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Financial repression to continue

Are you feeling subject to financial repression? You should be because it's the phrase used to describe how the Government reduces it's debts by lowering interest rates to a level that is negative in real terms. Anyone saving in a bank account or building society is having their savings eroded this way because they are not getting a real return. Bank base rate has been at the historically exceptional rate of 0.5% for some time and high street banks are as ...

Rolls Royce – Jam tomorrow after all

Rolls Royce announced their full year results today and they were very good - underlying profit before tax up 23% and revenue up 27%. The order book also grew by 19%. But the share price promptly dropped by 15% in morning trading. The reason for the fall was simply that the adjusted earning were below expectations, and there were some very negative comments from the CEO about the expectations for 2014. To quote: "we expect a pause in our revenue and profit ...

Barclays – Who benefits?

Barclays Bank announced their final results yesterday. The results did not match expectations and the shares fell 4% on the day. The national media led with the story that the company had still increased the bonus pool even so, and that the company now pays out more in bonuses than it pays in dividends to shareholders. The CEO, Antony Jenkins,  gave the usual excuse for the high pay levels - that they need to compete on the international scene for top class ...

Hargreaves Lansdown backs down

On the 17th January ShareSoc issued a press release which pointed out that the new charges announced by Hargreaves Lansdown would mean that some investors might face a doubling of costs. See the text of the press release here: Hargreaves Lansdown Double Charges Investors. The particular problem was that anyone holding a mixture of investment trusts, funds and direct shares in a SIPP would now have two separate "caps" on overall charges. ShareSoc was no doubt not the only body that raised ...

Who runs investment trusts?

Investment trusts are of course normal public companies, with a board of directors who are responsible to shareholders. Or to quote from a good article on these long established and low cost investment funds by Ian Cowie in the latest Aberdeen newsletter: "Unlike unit trusts, every investment trust has a board of directors whose duty is to represent the interests of investors rather than any fund management company. Investment trust directors can - and occasionally do - sack fund managers who ...