Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The 5% rate on sanitary products will end. Rishi Sunak also plans to ensure banks keep circulating cash
The chancellor will announce the abolition of the “tampon tax” in next week’s budget, marking the successful conclusion to a 20-year campaign by women’s rights activists.
Tampons and other women’s sanitary products currently have 5% VAT added to their price, but this will be scrapped, saving the average woman £40 over her lifetime. The tax will end when Britain leaves the EU at the end of December.
Leaked report for world’s major fossil fuel financier says Earth is on unsustainable trajectory
The world’s largest financier of fossil fuels has warned clients that the climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and that the planet is on an unsustainable trajectory, according to a leaked document.
The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.
Bank warns of ‘meaningful’ job losses in UK and of impact of coronavirus outbreak in Asia
HSBC has said it will slash 35,000 jobs over three years as part of a major shake-up as it issued a warning over the impact of the coronavirus outbreak in Asia.
The interim chief executive, Noel Quinn, confirmed on Tuesday that plans to cut $4.5bn (£3.5bn) worth of costs would involve slashing about 15% of the group’s global workforce. “We would expect our headcount to decrease from the current level of 235,000 to be closer to 200,000 in 2022,” Quinn said.
Africa’s richest woman suspect in criminal investigation into misappropriation of funds
Portugal has ordered a freeze on the bank accounts of the billionaire businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, who is currently the subject of a criminal investigation in Angola.
The public prosecutor’s office in Lisbon confirmed reports that dozens of personal and corporate accounts belonging to Dos Santos and her husband, Sindika Dokolo, were the subject of a seizure order.
Sussexes appear in one of their first engagements since stepping down as senior royals
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex attended an exclusive JP Morgan event in one of their first engagements since stepping down as senior royals, a palace source has said.
It is unclear whether the couple, who have pledged to become more financially independent, were paid for their roles as speakers at a summit the banking giant hosted in Miami on Thursday.
Tidjane Thiam is the scion of an influential family whose political connections and history spread across two West African countries: Ivory Coast and Senegal.
The 57-year-old came to prominence in the UK when he was named as the head of Prudential in 2009, making him the first black chief executive of a major British company.
The Credit Suisse chief executive, Tidjane Thiam, has been ousted in the wake of a saga involving corporate espionage, an alleged car chase and personal vendettas that has sent shockwaves through Switzerland’s famously discreet banking community.
Thiam, widely seen as one of the finance world’s leading lights, resigned after losing a boardroom battle that erupted when the bank admitted to having hired private detectives to spy on former staff.
Labor claims that although six of the recommendations have been implemented, the government has fallen behind their set timeframe
Labor has attacked treasurer Josh Frydenberg for falling behind on the government’s promised timetable for turning the recommendations of the banking royal commission into law.
On Friday, to coincide with the first anniversary of royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s final report, Frydenberg said the government was “on track to meet the accelerated timetable” to implement royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s 76 recommendations.
More than a dozen people outside Vancouver courtroom with ‘Free Meng’ signs were promised C$100 for two hours’ work on a movie
Protesters calling for the release of a senior Chinese telecommunications executive arrested in Canada have admitted they were paid actors, in the latest twist in a closely watched extradition case that has chilled relations between Ottawa and Beijing.
US bank becomes the first to establish a no-go zone in the oil and gas sector
Goldman Sachs has ruled out future financing of oil drilling or exploration in the Arctic and said it would not invest in new thermal coal mines anywhere in the world.
The new environmental policy, which was released by the US bank on Sunday, was praised by environmentalists, though many warned that it was only a first step.
Australian federal police say livestreaming of children performing sexual acts marks ‘alarming shift’
Australian paedophiles are paying as little as A$15 for children to perform sexual acts online while being filmed in the Philippines, according to the head of the Australian federal police team in Manila.
Senior officer Andrew Perkins told Guardian Australia there was an “alarming shift” from previously more common types of “sex tourism” to “convenient and low-risk” online abuse of children which can be customised to the specific requirements of customers.
