by The Investor
on January 19, 2010
After months of public wrangling, Kraft has agreed terms with Cadbury’s directors for a takeover of the British chocolate company.
The news will be a relief to City managers who’d been ‘forced’ to sample Cadbury’s Caramel and Dairy Milk bars to assess the correct price for their shares.
“820p!” cried Mike ‘Tubster’ Smugbottom, who runs the Saturn Consumer Contrition fund, as he swallowed Curly Wurlys like a puffin guzzling sand eels.
“No” *gmmf* “way!”, gulped hedge fund manager John ‘Two Belts’ Bainbridge, who hadn’t eaten this many Roses since his father gave him five tins at Christmas for exhorting £200 from a weak boy across the street to whom he’d sold a broken bicycle. “This stuff is the shizzle!”
Such fun and games are over, for imaginative writers and investors alike – but there is a more serious ramification arising from the takeover of this 200-year old British legend.
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by The Investor
on January 19, 2010
I have rounded up a bunch of house price predictions for 2010, to follow up my article on the likely fate of some first time buyers after the great UK house price crash stopped crashing (as shown in the BBC graph to the right).
These predictions aren’t wildly useful. It takes years for bearish sentiments to play out (Capital Economics was looking for a UK house price crash in 2004, as I recall), while the big banks are loathe to predict anything worse than stability (predicting losses implies more writedowns).
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by The Investor
on January 16, 2010
A busy week on Monevator covered everything from banker bashing to, well, financial adviser bashing. But it wasn’t all wanton violence, with posts on how to start investing, UK home buying, and DIY hedge funds, too.
Still need to work on making one or two of those articles shorter, though!
My post of the week is from The Simple Dollar, the huge US blog, and it continues the ‘financial adviser – friend or foe?’ theme.
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by The Investor
on January 15, 2010
Pity first-time house buyers. Having finally seen the ladder lowered from the great property juggernaut in 2008, most could still only scramble on-board with a loan from the Bank of Mum and Dad.
And as mortgages have become easier to get in 2009, house prices have shot back up, reversing the UK house price crash before it had barely begun.
Some 45% of house purchases in May 2009 were by first-time buyers – a huge number by the standards of recent years. But by November the percentage was down to 19%, according to the National Association of Estate Agents.
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