Investment

Thursday

Elliot Wilson

If you think British banks are bad, you’ve never tried China’s

It’s hard to think of anything more badly run than a Chinese bank. Somalia perhaps, or the BBC’s remuneration committee. Certainly, Beijing’s embattled lenders make ours look like paragons of financial rectitude. We may dislike RBS et al for bringing our economy to its knees, but at least we’re not saddled with a cabal of banks inextricably linked to whoever resides in Downing Street. Let’s start with good old-fashioned service. We may complain about our banks, how they all look the same and bombard us with adverts that would patronise a two-year-old. But at least they pretend to care. China’s banks don’t. Service is dire wherever you go. Internet or

Matthew Lynn

Why Britain’s economy will overtake Germany’s

What’s the most surprising thing that could come out of the current economic upturn? A rapid revival in northern manufacturing? The City really getting behind small British businesses? Ed Balls admitting higher public spending wasn’t always the best way to promote growth? Any of these eventualities would be fairly amazing. But the biggest surprise would perhaps be this: a gradual realisation that the UK is on track to become the largest economy in Europe. In the 19th century, at the height of the industrial revolution, the UK outproduced all of its European competitors. It steadily lost that position, however, ceding industrial leadership to the Germans and the French. In the

Thursday

Judi Bevan

Investment special: Which shops to bet on as recovery begins

After a long, cold and sometimes lonely winter for shopkeepers, at last there are glimmers of sunshine. Retail sales volume surged in May as shoppers shelled out £6.8 billion a week, the highest figure since records began. Although the rise was partly a recovery from a miserable March and April, depressed by the coldest spring for 50 years, it was also seen as the result of rising consumer confidence buoyed by better economic news and less fear of unemployment. Intriguingly, a survey by American Express claims people using loyalty card rewards more aggressively added up to £3 billion to household budgets over the past year. Then there is the news

Matthew Lynn

Investment: Why does so much always go wrong in August?

The weather might not be what it once was, and the football season might start so quickly it feels like it has hardly been away, but there is one thing everyone can surely agree on about August. Nothing of any importance happens. As we head into the dog days of summer, everyone can sling their feet up on the desk and relax. All the people who really matter — the ones running the big corporations, the banks or the government — are off sunning themselves by a pool somewhere. As for the office, it’s about as busy as a job centre in downtown Athens. The only people left are the

David Young

Lord Young: Investing in a start-up is the most rewarding thing I’ve done

Over the past few years we’ve all been living through a revolution — not one where crowds gather in Trafalgar Square and face water cannon, but a quiet revolution that has changed the way we work and live. When I first came to what was then the Department of Industry as an adviser in 1979, a ‘small firm’ was a company employing fewer than 500 people. Today we consider a small firm to be one that employs fewer than ten. As the size of companies has reduced, so the number has increased. There were just 800,000 in the whole country in 1979, there are about 5 million today; but of

Alex Brummer

Is Mark Carney about to bring Osborne’s cheap debt party to a close?

If free and open markets are the Wild West, inhabited by roving bands of asset managers, hedge funds, investment bankers and random traders, then the sheriffs are the central bankers. A change of sheriff makes a real difference to trading conditions. The focus of London traders and analysts has already shifted to a new sheriff with the arrival of Mark Carney at the Bank of England next week, and much anticipation of his new tool of ‘forward guidance’, which he is expected to unveil in August. Central bankers, far more than politicians, have long held sway over financial markets. That influence is at its greatest at times of economic tumult.

Thursday

Simon Nixon

What’s keeping the banks buoyant?

‘The central bankers have won,’ a senior City stockbroker said to me this week with an air of resignation. ‘There’s no point fighting them. Investors are doing as they’re told.’ And, wow, how they’re doing as they’re told. Thanks to central bank money-printing, cash is sloshing around the global financial system in desperate search of a decent return. There may still be little sign of a real economic recovery: China has slowed, to add to the misery in the eurozone. Yet the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of US stocks is at an all-time high and the FTSE 100 is within a whisker of breaking above its 14-year peak. Even

Jonathan Ruffer

When cautious-looking investments are the riskiest option

When can a famine taste pretty good? The answer is when you are eating the cattle which have just died of thirst. And that’s where we are today in the investment market. The famine is a lack of income — cash held in a completely safe bank, or in short-term government securities, earns almost nothing. Where’s the feast? The answer is in yield-bearing investments, into which savings are pouring — they produce a modicum of yield, to be sure — but that is dwarfed by the capital gains which have accompanied them. Those who have already made this switch are understandably rather pleased, and often rather pleased with themselves. Both

Stuart Wheeler

Stuart Wheeler – the secret to making money from spread betting

Well, there are two ways. You can own a chunk of a successful spread-betting firm or you can be a spread-better and get things right. Miraculously, I have managed to do both. I shall come back to that. First, let me tell you how it works. How many runs will England make in the first innings of their next Test match? The bookmaker — all spread-betting firms are bookies, whatever gravitas they may attempt to assume — might quote 260–270. You think they will make more than 270. So you ‘buy’ at 270, staking £10 a run. England make 350 runs. So you are right by 80 runs and, at

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Investment special: Confessions of a stock picker

