MoneyWeek

When it comes to the continental welfare state, “from the cradle to the grave” is meant literally. The city of Vienna offers grieving families extraordinarily comprehensive administrative help. Your adviser will help you find a spot in the cemetery a

Michael Smith, a music producer from North Carolina, has been charged in the US with using artificial intelligence (AI) to defraud the music industry out of $10m in royalties, says Gene Maddus in Variety. In 2018, Smith allegedly teamed up with an AI

Chinese markets are stuck in “limbo”, say Abhishek Vishnoi and Winnie Hsu on Bloomberg. Fund managers complain the shares lack both “the vigour of an emerging market and the stability of a developed one”. The benchmark CSI 300 index is down more than

America’s “most well-known recession indicator” has “stopped flashing red”, but that is not good news, says Elisabeth Buchwald for CNN. The two- to ten-year “yield curve” has been inverted since 2022, historically an indicator that America is heading

Small caps are “cool again”, say Charlie Wells and Suzanne Woolley on Bloomberg. After a long run dominated by the big seven tech stocks, investment advisers are increasingly looking to the “polar opposite”. Smaller companies tend to have floating-ra

“The tech sell-off has disguised a healthier market than the drop in the headline index level might suggest. Nearly three-quarters of US shares are in an uptrend. Pessimism sounds clever. But it only rarely makes sense for investors. So why do we lis

Despite a “widening war” in the Middle East and the Opec cartel’s “best efforts” to cap supply, oil prices just keep on falling, says John Rapley for UnHerd. Brent crude recently touched a near-three-year low below $70 a barrel. It picked up slightly

UK national debt is on course to surge from just under 100% of GDP today to 274% over the next 50 years, according to projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The OBR says that population ageing, climate change and higher defence

Legal pressure in both Europe and the US could result in Google facing billions in fines and even being broken up, say Adam Satariano and Jenny Gross in The New York Times. In particular, the EU’s highest court denied the company’s appeal over a deci

Shares in Apple fell on Monday after warnings that demand for the firm’s new iPhone 16 Pro model has been unexpectedly tepid, say Matt Turner and Subrat Patnaik on Bloomberg. Last week’s launch event was deemed “underwhelming” and one analyst has not

Boeing’s CEO Kelly Ortberg may have been in the job for only a month, but already he is “having to steer through choppy labour negotiations amid a financial squeeze”, says The Wall Street Journal: 33,000 International Association of Machinists and Ae

The TimesDespite a cost-of-living crisis prompting consumers to seek better deals, Mony Group, owner of price-comparison platform MoneySuperMarket and personal-finance website MoneySavingExpert, has seen its shares halve in five years, and profits ha

Every third chicken nugget in the world is made with equipment from Germany’s Gea, says WirtschaftsWoche. It is one of the world’s top providers of advanced systems designed to produce food, drinks and pharmaceuticals. As these are defensive sectors,

Shares in the home-loan unit of India’s biggest shadow bank, Bajaj Finance, soared 136% on their market debut on Monday, riding a wave of local enthusiasm for initial public offerings (IPOs), says Bloomberg. The share price rose to Rs165 against an o

“As if there hadn’t been enough drama in America, Donald Trump has survived another assassination attempt,” says Freddy Gray in The Spectator. The attempted killing of the former president at his golf course “was not nearly as threatening or deadly a

Like something out of a James Bond film, the pagers of hundreds of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon simultaneously exploded on Tuesday, flooding Beirut hospitals with more than 2,800 casualties, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, says David Ig

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump seems to have failed to move the betting markets back in his favour. Indeed, with £67.6m matched on Betfair, the odds on Kamala Harris have actually moved further in her favour, narrowing to 1.91 (52.3%), w

New home for Cala: Financial services group Legal & General is selling its housebuilder, Edinburgh-based Cala Homes, to investment groups Sixth Street Partners and Patron Capital for an enterprise value of £1.35bn. That sum is made up of £1.16bn in c

