division comprising half the group’s premiums. In the former category the combined ratio is a mere 41%, the best in the sector. The ratio for the overall company is 75.4%, while the group’s return on equity is 25%. The group also has an investment portfolio worth $30bn and recently snapped up smaller rival Validus Re for $3bn, just 1.14 times book value. The future looks bright in an era of climate change causing more disasters: it just raises premiums when there is another catastrophe.…

Politics & economics “Strikingly”, Rachel Reeves’ cuts did not extend to one of Labour’s “favourite schemes”, its new taxpayer-owned company, GB Energy, says The Economist. Last week, energy secretary Ed Miliband unveiled a new partnership with the Crown Estate – which owns the seabed around the UK – to speed up the construction of offshore wind farms. Miliband argues that a surge in domestic renewables can increase Britain’s energy security and provide clean power, say Jim Pickard and Rachel Millard in the Financial Times. There are doubts about Labour’s ambitious target to decarbonise our power system by 2030 (and bring down household bills by £300), not least due to long-standing issues about connecting wind and solar farms to the grid. Miliband has also admitted that it could take five…

With £40.8m matched on Betfair, Donald Trump remains the favourite to take the White House in the US presidential election in November. However, just as the gap in the head-to-head polls has narrowed and in some cases reversed, Trump’s odds have lengthened to 1.75 (57.1%), while those of vice-president Kamala Harris have narrowed to 2.5 (40%). Michelle Obama’s odds are now 100 (1%), reflecting the fact that Harris is set to be confirmed as the nominee in the coming days. I don’t think that this is just a temporary bounce for Harris, more a sign that the Democratic Party, many of whom had serious concerns about Joe Biden, are uniting around her. In 2008 Barack Obama regularly trailed the Republican nominee John McCain in head-to-heads during the brutal primary battle…

There was, on the surface, nothing very interesting or exciting about NatWest’s results, published at the end of last week. It reported a 16% decline in pre-tax profits for the first six months of the year, mostly due to more competition in the borrowing market, and weaker margins on mortgages as customers sought out more competitive deals. Even so, it still made a healthy £3bn in profits, which was better than the market was expecting, the shares spiked upwards on the news, and at 370p are now trading at the highest level in five years. The bank also, however, spent £24m over the last year preparing a mass-market campaign to sell off the government’s remaining 20% stake. Shareholding culture in decline It would have been a starry media blitz. The…

A carry trade can refer to any strategy that involves borrowing at a low interest rate and lending or investing the proceeds at a higher rate. However, when the term is used without any further clarification, it normally refers to a currency carry trade. This means that the investor is borrowing in the currency of a country that has low interest rates and investing in the currency of a country with higher interest rates. Since Japan has had very low interest rates relative to the rest of the world for most of the last decade, currency carry trades often involve borrowing in yen. However, the euro and the Swiss franc also became popular sources of funding during prolonged periods of negative interest rates in Europe during the past decade. The…

“Yes, of course rich people like Adele [pictured] are allowed to be sad. But at a time when so many people are unhappy because of their lack of money, there’s something repulsive about a really, really rich person ceaselessly bleating about the abject misery of their lives while being paid millions to do the thing they love for a living.” Columnist Julie Burchill in The Spectator “No part of me was thinking when Deadpool was finally greenlit that this would be a success. I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen. They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set…

literaryreview.co.uk When the US government was deliberating in 1967 on Lyndon Johnson’s Rat Bill, which would allocate $40m to dealing with rodents, demonstrators forced their way in, chanting “rats cause riots!”, says Will Wiles. Republican opponents scoffed that surely a few cats and a bit of poison would do the job. But as Rat City, an “engrossing” study of the problem by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, points out, things were not so simple. Rats are the “harbinger of urban decline and chaos”, and can spark civil unrest – rent strikes in protest at infestations, for example. But experts on rat behaviour knew that eliminating them was a real challenge. Rats are picky eaters, making them difficult to poison. And numbers quickly recover from any slump. One surprising result of…

