Podcasts

With all the shenanigans in Westminster last week you could be forgiven for failing to register we had a Spring Statement at all – let alone clocked its finer points. Editor Simon Lambert, assistant editor Lee Boyce and host Georgie Frost fill you in on what you may have missed. It includes forecasts from the Office for Budgetary Responsibility on the UK economy, along with income growth, interest rates, the pound and house prices. We also have the true scale of the tax burden on families and businesses, with the overall tax take equivalent to 34.6% of Britain's economy, a level not seen since Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. Income tax receipts will rise nearly £54billion in the next five years, with steep rises forecast for National Insurance, VAT and Corporation Tax. A hike in probate 'fees' was waved through without a vote or debate in parliament by classifying it as a fee not a tax – but the ONS is now calling it a tax. The OBR also reveals that two flagship savings schemes have not been anywhere near as popular as planned, while boilers are out – as are feed-in tariffs from solar panels.

Want to keep up with the latest earnings updates from the States? Well join Chris Hill and the Motley Fool Radio Show team here on Share Radio, direct from Washington DC, for news, views and analysis of the US stocks that matter. In this week's show: Boeing’s 737 Max gets grounded; Facebook makes some changes at the top; And Ulta Beauty reports stylish earnings. Motley Fool analysts Ron Gross and Jason Moser, and 1623 Capital Portfolio Manager Jeff Fischer, discuss those stories and dig into the latest from Adobe Systems, MongoDB, Oracle, Stitch Fix, and Uber. Plus, Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney talks Theranos and his new HBO documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.

Heimo Hammer is a former professional footballer who’s once hung out with Bono from U2, launched one of the first live streams on the (then) fledgling internet, and designed and built his own solar-powered electric car long before Elon Musk had thought about the Tesla! He’s always had an interest in marketing and advertising, spending time working for Bates and McCann Erickson and later joining Siemens as Head of Advertising. He signs off every correspondence with ‘feel good’. He runs his own digital agency in Vienna, Kraftwerk, and is involved with the ‘Fast Forward Forum’. This is an annual event where leading fi¬nanciers, marketers, consultants, entrepreneurs and mentors discuss and predict future trends and needs.

It’s hard to listen to the news at the moment without hearing some kind of warning about economy. Nearly all of those warnings focus on one thing – Brexit. It’s true that lots of people think Brexit is risky – but in the clamour to define what Brexit means, could we be blindsided by something else? Obviously it’s difficult to predict exactly how and when another shock to the economy might happen. But is there more we could be doing to get the economy ready for whatever might be around the corner? Guest host Hanna Wheatley is joined by NEF’s Head of Economics Alfie Stirling and Senior Economist Sarah Arnold.

Premiership rugby champions Saracens deny they breached salary cap regulations after recent allegations, while Manchester City are in the UEFA spotlight over Financial Fair Play. On the latest This is Moneyball podcast, assistant editor Lee Boyce and co-host Georgie Frost take a look at salary caps and whether they work in sport – with many top US sporting leagues having them. Christopher Stoner QC is our guest this week, as he helps navigate through the maze – and also helps take a look at what the FFP is, and whether it is working. Sir David Crausby, MP for Bolton North East joins us to tell us what is going on at the Trotters, with the future of the historic club in limbo – have the new potential owners been vetted enough? Elsewhere, we talk about the weekend of bad football 'fan' behaviour at grounds in England and Scotland, with Jack Grealish being punched in the Aston Villa vs Birmingham game – can more be done to protect players? The United States women's soccer team files a gender discrimination lawsuit and a bunch of 'cyber nerds' attempt to take over a Staffordshire football club – and fail.

27 years after the founding of the Premier League, it would be difficult for anyone to argue that it is anything other than a great success story. It’s the poster boy for a global, open, free-trading Britain. The beautiful game and the English league is an incredibly successful export business. But players’ enormous salaries, and transfer fees of hundreds of millions of pounds are variously described as obscene, ludicrous and even unsustainable. Each year the eyewatering amount of money spent in the business is not merely sustained, it zooms upwards year after year. In 1981 fewer than ten first division English footballers earned more than £175,000 a year. Now, the average player commands 15 times that. But there are many that long for the post-war era of English football - the so-called halcyon days of the game - when footballers were skint and players might have only received £10 as a signing-on fee from a transfer worth £35,000 to the club. Are they justified in missing the romanticism of the game? Or is this a bygone era best forgotten about in the age of hyperglobalisation? Joining the IEA's Digital Manager Darren Grimes to discuss is Mark Littlewood, Director General of the IEA.

Ian Forrest of The Share Centre looks at recent news from Cineworld (boosted by the acquisition of Regal in the United States, Standard Life Aberdeen and Wm Morrison, still facing tough competition in the supermarket sector. He looks ahead to numbers from Kingfisher and Ocado, which might reveal the effect of the Andover fire and have more light to shed on the M&S deal.

James Cameron-Wilson looks at the box office phenomenon that is Captain Marvel, taking nearly £13m in its first weekend and disproving, as with Wonder Woman, the traditional Hollywood studio view that films with female leads do not succeed with the general public. With no other new film making the top ten (Everybody Knows with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz made only #13), James's DVD of the week was Sink The Bismarck, the 1960 film starring Kenneth More.

Steve Caplin salivates over a jet-powered flying motorbike as well as a 5-seat flying car with massive range and speed - if it works. Shark denticles could help us improve aerodynamics. Citymapper is offering discounted London travel passes. Ikea is to sell pollutant-resistant curtains. There's an exploding Kalashnikov drone, mice that can see in the dark and a camping torch which would make a Swiss Army Knife envious. And Steve explains why using his Swiss Army Knife meant he couldn't use is Swiss Army Knife for some time afterwards!

Listen here Philip Hammond's Spring Statement speech.