Category: Savings & Investment

Dividends keep growing in 2017

UK companies paid out a record amount in dividends in the second quarter of this year. At a time when there is much heated debate about whether the Bank of England should double its base rate to 0.5%, it can be easy to forget the much higher income yield available from UK shares. While most…

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189 – The NASDAQ hits 6000

The market most associated with US technology shares reached a new high in April. You may be old enough to remember that the end of the 20th century was marked by a surge in the value of technology shares in the United States. Many of these were traded on the NASDAQ market, which became synonymous…

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177 – Inflation

For much of 2015, inflation barely existed. On the government’s chosen measure, the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), annual inflation oscillated between 0.3% and -0.1%. 2016 was a rather different story: the starting point was 0.3%, but by December prices were rising by 1.6% a year. The sharp rise over the year is mainly the result…

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171 – Interest rates in 2017

On 15 December, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) raised its key short term interest rate by 0.25%, to a range between 0.5% and 0.75%. It had made the same increase 12 months previously. When the Christmas 2015 rate rise occurred, the central bank was implicitly expecting to raise rates four times during 2016. However, a…

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167 – Marmite Wars

Inflation rose to 1% in September, but that will not be the end of the story. Last month a spat between Tesco and Unilever over the pricing of products under a new contract saw Marmite temporarily removed from the shelves of Tesco’s internet shopping website. The two parties resolved the issue quickly once it hit…

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