As interest rates start to fall, many risk-averse investors will be looking to lock in higher levels of income. But yields on longer-dated government bonds are already not much more than 4%, and on higher-quality corporate bonds they are scarcely higher. The yields on funds in the debt, loans and bonds investment-trust sector are significantly higher, with several of them exceeding 10%, but these may carry obscure risks, particularly for those specialising in the mystical world of collateralised loans. The Invesco Bond Income Plus (LSE: BIPS) trust yields a lower but still healthy 6.7% from a “very liquid” portfolio of listed bonds. Thanks to an average bond price of 92 and a weighted average bond maturity of 6.6 years, the redemption yield of the portfolio is 8%, which rises to…

Pubs have been a key part of the fabric of British life for hundreds of years. But pubs are not great businesses. Costs are high, and profits are low. It is also relatively straightforward to set up a pub. The most challenging part is complying with licensing and planning conditions. Aside from these hurdles, there are few other barriers to entry for potential rivals. These challenges explain why the number of pubs across the country has been falling for decades. But there are plenty of bright spots. People still want to go out, drink, eat and have a good time with friends and family, and demand remains high. As we saw in 2021 and 2022, as soon as the challenges of the pandemic were overcome, people wanted to go out…

● Financial-technology firm Revolut has finally secured a UK banking licence after a three-year wait. The licence means Revolut is now officially a bank, although restrictions mean it can’t start taking deposits just yet. It must build up its systems to a level the regulator is happy with before it secures a full deposit-taking licence. Revolut has hitherto been a digital banking app allowing people to hold a prepaid debit card and transfer money. Soon that will change as it becomes a fully-fledged bank. The licence means Revolut will eventually be able to hold customers’ deposits, “opening the door to new income streams, since it can start funding own-branded loans and mortgages”, says Kalyeena Makortoff in The Guardian. Securing a banking licence also means that deposits with Revolut will now…

● The British economy’s skills shortages continue to challenge organisations in many sectors. And smaller businesses often find it particularly difficult to compete for staff, especially when it comes to financial rewards. However, new research suggests there has been a surge in the number of employers offering flexible benefits packages to attract workers. These deals allow workers to choose from a broad variety of benefits, perhaps trading off salary in return for more holiday, better-value health insurance, gym membership or childcare support, for instance. ● While sophisticated cybersecurity attacks tend to attract most of the headlines, simpler scams, which are frequently based around emails, are a far more widespread problem. The number of phishing attacks on small businesses – whereby fraudsters attempt to get victims to share sensitive data they…

There was a time when you wouldn’t choose to eat in London’s King’s Cross unless you were passing through, says Katie Prescott in The Times. Now it is a “destination in its own right, the heart of Britain’s technology scene, with Meta Platforms, Google DeepMind and OpenAI among those in the area”. Simon Thomas (pictured), the founder of one of Britain’s most prominent computer-chip companies, Paragraf, is “in and out constantly”. It was over lunch here, in 2015, that Thomas and his fellow Cambridge academic Colin Humphreys, met with industry bigwigs and came up with the idea of producing semiconductors made of graphene in novel ways, with applications in a wide range of advanced electronic, energy and medical devices. Nine years later, the firm was spun out of Cambridge University,…

NV Crémant de Bourgogne Brut, Cave de Bissey, France £15.90, reduced to £14.10 each by the case, hhandc.co.uk I clearly remember, back in the 1970s, my parents could not afford Champagne, but they loved the opportunity to pour keener-priced crémants. This wonderful style of wine also likes to be dressed up with delicious blackcurrant liqueur to make a time-honoured Kir Royale. A darling of Parisian brasseries, this delightful “cocktail” had all the class and flair of a glass of Champagne, but with a little more romance and international intrigue. I remember selling bottles of Crème de Cassis in the 1980s when I worked in a wine shop as Kirs (blended with still, dry, neutral white wine) and Kir Royales were all the rage. Then Prosecco and Cava happened, and this…

