Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
These figures are so dramatic that they invite suspicion. Have managements really come to the firm view that working from home is so popular that employees’ demands for flexibility must be granted? Or did these banks have too much office space in the first place and now wish to save a few quid?
Labour leader has faced backlash after saying he would oppose any new tax on business in budget
Keir Starmer is under pressure to back future rises in corporation tax after a backlash when the Labour leader said he would oppose any new tax on business in next week’s budget.
Treasury officials are believed to be looking at increasing the tax on company profits from the current rate of 19% to up to 25% as the government tries to recoup some of the massive debts incurred during the pandemic, though the rise may be delayed until later in the parliament.
Coverage of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala criticised by group who say such attitudes ‘discourage women from taking on leadership positions’
Senior African leaders at the UN have criticised the “sexist and racist” language used in coverage of the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the new president of the World Trade Organization.
Okonjo-Iweala, a graduate of Harvard University, was confirmed as the new head of the WTO last week, making her the first woman and the first African to lead the organisation.
More executive roles are expected to relocate to home base of Hong Kong as part of Asia shift, where most of its earnings come from
HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, has recorded a 34% drop in profit for 2020 as it prepares to double down on its operations in Hong Kong and China despite concern about the political crackdown in the former UK colony.
The bank said on Tuesday that pre-tax profit was down from $13.3bn (£9.4bn) in 2019 to $8.8bn in the 12 months to 31 December, while the adjusted profit before tax of $12.1bn (£8.6bn) fell 76% on the year before.
US reveals preliminary results of inquiry into Pratt & Whitney engine fire that led to grounding of dozens of Boeing 777s around the world
Metal fatigue in the fan blades may have been behind the engine failure of a Boeing jet in Denver at the weekend, the US National Transportation Safety Board has said.
The Pratt & Whitney engine caught fire shortly after take off on a United Airlines Boeing 777-200, during a flight from Denver to Honolulu, with 231 passengers and 10 crew onboard. Pilots issued a mayday call and returned to Denver.
Trade bodies say many firms and workers face uncertain future, with 10 days to go until budget
Business leaders have told Boris Johnson that his roadmap for exiting the third Covid lockdown in England remains incomplete without fresh financial support for companies and workers hardest hit by the pandemic.
The prime minister promised the government would “not pull the rug out” from under struggling firms and workers while restrictions remain in place during the phased relaxation of lockdown, but to the disappointment of company bosses and trade unions he deferred details of future economic support to the budget in 10 days’ time.
Longtail Aviation cargo plane scatters small metal parts over Meerssen, injuring woman
Dutch authorities are investigating after a Boeing 747-400 cargo plane dropped engine parts shortly after takeoff from Maastricht airport.
The Longtail Aviation Flight 5504 cargo plane scattered mostly small metal parts over the southern Dutch town of Meerssen on Saturday, causing damage and injuring a woman.
FAA: United flight suffered engine failure before landing
Witness sees explosion and smoke from low-flying airliner
A United Airlines plane has rained debris on Denver suburbs, narrowly missing a home, after it suffered a catastrophic engine failure shortly after take-off on Saturday. The Boeing 777-200 returned to the airport safely for an emergency landing, with no reports of anyone hurt.
United said in a statement there were no reported injuries on Flight 328 from Denver International Airport to Honolulu, which had 231 passengers and 10 crew on board.
The bank, which is due to reveal its annual results this week, faces more challenges than the impact of Covid-19 on profits
HSBC’s chief executive Noel Quinn has had an unenviable first year on the job. In 2020 alone, Quinn rolled out a major restructuring plan that will involve at least 35,000 job cuts, battled the financial impact of Covid in both Asia and Europe, and steered the bank through a geopolitical storm over its response to democracy clashes in Hong Kong.
Now he is set to preside over the bank’s second straight year of declining annual profits.
As smoking falls out of fashion, BAT is pinning its hopes on younger users of e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches
Flashing an ice-white smile for her 50,000 followers on TikTok, a fresh-faced young woman pops a flavoured nicotine pouch into her mouth, as one of Pakistan’s most popular love songs plays in the background.
More than 3,000 miles away, in Sweden, another social media starlet lip-syncs for the camera, to a different pop tune. The same little pouches, made by British American Tobacco, appear in shot.
In Holyhead, traffic has fallen 50% as hauliers stymied by Brexit find their way from Ireland to France without entering the UK
Perched on the shores of Anglesey, the island linked by road bridges to the north-west coast of Wales, Holyhead’s geography has given it a leading role in British-Irish trade since the early 19th century.
About 50 miles directly across the Irish Sea from Dublin, a journey of just three-and-a-quarter hours by ferry, Holyhead was until December the second busiest roll-on roll-off port in the UK after Dover. About 450,000 trucks rumbled through each year on their way to Dublin, with cargoes of meat and agricultural produce, secondhand cars and items destined for the shelves of Irish supermarkets.
Artificial constraint highlights struggle to keep up with demand from cryptocurrency miners
The newest graphics cards from the gaming processor designer Nvidia will be artificially constrained in their ability to mine cryptocurrencies, the company has announced, as it desperately tries to manage a year-long inability to satisfy demand.
The RTX 3060, a high-powered PC peripheral designed to let gamers get the best performance from their machines, will ship with software that makes it half as effective at mining the cryptocurrency Ethereum as it could be.
Six justices handed down a unanimous decision backing the October 2016 employment tribunal ruling that could affect millions of workers in the gig economy.
