Every week I read a huge number of personal finance and investing articles. I thought you might enjoy a weekly shortcut to the best.
First, a quick thought on this week’s money news
Another action-packed week, with fears about banks continuing, manufacturers slashing jobs as if cutting grass, and house repossessions in the UK soaring.
No wonder stock markets fell. The UK FTSE 100 dropped 3.32% to close at 3,889, flirting again with the last year’s lows.
The thorn is whether we’re looking at Armageddon, or Growth, Interrupted.
As Behaviour Gap wrote this week, surprises go both ways. If things do get better in the underlying credit markets – if banks do (or can) regain their appetite for risk, and if currently shunned bonds and other financial assets regain some semblance of fair value – then a virtuous circle will kick in very quickly as balance sheets strengthen and stocks recover.
You don’t need to believe we’ll see a return to the go-go credit years for this scenario to play out. Corporate bonds are apparently pricing in worse defaults than the Great Depression, so arguably just avoiding that dire outcome offers plenty of upside.
Will we avoid it? As governments spend money as only people who own the printing presses can, that’s the several trillion dollar question.
In the meantime, I’m still trickling money into the markets.
The week’s best money posts
- No surprise to hear I agree with Oblivious Investor that Cash Flow = Wealth
- Plonkee wonders what the Victorians knew about money
- Lazy Man and Money looks at renting versus buying with some interesting ratios. (Potential flaw: I’d pay a huge premium to live in his area of San Francisco, and so would half the world!)
- US readers should check out The Dough Roller’s list of 70 Government websites about money. I’m inspired to do the same for the UK, so Brits should watch this space
- One for fun: Pimp Your Finances has quotes from his top 43 songs about money. (I vote Jeff Buckley’s Satisfied Mind, as a reminder that money isn’t everything)
- More on entertainment: Get Rich Slowly on cutting his TV bill in half
- I love The Simple Dollar’s cheap breakfast burritos. I’d like to introduce recipes to Monevator but I think they’d be out of place!
A few money articles from the UK weekend papers
- Jorma Korhonen, the successor to Anthony Bolton at the Fidelity Special Situations fund, is finding out-performance predictably elusive, but The Independent puffs him anyway.
- Missed out on those near-0% tracker mortgage rates? The Independent asks if it’s time to get a cheap fix instead. The Chelsea Building Society has a 10-year fix at 4.59%; that’ll look great if/when interest rates rise.
- The tax perks from a new healthcare Enterprise Investment Scheme could give you a head start, writes the Financial Times. (Consider the risks and cost carefully, says Monevator).
- After the wholesale flight from risk over the past 12 months, defensive shares look expensive, say analysts in the FT.
- Legal and General has slashed bonus rates in its with-profits funds, says The Times. Yet another reminder to invest via a cheap index tracker.
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