Investment Insights

In this edition of Smart Money, Ritu Vohora and Ana Cuddeford discuss the likely trajectory of UK interest rates, and what this could mean for savers and investors.

If you’ve been carefully squirreling away money for your future, it’s understandable to expect a fair reward for your prudence. Complicating things, however, is a cocktail of factors that makes generating the income you desire, or need, in retirement all the more difficult.

At the heart of today’s challenge is rising longevity. UK life expectancy continues to rise, with men and women aged 65 expected to live for a further 18½ and 21 years, respectively. Longer retirements mean our savings have to stretch further.

Emerging market corporate bonds have become a very large asset class. As of January 2017, the value of bonds issued by emerging market companies in hard currency – typically US dollars – as opposed to local currency, totalled US$1.85 trillion.