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The Results are in – the Emergency Budget is set to benefit Britons on the highest incomes!

If your personal finances benefitted from Friday’s budget, the chances are you were well off already. Continue reading

What the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, presented to the House of Commons on Friday was definitively not a Budget; it was ‘The Growth Plan’. The sixth chancellor since 2016 was careful to avoid the B word, despite the huge sums of spending and borrowing that he announced – greater than in most, if not any, real Budgets, let alone mini-Budgets. When the Autumn Budget proper emerges – probably in November or December it is most unlikely to contain anywhere near such a wide range of radical and costly measures as were announced on 23 September.

An Emergency Budget is scheduled on Friday (23rd September) 

Here’s what may and may not happen to the main taxes….Continue reading

The 0.2% miss that cost the equity market 5%

The biggest issue in markets at the moment is the worldwide central bank battle against inflation. Continue reading

The summer months are typically characterised by limited news, thin trading volumes and illiquid conditions which, can serve to accentuate moves in financial asset prices both to the up and the downside. The summer of 2022 has proved an exception.

Why invest surplus cash?

To benefit from real investment returns over the longer term.  The Bank of England base rate is currently 1.75%, with the target rate for inflation set as 2%.Continue reading

Recession Rally

So far in the third quarter of 2022 risk markets have rallied very strongly. This is pretty strange given that central banks have aggressively increased interest rates and talk of recession abound!Continue reading

The investing environment could hardly be more challenging. Global economic activity is slowing, Western developed economies are flirting with recession, inflationary pressures are extremely elevated, and Western central banks remain committed to raising interest rates in a concerted effort to bring them under control. The geopolitical backdrop is still as dark as ever; the war in Ukraine continues, China’s bellicose threats against the United States ahead of House speaker, Mrs Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Asia have become more pointed. Europe faces a natural gas shortage over the coming winter, Dr Mario Draghi’s Italian government has collapsed, while in the UK, the same fate has befallen Mr Boris Johnson’s administration.

More than 200 years ago, a French military officer stumbled across the Rosetta Stone, a 2000-year-old carving with clues to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs that had puzzled the world for centuries. We don’t exactly have a Rosetta Stone for our perplexing market’s future – no one does. But just as the Rosetta Stone opened a window into Egypt’s mysterious past, we have some clues that might help investors crack the code in the coming months.

FOMC Fallout

After yesterday’s post, we felt it necessary to provide a post-Fed meeting update. It is widely accepted that this Fed meeting was ‘the most interesting in 30 years’ given the state of the economy, policy and markets.Continue reading