Table of contents for Issue 1256 in MoneyWeek

“You can’t rely on anything any more.” The editor of WirtschaftsWoche, a German financial weekly, spoke for many this week as he assessed the fallout from Donald Trump’s Liberation Day, or Liberation Mayday, as WirtschaftsWoche prefers to call it. One of the few certainties of the post-war era was that you could depend on the US to prioritise the business environment and largely avoid capricious and economically dubious policymaking. Last week’s scare in the bond market (see page 5) has grievously undermined confidence in this belief. Allies and global investors are badly rattled, but Wall Street bosses, in particular, must be feeling as if they have just spent a night in A&E with a friend who went on the rampage and ended up with his legs sticking out of a…

Bond-market trouble has not been limited to America. As US Treasuries sold off, the UK 30-year gilt yield touched 5.65%, its highest level since 1998. On 9 April gilts suffered their biggest single-day move since the 2022 market meltdown unleashed by Liz Truss’s mini-budget, says Elliot Gulliver-Needham in City AM. Other major economies have also been affected, with Japanese bond yields hitting a 21-year high, says David Milliken on Reuters. Yet recent UK moves have been outsized, with the 30-year gilt yield actually rising more than the equivalent US Treasury at the height of the sell-off. In unwelcome news for Rachel Reeves, Britain’s “fiscal vulnerabilities” are back under market scrutiny.…

Prada has agreed to buy the Versace fashion brand for €1.25bn from the fashion conglomerate Capri Holdings. While the price was previously expected to be €1.43bn, a discount of €180m was secured because the “recent market turmoil and trade uncertainty has hit the retail industry particularly hard”, says Chloe Mac Donnell in The Guardian. The acquisition hints at an attempt by Prada to strengthen its position as an “Italian powerhouse” with Versace joining the fashion brands Prada and Miu Miu, the footwear labels Church’s, Car Shoe and Luna Rossa, and the pastry brand Marchesi. The deal isn’t a “complete dud”, says Bloomberg’s Andrea Felsted. Versace has “huge recognition and a rich archive with plenty of iconic styles”, while its “maximalist aesthetic”is far from Prada’s “elegant minimalism” and Miu Miu’s “cool-girl…

Shares in Indonesian coffee chain Fore Coffee shrugged off global volatility to surge 34% in their stockmarket debut in Jakarta, says Nikkei Asia. Despite investors’ concerns over both US president Donald Trump’s tariff policy and the Indonesian government’s fiscal policy, the stock reached 252 rupiah (1p) per share at the open from the initial public offering (IPO) price of 188 rupiah. Fore raised around 353.4bn rupiah (£16m) from the oversubscribed listing of 1.88 billion shares, representing a 21% stake. Fore operates over 200 outlets selling cheap coffee for roughly 33,000 rupiah (£1.49) a cup. It plans to use the proceeds to open around 140 new shops in two years.…

“In America’s escalating trade war with China, it won’t be Beijing that blinks first,” says Karishma Vaswani on Bloomberg. “Trump is right, China is guilty of unfair trade practices,” but the fact is president Xi Jinping “can withstand way more economic and political pain” than Trump. Trump excepted China from his 90-day tariff pause and they now stand at 145%. In response, China has increased tariffs on US imports from 84% to 125%. Trump’s “most ardent supporters continue to insist that he is a master strategist”, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. “To my feverish mind, it looks like Trump has a much weaker hand” in this game of “tariff poker”. The fact that China exports far more to the US than vice versa is actually a “source of…

There is one very odd fact about commercial aviation. Although it has grown hugely, and we all fly far more frequently than ever before, it has hardly advanced technologically for 60 years. Sure, the aeroplanes are a little safer, slightly quieter, and they use less fuel, but those are all minor modifications. In the one respect that matters to passengers – how quickly you can get to your destination – it has gone backwards. You can no longer fly faster than the speed of sound, as you could when Concorde was still operational. That might be about to change. We are on the cusp of a new era of aeroplane travel, with a whole series of technological advances making it possible that a commercial supersonic jet might be back on…

The balance of payments is the record of all transactions between a country and the rest of the world. Defined as simply as possible, the balance of payments is broken down into the current account and the capital account. The current account includes payments for exports and imports of goods and services, as well as money sent home by citizens working abroad and income from foreign investments. The capital account covers the difference between the amount that the country’s residents are investing abroad and the amount that foreigners are investing in it, plus some smaller items such as capital transfers and grants to other countries and changes in foreign-currency reserves held by the central bank. The balance of payments is an accounting identity in which every debit must be matched…

