MoneyWeek

The trial of Elizabeth Holmes (pictured), the founder of blood-testing start-up Theranos, began this week in “one of the biggest trials involving alleged fraud in Silicon Valley”, reports the Financial Times. Holmes has been accused of defrauding inv

Manchester United’s share price jumped 8% after the football club re-signed Cristiano Ronaldo (who originally left the club in 2009) from Italy’s Juventus. The jump is good news for investors with fund manager Nick Train, says The Daily Telegraph – h

Zhao Wei (pictured) –also known as Vicky Zhao – one of China’s most popular and wealthiest actresses, is apparently being erased from history. Bloomberg reports that Zhao’s films are being removed from streaming sites and her name scrubbed from credi

Gold prices perked up this week after US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech (see page 4). The yellow metal hit $1,820 /oz, a four-week high, on Monday. Powell hinted that US interest-rate hikes were still some way away. Low int

Despite having to pay out around €400m in the second half of 2021 to cover flood damage in central Europe, France’s insurance giant Axa is on track for a record annual profit of €6.5bn, reckons WirtschaftsWoche. The core property-casualty division’s

“Trading desks in Tokyo have fallen silent... Nobody bought Japan’s ten-year government bond in over-the-counter trading on 3 August... in the world’s second-largest market for sovereign bonds... the Bank of Japan [has been] hoovering up securities..

Luxury brands have long looked to China as their “growth engine”, says Laure Guilbault for Vogue Business. So, when the country’s government recently announced plans to “regulate excessively high incomes”, the sector’s shares tumbled by 12.85% in a s

“Communications Inc. has just had its first billion-dollar quarter,” says Jon Swartz on MarketWatch. Yet Zoom’s shares reacted by plunging 16%. The video platform, which became a household name during the pandemic, reported $1.02bn in revenue during

The return of schools could have a marked effect on Covid-19 infection numbers, testing the government’s faith in vaccines and travel restrictions, and inevitably leading to calls for the “return of tighter restrictions, perhaps even lockdowns”, says

Following a pandemic-induced rise in dog sales, more solicitous owners have brought about a boom in luxury dog-care items. As the market grows for products such as gourmet dog food, companies including UK-based Butternut Box have jumped on the trend,

“Cryptocurrencies are a bubble. I’d describe them as a limited supply of nothing... once the exuberance wears off... they will go to zero.” Billionaire investor John Paulson – who gained fame in 2007 by making $20bn for himself and his investors by s

We’ve been saying for some time that UK shares are among the cheapest in the world right now, particularly compared with other developed markets. It’s sometimes argued that this is mostly down to the mix of stocks listed in the UK rather than the pre

”Quality” is sometimes cited as an investment “factor” – that is, a trait shared by some stocks that has tended to result in outperformance of the wider market in the long run. Other “factors” include size (small caps tend to beat large caps) and val

What’s the most successful new British company of the last 20 years? You could make a good case for Ocado, or one of the rising fintech giants such as Wise, or for an artificial-intelligence start-up such as the recently listed Darktrace. You could a

• Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook (pictured) has sold $752m worth of shares in the technology giant after receiving the final tranche of a stock award that he was granted a decade ago, in 2011, when he took over as chief executive from the firm’s fo

Climate change is likely to do “great harm to regions that feed millions” and “make a cornucopia” out of once unproductive land, says The Economist. One study predicts that for every degree temperatures rise, the yields of the three crops that supply

London-based tech workers are in demand as Silicon Valley behemoths scale up their operations in Britain, says Sam Shead for CNBC. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Palantir and Twitter already employ tens of thousands of tech workers in “s

