Beer-bellies meet spread bets as arrows fly this week November 15, 2009 MENTION the name Mervyn King in the City and most readers of this newspaper will think of the chap who’s in charge of the Bank of England. But there is another fellow with the same name, who is far more at home on the oche than discussing the finer points of quantitative easing. This other [...]
Copper looks red hot for next year November 15, 2009 COPPER’S status as a widely used industrial metal meant it was always going to do well in 2009. Restocking, East Asian growth and growing confidence in the global economic recovery saw the price of the red metal on the London Metal Exchange (LME) rise to as high as $6,700 a tonne earlier in the year. [...]
YUAN’S PEG A PROBLEM FOR STRONG EURO November 15, 2009 JANE FOLEYRESEARCH DIRECTOR, FOREX.COMCURRENCY flexibility in Asia is a contentious issue, so the appearance of US President Barack Obama and US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) meetings last week immediately brought the topic back into the spotlight. Geithner made the most of the opportunity to stress the importance of flexible [...]
THE TIPSTER RETAILERS TRY TO BEAT THE RECESSION November 15, 2009 SO FAR, so good for the British retailers, it would seem. The likes of Marks&Spencer, Next and J Sainsbury have all released better-than-expected third quarter figures, and the latter is once again looking like an attractive proposition. Although lower food inflation might be expected to hit bumper sale figures, both the supermarket and its rival [...]
Dow’s winning run ends as energy falls November 12, 2009 THE Dow industrials six-day winning streak came to a halt yesterday as a drop in oil prices pulled energy stocks lower and a guarded outlook from Wal-Mart fanned worries about consumer spending. Stocks were also undermined by a US dollar rally, as its safe-haven appeal rose after several policymakers around the world warned the economic [...]
British Airways and Iberia merger sends FTSE soaring November 12, 2009 BRITAIN’S FTSE 100 hit its highest close in three weeks yesterday as British Airways soared with investors cheered as a merger with Iberia looked imminent, while gains were also powered by strength in banks. But the rise was limited by falls in commodity prices hitting miners and energy stocks, which together constitute a third of [...]
CHOOSING SURVIVAL OVER LITIGATION November 11, 2009 MARCUS MCCAFFREYPARTNER, FORENSIC SERVICES, BAKER TILLY WHERE previous recessions have seen problems of funding, this time round global financial liquidity has shrunk to unprecedented levels. There are still few re-financing options and what is available is only on offer to those entities with strong balance sheets or guarantees. One result of this is that international [...]
Investors ignore bubble concerns and flock to high-yielding bonds November 11, 2009 INVESTORS’ memories are notoriously short, so when Standard & Poor’s (S&P) recently warned that they were getting even shorter, it was something of a wake-up call. Despite one of the biggest financial meltdowns and dislocations of credit in history, European investors are once again being seduced by the high yields on offer with junk bonds. [...]
THE TIPSTER November 11, 2009 DYED in the wool chartists may still be hanging onto the longer term downtrend in the S&P 500 and claiming that the 65 per cent recovery since March is just a bear market rally – or even a dead cat bounce. But reasons to be bearish on the US stock market are rapidly vanishing as [...]
Reassurance on UK growth boosts the blue chip index November 11, 2009 BRITAIN’S top share index closed higher yesterday, as risk appetite received a boost after reassuring signals on the UK economy, and with miners the biggest gainers after a jump in Chinese factory growth. The FTSE 100 index ended 36.20 points higher, or 0.7 per cent, at 5,266.75, having touched a high of 5,301.14 earlier in [...]