“Divorces are expensive. Even for very wealthy people. Children are expensive. A certain lifestyle is expensive too. So it’s not just one problem, right? It’s a combination.” Former tennis star Boris Becker (pictured) on how he managed to go bankrupt, quoted in The Times “I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath. Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.” Abigail Disney, one of the heirs to the Walt Disney fortune, quoted…

hbr.org When managers are overloaded, the usual advice is to delegate more, says Frans van Loef and Jordan Stark. But what if you’ve delegated all you can, or your team already has too much work, and you’re still overwhelmed? Then three key strategies will help. First, make sure your team understands what “good enough” looks like. Too much perfectionism wastes energy and slows down progress. Similarly, feeling the need to involve the whole team in organisational decisions can end up making their lives harder, not better. AI tools may help in making “good enough” work less onerous. Second, eliminate all the stuff that you do by habit but that is probably best left undone as it adds no value and does nothing to help customers, colleagues or the bottom line.…

Why would you invest in Premium Bonds? There is no interest paid on savings, and no guarantee of winning a prize. But the chance of winning a £1m jackpot each month appeals to many. People also appreciate that the state-backed provider protects all their savings, even though the maximum amount of Premium Bonds you can purchase is £50,000 and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme insures £85,000 of your savings at banks. If you aren’t among the two savers who win the jackpot, other high-value tax-free payouts are up for grabs each month. There were 5,914,009 prizes in April 2025, with a total value of £412m, while 78 winners gained £100,000. However, the odds of winning anything at all are 22,000 to one. Of the 22.7 million Premium Bonds holders, two-thirds…

Are you hoping to launch a new business in the coming months? If so, funding from the Start Up Loans scheme could help. The Governmentbacked scheme, managed by the British Business Bank, has seen a 21% increase in applications since Covid. That partly reflects the high numbers of Britons who have launched new firms over the past year; NatWest and Beauhurst found that 846,000 new companies were registered in 2024. The Start Up Loans scheme is aimed at these new ventures. It offers loans of up to £25,000 to brand new firms and those that have been trading for under three years. These loans come at a fixed 6% rate of interest and can be repaid over terms ranging from one to five years. The scheme also offers a year…

US president Donald Trump’s uncompromising rhetoric appears to be having a negative effect on tourism, says James Tapper in The Observer. The number of Britons visiting the US fell 14.3% in March from a year earlier, which bodes ill for the summer and beyond. Nor are Britons alone. The number of Germans staying at least one night fell 28.2% and the number of Spanish 24.6%. Britons make up the biggest group of overseas visitors to the US, with around 3.9 million visiting every year. Of course, tourism is a two-way street and Americans are also having their doubts. Travel agencies have noticed a drop in sales since Trump’s inauguration and online forums are “filled with Americans asking variations of ‘Will they hate us?’”, says Lisa Abend in The New York…

Tesco’s CEO has warned of a “mounting price war among UK supermarkets”, with conditions in the sector becoming “very competitive”, says Isabella Fish in The Times. The country’s largest grocer is to “double down on cost cuts” in addition to lowering its profit forecast by up to £400m for the year, from £3.1bn to between £2.7bn and £3bn. The move comes after Asda recently pledged to “deliver its biggest round of price cuts in a quarter-century”, a move that has already wiped billions off competitors’ market values. No wonder Asda has decided to cut prices, says Hannah Boland in The Telegraph. It needs to do something to “stop the rot”. Its market share has dropped from 14.8% to 12.6% in the last four years alone, with overall sales “slipping”. This…

Six to buy Rightmove The Telegraph The property market is in the midst of a rebound, with easing inflation providing scope for interest-rate cuts. Given the online property portal’s dominant market position, it is well placed to benefit from rising transaction volumes, while a double-digit forecast rise in earnings justifies its “lofty” market valuation. Rightmove has the financial means to overcome an uncertain near-term operating environment; on a long-term view, it offers “investment potential”. 681p Hilton Foods Investors’ Chronicle Although Hilton Food’s prices were lower, volumes grew and adjusted pre-tax profit rose in its latest financial year. The processor of meat, fish and other protein products for supermarkets is increasing investment to fund its launch in the Canadian and Gulf markets. An improvement in return on capital employed over the…

