After the Nvidelity comes the Huangover. Jensen Huang joins long list who confused boardroom and bedroom
Landlords make last minute dash to beat buy-to-let stamp duty hike deadline March 31, 2016 Landlords and agents were scrambling to complete last-minute purchases of second home and buy-to-let properties today ahead of stamp duty hike which comes into effect at midnight. George Osborne's clampdown on buy-to-let properties was announced in November's Autumn Statement as part of a raft measures designed to tackle the housing crisis and help more first-time buyers on the property [...]
The mortgage market is helping to fuel a new credit boom March 31, 2016 Lending in the UK is recovering strongly. The annual growth rate of total lending hit 4.8 per cent in February, according to figures released by the Bank of England this morning. It is the highest growth rate since 2009 when lending was plummeting. Here's what is helping to drive it: Mortgage lending Borrowing is bouncing back in [...]
GE Capital and AIG jump on too small to be too big to fail bandwagon after MetLife win March 31, 2016 GE Capital has petitioned the US regulator to remove it from the list of financial institutions that are deemed too big to fail following a judge ruling in MetLife's favour yesterday. GE claims that reducing its balance sheet by half and scaling back its links to other firms mean it should no longer qualify for the tag [...]
Ladies who don’t lunch: Maike Currie talks to Jane Andrews about religion, money and fund management March 31, 2016 Britishness dictates that one should never discuss money, politics or religion in polite company. It’s right up there with knowing your place in the queue and keeping up to speed with the weather. But not if you’re having lunch with Jane Andrews, veteran fund manager at investment house Smith & Williamson, who specialises in finding [...]
Five reasons to think twice before investing in buy-to-let March 31, 2016 You hear it all the time. A relative or a friend has just inherited some money. They want to make it work for them. So they make what seems like an ironclad financial decision: they invest in buy-to-let. Why is this so common? After all, property ownership is a relatively recent trend. Well, rental properties [...]
Uncertainty, sure. Turmoil, probably. But this economist says Brexit might not be a disaster March 30, 2016 Britain will not awaken to a post-apocalyptic nightmare on 24 June if it votes to leave the European Union, a top economist has told City A.M. Dismissing the notion that Brexit would be a "disaster" for the UK economy, Jean-Michel Six, chief economist for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Standard & Poor's (S&P), also said [...]
Bank of England stress tests: Berenberg warns Lloyds Banking Group could be hit hard by 2016 stress tests while Standard Chartered and HSBC could fare better than in recent years March 30, 2016 Lloyds Banking Group is "particularly vulnerable to larger stress test losses" in 2016 compared to Britain's other big banks, analysts at Berenberg have warned. The Bank published its plans yesterday for this year’s stress test of Britain’s biggest banks, saying it would test to see how lenders would fare in a scenario where global growth falls 1.9 [...]
Peer-to-peer lending: What will happen in a downturn? March 30, 2016 Speak to any fund manager about their interest in peer-to-peer lending, and they all say the same: “it really needs to go through a business cycle, then I’ll look at it properly”. During the financial crisis, only one P2P lender was in existence – Zopa. Since then, it has been joined by industry heavyweights Funding [...]
UK economists top 100: From George Magnus to Stephen King, these are the most influential financial experts in the UK and Ireland March 30, 2016 Maybe you want to get your head around why British workers aren't producing as much as they should be, quibble about when the Bank of England should start hiking interest rates, or simply stay on top of the steady stream of economic indicators spun out by various agencies. There's a lot of chatter out there [...]
City Moves for 30 March 2016 | Who’s switching jobs March 30, 2016 RateSetter Marketplace lender RateSetter has made two senior appointments in credit and risk. Jim Gunner has joined the board as a non-executive director and chair of the risk committee. Nigel Wilkinson has joined as head of commercial credit. Both executives are ex-HSBC. Jim has spent his career in banking, most of it specialising in risk [...]