Westpac chief executive’s resignation draws little sympathy on all sides of politics. All the day’s events, live
And here is another indication of where question time is headed:
Last week, a bank broke money laundering laws 23 million times.
But instead of going after them, the Liberals are going after unions – trying to take away their right to exist.
This Government hates working people. We'll fight them every step of the way. pic.twitter.com/9vMhFquk4W
A group of north Queensland dairy farmers are on their way to Canberra to express their frustrations at what is happening within their industry.
That’s at the same time the Nationals are trying to get ahead of Pauline Hanson, who may have come late to the issues, but certainly has been running full steam ahead since becoming aware of it.
David Littleproud, the drought minister, some time ago said he fixed the supermarket [milk price] problem. He said he thumped his chest, waved his fists at them, and demanded they put their milk prices up.
Well, we know that solution lasted about five minutes.
The Westpac scandal has brought the role of financial institutions in enabling child sexual abuse into sharp relief
On 25 October plainclothes police barged through the red door of a family home in a dense neighbourhood in Rizal, a province two hours away from Manila.
There they arrested a mother who was allegedly sexually exploiting her own 12-year-old daughter. The 45-year-old woman was clutching her phone. Police took it and then handcuffed her.
Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all. By Rana Foroohar
‘In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.
You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.
Mahathir Mohamad says amount is insufficient but a better offer might lead Malaysia to drop its demand for US$7.5bn
Malaysia has rejected an offer from Goldman Sachs of less than US$2bn in compensation over the 1MDB scandal, in contrast to the country’s publicly stated demand of US$7.5bn.
Malaysia has charged Goldman and 17 current and former directors of its units for allegedly misleading investors over bond sales totalling US$6.5bn that the US bank helped raise for the sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
“Goldman Sachs has offered something like less than $2bn,” the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, told the Financial Times on Friday. “We are not satisfied with that amount so we are still talking to them … If they respond reasonably we might not insist on getting that $7.5bn.”
The world is sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that will have devastating consequences for the democratic market system, according to the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
Lord King, who was in charge at Threadneedle Street during the near-death of the global banking system and deep economic slump a decade ago, said the resistance to new thinking meant a repeat of the chaos of the 2008-09 period was looming.
Public banks could allow government agencies access to low-interest loans for infrastructure or affordable housing
San Francisco and Los Angeles are moving forward with plans to create their own public banks following the passage of historic legislation that made California the second state in the continental US to legalize the financial institutions.
Experts say their success and that of other California counties and cities with similar plans will depend on the governance structures they put in place and the financing they are able to secure.
Several large companies have announced their departure, including Visa and Mastercard, a week after PayPal exited
Nearly every payment firm that initially agreed to join Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra has backed out, in a potentially fatal blow to the social network’s plan for a worldwide digital currency.
Visa and Mastercard said on Friday they would no longer participate in the Libra Association and Latin American payment system Mercado Pago announced it would back out as well. Several other large companies have announced their departures .
Bank forced to shed jobs due to low interest ratess, Brexit and global tariff wars
HSBC plans to lay off up to 10,000 staff, more than 4% of its global workforce, as it embarks on a fresh cost-cutting drive, according to reports.
The cuts will affect mostly high-paid roles and come as the UK-based bank grapples with falling interest rates, Brexit and global tariff wars, the Financial Times reported. HSBC declined to comment.
Shadow treasurer calls for new banking inquiry after major banks failed to pass on full interest rate cut
Labor says the Morrison government should consider increasing the bank levy in response to the failure by the big players to cut interest rates in line with the central bank, and look at broader measures to boost competition in the sector.
The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, told Sky News on Sunday the government needed to sign off on a new inquiry into competition in the banking sector by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and consider all options, including hiking the bank levy, after the major banks declined to pass through the full rate reduction following the Reserve Bank’s latest cut to the official cash rate.