● “De La Rue’s rocky road on the public market may end on an unexpected high,” says Aimee Donnellan on Breakingviews. The banknote printer has accepted a 130p per share offer from US private-equity group Atlas, which seems a reasonable outcome for a firm that ”has spent years breaking itself up while battling seemingly terminal decline”. Although De La Rue has been in business for more than 200 years, the decline of cash – plus the loss of its contract for printing British passports in 2018 – has seen it struggle in recent years. Still, the shares have risen almost fourfold since mid-2023, after new chair Clive Whiley brought in a greater focus on cutting costs. And although Atlas’s bid might “seem like a dicey bet” in the era of…

Investors are not paying attention to the “once in a lifetime” breakdown of the monetary, political, and geopolitical order, says Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge-fund group. “A huge amount of attention is justifiably being paid to the announced tariffs and their impact on markets and economies, while very little attention is paid to the circumstances that caused them and the biggest disruptions that are likely ahead,” Dalio writes on X. Rising gaps in education, opportunity, productivity, wealth and values are causing the breakdown of democratic systems and the rise of autocratic leaders. Geopolitically, “we are going from multilateralism, which is largely an American world order… to a unilateral world order in which there’s great conflict”, he tells NBC. Trade disruption and the emergence of…

reason.com Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) is up against the same barrier Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to slash government waste and make the state more accountable more than four decades ago, says Zach Weissmueller. The barrier is what Milton Friedman called the “Iron Triangle of Politics”. The three points of that triangle are the beneficiaries, the politicians and the bureaucrats. The beneficiaries are the interest groups that profit from subsidy. They have strong incentives to maintain the status quo and are politically organised and powerful. The politicians are elected to serve their constituents but end up serving the beneficiaries. And the bureaucrats grow in power by managing all this and expanding their reach. The only way to make real progress is not with Doge’s thousand-cuts approach,…

The return of the “dire wolf” from extinction to the land of the living thanks to the scientific wizardry of genetic engineering captured the headlines earlier this month. The magic going on behind the scenes may be less dramatic, but is no less impressive. Genomics, or the applied use of genetics in medicine, is changing the way we diagnose and treat disease by tailoring treatments to the individual. The development of gene therapies that directly treat diseases, rather than prevent their emergence, is also “rapidly advancing”, says Daniel Lyons, a portfolio manager on the healthcare and biotechnology teams at Janus Henderson Investors. Early challenges in manufacturing and delivery have been overcome and research is ongoing with the aim of improving the potency and safety of treatments. Costs collapse and knowledge…

If you have a partner or children who are dependent on your income, then life insurance is worth considering, as it could give them valuable financial support if you die. According to Compare the Market, 39% of parents with children at home don’t have life insurance, despite 90% worrying about how their children would cope financially if they died. Life insurance works as a safety net, typically paying out a lump sum in the event of death. It could help the beneficiary to cover a mortgage, outstanding debts or regular bills. There are several forms of life insurance. Term life insurance is a policy that provides cover for a set period. If you die within that term, then the nominated beneficiaries will get a payout. If you live longer, then…

At first sight, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK may appear to be less vulnerable to the trade tariffs president Donald Trump has unveiled in recent weeks. Smaller firms tend to be more focused on domestic sales. These won’t be affected by the 10% tariff that the US has now imposed on imports from the UK. However, SMEs should not be complacent. The majority of British businesses are likely to take a hit from the chaos caused by Trump’s efforts to reorder global trade. Even those not directly in the firing line will suffer collateral damage. For one thing, many SMEs do make significant exports to the US, from scotch whisky producers to manufacturing companies. The UK’s vehicle industry, subject to a higher tariff of 25%, includes many…

2020 Château Vieil Orme, Bordeaux, France £11.55, reduced to £10.25 each by the case, Haynes Hanson & Clark, tel. 020 7584 7927, hhandc.co.uk Every year, without fail, the HH&C team scours Bordeaux for bargains and drives their truck back to Chelsea laden with gems. This year, I have picked six of the best. They are all unmissable and drinking right now. My headliner is the least expensive of this keenly priced collection. At five years of age, this merlot-driven beauty is augmented with 25% cabernet sauvignon and 15% cabernet franc, bringing uncommon class, a pretty little perfume, and a sleek chassis to this fantastic discovery. I am not sure how a £10 wine can taste this accurate and impressive! All wines are subject to by-the-case discounts, which are listed here.…

