Money Week

Harvesting profits

What could be greener than a tree? For anyone interested in sustainable investment, forestry has obvious appeal. But the allure of forestry goes well beyond its environmental credentials: the potential for competitive returns and a generous range of...

Fracas in Caracas

We are in a real-life game of Risk. In 2019, Fiona Hill, an official at the US National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term, said the Russians had informally proposed a plan whereby they would give the US free rein in Venezuela if the...

The best bets in the leisure sector

The leisure sector is but part of the gigantic services sector, which accounts for roughly 80% of UK GDP. The latter encompasses everything from professional services such as solicitors and accountants, to restaurants and coffee shops, banks and...

The world’s finest caviar

A warm welcome The Milestone Hotel and Residences in Kensington has teamed up with experiences specialist Beyond Curated to create A Sparkling Christmas in London. Highlights of the luxury package include a carriage ride past the city’s landmarks with...

A dangerous world

The way investors view defence stocks is changing. They are shifting from being seen as slow, plodding businesses to being viewed as genuine growth firms. This shift has led to a sharp rise in share prices and has made defence one of the strongest...

Reinventing retail

Boarded-up shop fronts and permanently closed department stores have become a common sight across Britain in recent years. As large chains collapse, online retailers gain market share and out-of-town retail parks grow, city centres are at risk of...

New frontiers

It has been a busy year for large companies’ IT departments. Firms ranging from Marks & Spencer to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) have seen their operations disrupted by cyberattacks. The incident at Jaguar is thought to have cost Tata (JLR’s owners) just...

Road to nowhere

What’s going on? The nation has a newish leader, elected on a wave of muted enthusiasm – or at least a sense that he couldn’t be as bad as the last lot – but who has quickly proved a disappointment in office. His government is looking weaker by the...

Madness and mayhem

“History is just one f**king thing after another,” declares a vulgar schoolboy in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys. Surveying the past 25 years can feel the same way. From Iraq to the euro crisis and from Brexit to bitcoin, a great deal has...

Making the grade

It’s been a tough two decades for UK-listed firms. BP, Shell and HSBC have dropped out of the ranks of the world’s largest listed companies. Britain’s current largest firm, AstraZeneca, doesn’t even make the global top 40. At the same time, the...

Go for gold

Gold succumbed to gravity this week. After a phenomenal surge – almost 30% in two months – it slipped by 6.3% on Tuesday, the biggest daily fall since 2013 (see page 4). Good. As gold bugs we like to see it do well, but we prefer stealthy, steady bull...

Closing time

What’s happened? The number of pubs calling last orders and closing their doors permanently has hit more than one a day for the first time, according to government statistics. In the first half of 2025, some 209 pubs in England and Wales called time...

Last orders?

“In the absence of tech-related spending, the US would be close to, or in, recession this year,” says George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank. Growth in the world’s largest economy is proving resilient despite tariff shocks and a sluggish labour market. The...

Nuclear summer

There may be few things that UK prime minister Keir Starmer and US president Donald Trump agree upon, but one of them is the benefits of nuclear power. The centrepiece of Trump’s recent state visit to the UK was a series of agreements to “accelerate...

Attack of the drones

There were many eye-catching elements in China’s Victory Day Parade in Beijing on 3 September, not least the sight of Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un flanking Xi Jinping as the Chinese premier showcased his country’s...

Last orders

For decades, alcoholic-drinks businesses have been prized by investors for their remarkable consistency. These were companies built on enduring brand value, deep-seated customer loyalty and seemingly unshakeable demand. This made them a reliable...

Soaking the rich

What are wealth taxes? Taxes that make you pay a levy based on your assets – typically your net wealth – rather than your income from work. Such taxes used to be far more common globally than they are now. Sweden charged an annual levy on net assets...

Discredited degrees

What’s the problem? The financial crisis facing the UK’s university sector is tightening its grip. The Office for Students (OfS) – the sector’s regulator in England – says that 40% of universities are running deficits and half will be in deficit next...

The state of Scotland

She has a book out? Yes. But given the publishers reportedly shelled out a £300,000 advance for a memoir titled Frankly, there are disappointingly few revelations in Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir. And whether you thrill to the words of Scotland’s former...

Strong drive

The EU’s trade deal with US president Donald Trump drew furious reactions in Paris and Berlin (see our politics page), but behind the theatrics the deal seems likely to be approved. The unequal accord will see the US impose 15% tariffs on most EU...

