In an arid investment climate such as the one we are currently enduring, something that offers a return of more than seven per cent would seem to be something to jump at.
That is the sort of yield now being offered by some companies struggling to find investors to fund their operations while the [...]
If you need evidence of the colossal damage wreaked on Britain’s once-gold standard pensions sector during the past 16 years, look no further than HSBC’s Future of Retirement report.
It would more accurate to call it the Future of Non-Retirement report, as it reveals that a fifth of current workers expect that they will [...]
Have you ever made a bad financial decision?
The chances that you have are high.
I say that because in my 20-years’ experience as a financial adviser, I have come to the conclusion that people, no matter how smart they may be in other areas of life, are generally terrible when it comes to [...]
The Whitehall Partnership would not usually flag up a rock ‘n’ roll star as a model of financial sense and sanity.
But in a world notorious for hedonism, excess and self-destruction, Suzi Quatro emerges as someone who could find work as a financial adviser were she not still minting money from her [...]
It is a measure of just how badly the financial environment has deteriorated since 2008 that a flutter on boring old Premium Bonds stands to yield better returns than a savings account.
Even though the Treasury has recently reduced the average return on Premium Bonds to 1.3 per cent, any winnings are tax free.
[...]
It makes you wonder just what goes on in the back offices of the insurance companies when you learn the gap between the worst and best annuity rates currently on offer is nearly 24 per cent.
A survey by the Association of British Insurers of the rates paid by its members to their [...]
The long-term consequences of one of the most outrageous financial scandals ever are beginning to emerge as a generation of savers nears retirement age.
Despite financial legislation introduced in January 2013, the years 1988 to 1994 witnessed what one commentator has called “a rampage of salesmen”; a rampage that resulted in some five million [...]
If a foreign government treated millions of its citizens in the same disgraceful way that ours has there would be international calls for armed intervention.
And with that total unawareness of irony which is a prerequisite for politicians of all stripes, our own David Cameron would probably be foremost among those wringing their hands [...]
Mark Carney, the new governor of the Bank of England, has arrived from Canada with a new trick for the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – something called “forward guidance”.
This entailed telling us that base rate will be held at 0.5 per cent for at least another three years, or until the unemployment rate [...]
People who like to dip into the stock market in the hope of making a quick killing have been put at even bigger disadvantage in recent years by the emergence of the so-called Dark Pools.
A largely American phenomenon, these are private, well concealed, stock market trading operations run by computers powered by complex [...]
