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 [...]
DEBATE: Should the London Stock Exchange cut its hours to improve work-life balance for traders? November 8, 2019 Should the London Stock Exchange cut its hours to improve work-life balance for traders? Galina Dimitrova, director of investment and capital markets at the Investment Association, says YES. Trading hours in the UK are 8am to 4:30pm GMT — some of the longest in the world. That doesn’t sound like a long day, but traders [...]
What happens to high yield bonds in times of market stress? November 6, 2019 | City Talk The current macroeconomic backdrop is creating challenges for investors. Global growth is slower and inflation is benign. Meanwhile, central banks appear to be returning to more accommodative policies and geopolitical tensions have increased. Downturns in the business cycle, often caused by adverse economic conditions, can lead to a number of trends that are negative for [...]
What Thomas Cook’s collapse tells us about the power of disruption November 4, 2019 | City Talk Whilst the failure of UK holiday firm Thomas Cook was sudden and a considerable shock to many, the writing has been on the wall for some time now. Driven by technology and specifically by the advent of online booking and reservation systems, the travel industry has long been undergoing a radical transformation across each of [...]