The two letters below are doing the rounds on social media.
The first from a 3 year old asking Sainsbury’s why it calls its tiger bread tiger bread when it looks like a giraffe.
The second, a reply from Sainsbury’s agreeing with the child and offering £3 giftcard.
The Government has welcomed announcements of new jobs at Asda and McDonald's with fulsome words of praise in the past couple of days.
The creation of an extra 5,000 posts at Asda this year merited an excursion to company headquarters and a staff Q&A session by Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday.
He said the expansion of WalMart-owned Asda was 'a real boost for the economy and more importantly for people around Britain seeking jobs'.
Continue reading "Cameron and Clegg gush over new shelf-stacking and burger-flipping jobs" »
Rolls-Royce sold the highest number of cars in its history in 2011, and it was all thanks to demand in China, its sales figures have shown.
The luxury British vehicle producer, which has been a figurehead in British motor history for 107 years, sold a record 3,538 motors last year.
This means sales were up 31 per cent on the year before, dominated by demand for its Phantom and Ghost models.
Continue reading "The charts that show how China is driving a boom at Rolls Royce" »
Forget buy-to-let, there may be more than a few people who read the story of the couple who bought the Whitney-on-Wye Toll Bridge, with its attached two-bedroom cottage, and thought I wish I’d invested in that.
The bridge cost £400,000 and is forecast by its new owners to generate £100,000 a year – and an 18th Century Act of Parliament when it was built granted it exemption from tax.
So, that’s a 25 per cent annual tax-free return derived from something that is also handily your home. That’s not just a potentially excellent infrastructure investment but also a prime example of the attraction of putting your money into a tangible object.
If you fancy a look you can take a walk along the bridge thanks to the magic of Google maps above.
Much has been made of the big financial squeeze. But if this chart, published by Vocalink, is to be believed, its effect should feel less constricting than it did a year ago.
Back then inflation was soaring while wage rises fell back to nothing. The gap remains wide, with wages continuing to fall behind price rises, but the situation has improved.
Why? Well, sadly this was no bounce back in the fortunes of the economy but due largely to a raft of tax changes.
This chart shows how average take-home wages - pay after tax and other deductions - surged higher in April and May last year.
Changes to the income tax and National Insurance system helped low earners, leaving someone on £7,475 a year £275 better off. But high and medium earners found themselves paying more.
So whether the squeeze has eased for you depends on your salary bracket - and what you buy. We'd like to hear your experience of the big squeeze...
@andrew_oxlade
The battering Tesco shares have taken as spooked investors ditched them can be taken as a clear warning that 2012 has the potential for a nasty stock market crash.
Tesco delivered a trading update that was poor in terms of UK sales. The supermarket giant is struggling in its own backyard, as consumers cut back and analysts have been sniping at its sliding like-for-like UK sales.
Despite those local troubles, Tesco has been consistently growing profits at a robust rate and that has kept its share price bobbing along. What did for it this morning was a hint of caution on that.
It said: ‘We expect Group trading profit growth to be around the low end of the current consensus range.’ And thus the shares of one of our most successful companies, that many were arguing was already undervalued, plunged 15 per cent.
Continue reading "Is Tesco's big share price drop a warning sign for a market crash?" »
We've long dabbled in the economics of online search and the patterns it throws up.
This kind of 'nowcasting' - using live data from the web that reflect real-time trends - gained wider popularity in 2010 and 2011.
Our first stab at this was an exceptionally crude house price predictor which, a little tongue-in-cheek in a post in June 2007, predicted that a crash lay ahead. A few months later, the market tanked [interestingly, many of you predicted a crash back then - see the comments].
Then we used our own search results - the amount of 'traffic' sent from Google et al to This is Money on a part icular search term - to devise a 'buy-to-let-ometer' and a 'stamp duty-ometer' in 2008 and 2009.
It's not an exact science as Google rankings can fluctuate but I keep an eye on certain search terms and our dominance for 'buy-to-let' rarely budges due to this wonderful guide by our mortgage specialist Simon Lambert: 10 tips for buy-to-let.
Continue reading "Our crude buy-to-let barometer rises ... as fools rush in" »
That a UK government is willing to put £17billion into the rail system is news that should normally delight. Then you find out that it is going into High Speed Two (HS2) and you pause for thought.
I’m not completely sceptical of this project – I’m probably 75% sceptical of it. As you have to be with any massive expenditure whose infrastructural and economic benefits are far from certain.
As with the Olympic 'legacy' (ugh), the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Or in the gagging.
It will be interesting to look back in 20 years’ time and see whether we did have reasons to be fearful, but here is why I’m sceptical of HS2:
It was just before Christmas. Everything was panic. It seemed as if the entire nation had squeezed into Hawkins Bazaar (RIP) in search of last-minute stocking-fillers.
But Britain's banks, the lucky sods, were quiet as mice. For good reason: 2011's most bombastic bounty was already in hand. A merry Christmas sorted, and nothing, absolutely nothing, asked for in return.
A mind-boggling €500billion lay dazzling at the feet of our monoliths' European neighbours even before Santa had mounted his sleigh - and plenty of that present will filter through to the City and our banks.
Continue reading "Why banks had a VERY merry Christmas... courtesy of the ECB" »
House price forecasts are a mug's game, that's something I've learnt over many years of being cajoled into making them.
Nothing highlights that more that how the property market defied gravity in 2011, with a catalogue of bad news failing to drag prices down substantially. In fact, Nationwide said prices rose by 1 per cent last year. [see the chart above]
However, the headline figures do not tell the full story, as they only measure properties that sell, or mortgages that are approved for buyers on them - they cannot measure what it would take in terms of price falls for all the properties sat on estate agents shelves to be shifted.
Continue reading "House price forecasts are a mug's game - so here's mine for 2012" »
