Merryn Somerset Webb

Everyone loves a showman. That’s why when Zohran Mamdani dived fully clothed into the very cold water off Coney Island last New Year’s Eve shouting “I’m freezing ...your rent,” he got himself an awful lot of attention. His plan to block rent increases on around one million New York apartments is now one of his best known— and most popular— policies. It’s also probably one of his worst.

You are paying too much tax. Pretty much everyone is. That’s the view of Arthur Laffer, the man who, back in 1974, drew the curve showing his take on the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue now known as the Laffer Curve.

The Republican Party’s anti-tax bard joins this week’s Merryn Talks Money to explain.

The Republican Party’s anti-tax bard joins this week’s Merryn Talks Money to explain.

Is there an AI bubble on the go? Yes. Obviously. Artificial intelligence-related stocks have accounted for some 75% of S&P 500 returns and 90% of capital spending since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch in 2022. Based largely on outsized valuations for America’s big tech companies, the index’s forward P/E ratio is much like where it was at the top of the dotcom days. You can argue about the scale of it and how this new technology should be measured, but however you cut it, it looks like a Capex bubb

“To touch gold is the closest you will ever come to touching eternity.”

“To touch gold is the closest you will ever come to touching eternity.”

Thirty five years and five months. That’s how long it took Japan’s Topix index to hit a new high and finally mark the end of the longest bear market in history.

What do you invest in when you think things might get really bad? For one answer maybe look to the fate of the Romanovs. Getting rid of them should have been easy for the Bolsheviks: the Russian royals were weaponless and trapped in a basement while their killers had guns. But it wasn’t so simple after all.

When we did our Edinburgh Fringe show in August we asked our audience how many of them have taken recent action to cut their tax bill. Around 20% put their hands up. Given that confessing to avoidance at a publicly recorded event could be seen to be in bad taste, it seems fair to imagine that the real number is more like 60%.