Revealed: the global league table of pension worry November 27, 2019 | City Talk Where in the world are investors most concerned about their pension savings? Schroders surveyed over 25,000 investors to find out. Experts often warn of a growing crisis in retirement saving. A study by the World Economic Forum, for example, calculated that the total shortfall in some of the world’s largest pensions markets would grow from $70 [...]
How the main political parties plan to help renters November 27, 2019 Wherever you stand on the recent debate about landlords putting thermostats in cages, many of us can agree that the rental system needs improving. This has become increasingly apparent as the number of people living in private rented accommodation has grown, doubling in the past three decades. Fortunately (and perhaps unsurprisingly), the main political parties [...]
IPOs – no sure thing? November 26, 2019 | City Talk IPOs always attract plenty of attention, particularly when they are of highly-recognised companies. But are they a wise destination for investor cash? IPOs offer plenty of glamour, a change from the usual stocks in an index, and there have been plenty of new entrants to the UK stock market over the past ten years. Some [...]
What is microfinance and why does it matter for investors? November 25, 2019 | City Talk Exclusion from the financial system is widely regarded as a major obstacle to people’s efforts to grow out of poverty. In 2017, 1.7 billion adults across the globe had no access to a bank account, with the vast majority of them living in emerging and frontier markets. 56 per cent of these were women, and [...]
Some inconvenient truths about income November 22, 2019 | City Talk “Chin up. Be positive. It’ll all work out.” We are always being encouraged to look on the bright side, but too much optimism can be dangerous. Take the simple matter of how much we expect to earn from our savings and investments. Far too many people around the globe take a “glass half full” approach [...]
Investors expect to take ‘10.3%’ a year from retirement savings November 20, 2019 | City Talk Investors believe they can make aggressive withdrawals from their retirement savings and not run out of money, according to the Schroders Global Investor Study 2019. Investors believe they will be able to withdraw, on average, 10.3 per cent a year from their retirement savings without running out of money, according to a new global study. [...]
Why take-up of shared parental leave is so dismally low — and the solution November 20, 2019 When the government introduced shared parental leave back in 2015, the idea was to encourage more fathers to stay home to care for their young children so that new mothers could go back to work if they want to. It was hoped that this in turn would go some way to closing the gender pay [...]
Has WeWork destroyed SoftBank’s credibility? November 13, 2019 | Sponsored By John Colley at Warwick Business School Why is Japanese investment firm SoftBank investing a further $8 billion into WeWork, even though the office rental company is now valued at just $8 billion, and buying out founder Adam Neumann at a further cost of $1.7 billion? Forgetting SoftBank’s previous sunk investments in WeWork – which [...]
Will CO2 rules choke car industry profits? November 12, 2019 | City Talk Europe’s car industry needs to tackle the huge challenge posed by new emissions regulations. But for those who do, it’s a major opportunity. The commitment to limit global warming to 2 degrees is the greatest challenge of our time. If we’re going to meet it then we need to cut harmful emissions from industry, and [...]
What now as monetary policy runs its course? November 12, 2019 | City Talk The UK looks set to reverse the course of austerity with all parties planning to ramp-up spending as the reality of a huge Brexit upheaval puts the pressure on both the treasury and Bank of England. However, despite the recovery seen in the post-2008 world, we have seen little upside in terms of interest rates [...]