This March saw the prices of residential properties rising at the fastest rate since just before 2007’s financial crisis, with the average price of a home in the UK increasing by 10.2% in the year up until March. The stamp duty holiday introduced by the Government certainly played a part in this development. Having been …
Government borrowing is at its highest level since the Second World War. According to the Office for National Statistics it reached £303.1bn in the year to March – nearly £250bn higher than in the previous year. Borrowing in March was £28bn – the latest month to set an unwelcome record. Borrowing in the year to …
You will likely have grown up knowing the ‘big four’ banks and their presence on every high street. Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds and HSBC (which you may remember as Midland Bank) were prominent in almost every town. If you needed a loan – especially if it was for business purposes – then your first port of …
At time of writing, the UK’s FTSE 100 index of leading shares is at 6,882 – up 7% on where it ended 2020. In the US the Dow Jones index is up 11% for the year at 33,821 with other major markets around the world also making significant gains in the first four months of …
Introduction In some ways, May was a relatively quiet month. Although, it did bring us the marriage of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the first PM to marry in office since Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, in 1822. Having eaten a slice of wedding cake and gone straight back to the office, Boris Johnson will …
As we look back on the 12 months since the UK first went into lockdown one thing is abundantly clear – financially, the last year has been good for some people. We’re not talking about the billionaires who have seen their shares rocket during lockdown but rather the many, many people who have saved money …
Introduction Some of the numbers in this month’s Bulletin are simply staggering. Whether it’s Amazon’s profits or the ‘investment’ (which could alternatively be considered ‘spending’, depending on your political viewpoint) announced by President Biden. There was a time where the ‘standard unit’ of currency we talked about was a million. Company profits and valuations were …
Whichever side you were on in the Brexit debate there was little doubt about one of the central arguments: leaving the EU would free the UK to do its own trade deals with countries and trading organisations around the world. At the end of January the BBC reported that the UK was applying to join …
The newspapers are constantly full of stories about the ‘richest men in the world.’ We are all familiar with some of the historical names on the list such as John D Rockefeller and Henry Ford, and today the title is being disputed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, depending on the respective share prices of …
Last month Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and boss of carmaker Tesla, announced that his firm had bought $1.5bn (£1.1bn) of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and expects to start accepting it as payment in the future. The announcement caused the price of Bitcoin to jump to $44,220 (£32,072) – a rise of 17% and a record …
