Interest-only mortgages are back, or so the Guardian tells us. The Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks (both part of the National Australia Bank Group) are to start offering what they call “low start” deals. Under these, …
Active fund or passive fund? Our answer at Moneyweek has often been that investors should buy cheap passive funds over active funds most of the time. Why? Because the average active fund costs too much …
It is festival time in Edinburgh. This means that you are pretty much obliged to either see a show or be in a show every day for a month. Mostly I choose the seeing option, …
Everything’s great. No doubt about it. Why? Because house prices are rising again. All the most recent surveys show strong rises almost everywhere, and that has made a good many commentators very happy. Not me. …
A worrying tit-bit in the FT today. It seems that the Lib Dems would like to see capital gains tax (CGT) rise from its current levels of 28% to the same levels as income tax …
I’ve tried, but I just don’t get it. I can’t see how Mark Carney’s big announcement yesterday is a revolution in monetary policy. Look at the headlines and you might think something big had changed. …
We’ve written frequently about how much we dislike stamp duty as a tax. If property is to be taxed on its capital value, we would much prefer to see a low and inflation-linked capital gains …
In this week’s magazine I write about the new lifetime limit for pensions. You used to be able to save up £1.5m into a pension before you got hit with any extra taxes. Not any …
A full page article in the FT a few days ago claimed that “experts are struggling to explain a great puzzle of the US economy.” It went on to note that since the late 1980s, …
I wrote here a few weeks ago about the oddly opaque manner in which the government figures out what inflation-adjusted GDP growth in the UK is. It doesn’t use the RPI or the CPI as …