My name’s Freddy and I’m an online gambling addict. The problem started a few years ago when I opened an account on Betfair.com. At first it was small bets on football games, maybe the odd greyhound. A fiver here, a tenner there. Click, click, click. It was fun. Pretty soon, however, the hobby had developed into a minor obsession. I moved on to the harder stuff: cricket, tennis, even X Factor results. I had some wins but more losses: £20; £30; oops, there goes a hundred. Click, click, click. Then I downloaded the Betfair app onto my phone. Tap, tap, tap. I realised things had gone too far when I

Tim Price

Investment special: The case for gold

Few assets are more misunderstood than gold. I might even refine that statement — if you’ll pardon the pun — and say that few assets are more misunderstood than money. Gold happens to be both. Technically, of course, we are constrained by government edict to use pounds sterling for the payment of our taxes and debts. My take on this dismal state of affairs, but also my optimism, can best be summarised in the title of Nathan Lewis’s recent book, Gold: The Once and Future Money. Economists give money three attributes. It should be a unit of account (we can price things in it). It should be a medium of

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Investment special: How Shinzo Abe has revived Japan

Thank goodness for Shinzo Abe. Back in 2007, I wrote here that ‘over the next two to five years Japan will turn out to be one of the best investments UK-based investors can make’. By the middle of 2012, nearly five years on, that wasn’t looking like much of a prediction. Then prime minister Abe appeared on the scene. Since his election in November the yen has fallen 20 per cent against the dollar and the Japanese stock market has risen not far off 50 per cent. Phew. So what’s so great about Mr Abe? The short answer is that he has promised to do something about the Japanese economy

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

In Cyprus as in Britain, the prudent must pay for others’ folly – but not like this

The Cypriots are the authors of their own misfortune, having turned their banking system into a rackety offshore haven for Russian loot and lent most of the proceeds to Greece. But it was madness on the part of bailout negotiators to shake confidence in banks across the eurozone by trying to impose a levy on deposits held by even the smallest Cypriot savers, in what was presumably an attempt to cream off a layer of ill-gotten foreign cash. And even if the proposal has been radically watered down by the end of the week, we now know the European powers-that-be are prepared to pull this device out of their toolbox

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Europe’s cap on bankers’ pay is merely a harbinger of the Great Persecution to come

‘Possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire,’ was Boris Johnson’s assessment of the proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses at 100 per cent of base salary, or 200 per cent with shareholders’ approval. This blunt exercise in market interference was tabled by a committee of MEPs led by a British Lib Dem, Sharon Bowles (perhaps in revenge for the fact that she didn’t win the Bank of England governorship, for which she applied) as a condition of agreeing a new set of bank capital reforms. With the support of all member states other than the one

Ian Cowie

Investment special: Tax allowances – use them or lose them

As if to demonstrate that every silver lining has a grey cloud, next month’s top-rate tax cut also means there will be less help in future from HM Revenue and Customs to boost high earners’ retirement funds. So there are just a few weeks left in which people fortunate enough to be able to write a cheque for up to £200,000 can get £100,000 of it back, risk-free, from the kindly taxman. Such eye-stretching figures demonstrate why it really can be worth the bother of getting to grips with tax planning ahead of the 5 April fiscal year-end. Incentives to wrestle with the detail of annual tax allowances and exemptions

Jonathan Davis

Investment special: Springtime for stockbrokers

You know you’re in a bull market when bad news is simply shrugged aside and even the most indifferent events are greeted exuberantly. The result of February’s Italian general election, which drags the future of the eurozone back into question, would have induced market panic had it come nine months ago. But the world’s equity markets barely blinked before resuming an attempt to breach all-time peaks. Something similar happened last week when the US Congress failed to agree how to avoid the package of mandatory spending cuts known as ‘the sequester’. When Republicans and Democrats came up with these cuts in 2011, they were so potentially damaging it was unthinkable

Alex Brummer

Investment special: Gaining from a housing recovery

The long period of dormancy for Britain’s housing market looks as if it is coming to an end — though there are huge regional differences. Central London remains exceptional, with the influx of overseas buyers into Kensington, Chelsea and adjoining neighbourhoods creating a microclimate of surging prices that has little to do with economic fundamentals — and has the political left salivating at the thought of a ‘mansion tax’ on properties worth £2 million-plus, even if that means turfing elderly widows out of family homes. Some five years on from the financial crisis that brought many lenders and house-builders to their knees, there are signs of a broadly based recovery.

Thursday

Louise Cooper

The wealth transfer and where it’s going

The last three years have been one big transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers. Thanks to record low interest rates, savers have gained little from tucking their money away in bank accounts, whereas borrowers have reaped the benefits. According to data from the Bank of England, mortgage holders paid interest of £1328 billion in the three years from 2008-2011, compared to £1897 billion in the preceding three years. That’s a difference of £569 billion, or just over £50,000 for each of the UK’s 11.2 million mortgage holders. Call it a stimulus if you like. But it’s a stimulus that involves clobbering savers so that borrowers can buy a flatscreen

Monday

Clarissa Tan

Euro-zonked

Well, so much for that. The FTSE 100 fell as much as 1.7 per cent this morning, while overnight the euro and Asian stock markets tumbled, after Europe’s leaders announced their grand 2-trillion-euro plan over the weekend to drag the Eurozone out of the mire. It appears the markets are well past the point of believing that political leaders can get us out of this mess. The consensus is that the plan is not concrete enough. Of course, equities may recover a bit later, as they have been prone to do in past days. But the whipsawing itself is the worst sign of all; stock investors and retail-end funds are

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

A hotel on the Strand is a potent symbol in the great money-Monopoly game

‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the captains’ tables. ‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its