Financial News Headlines

According to industry reports a number of lenders have slashed the rates on their fixed rate mortgage offerings even though the Bank of England decided to keep the base interest rate on hold again this month at its record low of 0.5 percent. A number of building societies and banks have cut the rates on their fixed rate deals.

High Street banking giant HSBC recently launched its lowest ever five year fixed rate deal, and last week saw Coventry Building Society and Nationwide Building Society reduce their fixed rate deals. One industry expert said that the reason why lenders were slashing their fixed rates even though the base rate had remained static was because they wanted to try and entice people off going for low standard variable rates.

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Hosting guests is one of the many joys of homeownership.  Carving out a comfortable space in your home that visiting friends and family can rest their head can be very rewarding.

Whether guests are staying for a few days or a few weeks, here are some easy ways to make their stay more accommodating:

• Pay Attention To Details – What do you like to have access to when you’re on vacation?  Do your best to make these things available to the guests in your home.  From the bed down to the bottled water, every detail in a guest room matters.
• No Room?  No Problem! – If you don’t have the luxury of an extra guest room, clean out a couple of drawers and make room in the closet so guests have somewhere to unpack their clothes.  Remove any clutter that might make guests feel shoved in a corner.
• Snug as a Bug in a Rug – Make your guests feel cozy!  If you have space, create an area other than the bed for lingering.  Pull a couple chairs and a small table together and create a reading space.  While you’re at it, offer some reading material like magazines or a collection of short stories for your guests to browse through during their stay.
• Little Things Matter – Plush robes, hair dryers, a night light and extra toiletries in case they forgot something can turn a good stay into a great experience.  And don’t forget the snacks!  Keep them readily available so your guests don’t feel like a burden by having to ask for food.

These tiny details really can make a big impact on your guests.  And don’t forget to relax!  Your guests appreciate your hospitality but they are likely more interested in your company.  Sit back and enjoy your time with them – with a little attention to details, your guests will think they’ve checked into a 5-star hotel.

According to the UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority, nearly three million people could be in line for compensation over mis-sold PPI or Payment Protection Insurance. The regulator claims that 2.75 million people could be entitled to compensation totalling £2.7 billion.

Banks and financial institutions have been given until the beginning of December this year to bring in new rules with regards to dealing with complaints over PPI. The FSA has already said that over a five year period it had found a “wide and deep evidence of weaknesses in PPI sales”.

PPI is a type of insurance cover that is designed to cover repayments on loans and other forms of borrowing for a specified period of time in the event that the policyholder is unable to make repayments due to redundancy, sickness, or injury. Howeve

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The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a $26 billion bill that Democrats say will save the jobs of over 300,000 school teachers, municipal workers and first responders such as police officers and firefighters. The measure’s passage hands President Barack Obama a key election-year victory as he seeks to convince skeptical voters that his economic recovery plan is working.

The bill passed the Democratic-controlled House by an almost entirely party-line vote of 247 to 161.

“Today we will create or save 300,000 jobs and not just any jobs, but jobs that are essential to our country,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said during a press conference after the vote.

In a highly unusual move, Pelosi recalled House lawmakers Tuesday for an emergency vote on the bill just as they were settling into the six-week summer recess. Read more…

Since the Great Recession began, venture capitalists and angel groups have been making smaller investments in their portfolio companies.

From 2007 through the first quarter of 2010, the size of the average (mean) investment round fell by 31 percent, and the size of the typical (median) investment round declined by 39 percent in real terms, according to analysis of data from Dow Jones Venture Source.

Below is a chart which shows the trend, created from the Dow Jones data.  The numbers are normalized with the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator to take into account the effect of inflation.  The chart shows that, after small increases from 2005 to 2007, the sizes of the average and typical investment round have declined sharply during the Great Recession.

Moreover, this decrease has come despite an increase in the share of later round investments (which tend to be larger).

The Size of Investment Rounds, 2005-2010:

Source: Created from data from Dow Jones Venture Source.

Why are venture capitalists putting less money into companies now than before the Great Recession began?  Are VCs are taking smaller stakes in the companies in which they invest, or are investors putting in less money for the same share of ownership, driving down valuations?

There’s no way to know from the publicly available Venture Source data because information on ownership stakes isn’t reported.  But I suspect that valuations of high growth companies are coming down.

That’s what a Fall 2009 report from TrueBridge Capital Partners suggests.  The authors explain that median seed and start-up stage valuations declined dramatically during the recession, saying “Median early stage pre-money valuations reached their second lowest point of the past 15 years in the fourth quarter of 2008, the last time period for which we have data available …. Anecdotally, downwar

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