Mapping the Global Story of Money Dariusz Wójcik (ed) Yale University Press, £30 “A picture is worth a thousand words,” they say, and in the Atlas of Finance, Dariusz Wójcik of the National University of Singapore has led a team of economists, geographers and illustrators to paint a picture, in the form of a collection of charts and maps, to show how the global financial system works. In so doing, Wójcik’s text puts paid to the jargon and equations that bedevil books purporting to help the layperson understand finance. It opens with a whirlwind tour of financial history that takes the reader from ancient Sumeria, where basic ideas of measurement and record keeping were pioneered, to the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and JM Keynes. It then dives into…

At this year’s summer Olympics in Paris, 10,500 athletes across 32 sports in 329 medal events are competing for the ultimate prize – the gold medal, says Anthony DeMarco in Forbes. The 2024 gold medal, as won by Britain’s Tom Pidcock (pictured), who came first in the cross-country mountain bike event on Monday, is worth around $950, based on the spot values of the metals it contains. That makes it probably the most valuable of any Olympic gold medal and $242 dearer than the gold medals awarded at the 2012 London Games. The Paris gold medal is made from 505 grams of silver, 18 grams of iron from the Eiffel Tower and just six grams of gold (used to plate the medal). Had it been made entirely of gold, each…

The number of overseas visitors to Thailand hit 17.5 million in the first half of 2024, a rise of 33% on a year before and a welcome boost to a country where tourism makes up a fifth of GDP, says Lex in the Financial Times. Meanwhile, Chinese electric-vehicle makers are setting up shop as they seek to dodge US tariffs, providing a tailwind for local manufacturers. Yet the local SET index has plunged by 18% over the past year. As so often before, the problem is chronic political instability, this time over whether the sitting prime minister can continue in office amid legal challenges. On a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 17 the SET is still pricier than regional peers, which is keeping value investors at bay. “Rattled” by divisive politics,…

Exceptionally generous state stimulus during Covid allowed US households to accumulate large “excess savings” (the extra amount saved above the “pre-recession trend”). With fewer ways to spend cash during lockdown, by August 2021 American households had collectively saved $2.1trn more than they normally would have, say Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Edgard Oliveira of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. That huge cash cushion allowed consumers in the world’s largest economy to continue splurging despite soaring inflation. Yet as of March 2024 these “overall excess savings” appear to “have been fully depleted”. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit an eight-month low in July.…

Diageo’s CEO Debra Crew has warned that consumers are facing an “extraordinary environment”, says Madeleine Speed in the Financial Times. The drinks group’s shares lost almost a tenth after it produced its first global drop in sales since 2020. Revenue in the year to 30 June slipped by 1.4% to $20.3bn, while the volume of drinks sold dropped by 5% as consumers lowered spending. The fall was very steep in Latin America, where net sales plummeted by 15%. While Crew thinks that Diageo will eventually “get back on track” once the consumer environment improves, this could take time, and the outlook for the next year is also “grim”. Crew has had a controversial first year as CEO, say Aimee Donnellan and George Hay on Breakingviews. While her appointment last June…

US temperature-controlled storage and logistics company Lineage has raised $4.4bn in its initial public offering (IPO), the largest stockmarket debut of the year so far, says Bloomberg. The company is listed on New York’s Nasdaq exchange and sold nearly 57 million shares for $78 each, near the top of its price range, resulting in a market value of $19bn. Lineage’s flotation is the biggest in the US since British chipmaker Arm Holdings last September. The IPO has also drawn interest from Norway’s $1.7trn sovereign wealth fund. Lineage has 482 warehouses across 19 countries. Although it recorded a loss of $96.2m last year, sales rose to $53bn from $4.9bn in 2022.…

