MoneyWeek

Interest-rate cuts are “in play”, the Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey tells the Financial Times. The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) again held interest rates at 5.25% at this month’s meeting, but cheaper money is coming into view. An

“[Online] searches for ‘ESG investing’ have plummeted back to mid-2019 levels... The term was the product of an uneasy three-way alliance [between] ethically driven investors [including] pension funds, universities and religious organisations... inst

Retailer Next’s shares jumped by 5% last week following a “better-than-expected annual profit haul”, says Holly Williams in the Evening Standard. Next reported a 5% rise in underlying pre-tax profits to £918m for the year to 31 January 2024, better t

The price of a Centre Court debenture at Wimbledon has risen by 45% to £116,000 for the next five years – four times as expensive as a decade ago and working out at £1,657 a day during the annual tennis championships, says Martyn Ziegler in The Times

Investors’ appetite for initial public offerings (IPOs) of “promising yet loss-making companies could be returning”, says Kari Paul in The Guardian. Shares in social-media platform Reddit soared by nearly half when they listed last Thursday, implying

Turkey has “stunned” investors by hiking interest rates to 50%, say Ezgi Erkoyun and Daren Butler for Reuters. Inflation hit 67% in February. The Turkish central bank has long come under pressure from president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to keep rates much

America and Japan are “planning the biggest upgrade to their security alliance” since their 1960 mutual defence treaty, in a move to “counter” an expansionist China, say Demetri Sevastopulo and Kana Inagaki in the Financial Times. President Joe Biden

A terrorist attack in Moscow last week ended in the deaths of more than a hundred concertgoers. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the atrocity. In a televised address, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not mention the terrorist group, howev

“After five months of brutal conflict and a number of failed attempts,” on Monday the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, say Rachel Pannett and Kelsey Ables in The Washington Post. The US vetoed previous

In a few weeks’ time voters in large parts of England will go to the polls. But in contrast to recent years, when there have been a large number of election-related markets, including on the control of individual councils, there has been relatively l

It is the most radical move Unilever has made since Hein Schumacher was drafted in to lead the conglomerate last year. The business, which manufactures Dove soap and Hellman’s mayonnaise, had drifted for years under the dismal management of Paul Polm

● Close Brothers is “more vulnerable than most” to the Financial Conduct Authority’s crackdown on potential mis-selling of car loans, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. It probably won’t be a case of “PPI on wheels” – PPI cost banks more than £50bn

We’re almost finished reviewing our MoneyWeek exchange-traded fund (ETF) model portfolio, and it’s our investment in UK small caps that looks the most troublesome, as we’ve analysed extensively in the last few articles. This investment is one of the

Investing strategies can be split into two broad types. Passive investments aim to earn the same return as the wider market as cheaply as possible, by buying all the stocks in an index such as the FTSE 100 or the S&P 500. Active strategies aim to ear

The outlook for the US is a little less bullish than it was 12 months ago, says Abby Joseph Cohen, the former chief investment strategist at Goldman Sachs, who earned a reputation as a permabull for her upbeat forecasts in the 1990s and 2000s. “Consu

“Don’t get me started on the pay disparity, but male actors get paid more because they used to say they drew in the audiences. And actually, that hasn’t been true for decades, but they still like to use that as a reason not to pay women as much as th

unherd.com In her recent speech to the City of London, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said that her party intended to usher in a revolution as radical as Margaret Thatcher’s, says Tom McTague. She was thinking of the economic growth of the 1980s, b

collabfund.com/blog You can have too much of a good thing, says Morgan Housel, and that applies to cleverness too. How is it possible to be too smart? If asked why the stockmarket fell last week, an average person will say they don’t know. A very sm

snowdon.substack.com “Of all the delusions of Britain’s ruling class, none is more absurd than the idea of tackling obesity by forcing the food industry to take the calories out of its products,” says Christopher Snowdon. It has been tried with suga

Activist investor Tribeca Investment Partners is urging Glencore to abandon plans to spin off its lucrative coal division, and also wants it to shift its primary listing from London to Sydney, says the Financial Times. The Australian hedge fund sugge

■ The Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust is to buy back at least £1bn, or 9%, of its shares to lift its stock price, currently at a 13% discount to its net asset value (NAV), says CityWire. Baillie Gifford’s flagship trust is still recovering from th

Debt as a percentage of GDP has grown rapidly over the past half century in the US and in other major developed countries. This is true of both government and private-sector debts. In the US, total debt grew from about 150% of GDP in 1970 to around 3

SMRs are advanced nuclear reactors with a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) – megawatts electric – per unit, around a third of the generating capacity of traditional reactors. Because SMRs are so much smaller, simpler, cheaper and quicker to assemble

● The amount we’re all paying in accidental subscriptions has doubled in a year, according to Citizens Advice. More than 25% of us – 13 million people – have accidentally taken out a subscription in the past 12 months. It could be anything from a fit

Last week shareholders in special-purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) voted to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), Donald Trump’s media business. The new firm will list on the Nasdaq, says Ortenca Al

Jeremy Hunt’s budget pledge to move towards the abolition of national insurance raises many questions – not least, how would Britain pay for state pensions? While people’s national-insurance contributions are not ring-fenced, a significant proportion

● Do you know how much you are paying your pension providers in annual charges and other fees? Providers don’t always make it easy to check, warns the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the chief City regulator, which has just announced a review of f

An excellent source of investment ideas for us over the years has been “platform businesses”. These often simplify or enhance their customers’ proposition in return for a fee. Platforms tend to be very scalable and have relatively fixed costs. As a r

Mohsin and Zuber Issa “turbocharged their retail empire in the easy-money era through dozens of debt-funded deals” to form one of the world’s largest owners of petrol stations and supermarkets, says Bloomberg. Their sprawling EG Group empire now incl

2022 Dappled, Appellation Chardonnay, Yarra Valley, Victoria, Australia £34.50, nattyboywines.co.uk Dan Long is a consummate wine retailer, talented restaurateur and sniper-accurate wine buyer. He is making serious waves in London with his two impre

Harnessing the New Opportunities the Metaverse Creates Shurick Agapitov Worth, £20 In 2021 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced he was rebranding his social-media company as Meta, and refocusing it on a virtual-reality world known as the metav

Vietnam, Poland and the Origins of Prosperity Rainer Zitelmann Encounter Books, £21.99 Book in the news… the miracle of capitalism The issue of inequality and relative poverty in developed countries has shot up the agenda in recent years, and some c

Editor: Andrew Van Sickle Markets editor: Alexander Rankine Comment editor: Stuart Watkins Politics editor: Emily Hohler Wealth editor: Chris Carter Shares editor: Matthew Partridge Senior digital editor: Kalpana Fitzpatrick Writer/editorial assistan