First, the ABI suggests checking if you are covered already. Some student halls might already include insurance, or your parents’ policy might extend to you.

If not, there is the option of buying contents insurance.

“This type of policy covers the cost of replacing or repairing your possessions if they are damaged, destroyed or stolen – giving you peace of mind that you’re protected should something go wrong,” the ABI said.

You must check how much you’re covered for and whether it’s enough to replace everything, including the maximum value of a claim on a single item.

You can do this by creating an inventory of all of your contents, including clothes, electronics and furniture, and adding up the cost of replacing each item.

You might need to pay extra to cover a nice bike, or to cover items that you take out and about with you rather than leave in your accommodation.

And, if you’re driving, make sure your insurer knows the car is kept somewhere new.

If it is your parents’ car and you are now the main driver, you have to inform the insurer. It’s illegal if you don’t.

It said that rent rises were being seen across the UK, but the situation still differed depending where renters were looking.

“In less expensive areas, renters have more capacity to absorb rent rises before hitting an affordability ceiling, whereas in the most expensive areas, rents are already stretching what renters can pay, capping how much further rents can increase,” the report said.

It predicted a further acceleration in rent rises to 4% or 5% by the end of the year, although that still roughly matched the average annual rise in workers’ earnings.

New investment in homes to rent by landlords was “still muted as a result of higher costs and more regulation”, Zoopla said.

Nathan Emerson, chief executive at Propertymark, which represents lettings agents, said the report underlined the need for more high-quality rental homes.

“A sustainable private rented sector requires the right conditions for responsible landlords to invest for the long term,” he said.

“Increasing supply must remain a priority if we are to give tenants greater choice, improve affordability and create a more stable rental market.”

The Tourism Authority of Thailand predicts 250,000 Chinese tourists during Golden Week, generating 11.5 billion baht in revenue, reflecting significant year-on-year growth and promoting diverse travel experiences within Thailand.

Key Points

• The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) anticipates around 250,000 Chinese tourists will visit during the Golden Week from September 25 to October 7, generating approximately 11.5 billion baht in revenue, representing year-on-year increases of 24% in arrivals and 37% in revenue.
• TAT Governor Thapanee Kiatphaibool noted positive trends, with October bookings from China up 16% and flight searches rising by 24%. Major demand is from cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, with direct flights available to popular Thai destinations.
• The extended holiday is expected to facilitate longer stays and higher spending, allowing for broader exploration of Thailand. TAT’s “Amazing Thailand, Mid-Autumn (Nihao Month) 2026” campaign will promote cultural experiences and collaborations with tourism partners.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) expects about 250,000 Chinese tourists to visit Thailand during the extended Golden Week travel period from September 25 to October 7, with tourism revenue projected at around 11.5 billion baht. The projections represent year-on-year increases of 24% in arrivals and 37% in revenue during the 13-day period spanning the Mid-Autumn Festival and China’s National Day holiday.

TAT Governor Thapanee Kiatphaibool reported positive travel indicators, with October bookings to Thailand up 16% and flight searches from China rising 24%. Demand is coming from major cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Chongqing, while direct flights connect Chinese travelers with Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, and Udon Thani.

The extended holiday is expected to support longer stays, higher spending, and travel to a wider range of Thai destinations. With projected revenue growing faster than arrivals, TAT sees an opportunity to attract higher-value travelers while encouraging visitors to explore beyond established tourism centers.

TAT will promote its Amazing Thailand, Mid-Autumn (Nihao Month) 2026 campaign during the period, featuring familiarization trips for key opinion leaders, Thai cultural experiences, visitor privileges, and joint promotions with tourism partners.

Source : Tourism Authority of Thailand Forecasts Strong Chinese Tourism During Golden Week

President Donald Trump has dismissed warnings about the risks of artificial intelligence and rejected calls from senior industry figures to slow the pace of development, saying the United States was ahead of China and intended to stay there.

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump told reporters on the sidelines of the Irish Open today. “And we can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.”

His comments followed a blog post published yesterday by Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic PBC, calling on the industry to slow down and arguing that the effort required industry and global coordination. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp, endorsed the message shortly afterwards.

