As many world leaders stay away, will any progress be made at ‘family reunion for the people who broke the world’? Political and economic problems loom heavily over the global elite as they gather at Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF). But is there any political will to fix them?

As Brexit takes its toll on the property market, there is some good news for borrowers First-time buyers and homeowners remortgaging their properties have been given some good news at the start of the year as a number of lenders have cut their rates in an increasingly competitive market. Last week HSBC dropped rates on 31 different mortgages while the market-leading product for a 10-year fixed-rate loan also went down.

When a ‘chip and signature’ payment card is refused, the impact on a shopper’s dignity is hugeMy mother was gleeful. We had identified a pair of designer trainers coveted by her grandson and she had resolved to buy them for his Christmas present. She braved the Saturday scrum in Footasylum, queued on painful legs for the till and wrestled the shoebox into her shopping bag. It was then she was told that her custom was not allowed. Like many people with disabilities, my mother uses a “chip and signature” debit card because she is unable to manage a pin. The cards, issued by Visa and Mastercard, operate in the same way as chip and pin, except that when they are inserted into a card reader, a message informs the trader that a signature is required.

No sooner has one law changed in gambling companies’ favour than another turns against them. Now all bets are off againWhat starts in the US, the cliche goes, inevitably ends up in the UK (burger restaurants, assaulting fellow shoppers on Black Friday and syphilis are favourite examples). But the Americans are not always so keen to embrace our exports. There are, of course, examples of Brits and our brands smashing it in the US: the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, the Beatles and (so the company’s advertising slogan told us) the industrial conglomerate Hanson, which liked to brag how it was “a company from over here that’s doing rather well over there”. But those occasional triumphs are offset with a long list of wonderful-sounding sales pitches that never quite seemed to deliver much – apart from swingeing losses.

The slowdown at Apple should surprise no one given that most adults on the planet already have a smartphone It must be tough being Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be too sympathetic: in 2018

Consumer borrowing is falling, which is no bad thing. But it’s uncertainty, not regulation, that’s acting as the brakeA sharp decline in household spending on the never-never, and especially spending on credit cards, is a trend that must surely be welcomed. The Bank of England