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Here's a festive scene for you. I'm in John Lewis in Edinburgh. I'm leaving the cookery department and heading, via the escalators, for the toy department to have a go [...]

Back in 1962, most European bankers were mad for monetary union. They were planning for it and seeing it, as Statist magazine said at the time, as 'part of the [...]

In the end, the Fed didn't really have a choice. Given that markets had already priced in quantitative easing part 2 (QE2), they had to deliver. Failure to do so [...]

It's been a long time in the thinking but the coalition has finally given the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest), the universal pension savings scheme dreamt up by New Labour, [...]

One could argue forever about whether house prices are too high or not. Or even about whether they are affordable or not. Assume that interest rates will never rise. Then [...]

It used to be that if you wanted to get a rate on your savings that would beat inflation you got a cash Isa, the idea being that with no [...]

If you want to upset yourself, take a look at spikejapan.wordpress. com. This is a blog that is subtitled Down the Benjo (a very direct Japanese word for loo), and [...]

I love investment trusts. I love them for their price. Many of the best still have management charges of under 1 per cent, which, these days, counts as very cheap [...]

Y ou will not have heard of Mr FM Osborn. However, I feel I know him rather well. Why? Because I have a copy of an article he wrote in [...]

Are equities cheap? If you believe in the 'yield gap', the answer is yes. The theory around this holds that, in a normal situation, equities should yield less than bonds [...]

Whenever economists want to scare us, they mention Japan. They note that since the collapse of its bubble 20-odd years ago, it has been caught in a cycle of hideous [...]

In his memoir, Tony Blair claims that it was his idea to give the Bank of England power over interest rates , that he was never 'kept out of the [...]

Something has changed. Until very recently the investment world was, for the most part, convinced that the worst was over and that a recovery of sorts had taken hold. No [...]

If you are feeling a little poorer than you'd like, it's probably because you're making too many trips to the supermarket. A recent survey shows that over the last three [...]

For those who like their fishing wild and scenic, Shetland can be hard to beat, finds Merryn Somerset Webb I'm a hot-weather-holiday person. I like beaches and swimming in a [...]

When we first moved to Edinburgh 18 months ago, the last thing my husband and I wanted was to buy a house. It seemed perfectly obvious that the house price [...]

I'm settling into my summer reading: I've read Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and I've now moved on to a note just out from Baillie Gifford called Rational Optimism . [...]

The indefinite suspension of National Savings & Investments (NS&I) Index-Linked saving certificates earlier this week has irritated savers ( see page 2 ). And for very good reason. Without them [...]

Tomorrow is an important day: it marks the start of the next lunar cycle. You might think this is totally irrelevant to this column, but there is a possibility you [...]

T he Budget went down pretty well. Commentators have called it ambitious, brave, clever and all manner of nice things. The markets are pleased too: the pound hit [euro]1.22 on [...]

I rarely find myself wanting to be a politician - or to stand in the shoes of a politician - even for a second. Not so today. Right now, I'd [...]

What is the point of providing tax relief on pension contributions? The usual answer is that we want to encourage people to save for their old age. That's true of [...]

What do you do if you are a rich man in need of a pension fund? It isn't an easy question to answer these days. There isn't much point in [...]

We've just bought a house. It is exactly the kind of house we have long wanted to live in, so we are thrilled. But I am also pretty sure that, [...]

You probably think gold is in a bubble. After all, it hit new highs in dollars, pounds and euros this week - and has pretty much quintupled since its lows [...]

Last week I said here that only one thing would make me pour what small part of my money isn't devoted to gold into European equity markets - quantitative easing. [...]

Last week, I wrote here about the crisis in Greece and its likely effects on the eurozone. I didn't expect any of them to be good. And they haven't been. [...]

Ihave a friend who has recently discovered day-trading. She looks for the biggest fallers in the stock market over a month, checks that the shares that have fallen more than [...]

Iwas wondering earlier this week if the Icelandic volcanic eruption might have an effect on stock markets. Not because it would actually affect revenues, profits or valuations but just because [...]

Politicians live in the constant hope that saying something is true will somehow make it true. Witness Gordon Brown being interviewed on Radio 4 this week. Pretty much regardless of [...]

Given the excellent performance of global markets over the last few months, I am mightily relieved that at various points over the last year I have managed to at least [...]

In 1958, Chairman Mao set China's steel production target for the year at 10.7m tons. It wasn't long before it became perfectly clear that the country did not have a [...]

The British started paying National Insurance (NI) in 1946. Before that, state pensions had been available but were means-tested. The new idea was that everyone would contribute and everyone would [...]

Last week, I spoke at the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) conference in Brighton. This was particularly interesting for me as, when I meet property professionals, I am normally meeting [...]

Afriend has sent me an e-mail saying she has just sold her flat in London - at what, I imagine, will turn out to be the top of this market's [...]

Iwant to talk about China again this week. But first, a note on the euro. I wrote here in August 2009 that the European currency experiment was under rather too [...]

Afriend has just sent me a picture of his latest eBay purchase: a 100 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. It cost him [pounds sterling]2.48. Clearly, these notes have been printed [...]

Idon't imagine that there are many FT readers who need to take out a pay-day loan. That's a good thing. Pay-day loans, like so many financial products, sound just fine [...]

Last year was full of surprises. For most of us, one of the biggest was the rise in UK house prices: according to Halifax, they ended 2009 around 4 per [...]

It is the fastest-growing consumer of luxury goods in the world. It will have an economy bigger than the US by 2027 (or maybe 2030, depending on who you listen [...]

There's a lot of pressure on financial commentators around this time of year. We're expected to tell people what will happen over the next 12 months, in spite of mostly [...]

Merryn Somerset Webb Investing Back in 2000, Bill Bonner, author of financial newsletter The Daily Reckoning, announced his trade of the decade. It was a simple one: sell dollars, buy [...]

For the past year or so, I have shared this page with UK fund management guru Anthony Bolton. No more. Bolton announced here last week that he was due to [...]

Every time a new study comes out showing how large the gender pay gap is, it's shocking and irritating in equal measure. Shocking for all the obvious reasons - particularly [...]

Everything you learnt at business school is wrong,' says GMO's James Montier in his latest collection of essays, Value Investing: Tools and Techniques for Intelligent Investing . I didn't go [...]

Investing Iam having the kind of month in which everyone seems to think I am wrong about everything - and they aren't shy about saying so. Last week, at a [...]

Much fuss this week about the Financial Service Authority's (FSA) review of the mortgage market. The effect of the reforms it proposes, said its critics, will be to lock a [...]

T he biggest argument in fund management is between those who believe that it is possible (and consistently so) for an individual manager to outperform the stock market and those [...]