Bitcoin hits record high ahead of Coinbase IPO tomorrow April 13, 2021 Bitcoin hit a record high of $62,839 this morning, marking yet another record this year for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. Bitcoin topped $60,000 early last month, fueled by Tesla’s move to buy $1.5bn of the digital currency for its balance sheet. For the past two weeks, it had traded in a tight range. Major firms [...]
S&P 500 and Dow climb for third day and close at records April 9, 2021 The S&P 500 and the Dow rose to close at record highs, posting a third straight weekly rise partly on lift from growth stocks, with a late-day rally building gains ahead of quarterly earnings season next week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 299.21 points, or 0.89 per cent, to 33,802.78, the S&P 500 gained [...]
Digital pound would boost post-Brexit City, says think tank April 9, 2021 A digital pound should be at the heart of efforts to strengthen the City’s global attraction as a post-Brexit financial centre, think tank CityUnited Project said on Friday. The finance ministry will set out proposals for making Britain’s capital market more attractive after Amsterdam toppled London to become Europe’s top share trading centre following Brexit. [...]
Markets: Indexes in London and New York push further into record territory April 8, 2021 FTSE roars to highest levels since February 2020 as Wall St inches up
FTSE 100 jumps on post-lockdown hopes but Wall Street flat April 6, 2021 London’s FTSE 100 climbed by 1.4 per cent today as prospects of a planned re-emergence from lockdown next week boosted shares. The capital’s premier index currently stands at 6,840, its highest levels since 11 January. Across the Atlantic, however, the mood was more subdued, with Wall Street’s main markets flat at the open this afternoon. [...]
More young people are turning to ISAs to invest, but also to have impact April 6, 2021 | Sponsored The impact of the global pandemic, big political changes, and social justice movements on day-to-day life in the past 12 months has been substantial. One of the key areas affected has been people’s personal finances, from loss of income on one hand, to increased savings from less leisure spending on the other. So how have [...]
Will ESG turn Bitcoin into a digital ‘stranded asset’ or monetary MySpace? (Part I) April 6, 2021 | City Talk In this first instalment of a two-part piece, Ben Ashby, Derek Usher and Gerard Fox explain why environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors will undermine Bitcoin’s eye-catching rise, here focusing on the ‘E’. We have many economic reasons for believing that ‘first-generation’ crypto assets will fail to displace either ‘conventional’ money or traditional safe assets [...]
Bernoulli’s Prisoner’s Dilemma: applying the scenario to modern markets March 30, 2021 | City Talk In 1738, the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli proposed a simple thought experiment: “A rich prisoner who possesses two thousand ducats but needs two thousand ducats more to repurchase his freedom, will place a higher value on a gain of two thousand ducats than does another man with less money than he.” Let’s place [...]
Bond investors and sustainability: is it all greenwash? March 29, 2021 | City Talk With issuance of green, social and sustainability bonds expected to hit a record $650 billion this year, Schroders’ Head of Sustainable Credit Saida Eggerstedt tackles the topic of greenwashing. “We are in a boom era for borrowing linked to sustainability criteria,” according to Saida Eggerstedt, Schroders’ Head of Sustainable Credit. In 2020, the global issuance [...]
FTSE 100 and Wall Street rise on recovery optimism March 26, 2021 FTSE 100 climbed further this afternoon as Wall Street opened higher on renewed economic recovery optimism. London’s blue-chip index is trading 0.9 per cent higher this afternoon as higher retail sales triggered a new wave of confidence in the economic recovery. Mining stocks including Rio Tinto, Anglo American and BHP pushed higher after a slow [...]