Europe’s super-technocrat Mario Draghi – the former chief of the European Central Bank and Italy’s emergency prime minister in 2021-2022 – last week delivered a long-awaited report into Europe’s stagnant economy and what can be done to revive it. Dur

We already know that the “horror Budget” that new chancellor Rachel Reeves plans to unveil at the end of next month will include huge tax rises. The incoming government has told us at length about the £22bn “black hole” in the public finances left be

● It’s ironic that “while London is pinning its initial public offering revival hopes on a possible listing of Chinese online fast-fashion retailer Shein,” homegrown Asos and Boohoo “are going nowhere”, says Lex in the Financial Times. Their shares h

Last Saturday was the St Leger Stakes – the final classic of the British flat-racing season – so if you trust in investment cliches, this week should be an auspicious one to get back into the market. “Sell in May and go away, come back on St Leger da

Markets have become less efficient over the past three decades, says hedge-fund manager Cliff Asness, one of the pioneers of quantitative trading (using mathematical models and statistics to identify opportunities). Trends that have driven this shift

Stockmarket returns are often quoted on the basis of price return – the gain or loss in the price of the shares that make up the index. However, investors will also receive dividends from many companies and over the long term this can amount to a muc

Liam Halligan The Telegraph Scotland’s Grangemouth oil refinery is to close, with the loss of 400 jobs, says Liam Halligan. This comes on the back of the closure of Britain’s last two blast furnaces at Port Talbot steelworks, with the loss of 2,500 j

“I’m too stingy.” Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured) on why, unlike some former Conservative colleagues, he isn’t paying more than £2,000 to keep his ministerial red box, quoted in the Financial Times “Peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of jus

asimov.press Charts are a concise way to present data and tell a story, say Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace. A picture is worth a thousand words. But beware. The stories told do not tell the unvarnished truth, but “reflect the interpretations o

backofmind.substack.com A few years ago, I decided to take betting on the horses seriously, keeping records and applying a “cybernetic” system, says Dan Davies. The idea is that you “can often use the recent history of a system as a proxy for an uno

unherd.com Donald Trump’s televised debate with Kamala Harris will be remembered for Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been eating the pets of the natives, says Oliver Bateman. They haven’t been. But the claim reveals how quickly wi

marginalrevolution.com The UK’s “Orwellian” Equality Act demands equal pay for work of equal value, says Alex Tabarrok. Work is deemed to be of equal value if it is similar, or makes similar demands upon the worker. In short, “supply and demand have

The insurance industry is one of the world’s most important, but also misunderstood and underappreciated industries. Most people think of it as an unnecessary cost – they think of the products they see and use, such as home and car insurance. These a

The Lloyd’s market is the fifth-largest provider of reinsurance in the world, based on 2023 gross written premium numbers compiled by rating agency AM Best. The largest provider is Swiss Re, followed by Munich Re, Berkshire Hathaway and Hanover Re. S

Ask a UK wealth manager what his clients are asking about most at the moment and they will all tell you the same thing. All anyone wants to know is whether they should sell everything ahead of a Budget expected to include a sharp rise in the rate of

The rise in the gold price ought to be very good news for gold miners. In theory, every dollar on the gold price goes straight to profits as mining costs are fixed. Gold-mining shares used to be regarded as a leveraged play on the gold price, amplify

Dr Martens’ shares have slumped by 85% since listing three years ago. Are they now cheap, or could there be more pain ahead for investors? In 2011, after 50 years in control, the owners of Dr Martens, the Griggs family, put the business up for sale.