Amodei said Anthropic would introduce new safety steps including the use of third-party evaluators, an idea Altman also said he would follow.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said today that Amodei’s proposal could serve as a model for the private sector, including by giving independent observers access to the models.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Hassett called AI safety a “solvable problem”. He said AI was advancing rapidly enough to potentially overcome existing cybersecurity defences, but that companies were also developing new safeguards.

He added that Trump administration officials Sean Cairncross and Michael Kratsios were also studying the issue.

Congress weighs its response

Some Democrats have seized on the risks around AI ahead of the November midterm elections and the 2028 presidential contest. Former president Barack Obama told a private fundraiser last week that Democrats should make AI oversight a central campaign issue, according to the New York Times.

Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who helped introduce a bill to protect AI whistleblowers, said a lack of expertise in Congress risked hampering regulation while the Trump administration maintained a hands-off approach.

“We need agreement from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to put aside our partisan pre-election bickering and put in place some real guardrails before AI goes off the rails,” Coons said on Bloomberg This Weekend.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said on ABC’s This Week that House Democrats would meet as a caucus on Tuesday morning to discuss possible action on AI.

Mike Johnson, the House speaker, called for a partnership between the technology industry and government. His message to the companies, the Louisiana Republican said on CNN’s State of the Union, was that they “have a corporate responsibility to make sure your products are safe”.

“We have got to summon everybody together,” Johnson said. “I have talked to the president about this as well. They probably should be summoned together at the White House.”

Industry split on the role of government

Amodei said there was a role for government regulation. “Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do,” he said in an interview aired today on CBS’s Sunday Morning.

David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and now co-chair of his technology advisory council, said AI companies did not need government permission to slow down or be more responsible. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack,” he wrote in a post on X. “The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways.”

Amodei told CBS a longer-term agreement with China would make sense to put a “speed limit on the rate of AI progress”, though he accepted it might be unrealistic. Verification would need to be “ironclad”, he said, because of the military advantages of pulling ahead. “Honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible. But we should try.”

Safety concerns have risen alongside a growing US backlash, fuelled in part by objections to the strain new data centres place on local power supplies. Concerns that AI is driving up electricity bills and taking away jobs have made it a central issue in the midterms.

“They’re bringing up things that won’t happen, but whoever wins, with AI, wins,” Trump said.

About the author

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Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.

Almost half of the UK university spinouts founded between 2013 and 2024 came out of Oxford, Cambridge and London, and those three cities attracted two-thirds of the venture capital that went into the sector, according to a report published in February by Tony Hickson, whose career was based in university technology transfer, investment and startups.

Data compiled by Indeed for Bloomberg also show the so-called Golden Triangle accounted for more than half of the sector’s hiring.

More than 2,000 university spinouts have formed in the UK since 2010, with a combined value of about £49bn, most of them in deep tech, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering. Oxford Nanopore went public at a £3.4bn valuation, and Oxford Ionics and OrganOx were each acquired for more than $1bn last year.

Research outside the three cities

One company formed outside them is METzero, which spun out of Newcastle University in 2024 and has raised about £750,000 in grants. Its technology uses microbes and electrodes to break down sewage, using less energy than the century-old method of pumping oxygen through tanks and giving off ammonia that can be recovered and sold as fertiliser. Thames Water, the UK’s largest water company, is trialling it.

Pavlina Theodosiou, METzero’s chief executive, said support from Northern Accelerator, a government-funded programme founded in 2016 to help researchers commercialise their work, was vital. It paid for someone to develop the business plan, and a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship bought her out of her university contract for a year.

Across the universities in Northern Accelerator’s umbrella, the number of spinouts rose from two in 2018 to 10 in 2025, against the 70-odd coming out of the Golden Triangle each year.

“The north east does not lack innovation or founders’ ambitions,” Theodosiou said. “It just lacks that same density of specialist capital.”

Listings moving abroad

Just 36 per cent of spinouts founded between 2013 and 2024 that went public did so in the UK, down from 79 per cent of those founded before 2013.

PsiQuantum, a quantum-computing spinout from the University of Bristol, moved to the US and was valued at $7bn in a fundraising round last year. Exscientia, an AI drug-discovery company from the University of Dundee, listed on the Nasdaq in 2021 before merging with the US biotech Recursion Pharmaceuticals three years later.