Investors are profoundly shaped by big crashes, says James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. Years such as 1987, 1998, 2008 and 2020 stay long in the memory. Now April 2025 “should join that list”. The period since Donald Trump unveiled global tariffs at the start of the month has seen a record $6.6trn two-day wipeout on US markets, followed by one of the largest one-day rallies in history when Trump announced a 90-day pause to most new tariffs last week. Focusing the guns on China Trump is instead concentrating his trade guns on China, hiking tariffs on the country to 145%. Beijing has responded with 125% import duties on US goods. The world’s top two economies have “effectively declared a trade embargo on each other”, says George Magnus in…

“Maintaining the dollar’s role as the dominant... currency requires that the US economy accommodate an inherent contradiction between global integration and national sovereignty... When a country [subsidises] its own manufacturing... its trade surplus must be absorbed by... partners [with more open economies]... It is not just coincidence that the US, with its deep, flexible and well-governed financial markets, has manufacturing shares of GDP well below the global average, unlike economies such as China’s [with] manufacturing shares well above the global average... The US is justified in acting unilaterally to reverse its role in accommodating policy distortions abroad... The dominance of the dollar in global... finance has long been assumed to be a net benefit for the [US], but... while it benefits Wall Street [it comes] at a cost to... manufacturers…

There’s something almost “surreal” about the market’s reaction to the latest results from retailer JD Sports, says Alistair Osborne in The Times. Even though it sells trainers, a product Donald Trump is “itching” to apply tariffs to so that they can be made in America, the shares shot up 10% on the back of a mere 0.3% rise in fourth-quarter like-for-like sales – even before Trump announced a delay to the tariffs. What’s more, it has told investors to expect “volatile” trading with no underlying sales growth this year. Perhaps the only explanation for this paradoxical reaction is that investors have decided not to give the company “any more of a kicking” now that its shares have halved in two years. The results were actually reasonably “solid”, says Hargreaves Lansdown’s…

The war in Sudan and the crash in the naira, Nigeria’s currency, have dented profits at MTN, one of Africa’s largest mobile-network operators, says WirtschaftsWoche. But the long-term outlook remains auspicious. The group has 291 million customers, six million more than last year, which highlights the extent to which population growth underpins sales in the sector. In Ghana and Uganda, both rapidly developing economies, the group achieves operating margins of more than 50%. A growing emphasis on digital financial services through mobiles – a venture with Mastercard – also bodes well. The Johannesburg-listed stock also yields 3.2%.…

Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, has reached an agreement with the Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) to govern Europe’s biggest economy five months after the last government collapsed. Germany’s parliament is due to meet on 6 May to elect Merz as chancellor, but he “should have no problem” given his 13-seat majority, says Paul Kirby on the BBC. His next challenge is to persuade voters, who have deserted his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party “in droves”, that he can “fix the economy and get immigration under control”, says Bertrand Benoit in The Wall Street Journal. The CDU has just been overtaken in an Ipsos poll by the Alternative for Germany party. Germany, which relies on exports to the US for about 4% of GDP, has been “stagnating” since…

The Trump tariff chaos and the broader sense that the world is changing profoundly (see right) makes it hard to remain optimistic at times like these. There’s a temptation to retreat to safe assets – such as cash or gold – which may well turn out to be the smart call in the shorter term. Yet there is a bullish way to think about these changes as well. They may end up being part of a long-overdue adjustment – just not quite in the way that the US president and his advisers hope. America has dominated global markets to an unhealthy extent over the past decade or more. The degree to which it has beaten almost everything else is striking: the MSCI USA index has returned 12.4% per year (in…

China steals a march in the AI race Vivian TohNikkei Asia A “quiet AI revolution is unfolding in places few analysts bother to look”, says Vivian Toh: China’s countryside. Here, rice farmers are using AI for tailored advice on how to save their crops from flooding and disease. In the process, China is providing an AI road map for the rest of the world. Unlike the West, China’s leading AI services are generally free, “driving mass adoption”. The integration of DeepSeek into WeChat, China’s super app, in February, led to rapid adoption at scale across an enormous, largely rural, population (China has 300 million farmers). This reveals a “broader strategic divergence between the US and China”. As Washington debates security aspects – Australia has already banned DeepSeek on all government…

ft.com/alphaville Things were “looking very dicey” for Americans after the White House introduced an “aggressive and bafflingly calculated” set of tariffs on its trading partners, says Alexandra Scaggs. Stocks and the dollar went down, Treasury yields up. Not good. Long-dated Treasuries started selling off hard. Thankfully, our “wise friends”, the bond vigilantes, were at hand and ready to act. These bond investors have a bad name for their tendency to terrify governments into holding off on spending and investment. But things have changed. Few would have dreamt that the US executive branch would be willing to try an “American version of Brexit”, but “even dumber and more harmful to the global economy”. But the vigilant vigilantes knew this wouldn’t work and stepped into the breach. Donald Trump backed off on…

