Bank finance articles and tips

Ever heard of corporate intelligence, corporate security, and counterespionage? Well, there are people whose main business is to mind your business by scavenging through your garbage, undermining your privacy and stealing corporate information. Just when you think having your own paper shredder and performing in-house shredding is enough - think again. There are pitfalls to this practice, and you are as endangered as when you didn't have a shredder...

As Benjamin Franklin said, 'the only things that are certain in life are death and taxes', a statement which has stood the test of time and Inheritance Tax touches on both of these issues. When you pass away, an assessment is made as to the value of your estate, including cash, property businesses and so on. If this exceeds the current nil rate band (set at £325,000 until 2014) then your family will have to pay 40% tax on all other assets.

This tax bill can be reduced through various methods, but you must consider the impact of these options and do an Inheritance Planning Review as there is rarely one solution which suits most people. For example the easiest way to avoid it is to gift your money away and live longer than 7 years so that the gift is completely outside your taxable estate. However there are obviously issues here regarding whether you would like access to this money again, whether it is wise to give your beneficiaries large amounts of money when they are young and so on.

The foreign exchange market has not been behaving the way it should, and the euro has been the most disobedient currency of the majors.

In July the German ZEW expectations index (a measure of sentiment among German investment professionals) fell to a worse-than-expected 30-month low of -15.1, attributed to the European sovereign-debt crisis. The euro should have fallen, and it rose.

Days later, the flash composite PMI for July plummeted to 50.8 from 53.3, barely remaining above the boom-bust line at 50. The EUR climbed again.

So, with fundamentals not adding up, we'll instead look at technical analysis. However, depending on the time frame you look at, the EUR might be set to rise or go down. And, it isn't easy to determine which time frame to use, as the fx market is facing conditions never seen in the 37 years since the 1974 introduction of floating currency rates (and nothing has come close in the 12 years since the EUR was introduced).