The main reason is the lack of scale-up capital. There is almost four times more private funding for startups in the US than the UK, and the gap widens to nine times for investments above £100m, according to the government’s Council for Science and Technology.

There is also a “persistent technical literacy gap” among British financiers, said Hickson, whose review was published by UK Research and Innovation. It is “most acute among later-stage investors, many of whom lack the scientific expertise needed to assess complex scale-up ventures.”

The government was reportedly considering an exit tax for university spinouts moving abroad, but quickly ruled out the idea, according to the Financial Times. Critics argued it would penalise successful businesses without fixing the underlying factors that push them abroad. The government said it wants the country “to be one of the best places in the world to start and scale a business,” but declined to comment on policy speculation.

Duncan Ivison, vice chancellor of the University of Manchester, said it is not always a bad thing when spinouts move abroad. “If we spin out a billion-pound company from Manchester and they set up in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco, I’m like hallelujah,” he said.

The number of UK spinouts has fallen from its pandemic peak, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. The average university stake fell to 16 per cent in 2024 from 28 per cent in 2017 following a government review, the Royal Academy of Engineering said.

Specialist university finance firms have also proliferated, among them Oxford Science Enterprises, which has raised over £800m, and Northern Gritstone, a cluster of universities in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Leeds.

After a pilot in Northumbria, Theodosiou is hoping to raise £1.5m by the end of the year to move METzero into its own premises. To get the funding, she is planning three trips to London this month. “That’s where the money is,” she said.

About the author

Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.

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Americans’ 401(k) balances reached a record high in the second quarter of 2026, new data shows.

The average 401(k) balance climbed to a record $155,800 in the second quarter of 2026, up 10.5% from the previous quarter and 13.1% from a year earlier, according to Fidelity Investments’ Q2 2026 Building Financial Futures report.

“After a slight drop in the first quarter of 2026, the average 401(k) and 403(b) account balances rebounded to record levels in Q2 2026,” the report noted.

Jade Warshaw, co-host of “The Ramsey Show,” told FOX Business that the gains reflect years of strong market performance, increased participation from younger workers and a growing desire among Americans to build financial security amid ongoing economic uncertainty.

AMERICANS’ 401(K) BALANCES HIT RECORD LEVELS IN 2025

The average 401(k) balance climbed to $155,800 in the second quarter of 2026, up 10.5% from the previous quarter and 13.1% from a year earlier. (iStock)

“I think it’s a combination,” she said. “… I’ve seen a trend with Gen Z, who is really investing more.”

Heightened economic uncertainty has played a role, prompting some Americans to focus on the aspects of their finances that they can control, according to Warshaw.

“Depending on the generation that we’re talking about and whose account we’re talking about, different things are driving it,” Warshaw said. “I think right now, there’s just a want and a need for security.”

She added, “You can look at the worldview, and it can just feel a little bit anxiety-ridden, and a lot of us find peace in controlling a controllable.”

MOST 401(K) SAVERS MAY BE SHORT-CHANGING THEMSELVES, DATA SHOWS

Warshaw also credited years of strong market returns with encouraging more workers to continue investing. (iStock)

Warshaw also credited years of strong market gains with encouraging more workers to continue investing.

“I think a lot of people are wanting to capitalize on that,” she said.

However, Warshaw cautioned against prioritizing retirement investing before building a financial foundation. 

She encouraged Americans to follow Ramsey Solutions’ “7 Baby Steps,” beginning with a $1,000 emergency fund, paying off consumer debt and building three to six months of living expenses before investing 15% of gross income for retirement.

For workers whose retirement accounts have reached record balances, Warshaw said the biggest mistake is trying to outsmart the market.

BEWARE THE TICKING TIME BOMB HIDING IN YOUR 401(K)

Jade Warshaw, co-host of “The Ramsey Show,” cautioned against prioritizing retirement investing before building a financial foundation.  (FOX Business)

“What I suggest for people to do is invest in the most boring way possible,” she said.

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Rather than reacting to market swings, Warshaw recommends consistently investing through payroll deductions using dollar-cost averaging. 

“You set it and forget it and let it run,” she said, comparing the approach to “the tortoise and the hare” and arguing that steady investing gives savers the best chance to build long-term wealth.