The Treasury has been consulting with financial services companies about the possibility of a cap on the amount that can be held in ISAs according to reports in one national newspaper. A figure of £100,000 was allegedly suggested by one Treasury official. There have been no denials from the Treasury, which has said it was just listening, not putting forward any firm proposals.
October’s dose of dysfunctional US Government may not be the last.
The time was that the global prize for crisis deferral – as opposed to resolution – belonged to the EU.
The provisional UK economic growth figure for the third quarter of 0.8% was in line with market expectations, but no less welcome for that. As the graph shows, the UK economy has made a stuttering recovery from the financial crisis, but now appears to be gaining some momentum.
Exceptional… exceeds expectations… meets expectations… needs improvement… unsatisfactory. It’s a rating system familiar to anyone who has ever received a performance review. Right now, the performance of inflation is not meeting expectations – and that may be a good thing.
According to the Bank of England, economists assume interest rates will rise and move toward equilibrium or a ‘natural’ real rate of interest that takes into account inflation over the long term.
Contrarians probably are waiting for the other shoe – or in this case, U.S. stock markets – to drop.
If you’re not familiar with contrarian investing, the theory goes something like this: Consensus opinion is often wrong. When the majority of investors have a bullish outlook and believe stocks are going to move higher, the chances are stock values will drop. Likewise, when the majority has a bearish outlook and believes stocks are going to move lower, the chances are stock values will rise.
If you could accurately predict how share prices would move, you’d probably be quite wealthy. If you could offer insight that helps analysts and investors do a better job predicting such things, you might win the Nobel Prize. That’s what happened last week when American economists Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen from the University of Chicago, and Robert Shiller from Yale University, jointly received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2013. They were recognised for their empirical analysis of asset prices. (more…)
Curse of Chucky, Scream 2, Final Destination 5, Freddy vs. Jason… You know Halloween is nearly upon us when you can’t surf channels without finding a multitude of horror flick sequels.
The privitisation of The Royal Mail saw small investors being favoured over large. Savers who applied for up to £10,000 worth of shares in Royal Mail have ended up with fewer shares than they wanted.
If ever you wanted some proof of the global nature of the FTSE 100, then a couple of sharp reminders have been recently administered. That great, reliable Anglo-Dutch stock and stalwart of the FTSE, Unilever, was given a bashing last week; not because its products have gone wrong, after all Dove Soap, Flora and Knorr Stock cubes are still household staples. No, this time it is the effect of the emerging markets where their global and regional brands have been affected by the recent fall off in many emerging and developing national currencies.
