Spectator money

There are some American imports for which we should be thankful. Not Donald Trump, obviously. Other things, though – the motor car, baseball, Dolly Parton, chewing gum, and, erm, crayons. On the other hand, there are a number of US products we could do without. I’m thinking here of evangelical preachers, sub-prime mortgages and Spam. Then there’s Black Friday. While this day of frenzied shopping has been part of the American calendar for decades, it’s a recent UK import. Always falling on the day after Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November – so the 25th for us Brits), Black Friday’s hype spirals year after year. Shops promote it heavily, claiming that

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November. It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg. Higgins likes his taxis. He spent £18,000 swanning around London in them between March and October 2015. He also likes his reading. He’s a voracious absorber of anything from Robert Graves and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. Hence the pile of papers. Children flick in and out of the breakfast room – he has six of them. Life could

When I was at school in the, er, 1980s, there was no such thing as financial education. Yes, we had maths lessons but they focused on the hypotenuse and mastering scientific calculators. I still break out in a sweat at the thought of trigonometry. Since my day (when all this was fields etc etc), the curriculum has changed significantly. No more Home Economics – I think it’s called Domestic Science now – and I’m guessing that ballroom dancing has been replaced by something altogether more modern. I also suspect that the fledgling word processing lab at my high school has morphed into a 21st century cutting-edge centre where coding lessons

It’s that time of year again. Mindful of the impending big Christmas shop, people start counting up credit card reward points in the hope of turning them into vouchers and cash. But they could find that their loyalty hasn’t paid off. Reward credit cards can be a useful alterative to debit cards because they offer a little something extra on each spend, such as points. However, not all cards are as rewarding as they seem. In fact, shoppers could be earning very little each time they use their card if the rewards are limited to where the money is spent. In addition, some cards charge considerably higher interest rates than

It’s the morning after an 18-month campaign – and the markets have started to digest Donald Trump’s surprise election as US President. In early trading, the FTSE 100 index jumped by 49 points, or 0.7 per cent, to 6960. The Dow Jones industrial average is on track to hit a new record high when the US stock market opens later today. Last night the Dow closed near to its highest levels. And, after touching almost $1,340 an ounce yesterday before falling back, gold is up slightly this morning at $1,291. Meanwhile, Dame DeAnne Julius, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, told the BBC Today programme: ‘The difficulty with

It’s always puzzled me why there’s still such a taboo around gambling in the UK. If you count people who play the national lottery, more than 50 per cent of us have had a flutter over the past four weeks. And if you like to think of playing the lottery as making a charity donation rather than gambling (are you sure about that?), there’s still almost one in three of us who have gambled in the last month. Like most things, gambling needs to be done in moderation. Lose control and it can have disastrous life-changing effects. But the majority of people who enjoy a flutter manage to do so

Scepticism has a solid place in the history of British philosophical enquiry. Back in the 18th century, empiricists such as David Hume dedicated their lives to the importance of suspending belief in things for which there is insufficient evidence through experience. On the whole, it’s a tradition our culture has maintained. Scepticism rears up in daily life all the time – for example, when your mother-in-law asks how you are, and you think: ‘Is the asking of this question sufficient evidence for me to believe that you really are genuinely interested in how I am?’ Yet at some point, I would argue in the last two years, and possibly almost entirely

For one in seven people alive today, Facebook is their window on the world. More than one billion of them log onto the social network on their mobiles each and every day. Facebook knows their hopes, dreams, secrets and fears. It knows who their friends and family are and what they look like. It knows what interests them and who they are likely to vote for. Armed with this vast amount of information about the real-time behaviours, likes and dislikes of users, Facebook will have a very good picture of personality and attitude towards risk. That insight will become increasingly valuable, as we shall see. This week, the insurer Admiral

It’s about time. The city watchdog has announced it will take action to improve competition in the current account market. Let’s face it, current accounts are a bit rubbish, aren’t they? Many offer 0 per cent interest no matter the balance, overdraft charges can be extortionate, late payment fees are astronomical and, despite years of industry pleas, switching accounts is still seen as a pain in the neck. To add to customer woes, back in August the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published a number of recommendations aimed at shaking the retail banking industry, including ordering banks to share customers’ information with third parties from 2018 to make it easier for

Would you rent out your cat? What about your lawnmower? Or your driveway? That first one may not be practical but new research shows that, as a nation, we are embracing the sharing economy, whether that’s pets, home appliances or our living spaces. It’s good to share. My sister has instilled that virtue in her young daughter although, admittedly, neither her nor I were very good at it when growing up. I recall many arguments over weekly deliveries of Just Seventeen magazine, not to mention rows about favourite toys and treasured books. Maybe if money had changed hands, we would have been better at sharing? According to Lloyds Bank Insurance, last