The handbag that costs 8.6m

Afortnight ago, at Sotheby’s in Paris, the bag Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas made for Jane Birkin – the original Birkin bag – sold for €8.6m. That is the highest price ever fetched at auction for a handbag. The funny thing is, for such a coveted...

Catch a fallen star

In June, Spectris, the high-tech precision measurement firm, was bid for by private-equity giant Advent International, which prompted a bidding war. In a year marked by a large number of takeovers, this one stands out. It was bought because it is a...

Travel takes off

In spite of a constant barrage of negative headlines in the press, covering everything from geopolitical tensions and global economic jitters to concerns about overtourism, the world’s travel industry is quietly cementing its position as a remarkably...

Hack attack

The dust is finally settling on the cyberattack that downed Marks & Spencer’s online store for more than six weeks this spring. The ransomware attack, carried out by a hacker group calling itself Dragonforce, wiped £300m off M&S’s 2025-2026 profits,...

A dangerous game

When the president of the US is a former television show host, it’s no wonder that world politics resembles a bad am-dram production with a furious director. “I’m not happy with Israel… I’m not happy with Iran either… we basically have two countries...

Bargain bling

Those who dislike luxury stocks cite similar criticisms to those who dislike the clothes many of them make. They are too expensive, fashionable one minute and out of style the next. For European investors, however, they are difficult to ignore. Some of...

Down and out?

The decline of London’s stockmarket is starting to look “terminal”, says Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. Payments giant Wise has decided to shift its primary listing from London to New York just four years after first floating in the capital. Wise is that...

Who’s driving Tesla?

Back in business

It has been a long winter for the UK’s commercial property sector, but at last it seems spring is in the air. Savills reports that the vacancy rate in the City and West End of London office property market has fallen from a peak of 9.5% in late 2023 to...

Bad week for:

A judge has ordered (pictured) to pay Coleen Rooney (both celebrity “footballers’ wives”) at least £1.4m in legal costs, says Sky News. In 2022, Vardy lost the highprofile “Wagatha Christie” court case she had brought against Rooney, whom she had...

Supercomputer

You might think that creating a highly accurate model of the way air passes through a jet engine would be relatively easy. It is incredibly hard. The enormous number of variables means that it is, in fact, beyond the abilities of our most powerful...

A firm with plenty of fizz

The best opportunities on the stockmarket are often found in sectors with a relatively low profile. One of these is AG Barr (LSE: BAG). The soft-drinks business may lack the excitement of sectors such as technology, but the Scottish company has managed...

On the edge

“Markets are discovering the real Trump trade is ‘Sell America’,” say Saleha Mohsin and Carter Johnson on Bloomberg. Stocks soared late last year on bets that the incoming president would initiate an American golden age. It hasn’t worked out like that....

Healthy genes

The return of the “dire wolf” from extinction to the land of the living thanks to the scientific wizardry of genetic engineering captured the headlines earlier this month. The magic going on behind the scenes may be less dramatic, but is no less...

Trump’s cunning plan

“That’s all very well in practice, but what about the theory?” Investors have been grappling with this question for some time. They can see that America is serious about tariffs, prompting a slump in equities and widespread fears of a global recession...

Electric shock

Is UK energy really dearer? It is. This week saw an “awful April” jump in the price cap on domestic energy bills. That’s bad enough. But the deeper fear is that the UK’s continuing high energy costs are crippling whole sectors of the economy – notably...

The cost of Covid

What’s the pandemic’s legacy? For around two million people in the UK, and an estimated 400 million worldwide, the pandemic’s legacy is serious, and in some cases involve ongoing debilitating, Covid-related illness – including breathlessness,...

Slim profits

Obesity is a growing global problem and a real threat to the health of individuals. It is not just an aesthetic issue, but also a serious health concern – it is, to be blunt, very hard to be overweight and healthy, says Ali Khavandi, consultant...

Burst bubbles

Overvalued, overhyped, over here. On 10 March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite index, which investors worldwide were watching more closely than their local indices thanks to its skew towards technology, notched up a 16th successive record high. That turned...

Coughing up

What’s happened? Until about two weeks ago, “the idea that Europe would no longer be able to rely on America’s military might for its defence was unthinkable”, says Emma Duncan in The Times. “Now it feels inevitable.” Following the angry scenes in the...

Dig, baby, dig

What’s happened? Ukraine was this week on the verge of finalising terms with the US over access to its vast reserves of precious minerals. It follows months of tense negotiations in private and dramatically worsening relations in public. As MoneyWeek...

Africa awakes

It has been a tough few years for Africa. The fall in commodity prices over the past 15 years, as well as the Covid shock, caused growth rates to slow in most African countries, as Benoît Chervalier, an investment banker and co-founder of the Business...

