Newsbites

MiFID II might sound like some sort of contraption you send to Mars, but in reality this legislation could have ramifications for your net worth…

George Osborne (presumably accidentally) has delivered a great Budget for savers. Is the tide turning for the prudent?

It’s easy to be daunted by the vast debt numbers that seemingly threaten to overwhelm UK households, but remember we’ve got trillions in assets, too.

New figures reveal how much the nation has got stashed away in ISAs. And surprise surprise, it’s less than it should be.

What do you think? Will you be taking popcorn into the cinema to see The Iron Lady come January – or sneaking in a bag of rotten tomatoes?

An update on what’s been happening on Monevator, where we’re going, and how you can get more involved.

Update: I’ve now uninstalled the pop-up, as NOT annoying my readers is my number one priority. Of course if you can recruit a friend or two as a subscriber to make up for it, I’d be hugely grateful! ;) Apologies for a dull housekeeping post, but a couple of quick queries: I have installed a [...]

A competition is underway to find the most lucrative Shopify store. UK residents can’t win the $100,000 prize, but we can win something bigger.

The number of visitors to Monevator tripled in 2009, and RSS subscriptions rose 20x. What about 2010?

The stock market might have mounted a bit of a recovery over the past ten days, but unfortunately your writer has gone the other way. Picking up a particular virulent strain of Lurgy maximus while messing about on the river last weekend, I’ve been confined to bed for the past 96 hours on a diet [...]

Financial journalists were just about the only winners in 2008. Whether it be Robert Peston on the BBC, the bookworms of The Economist, or the gorgeous anchor babes on CNBC, business reporters have had more front pages than Madonna. Now they’re squeezing every drop from 2008 with their end-of-year roundups. No time to read them [...]

Pretty, isn’t it? Well, perhaps not if you’re a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, responsible for setting interest rates. In your case it’s a headache: a rather bloodier shade of red might be more appropriate. The graph is taken from the Bank of England’s latest quarterly Inflation Report for November 2008. [...]

Regular readers will have noticed Monevator has had an overhaul in recent days. The new look is based on Chris Pearson’s amazing new Thesis premium Wordpress theme, which I’d urge all you Wordpress users to consider using. I based the previous incarnation of Monevator on one of Chris’ earlier themes, Copyblogger; I loved the clean [...]

The actor from Lock, Stock (and Press Gang, for a certain generation) has given The Telegraph a cautionary tale on the reckless spending and debt-mania that saw him go bankrupt at 31: I guess I was under the impression I had more money than I did. But I was very wasteful – I bought a [...]

New government statistics reveal home ownership in the UK is the lowest it’s been for a decade. In London there are an incredible 110,000 fewer home owners than in 2001 (not that surprising if you’ve seen London prices recently). Blame buy-to-let.