Activist shareholder Engine Capital Management has lambasted Dye & Durham for pursuing more acquisitions and urged directors to “stop the shenanigans”, says Bloomberg. Engine is irritated by the Canadian software company’s plans to buy Lexis Affinity

■ Global inflows into exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are set to reach new record highs this year, says the Financial Times. In August, investors added $129.7bn to ETFs, slightly lower than July’s record monthly inflow of $198bn but above the 2024 month

Should small business owners be worried about the Labour government’s plans to beef up workers’ rights? Not according to ministers, who have launched a charm offensive to soothe entrepreneurs’ fears. Last week saw deputy prime minister Angela Rayner

Has your small business seen a drop-off in internet traffic in recent months? If so, changes made by search giant Google may be the cause. Since the latest tweaks to the algorithm that it uses to generate search results, introduced earlier this year,

● Did you know your bank almost certainly has a cash deposit limit, restricting the amount of cash you can pay into a business account on a single day? More small businesses report falling foul of these limits, particularly as branch closures force t

Bitcoin has been an extremely lucrative asset for those who invested when it first took off. Even if you had bought as late as four years ago, and simply held on, you would be looking at a very good return. However, since early 2021, bitcoin has been

The Darzi Report has exposed the dire state of the NHS. Ara Darzi, a former Labour minister and surgeon with more than 30 years’ experience in the NHS, found the health service has suffered from decades of underinvestment in people and buildings. The

Some analysts argue that falling unemployment implies stronger growth, higher profits and, therefore, higher share prices. Others argue that things are not so simple, and that good jobs figures may actually be bearish. This is because a fall in unemp

The past fortnight has been a mixed bag for my ten long tips, with five rising and five falling. High-street clothing retailer Next went up from 10,090p to 10,390p, engineering group Rolls-Royce advanced from 464p to 499p and cruise-ship operator Roy

Majedie Investments appointed Marylebone Partners as its manager in January 2023 to invest in compelling long-term opportunities across highly differentiated, liquid-return sources. These comprise external managers, global equities and special invest

Warren Buffett tells a funny story about his first encounter with Ajit Jain – the genius Indian “insurance guru” who has proved indispensable in Berkshire Hathaway’s journey to become the first trillion-dollar company outside of big tech. It was 1986

At the age of 12, Gary Stevenson was selling sweets at school to make a bit of pocket money, says Natalia Junquera for El País. At 16, he had been expelled for selling cannabis. By the age of 23, he was a City trader, and Citigroup had paid him his f

Beaverbrook, the former home of Lord Beaverbrook – the influential press baron and politician – is a Grade II-listed country house estate in the Surrey Hills, says Bridget March in Harper’s Bazaar. The surroundings are “glorious”. “Stroll around the

2021 Ivresses, Domaine Canet-Valette, Saint-Chinian, Languedoc, France £27.90 each, sold by the six-pack, robertrolls.com Wine always takes the lead in my life, but I never drink wine without food. And because I have worked in, owned, and consulted

“There are certain things one expects to find on a luxury yacht,” says Craig Ritchie in Canada’s Nuvo. “Luxurious amenities? Always. Spacious beach club for swims and more? Absolutely. Extensive wine storage? Of course.” What you don’t expect to find

Sanda Island, Mull of Kintyre, Scotland. Three islands off the Kintyre Peninsula comprising a 454-acre island with seven houses and a helipad, and two smaller islands. 5-bed house, three 1-bed, two 2-bed and a 3-bed cottage, tavern. A four-bedroom ho

Given that it’s a hobby rooted in nostalgia, there’s something ironic about the fact that TikTok – a short-video social-media platform better known for airing teenage angst – is driving the current fad for matchbox collecting. A new technology is spa

Going…Sotheby’s has teamed up with online sports platform Fanatics to hold an auction of more than 40 of the “rarest and most coveted” sports trading cards at a former church in New York on 24 September. The highlights among the “holy grails” include

A decade of rock-bottom interest rates transformed the world of collecting from one of enthusiasts trading among themselves to a cutthroat world of speculators seeking returns from alternative assets, says Hugo Cox in the Financial Times. The upshot

“What is an Ace meant to catch?” I ask my beginners. “A King,” they reply obediently. With this notion ingrained in us, admire the defence of Manchester’s Justin Hackett, West, on this deal from the European Championships. Doing well to avoid the doo

Following the televised debate between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last week, the odds of a Harris victory probably increased. But that has no effect on the underlying financial situation. Neither candidate has any intentio

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