News & Insight • Weekly Newsletters

09 September 2022 | William Buckhurst

That Was The Week That Was

MACRO

• The ECB raised rates by 75bps, its largest ever single rate hike
• New UK Prime Minister, Liz Truss, outlined plans to cap average household energy bills at £2,500 a year
• A sombre end to the week following the sad death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

COMPANY NEWS

• Melrose shares fell sharply after announcing that they would spin out the GKN automotive business as a separate listed entity
• Apple’s product day this week saw the launch of the new iPhone 14 Pro with an always-on display letting notification addicts stay connected all day, every day. The new Apple Watch also features a temperature sensor for the first time, enabling it to offer ovulation detecting as part of its period tracking feature
• Two of the UK’s largest housebuilders are set to merge after Vistry agreed a £1.3bn cash and shares deal to take over smaller rival Countryside

FUND NEWS

Bill Gross, the former high-profile bond manager at PIMCO, who once said that UK gilts "rested on a bed of nitroglycerin", is now betting on sterling. With the UK currency now around 20% cheaper against the US Dollar, Gross thinks the fall in the currency is overdone

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY

• 1974: The day after President Ford pardons Nixon for the Watergate scandal, US markets tanks 2.2% on fears that the pardon will not put full closure on the scandal
• 1998: Google is founded with a $100,000 initial investment

IN OTHER NEWS

As the nation mourns the death of our Queen, we look back at some of the financial highlights of her reign:

It’s hard to measure the Queen’s wealth because some of her assets were privately held and some are part of the Crown Estate, which is not directly controlled by the monarch. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates her fortune, conservatively, at £370m

The Royal Collection is one of the world’s greatest troves of fine art. Amassed by wealthy and powerful kings and queens in the last five centuries, it includes more than one million works, including priceless paintings by a long list of masters ranging from Rembrandt to Lucien Freud

The Queen was implicated in the Paradise Papers, formerly secret documents leaked in 2017 exposing interests held offshore by the rich and powerful as a means of tax avoidance. They said the queen had through the Duchy of Lancaster placed around £10m in funds held in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda -- British overseas territories that are considered to be tax havens

The Queen spoke for the nation when in 2008 she asked economic experts why the credit crunch had taken so many by surprise. At an event at the London School of Economics at the height of the financial crisis, she inquired: ‘Why did nobody notice it?’

 MARKET DATA

 As at 9^th September 2022. Source: Financial Express

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