● “Duncan Wanblad’s job is not getting any easier,” says Karen Kwok on Breakingviews. After fending off a bid by rival BHP, the Anglo American CEO (pictured) delivered “decent” half-year results. But a fire at a key coal mine and problems in diamonds are hindering the group’s “self-help plan”. The fire may hurt prospects for the coal unit: valued in line with peers such as Arch and Stanmore, it could be worth $3.7bn, lower than the $5bn hoped for. “Wanblad may have to compromise on diamonds too” after cutting output guidance. A “time-pressured sale” risks a price at the lower end of a $3bn-$7bn range. At those valuations, the whole of Anglo is in line with the $47bn that BHP offered. Shares have fallen back to where they were before…

“We have had a 40-year bull market, during which there have been only the briefest of conventional bear phases,” says Jonathan Ruffer, the veteran investor whose firm runs the Ruffer Investment Company investment trust. The sell-offs – 1990-1992, 2000-2002, 2008-2009 and 2022 – were “stockmarket crashes – crevasses which, in a jiffy, do immense damage to investment returns”. “The identification of these has been the single biggest contributor to our track record,” says Ruffer. (The trust has returned 6.9% per year since it launched in July 2004, below the 7.4% rate achieved by the FTSE All Share, but with far less volatility, according to Citywire.) “In each and every one, we were too early—in 2000, it was 14 months; in 2008, it was a full two years; in 2020, it…

city-journal.org What happens when you give people free money with no strings attached? A scientific experiment designed to test this widespread proposal for a “universal basic income” has just completed, says Robert VerBruggen. The study included 3,000 lower-income Americans, aged 21-40, who were randomly assigned to receive either $1,000 a month for three years, or just $50 for their continued participation. The results were roughly what common sense would have predicted: that when people get free money, they “work a bit less and play a bit more”. They spend a bit more on healthcare, but with no enduring health benefit. The loss of effort at work was not offset by any other productive activity, nor exercising or caring for children, or self-improvement. The study will not, of course, end the…

Elliott Investment Management has built a “sizeable” stake in Starbucks, says The Wall Street Journal. The activist investor has been engaging with Starbucks behind the scenes and may reach an agreement soon, but the exact size of its position and specific demands are unclear. Starbucks, which has been losing ground in the US and facing increased competition in China, recently reported a slowdown in visits and unexpectedly weak sales and earnings. The stock has slid by 35% from a record peak in 2021, and the company has slashed its outlook twice this year. CEO Laxman Narasimhan took over last year from longtime leader Howard Schultz, who has since openly criticised Narasimhan and the firm’s direction.…

Does your business have a website? The answer is “no” at more than one in five small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, according to a recent report, but two-thirds of those SMEs felt that setting up a website would be good for business. That doesn’t necessarily mean launching an e-commerce channel. Merely having an online presence can boost your brand and enhance your company’s credibility. In that context, web-hosting firms have become hugely important. These are the businesses that will provide you with the internet space you need for your website, and ensure it is accessible to internet users. Web hosts can support you with everything from registering a domain name to ensuring your site is safe and secure, but above all, they provide the digital real estate…

“Tuhu is the market leader in China, where vehicle-parts retailing is still in its infancy” My investment strategy is built on diligence, discipline, and patience. We look for good businesses run by competent management teams, available at a price that leaves us with a margin of safety. We therefore tend to avoid thematic investments, start-ups, highly geared companies, cyclical businesses earning peak margins and stocks on high multiples to earnings. I focus on managing absolute risk and losing little money during market drawdowns, which should help compound returns at higher rates over the long term. As a result of this approach, the trust has a contrarian value tilt and is primarily invested in mispriced small and medium-sized companies that are the “winners of tomorrow” before they become well-known. Here are…

