Fronting a brand new family business October 2, 2011 THE Asprey name is undoubtedly familiar to you. The British luxury brand has been around since the time of Queen Victoria. For 200 years the family sold luxury goods to the world’s well-heeled before being bought out by a devoted customer. Sadly, when William Asprey, the seventh line of the family, came to start up [...]
City: Labour leadership is unimpressive and being disingenuous on spending cuts September 25, 2011 ED Miliband and Ed Balls – the double act at the top of the Labour party – are less impressive than the duo they replaced, according to the City A.M / PoliticsHome Voice of the City panel. Almost three quarters of panellists (72 per cent) said Ed Balls, Labour’s shadow chancellor, was less impressive than [...]
Jobs data boosts FTSE but US markets falter October 7, 2011 London stocks have closed slightly higher after better-than-expected US jobs figures prompted an afternoon rally, but US markets remain down after fresh downgrades of Spain and Italy. The FTSE 100 index spiked sharply when US figures showed 103,000 new jobs created, and while it gave up most of the gains it still closed up 0.2 [...]
Car insurers hit by probe into rate rises September 8, 2011 SOARING car insurance costs are at the centre of a new investigation by the UK’s competition watchdog, to assess whether insurance firms are raising premiums unnecessarily. The Office of Fair Trading yesterday said it was so concerned at signs that premiums rose up to 40 per cent in the year to March that it launched [...]
Scandal dents Swiss bank’s reputation September 16, 2011 THE three keys that make up the UBS logo symbolise confidence, security and discretion. After yesterday’s news, that logo needs to be redesigned. Although the $2bn hit is likely to wipe out third quarter profits (estimated at $1.5bn by analysts), the loss itself will be manageable enough. UBS lost $1.32bn in the second quarter of [...]
DRAGHI TURNOVER RAISES ECB MOVES November 6, 2011 ON THURSDAY, the world’s equity markets got an unexpected, but thoroughly welcome present: a 25 basis points reduction in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) key lending rate. And the generous benefactor? None other than Mario Draghi, its newly installed head. Analysts had not expected the move, not least because Draghi only assumed his new role [...]
Government bans injury claim referral fees September 9, 2011 The government has banned the referral fees paid for customer data that have been blamed for a surge in personal injury claims against car insurers, retailers and the NHS. The Ministry of Justice has said the ban on such fees, to apply solely to personal injury cases, is designed to tackle the alarming rise in [...]
Berkeley upbeat as sales and land bank grow September 5, 2011 House builder Berkeley Group performed better than expected in the four months since May and now expects to reach its five-year profit target at least two years early, it has said. In an upbeat trading statement, Berkeley said since it revealed its five-year growth strategy in May its forward sales had grown to in excess [...]
Berkeley upbeat as sales and land bank grow September 5, 2011 House builder Berkeley Group performed better than expected in the four months since May and now expects to reach its five-year profit target at least two years early, it has said. In an upbeat trading statement, Berkeley said since it revealed its five-year growth strategy in May its forward sales had grown to in excess [...]
Man Group leads FTSE fallers after shock asset fall September 28, 2011 Hedge fund Man Group has ended the day almost 25 per cent, the biggest one-day plunge in its share price since November 2008, after shocking the markets with the scale of asset outflows over the past three months. UK stocks closed lower as confidence bled out of the market in the last hours of the [...]