“If you visit a British university, you see 400 students passing out in media studies and only 30 engineers… When I started we were a group of mechanical engineers, but now more than 50% of our engineers are software or electronics specialists, plus

buzzfeednews.com Dan Ariely “literally wrote the book on dishonesty”, says Stephanie Lee. Ariely’s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty was abestseller in 2012. Now, his own honesty is in question. Ariely was the author of a landmark study that claim

spectator.co.uk Of all the things sacrificed in lockdown, the one least to be regretted is the poolside summer holiday, says Simon Evans. Every year we take time out to “recharge the batteries” – but inactivity “does no such thing”. The misery of

bournbrookmag.com The idea of universal basic income (UBI) – that everyone should get money sufficient to live on from the state without condition – has been doing the rounds again, says Alexander Adams. The Design and Artists Copyright Society ha

US activist investor Starboard has branched out into the booming special purpose acquisition company (Spac) market, with a deal that takes data-centre operator Cyxtera Technologies public and values it at $1.5bn, says CNBC. Spacs are shell companies

■ Scottish Mortgage investment trust has seen a tenfold return on its investment in Boston-based biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks, which is going public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (Spac), says Citywire. The trust has inve

Free cash! Student discounts! Vouchers! Interest-free overdrafts! Banks have been rolling out the usual perks in a bid to attract new university students. By doing so, they hope to catch today’s freshers before they become tomorrow’s graduate earners

• Has your business thought about how to reduce its carbon emissions? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Just 11% of small businesses measure the current size of their carbon footprint, according to new research from the British Chambers of Comme

Take-up of the state-backed Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS) remains modest compared with the schemes it replaced, including the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and the Bounce Back Loan Scheme. But if your business has a CBILS debt, t

Poly, which makes conference-room paraphernalia and office headsets, reckons there are about 50 million conference rooms around the world, but only 10% are equipped for videoconferencing. Some commuters are gradually returning to the office, but ther

Brazil’s Nubank is planning a US initial public offering (IPO) valued at more than $55.4bn following a recent funding round led by Berkshire Hathaway, says Reuters. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate valued the bank at $30bn. Nubank is one of Latin Americ

• “Who’d buy a $7bn company from a used-car salesman? More than you may think,” says Alistair Osborne in The Times. Used-car website Cazoo has just achieved the most valuable listing ever for a UK company on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s a big su

We believe that steering companies with more questionable track records, or in more polluting industries, towards sustainable practices should help to manage investment risks over the long term, improve returns and benefit the planet. Here are three

South Korea is to become the first country in the world to force technology giants to allow alternative payment systems in their app stores. A so-called “Anti-Google law” passed the country’s National Assembly this week, says Kate Park for TechCrunch

Shares in real estate agent Purplebricks (Aim: PURP) fell after it announced an overhaul to its business model, says iNews. Instead of using self-employed sales agents, the firm will move to a fully employed workforce, which it says will help it meet

Charles Deville Wells was born in Broxborne in Hertfordshire in 1841 and spent most of his childhood in France, becoming an engineer working in the Marseille shipyards. In about 1879 he ran a scheme to raise money to build a railway, then absconded w

It’s funny how my drinking habits have remained relatively constant over the years, even though my palate veers all over the place on account of the tens of thousands of wines that I taste. I don’t think I have dipped into asingle claret since writin

Mircea Raianu Harvard University Press, £31.95 India is not only one of the world’s largest economies, but also one of the fastest-growing – and its most well-known firm, the conglomerate Tata, has been at the heart of that process, says Tunku Varad

Brickability (Aim: BRCK) is a brick- and building-materials supplier. Despite a 13.2% drop in like-for-like revenues from the year before, due to the effect of coronavirus restrictions, it highlighted a strong recovery in its annual report for the ye

• Actress Nicole Kidman is starring in a new adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2018 novel Nine Perfect Strangers, in whichshe plays a sinister new-age guru. This is despite the fact that the 54-year-old (pictured), who graces the cover of Marie Claire A

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£3.1m The cost of repairs to the 175-foot-high Duke of Wellington monument, near Wellington in Somerset. It has form. Money started running out shortly after construction began in 1817 and it only attained its full height in the 1890s, by which time