I’m resting on my bed, taking in my surroundings. My eyes follow the curvature of the room – the vaulted ceiling, the carved-stone walls, the rounded doorways and cubby holes filled with antiques. The fireplace in the centre is the only structure with straight lines, and even that wouldn’t look out of place in an ancient abode. This is not your typical bedroom. Then again, Argos in Cappadocia is not your typical hotel. Built into the hillside in the village of Uçhisar, it was created from a collection of old stone houses, cave dwellings, tunnels, rock-hewn churches, and a monastery. Embracing nature, sustainability, and cultural heritage, it offers the opportunity to sleep in a living piece of history. The transformation into a luxury hotel spanned several years and there’s minimal…

Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back Torsten Bell Bodley Head, £20 The electorate has given its verdict on Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves now face the challenge of meeting people’s expectations at a time when the fiscal situation is worse than many people realise, which will force the government to make hard choices about spending and tax. One man with a view about what to do is Torsten Bell, former head of the Resolution Foundation, and now newly elected Labour MP for Swansea West. In this book, he lays out the problems the new government will have to deal with and offers some solutions. The main reason for rising inequality and economic stagnation, Bell argues, is poor productivity. Indeed, had growth in productivity…

“We have a big currency problem,” Donald Trump tells Bloomberg Businessweek. The US presidential candidate flags the “strong dollar/weak yen, weak yuan” as a barrier to a revival in US manufacturing. Since the 1990s, US Treasury secretaries have generally taken the view that market forces should determine exchange rates, says Alan Rappeport in The New York Times. In 1995, Clinton administration official Robert Rubin even declared that “a strong dollar is in our national interest” as it helps to reduce government borrowing costs. A tax on manufacturers? Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, argues that a strong currency is effectively “a subsidy for US consumers but a tax on American manufacturers”. He wants the balance to be re-set in favour of America’s “hollowed-out industrial base”. A Trump White House…

Shares in Reckitt Benckiser have slumped by 9% to a ten-year low after a US court ruling that a baby formula produced by rival Abbott Laboratories had caused a little girl to develop fatal necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), a bowel disease, says Jack Simpson in the Guardian. The verdict, which saw Abbott ordered to pay $495m (£385m) in damages, follows similar judgments against both companies over their formulae for premature babies. With Reckitt due to face its own NEC-related trial in September, investors are “waiting to see whether the company will be subject to further payouts”. The lawsuits amount to little more than a “shakedown” against both firms and their “life-sustaining formula for pre-term infants”, which only makes them a few million a year in sales, says The Wall Street Journal.…

Six to buy Kingfisher The Telegraph Kingfisher, owner of Screwfix and B&Q, has seen a fall in profits over the past two years owing to high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. But improving household sentiment and easing monetary policy bode well for the DIY retailer. Its strong market position, improving financial outlook, low valuation, ambitious share-buyback programme and 4.5% dividend yield all make it a “worthwhile long-term investment.” 277p J Sainsbury The Times In recent years Sainsbury’s has grappled with tough competition from cheaper rivals Aldi and Lidl, cost-of-living pressures and thin margins. But the group has been simplifying operations by scaling back its clothing division, selling its banking unit, refocusing on food, and promising investors a dividend yield north of 5%. Sainsbury’s has also been winning customers with its…

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who had been living in Iran, was reportedly killed by Israel on Wednesday morning, just hours after it eliminated a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, says The Guardian. The two assassinations are “heavy blows” to the terrorist groups and “raise the stakes for Iran”, which backs both. It may also escalate the war in Gaza into a broader regional conflict. Israel declined to confirm that it was responsible, but its intelligence services “have a history of carrying out covert killings inside Iran”. The move against Haniyeh (pictured) in particular is a “huge gamble” for Israel, says Andrew England in the Financial Times. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no doubt betting the strike will send a “message of deterrence to his country’s enemies”…

