Business & Finance News

The woman who wants to make kids better with money

Erwin Oropesa 3 weeks ago

The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Louise Hill, founder of GoHenry, a banking business that provides debit cards for children.

Standing on the touchline as her son played football, Louise Hill started moaning about how her kids’ spending habits were spiralling out of control.

At the time her son was eight and her daughter was 11. Louise was so frustrated by how much they were buying online that she would pin Apple invoices to the fridge door to help her kids understand why their £4 a week pocket money was now just 50p.

The two other parents she was chatting to back in 2009 had similar stories, so the conversation really struck a chord. And inspired the beginning of a business.

“One of the dads started talking about how his son had bought something on eBay, the

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EU Powers Suffer Shock Defeat as Irish Take Key Finance Job

Erwin Oropesa 3 weeks ago

(Bloomberg) — The euro region’s smallest nations staged an uprising to put one of their own in charge of finance ministers’ meetings and strike a blow against the bloc’s major powers.

Ireland’s Paschal Donohoe won a secret ballot of 19 colleagues Thursday to become president of the Eurogroup, defeating the Spanish favorite, Nadia Calvino, who was backed by the European Union’s four biggest economies.

Germany, France, Italy and particularly Spain were angered by a loss that they failed to see coming, said one official with knowledge of the process. Smaller countries from eastern Europe said they felt that in backing Donohoe they were supporting one of their own, said another.

The fact that both leading candidates came from countries that were bailed out during the sovereign debt crisis is a sign that the EU is ready to turn the page on the divisions of the austerity years. Yet the small

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How EU Finance Chiefs Squandered Their Influence With Bickering

Erwin Oropesa 4 weeks ago

(Bloomberg) — Jeroen Dijsselbloem had been running the euro-area finance meetings for less than three months in 2013 when he stepped, bleary-eyed onto the stage at 4 a.m. to tell Cypriot savers they would have to help shoulder the cost of saving their country’s banking system.

With the single currency close to implosion at several points during the Dutchman’s tenure, traders around the world would soon get used to tuning in as he helped to thrash out a series of critical rescue packages in the meetings of Eurozone finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup.

Today the fallout from the coronavirus is raising familiar concerns about the resilience of public finances in the European Union. But the cohort of ministers who followed Dijsselbloem in the Eurogroup have largely gone missing. The election of a new president to fill his former role on Thursday offers the club a chance to revive its

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