Good week for:

US singer Beyoncé (pictured) won the album of the year award for the first time last Sunday at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards for Cowboy Carter, says The New York Times. She also became the first black artist to win a Grammy for the best country album...

From the editor...

What do the following events have in common? The global financial crisis of 2008. The advent of Covid in 2020. The surge in inflation in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. DeepSeek’s apparent threat to US AI. The answer is that...

Forever young

The demographics of developed countries are undergoing significant change. The percentage of the population aged over 65 is on the rise. The figure is already 29% for Japan, 24.5% for Italy, 19% for the UK and 16% for the US. The UK percentage is up...

Microcars make a comeback

Bigger tends to mean better in the car world, says David Green in The Times. But microcars are making a comeback due to environmental concerns. “And they are cuter than ever.” The concept isn’t new. Microcars have been around for decades as a “cheap...

System error

What is the ONS? The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK government’s statistics authority, charged with “collecting, analysing and disseminating statistics about the UK’s economy, society and population” – chiefly for use by government and...

All alone

What’s the issue? The famous observation of the former US secretary of state Dean Acheson, that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role in the world, remains as accurate today as when he made his comment in 1962. The United Kingdom’s...

Christmas cheer

Trump might be light on detail, but his messaging points to a warm environment for America’s smaller, domestically exposed businesses and entrepreneurs – bringing back manufacturing to the US, imposing high tariffs, boosting enterprise with tax breaks,...

Why AI firms are resorting to advertising

It might offer some useful tips on what shampoo to buy halfway through a chat about where to go on holiday. Or it could casually mention which brand of TV you should buy next while you are asking it to summarise a long and dull work memo. Conversations...

Sickbed Britain

What’s happened? Employment minister Alison McGovern has admitted that the current benefits system is not working “for anybody”, not least because you’re better off on sickness benefit than if looking for a job. You get more money if you’re signed off...

Peasants’ revolt

What’s happened? Changes to agricultural property relief (APR) and business property relief (BPR), announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves in her Budget, have become the subject of fierce debate, one that has not died down since 13,000 farmers protested...

Radical capitalism

Who is Javier Milei? He’s the former economics professor and “anarcho-capitalist” who won Argentina’s presidential election last autumn, and took power almost a year ago with no prior political experience. A life-long libertarian who swore to take a...

Growth sprouts

American small caps (firms with market capitalisations of up to $2bn, although some would include companies worth as much as $10bn) have traditionally been seen as the best place for investors seeking high long-term returns. They have outperformed...

Welcome back to Trump’s world

Donald Trump won the US presidential election, gaining 277 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 224 at the time of writing, with 37 still to be announced. It also looked possible that the Republicans would win the “trifecta”: the presidency, Senate...

Lights out

How big is the sector? The night-time economy – including restaurants, bars, nightclubs and other night-time services – contributes 6% a year to the UK’s GDP and accounts for 8% of employment. In 2022, that meant that in terms of consumer spending,...

Uphill struggle

“Bull markets don’t die of old age; they are murdered.” Upswings usually end because central banks put up interest rates and snuff them out (2022); or because bubbles burst (2000, 2008); or a crisis damages confidence and changes the economic outlook...

Recalculating risk

What’s happened? Storm clouds are gathering over the global insurance industry, which is facing yet another year of “exceptional” insured losses, with even worse in the offing. Ratings agency Moody’s estimates that the recent US hurricanes Helene and...

How to play the music market

The share prices of some companies spiked during the Covid pandemic and associated lockdowns – those that catered for people who found themselves suddenly sitting around at home with as much, if not more money than ever, but not much to spend it on. As...

The race for the White House

November’s presidential election in the US is nearly upon us and the contest between current vicepresident Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump is heating up. Election outcomes “tend to have limited long-term impact on the broader economic...

From the editor...

One day in May 2016, the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper, appeared with a stark warning on its front page. An anonymous official, long rumoured to have been close to Xi Jinping, said that China could succumb to a slump of...

Mario’s medicine

What’s happened? 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...

Banking on fintech

The interest rate cycle has turned. On 1 August, the Bank of England cut the base rate from 5.25% to 5%. That should be good news for the banking sector, which is already up by 14% so far this year. Yet taking a longer-term perspective – and comparing...

A grim tale

The far-right, populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is celebrating a “historic success” in local elections in the east of the country, says the BBC. The party topped the polls in the state of Thuringia, with almost a third of the vote – nine...