Economy

The Bank of England has raised interest rates from 0.5% to 0.75%, only the second rise in a decade. Currently, interest rates stand at their highest since 2009 and reflect what the Bank of England perceive as a general pick-up in the economy. The Bank said that a rise in household spending has strengthened the British economy. Economic growth for t...

Trump’s presidency has seen U.S. trade policies return to a bygone era of protectionism. At the start of July, the U.S announced $34 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods, suggesting that Trump has China firmly in his sights. With $16bn more in the pipeline and Trump advising his administration to prepare to collect a further $200bn worth of Chinese...

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has announced that GDP growth is down to 0.1% from last quarter’s 0.4%. This means that the first quarter of 2018 saw the UK economy at its slowest growth since 2012. Rob Kent-Smith, head of national accounts at the ONS, said: “Our initial estimate shows the UK economy growing at its slowest pace in more tha...

The Australian economy has experienced between 2-3% growth for the last few years. Growth in consumer spending and public investment certainly helped, but soft housing and business investment and a large detraction in net exports weighed on growth. No recession on the radar although growth is seen to be below potential, certainly when compared with...

A recent survey by the think tank, the Resolution Foundation, has found that almost half (48%) of respondents expected people born between 1981 and 2000, categorised as millennials, to have a standard of life worse than their parents due to economic concerns. In contrast, only 23% believed that millennials could expect their standard of life to be...

The deputy governor of the Bank of England has stated that the bank should not be tempted to increase interest rates due to “imponderables” within the UK economy. The comments from Ben Broadbent, an ally of the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), were published in an interview in mid-Ju...

With the hung parliament following the UK election result - it turns out that there isn’t a consensus view!   But perhaps what the UK now has is a parliament that better reflects more of the views of the UK people, a generally well diversified bunch.  So what does this mean for investment markets? When you take a much wider view, considering the gl...

With Republican candidate Donald Trump defying both the polls and expectations across the globe and convincingly winning the US election over Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, 2016 will undoubtedly go down as the year of the political upset. The US dollar took a considerable hit after Trump’s victory was confirmed, but bounced back to a thirteen-...

According to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement and Spending Review, we all look set to face a galvanised HMRC, with an increased war chest for tackling tax evasion and avoidance. The Chancellor believes £5bn of additional revenue is expected to be raised by his new range of initiatives. Measures are planned to introduce new penalties for the Genera...

Just over four months ago, George Osborne delivered his second Budget of 2015, following the Conservative Party’s outright victory in the May general election. At that moment, the view from 11, Downing Street must have looked remarkably pleasant. Osborne’s handling of the economy was widely credited with playing a large – if not pivotal – part in t...

Introduction Well, what a splendid month October was, with all the major world stock markets that we cover in this Bulletin skipping merrily upwards. Germany and China led the way with gains of 12% and 11% respectively, and if you only looked at the figures you’d be quite justified in thinking that everything in the world economic garden was rosy....

The end of September, and the end of the third quarter of 2015 – a quarter which, as all the financial press reported, was the worst for global equities since 2011. As CNBC put it: A sustained collapse in commodity prices, China’s stunning market rout followed by its shocking currency devaluation as well as fears of a Greek default and a US interes...

Introduction “Markets can fall as well as rise…” Never was that statement more true than in August, when virtually all the major world markets headed down, led by the plunging stock market in China. It became virtually impossible to watch a news bulletin without seeing a shell-shocked fund manager or a weeping private investor. It is, however, impo...

Those who listened to the Summer Budget on 8th July for news affecting small businesses will no doubt have been glad to see corporation tax slashed and the employment allowance increased, but an article recently published by KPMG asked, did the Summer Budget go far enough in announcing measures to help small businesses grow? In the lead up to the...

July was a dramatic month. Greece held a referendum and emphatically rejected the austerity package offered by its creditors. Motor-cycle riding Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned,  calling the creditors “terrorists”, and the new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, was seen going into yet another final, final crisis meeting with his negoti...

An essential part of writing this bulletin each month is making daily notes on the main business and stock market news. This month we have comfortably broken our record – more than six pages of notes. And as you might expect, about half of those pages are about Greece and its debts. ‘An agreement was in sight’ on the debt repayment – but then the f...

Chancellor George Osborne has surprised voters, political and business leaders alike by announcing that he will take the unusual step of delivering a second 2015 Budget on 8th July, just one hundred and twelve days after the Budget of 18th March. With an Autumn Statement also due later in the year, the second Budget will mean the Chancellor will de...

There are three things going on in the markets right now. First, most of us know that long term performance smooths out short term volatility. By definition, weekly, monthly, or quarterly data will always be more volatile than the long term trend. Go back to the 1980s or 1990s, when real GDP growth was 4%, a “slow” quarter was 2%. But today, our Pl...

  It’s only two months ago – on December 3rd – that Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne delivered his Autumn Statement. But we’re now just a few weeks away from his last Budget before the General Election, which will be held on May 7th. When Osborne delivered his Autumn Statement he was relatively optimistic. Britain was recovering from...

Online shopping is booming and online retailers should brace themselves for the busiest December on record, as UK shoppers plan to leave their Christmas shopping later than ever. That’s the verdict from Experian, which revealed its predictions for the 2014 festive season this week. In 2013, ‘Manic Monday’ – 9th December 2013 – witnessed a huge spik...

On 3rd September this year, the FTSE 100 index briefly touched 6,898.62: this was within 52 points of the all-time high of 6,950 reached in the final trading session of 1999. Since then the FTSE has fallen significantly. At the time of writing this update, it stands at 6,367 – down more than 500 points (nearly 8%) from September 3rd. Not surprising...

The Chancellor may have gone for the popular phrase from Chancellors of yore by taking ‘a penny off a pint’, but what were the real big announcements during The Budget 2014? We summarise the 8 main points: 1. Changes to pensions mean many more options than just buying an annuity In measures to be introduced in April 2015, pensioners will have compl...

I was never a fan of Mr. Brown as either Chancellor or Prime Minister, but he must be given enormous credit for one decision and that was to persuade Mr. Blair to drop the idea of Britain joining the Euro. I agree with the general consensus amongst political commentators and financial journalists that this will now never happen (or, at least, not i...