Money

The horror! Yesterday we discovered that UK economic output — as measured by GDP — fell by 1.6 per cent in the first quarter of the year, 0.1 per cent worse than the 1.5 per cent originally reported. This is practically a rounding error. To put it in context, as recently as March the Office for Budget Responsibility, which crunches the numbers for the Chancellor, was forecasting that GDP would fall by 3.8 per cent in Q1. As well as still beating these gloomy expectations, the latest figures are also old news. But if anything, the detail is encouraging. The downward revision to headline GDP was largely due to a bigger decline

Time is, I fear, running out. Running out, that is, to avoid handing to a small number of multinational corporations our right to buy and sell things. Running out to prevent governments and central banks helping themselves to our savings, by means of negative interest rates. The payments industry is closing in on its target of driving cash out of circulation and instigating cashless payments as the only way of doing business. That, at least, is the conclusion one might reach from reading a report by Worldpay: the Global Payments Report 2021. It claims that cash payments in UK shops in 2020 made up 13.4 per cent of total payments,

If you’re looking for proof we live in a computer simulation, consider the farcical story of dogecoin. Named after an internet meme about a talking dog, the joke currency was created as a parody of bitcoin. Dogecoin has no practical uses, yet online investors have ploughed billions into it. ‘We thought it would just make the viral rounds on social media,’ said founder Jackson Palmer. Last week the valuation passed $68 billion — more than Kraft Heinz and Ford. Palmer is now worth several hundred million dollars. Not bad for a Twitter gag. Although it’s seven years old, dogecoin wasn’t a big deal until a few months ago, when supportive

Compared with the United States, the UK has so far been relatively cautious about launching stimulus programmes to kick-start the economy. And yet perhaps it doesn’t need to. People are paying off their credit cards, putting some money into the stock market, buying new houses, as well as finally booking a restaurant and getting back to the shops. A lot of money is about to be unleashed on the economy, even if this stimulus is largely invisible now. The interesting question is this: where will all the money go, and which sectors will be the big winners? It may at times seem as if Rishi Sunak is spending like crazy.

If your local pub ever reopens, don’t be surprised if one thing is missing: the till. The anti-cash lobby is seeking to take advantage of the pandemic to rid us of our banknotes once and for all. When UK Finance — the trade body for the banking and payments industry — pushed the government two weeks ago to increase the limit on contactless card payments to £100 (it was raised from £30 to £45 at the beginning of the pandemic), it was a new offensive in a campaign for a cashless society which has been going on for years. Small shops might fight back — the British Retail Consortium warns

No new year would be complete without the traditional Oxfam survey showing that a few of the richest people on the planet own more assets than the poorest 50 per cent of the world’s population combined. The figures change, but the gist is the same. January is usually a slow month, and it makes for startling headlines, intended to get us thinking about capitalism’s shortcomings. It’s also been tradition, for those of us more positive about free markets, to offer a retort: before Covid, global poverty was falling at the fastest rate in history. Global inequality was narrowing because of capitalism, not despite it. Oxfam arrives at its figures by

For those trying to argue that the evils of colonialism still hang over former lands of the British Empire, the legacy of racism suppressing their ambitions and achievements, the Republic of Singapore presents something of a challenge.  Just how did this particular colony manage to become not only one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but one of the highest-fliers in the United Nations’ Human Development Index? Indeed, the Asian city state has once again this week been promoted as a model for its former colonial master to emulate.  It can’t just be the Guinness that has attracted investment to another former corner of British soil over the past couple

What a strange non-event was the stockmarket reaction to the announcement of the latest national lockdown. Retailers, leisure companies, travel firms – all was calm. Marks and Spencer was down half a per cent on the morning, while Next was up five per cent on the back of good online results before Christmas. EasyJet was down two percent but International Airlines Group (IAG) was up 0.4 per cent. Cruise operator Carnival was down 0.7 percent but travel group Tui was up two per cent. It was just like any other day, as if nothing had happened on the Covid front. But then maybe that is because nothing much had happened.

It’s often said that classic cars are one of the best investments around, with some models outstripping the profits to be had in property, art and even gold. The problem is, it’s not really true. Yes, if you were smart enough to buy, for example, a McLaren F1 for £2m a decade ago then you could cash it in today for a tidy profit of at least £8m, and if you happened to snap-up a Ferrari 250GTO in the late 1990s for what might then seemed like an astronomical $7m, it could now be worth something approaching seven times as much.Other blue chip collectable classics have also performed exceptionally well,