The London Stock Exchange is delighted to welcome Moneysupermarket.com Group plc to the Main Market.

Moneysupermarket.com Group (MSC) operates two flagship websites, moneysupermarket.com, the UK’s leading finance price comparison website; and travelsupermarket.com, a leading UK travel price comparison website. Together they attracted 64 million visitors and 523 million page impressions last year.

MSC’s internet business was established in 1999 and currently operates across four verticals: money, insurance, travel and home services, covering 25 price comparison channels. The company’s websites were ranked by Hitwise as the number one finance price comparison website in the UK (based on estimated market share in April 2007 in the Banks and Financial Institutions category excluding non-price comparison websites).

In addition to its primary internet business, the group operates Mortgage 2000, an offline intermediary business providing mortgage sourcing and information systems and related services to financial intermediaries, and the leads distribution business paaleads.com.

08.08.2007 - Consumer credit in the USA rose by $13.1bln in June

Consumer credit in the USA rose in June by $13.1bln, the Federal Reserve System reported. The economists estimated $4bln increase in June. May reading of consumer credit was revised from $12.9bln to $16.0bln. Total volume of consumer credit (hire-purchases, bank and credit card loans) was $2.447bln in May and $2.460bln in June. At the annual rate consumer credit rose by 6.5% in June, compared with 7.9% in the preceding month.

Dollar Threatened by Domestic Diversification

Most Dollar bulls cringe when they hear the word “diversification.” Within the context of forex, diversification usually refers to the shift towards non-Dollar denominated assets among Central Banks. The thinking is that with the declining Dollar, it probably makes sense to hold reserves in non-US investments. However, analysts have begun to realize that this only represents a small segment of entities that could harm the Dollar by diversifying. The world’s Central Banks probably hold at most $5 Trillion of reserves, whereas US institutional investment funds probably have over $20 Trillion collectively invested in US assets. Thus, diversification in this segment probably poses a much greater threat to the long term health of the USD.