The UK has one of the most active and vibrant fintech sectors in the world, but there are not that many publicly-traded opportunities for the average investor. Most of the UK’s fintech champions are privately-, venture-capital- or private-equity-backed companies with no plans to float any time soon. LendInvest (LSE: LINV) is the rare exception. The firm was founded in 2008 to disrupt UK property lending, with an estimated addressable market of £150bn at the time of its initial public offering (IPO) in 2021. LendInvest joined the market during the busiest year for public offerings in London since 2007. Globally, 2021 was a record year for new listings, especially for tech names, as investors piled into any company that looked like it could benefit from the disruption caused by the coronavirus…

One company with promise in precision medicine is CareDx (Nasdaq: CDNA). Its genetic testing is the “gold standard” for surgeons wanting to match donated organs with patients in order to cut the chances of post-transplant organ rejection, says Paul Major of Bellevue Healthcare Trust. Its tests also inform clinicians that the body is starting to reject an organ so doctors can adjust medications, which is important given the scarcity of donated organs. The stock currently trades at only 18 times 2026 earnings, despite revenue more than doubling between 2019 and 2024. With the field of personalised medicine changing every day, it is “difficult and expensive” for hospitals and clinics “to keep up with this continually evolving technology”, says Paul Major. It therefore makes sense for them to outsource the genetic…

● Traditionally, banks and building societies boost their individual savings account (Isa) rates in April to attract business in the new tax year, writes Ruth Jackson-Kirby. But the best deals “have already begun to disappear”, says George Nixon in The Sunday Times, with savers being urged to lock into one of the top rates while they can. ”It is looking increasingly likely that the Bank of England will cut interest rates, and so banks are slashing their rates in anticipation.” ● “London is losing its millionaire residents at a similar rate to Moscow, with 30,000 gone in the past decade,” says Mattie Brignal in The Daily Telegraph. There were 245,100 millionaires in the capital in 2014, but this had fallen by 12% to 215,700 in 2024. The only city in…

● Your business has a better chance of succeeding if it is based in Manchester, Leeds or Birmingham. A new survey from Brandgility identified the three cities as the best locations in the UK for small companies, based on 15 key factors related to business activity, wellbeing, infrastructure and talent. These included metrics such as business birth and survival rates, the cost of renting an office, broadband speed and access to skilled workers. ● The introduction of higher employers’ national insurance contributions has prompted more than six in ten SMEs to consider changes to their employee benefits packages. A survey by Canada Life found that 61% of them are now looking at changes such as reducing benefits, shifting to salary-sacrifice arrangements, and asking employees to pay more for perks such…

When Donald Trump called off the worst of his tariff blitz, he told reporters that the reason was that “people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy… a little bit afraid… a little queasy”. As well as the turmoil in the stock and bond markets, no doubt the president had in mind the “parade of executives and traders” he saw in his morning viewing of Fox News, says Justin Sink on Bloomberg. They all sounded alarmed. The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon (pictured), particularly “piqued the president’s interest”. Dimon struck a different tone. He said it was ”perfectly reasonable” to think global trade was unfair, and that foreign policymakers needed to stay calm and “negotiate some trade deals”. Trump praised Dimon. “He understood…

An American beast The “snazzy” Broil King Baron 490 IR gas barbecue is from one of America’s favourite brands, says Derek Adams in T3. “This is a four-burner beast with a side-mounted steak sizzler, a rotisserie with dedicated rear burner, heavy-duty reversible cast-iron grilling grates, a sturdy side shelf… and backlit control knob for nighttime grilling.” Few large barbecues can compete for sheer versatility and performance. £1,519, thebbqshop.co.uk Pizza anytime, anywhere The Gozney Tread propane-fired pizza oven is perfect for cooking pizza and other meals “just about anywhere,” says Dan Cavallari on Tom’s Guide. It weighs just 30 pounds, which means you can take it “to the park… and open up tons of cooking options far away from the kitchen”. It is one of the smaller ovens on the market,…