Business leaders buoyed by meeting with Michael Gove and EU counterpart on protocol glitches
Business leaders in Northern Ireland are optimistic that Brexit barriers preventing parcels, pets, potatoes and plants getting to the region from Britain will be eased after a meeting between Michael Gove and his EU counterpart, Maroš Šefčovič, on Thursday.
They said the UK and the EU had a legitimate reason to remove or ease the barriers because they were having an impact on daily lives, in breach of a pledge in the Northern Ireland protocol that states the “application of this protocol should impact as little as possible on the everyday life of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland”.
The environment, climate change and the protection of nature must be the defining tasks of rich and major developing countries now and in the years to come, the outgoing head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has said, and the institutions that advise governments must take responsibility for keeping them focused on those tasks.
Ángel Gurría said the coronavirus crisis must be dealt with as a matter of urgency, but that the biggest task after that would be tackling the world’s environmental emergencies.
World’s biggest investor wants polluting industries to set targets to cut emissions and reach net zero
BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has said that oil companies and other polluting industries should disclose their carbon emissions and set targets to cut them, in the latest sign of the rapid reassessment of climate risks by asset managers.
All companies in which BlackRock invests will be expected to disclose direct emissions from operations and from energy they buy, known respectively as scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, the investment firm said in a letter outlining its plans.
Back to bitcoin... and a senior US central banker has insisted that the cryptocurrency doesn’t present a serious threat to the US dollar’s position.
St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard told CNBC that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency was safe:
“I just think for Fed policy, it’s going to be a dollar economy as far as the eye can see — a dollar global economy really as far as the eye can see — and whether the gold price goes up or down, or the bitcoin price goes up or down, doesn’t really affect that.
“You don’t want to go to a non-uniform currency where you’re walking into Starbucks and maybe you’ll pay with Ethereum, maybe you’ll pay with Ripple, maybe you’ll pay with bitcoin, maybe you’ll pay with a dollar. That isn’t how we do this. We have a uniform currency that came in at the Civil War time.”
Bitcoin poses no threat to the dollar as the world's currency leader, Fed's Bullard says https://t.co/vc0gwcXYd4
It’s also been an exciting day for Italian government bonds.
Rome sold debt at near record-low interest rates today, as investors flocked to the first bond auction since former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi became prime minister.
Rome is set to raise a total of €14bn ($17bn) from the sale of a 10-year nominal bond and a 30-year inflation-linked note, one of the banks managing the issue said, adding demand had totalled more than €82bn.
The final size of the order book is well below the record €134bn in demand the two bonds had initially attracted, with many investors dropping out after Italy cut the return on the issues.
Draghi sells! #Italy attracted >€110bn of investor bids for a new 10y bond it’s offering in a publicly-syndicated sale which is the first since Mario Draghi took over as PM. (via BBG) pic.twitter.com/j7s1YfM5oT
FTSE 100 posts biggest daily gain for over a month as investors buoyed up by vaccine and US economy hopes
The pound has hit its highest level against the dollar for almost three years as global markets were buoyed up by hopes for a faster economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Sterling rose by 0.5% to hit a 33-month high against the dollar on Monday, trading above $1.39 on the global currency markets for the first time since 2018, while also rising to a nine-month high against the euro of almost €1.15.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, set to be named director general, joins as global trading system facing make-or-break moment
Even for an economist, there are lots of very large numbers in the life of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. As the chair of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, she has overseen the annual immunisation of millions of children. When managing director of the World Bank, she oversaw $81bn (£58bn) worth of operations. In her stints in charge of Nigeria’s finances, she tackled Africa’s most populous country’s $30bn debt. And she has 1.5 million followers on Twitter.
There are lots of smaller numbers too: the 20 non-profit organisations that have appointed Okonjo-Iweala to their advisory boards, the major banks and corporations she has advised, the 10 honorary degrees in addition to her own doctorate, 20 or so awards, dozens of major reports authored, and the books.
After putting $100m into Covid research, the billionaire is taking on the climate crisis. And first he has some bones to pick with his fellow campaigners...
Bill Gates appears via video conference – Microsoft Teams, not Zoom, obviously – from his office in Seattle, a large space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Lake Washington. It’s a gloomy day outside and Gates is, somewhat eccentrically, positioned a long way from the camera, behind a large, kidney-shaped desk; his communications manager sits off to one side. If one had to stage, for the purposes of symbolism, a tableau of a man for whom a distance of 3,000 miles between callers still constitutes too intimate a setting, it might be this. “As a way to start,” says Gates’ aide, “would it be helpful for Bill to make a couple of comments about why he wrote his new book?” It is helpful, and I’m not ungrateful, but this is not how interviews typically commence.
There is an urge towards deference, when speaking to Gates, which attends few other people of commensurate fame. Celebrity is one thing, but wealth – true, former-richest-man-in-the-world wealth – is something else entirely; one has a sense of being granted an audience with the Great Man, a fact made more surreal by his famously muted persona. The 65-year-old has the lofty, mildly longsuffering air of a man accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room, leavened by wry amusement and interrupted, on the evidence of past interviews, by the occasional peevish outburst – most memorably in 2014, when Jeremy Paxman questioned him about Microsoft’s alleged tax avoidance. (“I think that’s about as incorrect a characterisation of anything I’ve ever heard,” he said, practically squirming in his seat with annoyance.)