🏠 Are Property Prices Falling?

This is The Hedge, the newsletter that's like a personal chef who serves up nuggets of money and investing knowledge, instead of omelettes.

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• Prices accurate as of approximately Wednesday 4:30PM BST.

🏠 London Rents May Be Easing

No, that's not a typo. Apparently the rents in London are actually starting to chill the F out. This is a classic supply and demand issue, and it appears that the rental properties available on the market are finally coming back to manageable levels.

The number of available properties are up 60% since the start of the year and, more interestingly, are up 24% since before the start of the pandemic.

The exodus out of the cities that was predicting on the outset of the 2021 work from home revolution doesn't appear to have completely come to fruition, but this may be partly a result of fewer people needing to live in Greater London than before.

It's likely that this trend will be replicated across the country, but it will happen on different timescales.

Not only that, but some analysts are predicting that the London property market will actually fall 12% over the next two years.

🏛 Will You Pay More Tax Under Rishi or Liz?

🇮🇲 Isle of Man Freezes Electricity Prices

This is an interesting one. Obviously energy prices are a big story right now. Seems like it's the only fuckin' story if I'm honest.

The Isle of Man is expected to approve a freezing of electricity prices until April 2023. The mechanism of this price freeze is pretty interesting. The plan is to provide a loan to the utility provider (singular, there's only one) to cover the difference between the cap and the amount charged to residents.

This loan will then be repaid from household bills over the next 20 years. It's kind of like Rishi Sunak's original Klarna-style plan, but on a much bigger scale.

It will be interesting to see whether the pollies in Westminster are taking notes, and Scottish Power is already lobbying the government to do something similar for the rest of the UK.

🥽 Invesco Bets on the Metaverse

Funds management giant Invesco is setting up a fund to specifically target companies going hard on the Metaverse. The most obvious of these is the blue juggernaut in the room, Facebook, who are so high on the bandwagon they even change their bloody name.

Even with one of the biggest budgets on Earth, this is what they've come up with so far.

I dunno about you guys, I'll probably leave this one off my buy list.

🔺 The Hedge Community

Want to chat with likeminded people about money and investing? Want somewhere you can ask your financial questions? I got you. The Hedge Discord server has some great discussion on all things to do with money and investing.

It's not just me rambling on either, we've got some awesome contributors in there who are sharing their resources and thoughts. Click below to join.

🌏 Snippets

• Citibank reckons inflation is going to hit 18.6% in early 2023.

• Amongst all the doom and gloom, at least energy and banking shareholders are having a win. They've paid out record dividends last quarter, well ahead of pre-pandemic levels.

• For the first time ever, Britain has imported no energy from Russia, down from almost £500m of the stuff.

• If you want to have a pint and a dry steak with the expected new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, it'll run you £3k at the Tories Autumn fundraiser. Might get a PPE deal out of it though.

• The US government is considering cancelling student debt. They won't be wiping out the full $1.7 trillion (yes, with a T), but they'll be paying off $10k of the loans for people earning under $125,000.

See you next week 🚀

Jason