MoneyWeek

Worried about living costs? You aren’t alone. A survey from Aviva suggests that 74% of adults are too. And for good reason. It looks like Covid-19 has somehow shifted us from an age of plenty into an age of shortages, where supply just can’t meet dem

Chinese thermal coal prices have hit a record high. Flooding in the country’s northern Shanxi province, a major coal producer, sent prices on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange to ¥1,408 (£161) a tonne on Monday, says Laura He for CNN. That was an all-

“India’s equity market is on the cusp of overtaking” Britain’s, say Abhishek Vishnoi and Swetha Gopinath on Bloomberg. India’s market capitalisation stands at $3.46trn and has soared by 37% so far this year. The former British colony is fast closing

“Emerging market” (EM) is not just a euphemism for “poor”, says Karthik Sankaran in Barron’s. An EM is supposed to converge with income levels in wealthy countries. The US was a fast-growing “19th-century EM that first converged and then surpassed th

Boris Johnson was in ebullient form at the Tory conference in Manchester last week, setting out his vision for a “high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity” Britain. The main thrust of his speech was that instead of using low-wage EU migrants to fill

Buyout pioneers step down: Henry Kravis and George Roberts, co-CEOs of the $492bn American global investment and private equity company KKR & Co, are stepping down to “pass the torch to handpicked successors”, says Miriam Gottfried in The Wall Street

Facebook’s critics have charged it for years with knowingly causing its users harm, putting profits over safety and intentionally driving user engagement by sowing division. Now a trove of internal documents has been placed in the public domain, whic

project-syndicate.org “Bad news travels,” says Kishore Mahbubani. So when Afghanistan’s government collapsed recently, the whole world was watching. Yet when Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, produces “the world’s most effective

I’m not usually a fan of funds of funds, largely because they cost investors so much money: funds’ fees are piled on top of each other. But when it comes to investing in private equity (PE), there is little choice. Listed PE funds of funds are the be

The boom in energy prices has taken us by surprise. Oil prices have leapt to multi-year highs, while gas shortages are affecting everything from ice cream to dentistry. Even coal has made headlines as one of the best-performing asset classes of the y

Sheepwash is a tiny village in North Devon with a population of just 250 or so people. The Sheepwash Chronicle is the local magazine for and about the residents. It’s not what you might call the mainstream media. I have some close family down there,

For most people, this month’s outage at Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was simply an inconvenience. But for small businesses that depend on these networks to make online sales, the six hours they were down meant six hours of no trading and no reven

Ask any pub-quiz champion which is the longest river in France and they will tell you it is the mighty Loire. But they may be stumped if asked to tell you where it starts. The answer is deep down in the Ardèche. The département in the south of France

Charlie Mullins, the self-styled “plumber to the rich and famous”, once observed that his most prudent investment was the bag of tools he built up as an apprentice. “Every time I had some money, I would buy another tool.” They have stood him in good

The Porsche Taycan 4S Cross Turismo is “an electric family car with a sporty, adventurous twist”, says Guilherme Marques for Portugal Resident, and boasts all the hallmarks you’d expect from the pedigree. Porsche may not be the brand most associated

Fernielaw House, Colinton Village, Edinburgh, Scotland. A Grade B-listed, 1730s mansion with views of the Pentland Hills and the Forth Valley. It has Georgian sash windows, period fireplaces with wood-burning stoves and mature gardens. 4 beds, 3 bath

Immersive LDN, London Directed by Alexander Wright The end of a pandemic, a booming stockmarket – it’s not hard to see the parallels between New York at the start of the “roaring twenties” and the modern day. So it seems appropriate that, after a C

It would be fair to say that Mike Ashley is not popular in Newcastle. Even by the standards of Premiership football, the retail tycoon and former club owner had a notoriously “fractious” relationship with fans, say Murad Ahmed and Andrew England in t

America’s leading colleges are probably the least curious institutions in the country. They are convinced they have The Truth – on diversity, anti-racism, climate control, equality, and ESG (environmental, social, corporate governance) investing. No