Diamond share price rise or paste?

What has the Queen done with our shares in 60 years?

The FT30 share index, the oldest one in the world, stood at 115.8 in 1952 and it closed at 2009.4 on Friday.

That's a big rise. It has multiplied by 17 times, or risen by 1,600%.

However, as far as I can see, prices as measured by the Retail Prices Index or RPI are 23 times higher than in February, 1952.

That's a 2,300% increase. Not so good.

One thought, though, the FT30 index rise doesn't include the dividends you would have earned in that time.

Add in dividend income over 60 years and you'd be well in the money.

1 million tax penalties

One million taxpayers face a penalty of £100 for failing to submit their self-assessment tax returns on time.

But the figure is the lowest since they were allowed to file online, comparing to 1.4m last year and 1.6m the year before.

The tax office, HMRC, allowed an extra two days' grace beyond the 31st January deadline because of a strike, but the 1 million had still failed to file by midnight last night.

They will have to pay the £100 fine whether or not they have additional tax to pay unless they have a reasonable excuse, such as a serious illness, a bereavement or a loss of documents because of theft, fire or flood.

After three months additional fines of £10 a day will start to accrue.

Self-assessment tax forms have to be filled in by people with more complicated tax affairs - for instance the self-employed or those with a high income from savings. The latest forms were for the tax year which ended in April, 2011.

A record  9.45m forms arrived by last night and 7.65m were submitted online - another record.

Sale and rent back business closed down

The sale and rent back business, where desperate homeowners agree to sell up but are allowed to carry on living in their properties, has effectively been shut down by the financial regulator, the FSA.

But thousands of families will be on their own if they run into problems because of the deals.

The FSA said most of the firms "were more focused on their own commercial success rather than the welfare of the customers, with one firm even resorting to fraud".

Commissions averaged £4,000, and total fees paid by customers ranged up to £40,000.

Most companies offering the service have now pulled out and one is the subject of an FSA enforcement procedure.

Investigators found that sale and rent back providers didn't assess whether customers could afford their terms, didn't give them enough time to decide and drew up agreements using incorrect information.

They were running promotions which broke FSA rules and their training and record-keeping were inadequate.

Only 61 regulated sale and rent back deals have been arranged since the FSA began to regulate the sector in 2009. 5 firms will now conduct a review of these sales to see if customers have lost out.

But the Office of Fair Trading suggested that 50,000 transactions had taken place previously, arranged by 1,000 firms together with an unknown number of professional landlords.

These customers don't have the benefit of financial protection from the FSA and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme if things go wrong.

Even if the 50,000 figure turns out to be an overestimate, as some believe, many thousands could still be at risk.

Why are bankruptcies falling?

Official figures today confirmed the continuing fall in the number of bankruptcies as families cut back on their borrowing and those who do hit the buffers opt for cheaper ways of getting protection from creditors.

Total personal insolvencies fell by 11 per cent in 2011 to just under 120,000 in England and Wales, according to the Insolvency Service.

Within than total, the number of bankruptcies dropped sharply, by 29 per cent, to 41,845.

It's not unexpected for financial failures to drop back after a recession, following an initial surge, as households avoid new borrowing and banks and credit card companies restrict their lending.

There's also a tendency to put off applying for help until after Christmas and New Year celebrations, so some debt experts predict a rise in insolvencies in the first few months of 2012.

However, most dramatic has been the recent jump in Debt Relief Orders, a cheaper alternative to bankruptcy which doesn't involve going to court.

While bankruptcies declined last year, Debt Relief Orders rose 15% to 29,949.

DROs are designed for debtors with hardly any assets and debts of less than £15,000.

At the same time, many people in difficulty, along with small traders, have been opting been opting for Individual Voluntary Arrangements, under which payments to creditors can be reduced - rather than choosing bankruptcy.

Despite the overall fall last year, total insolvencies continue to run at more than twice the levels seen before the credit crunch and the lending boom which preceded it.

Alarming rise in theft from customers

There's been 41% rise in employees stealing money from customers or the businesses they work for.

Fraud experts say the jump is partly the result of continuing austerity, with some staff desperate to make ends meet or fearing redundancy -- although in other cases the perpetrators enjoyed the thrill of committing a fraud or wanted to take revenge on bosses.

The figures come from CIFAS, which analyses fraud for an alliance of leading firms, including banks, credit card companies, retailers and insurers.

It has been monitoring a sample of 80 members and reports that last year cases of "dishonest actions by staff to gain a benefit from theft or deception" rose to 220 from 156 the year before.

The numbers in the sample appear small, but they only cover those cases where there is evidence of an identifiable criminal act. CIFAS says the rise is "alarming".

Richard Hurley, a CIFAS manager, warns that "many of these fraudsters steal from elderly and more vulnerable account holders"

He says that nearly a third of the cases involved the theft of cash from customers.

Here are some typical cases:

* an employee stealing cash from a customer. An example would be where a customer deposits £150 cash into an account but the member of staff steals £20 and
deposits the rest.

* a customer service worker at a credit card company diverts funds from your account while speaking to you over the phone and looking at all your account details

* a phone company account handler handles your payments and diverts cash for his own benefit.

* a staff member steals from a company by removing cash from the float in the till.

Risk-averse jerks - the banks

One of the Bank of England's independent policy experts has suggested banks could be "risk-averse jerks"  for holding back on lending to smaller businesses.

And he added that there were even more significant "fundamental" problems in their attitude to lending to businesses with productive ideas.

Adam Posen is a US economist who sits on the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee, which votes every month on whether to change the level of interest rates.

He said on BBC Radio 5Live that UK banks were not doing enough to support the real economy.

"How much of that is because they are reluctant, risk averse jerks and how much because there is something more fundamental at work - I think it's as much fundamental if not more so," he explained.

He said that cutbacks in lending to small, medium and new businesses had been "tremendous".

And Mr Posen commented that banks were "choosing to lend to roll over debts to large borrowers...but they're not issuing new loans to new borrowers."

Child Benefit cuts slammed

The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies has branded the government's planned cut in Child Benefit as "neither efficient nor fair".

Child Benefit is due to be removed from families with a higher rate taxpayer from January next year.

The IFS is warning that the cliff-edge effect of withdrawing the benefit if one parent goes above £42,475 in earnings will hit hundreds of thousands of families.

200,000 could find themselves with a lower overall income after a pay rise.

Another 170,00 could actually increase their income by taking a pay cut.

The IFS recommends a gradual withdrawal of the benefit for higher rate taxpayers.

It says one route would be to integrate it with means-tested Child Tax Credit.

Ministers have already indicated that they are looking at making the planned Child Benefit changes fairer.