Branded consumer staples are usually seen as a very defensive sector. They tend to beat the market when investors get nervous about growth. That pattern isn’t playing out as reliably as it normally does in this cycle. While a few staples firms are performing very well – Colgate-Palmolive is up 25% this year – many other stalwarts, from Nestlé to Mondelez, are not. In some cases, the weakness is down to a specific problem (Reckitt’s decision to buy Mead Johnson in 2017 stands out – page 6). In others, it’s clear that firms are struggling to balance pricing power against volumes. Many have put up prices to pass on higher costs and protect margins. This kept both revenues and profits growing, but caused the volume of goods sold to shrink.…

Scrap the two-child benefit cap Miriam CatesConservative Home The most expensive benefit, the state pension, costs taxpayers £135bn a year (that’s £3,600 per individual), yet sadly this “unconditional generosity” does not extend to children, says Miriam Cates. George Osborne “shattered” a 60-year-old social contract when he introduced the two-child benefit cap in 2017 as part of a push to reduce the size of the welfare state. But children are not a luxury. They are “quite literally” our economic future. And they will be paying for our healthcare and pensions when we retire. Today, the costs of raising children are so high that most ordinary working people struggle to make ends meet and therefore require additional state support. This is because housing costs are high, as are taxes – because they…

project-syndicate.org Recent elections in France and Britain, and America’s presidential campaign, “show the dilemmas left-leaning parties confront as they try to fashion new identities and present credible alternatives” to the populist right, says Dani Rodrik. The left has come a long way since the financial crisis, when it was basically missing in action. But there is still work to be done because the left “continues to send mixed messages about what they really stand for and who they represent”. Leftist parties have become “unmoored from their traditional working-class base and veered towards the educated elite”. But if the left is to regain political strength, it must “return to its roots and once again represent the interests of working people” with a focus on “good, secure, productive jobs” for workers without…

“In 2023 trade comprised only 27% of US GDP, compared with 66% in the UK” Inflation seems to have slipped from the headlines. This is unsurprising because since May inflation in Britain has been hitting the Bank of England’s target of 2%. Yet this is largely because of a sharp reversal in goods and energy inflation. Meanwhile, services inflation and the cost of owning and maintaining property in Britain continue to rise. This suggests that we are still in a broadly inflationary period, with much of the pressure being taken off as the costs of goods and energy eases from previous highs. This is particularly important to understand because talk of tariffs and trade war is on everyone’s lips – and there is nothing like a trade war to raise…

■ British investors pay almost three times as much for stocks and funds as Americans, says Ali Hussain in The Times. The gulf is due to the fact that Britons are more likely to buy active funds with higher fees, while US investors tend to use cheaper tracker funds. British fees have been steadily decreasing. The Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty rules aim to ensure positive outcomes for clients and push down costs. However, US investors benefit from a larger market with more competition, resulting in lower fees. About 51.2% of US investments are in passive funds, compared with only 23.8% in the UK. Cultural differences also play a part in the gap in costs. Americans have to be more self-sufficient owing to a lack of social welfare and a…

When you go on your summer holidays you probably don’t think about what it will do to your mobile phone bill. But if you aren’t careful, you could find your phone adds a hefty amount to the overall cost of your time away. You should be aware that your phone provider could charge you more for using your phone abroad – roaming charges, as they are known, have been around for decades. But since we left the EU they have become a bit more complicated. EU countries are banned from charging their customers more to use their phones in other member countries than they pay at home. Following Brexit, British customers no longer have that protection and since 1 January 2021 “providers have been able to reintroduce these fees”, says…

Small businesses last year raised £8.8bn of equity finance from investors such as venture-capital firms and private-equity houses, according to new data. However, the figures, published by the British Business Bank, represent a 48% decline on the previous year. The slowdown reflects both supply and demand. Higher interest rates saw the cost of finance rise last year, limiting the funding available for investment at some venture capital- and private-equity houses. But business owners and founders also appear to have become more wary of taking on this type of investment, possibly amid concerns that valuations have fallen back over the past couple of years. Nevertheless, more than 2,000 small businesses did raise equity last year, the British Business Bank points out. And equity investment has come in at more than £2bn…