Business

Blue-chip opportunities despite euro turmoil

13 March 2010
Ian Cowie

Pity the poor estate agents. Now there’s a phrase you don’t see very often. Barely had they begun to market Spanish villas and French gîtes as bargains because of the weak euro, than the pound began its precipitous decline.

Sterling-denominated investors may be tempted to keep their cash close to home until exchange-rate fluctuations become much less exciting. In the case of continental real estate, that would seem wise — especially when the Economist calculates that house prices in Spain remain 60 per cent higher than they should be relative to long-term average rental yields. For comparison, on the same...

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Poor prospects in the sell-us-your-gold rush

13 March 2010
Dominic Midgley

The permatanned television ‘entertainer’ Dale Winton is hosting an unintentionally hilarious series of commercials on daytime television these days. Using the same format as The Antiques Roadshow, the ads for something called CashMyGold show members of the public sitting round a table with Winton and an ‘expert’ who values their gold trinkets. They beam in delight when the jeweller informs them what he thinks the bling is worth. One of them even says: ‘That’s a lot more than I thought.’

On the face of it, these ads are very convincing. After all, the gold price at the moment is indeed...

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Cult collectibles from Barbie to Gaga

13 March 2010
Jasmine Birtles

Barbie and Dr Who are perhaps not the first names that come to mind if you’re looking for things to collect for profit. They’re hardly van Gogh, but they have been commanding headline-grabbing prices at auction for long enough now to be interesting to serious investors.

The new collectibles say little about art — although they belong very much to the world of design. They are all about icons, dreams, personalities, popular culture and the fixations of youth. Toys, comics and gadgets from as recently as the 1980s and 1990s are changing hands for staggering amounts on eBay and speciality...

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Is now the time to buy back into China?

13 March 2010
Jonathan Davis

One tried and tested rule in investment is that the bigger and more widely shared the worry, the less likely it is to be realised. Remember Y2K and the Sars epidemic? Both produced warnings of global disaster. Neither turned out to be anything like the threat that doomsters had predicted. Contrast that with the subprime mortgage crisis, whose dimensions only became widely apparent some time after the crisis had already broken. In the years when investors should have been worrying about uncontrolled bank lending, most were too busy loading up on anything they could buy with cheap credit to notice...

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Our man in the car park contemplates the grotesqueries of ‘the beautiful game’

13 March 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy — but I’m irritated by the modern fashion for corporate chiefs to declare their club allegiances in the interest of looking blokeish. I’m prepared to accept that the governor of the Bank of England has a lifelong passion for Aston Villa, on the basis that no one would make that claim to...

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Trust in a market where it pays to deceive?

6 March 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless to say, a ‘hotel and leisure group’ operating under a different name) to deceive investors and analysts into believing its debts were smaller than they really were. My handiwork en-abled the brewer to borrow a seven-figure sum in order to lend smaller parcels of cash to its tied pubs — but...

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