Financial news

• Marks & Spencer to reveal dozens of store closures

  20-05-2018 17:53 via theguardian.com
  Staff braced for announcement as retailer’s restructuring plan gathers paceHundreds of Marks & Spencer staff will find out as soon as Monday whether their store is closing, as the retailer accelerates its retrenchment from struggling UK high streets.The M&S chief executive, Steve Rowe, is shutting 100 of its large clothing and food shops amid falling sales and profits. It has already closed 20, affecting about 900 jobs, but staff are braced for the axe to fall on another tranche of
  
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• TSB customers still unable to access accounts four weeks after 'glitch'

  20-05-2018 16:01 via theguardian.com
  Analysts say the chaos cause by an IT upgrade will cost the bank tens of millions in fines and compensationTSB customers are still unable to make payments or access key accounts almost a month after the botched IT upgrade. As one group of analysts said the chaos could cost TSB as much as £56m this year alone, many of the problems that have bedeviled the bank are yet to be resolved as the crisis enters its fifth week. Continue reading...
  
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• Italy’s policies make sense, it’s eurozone rules that are absurd | Larry Elliott

  20-05-2018 12:05 via theguardian.com
  Tax and spending plans will cost around €60bn a year, or 3.5% of Italy’s GDPWilliam Hague once described the euro as a burning building with no exits, and the experience of Italy over the past 20 years has proved that the then Conservative party leader was absolutely right.Joining the single currency was made easy at the end of the 1990s. As one of the original signatories of the treaty of Rome, Italy desperately wanted to be in monetary union’s first wave. Continue reading...
  
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• Nation of shoplifters: the rise of supermarket self-checkout scams

  20-05-2018 11:03 via theguardian.com
  You’re not a thief, are you? Perish the thought. But when it comes to self-checkout tills anyone can make a ‘mistake’A couple of Tuesdays ago, after a difficult day at work, a thing that happens to me more often than I’d usually care to admit happened once again. At a supermarket self-checkout machine a frozen pizza I tried to swipe wouldn’t register, leaving me irked and full of spite. As a kind of reproach, I prepared to bag the item in any case, but a pang of wea
  
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• BP boss's pay may be excessive – but protests won't threaten him

  20-05-2018 08:44 via theguardian.com
  Energy executives prepare to face annual protest over pay, but system is stacked in their favourJust like Napoleon, Leon Trotsky and (presumably by early July) England football manager Gareth Southgate, BP boss Bob Dudley knows all about swift retreats from Russia.In 2008 the veteran oil exec fled the country, and his then post as head of BP’s Russian joint venture TNK-BP, following an “orchestrated campaign of harassment”. Continue reading...
  
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• Oil price keeps rising – will it come back to earth with a bump?

  20-05-2018 08:30 via theguardian.com
  Changes in supply and demand mean that current highs will be corrected next yearThe big story in the financial markets in 2018 has been the sharp rise in oil prices, which last week hit $80 a barrel for the first time in four years.But if oil analysts are right and the cost of crude is set to carry on rising, hitting $100 a barrel over the coming months, the big story of 2019 is going to be how oil came down to earth with a bump. Continue reading...
  
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• It’s said Brexit is ‘not going to plan’. Did we ever have a plan? | William Keegan

  20-05-2018 08:00 via theguardian.com
  The chaotic negotiations both within the Tory party and without means we need to consider an alternative: not leavingYour correspondent is not as well up on social media as his wife and children, but I could not help noticing a slogan posted beneath a London traffic light the other day. It claimed to be from the Instagram project Notes to Strangers – new to me, I must confess – and confidently proclaimed: “Having a Plan B will make your Plan A unsuccessful”.This was on ye
  
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• If risk is such a good thing, why is it all heaped on to the young and struggling? | Sonia Sodha

  20-05-2018 07:00 via theguardian.com
  To forge a creative life, a measure of security and stability can be a tremendous boonThe Tories have got a youth problem and they’re going to fix it with peri-peri chicken. Not how they’d put it, but you hardly need to be a marketing whiz to work out that their latest big idea to tempt in new members – a Nando’s discount card – isn’t aimed at octogenarians in the home counties.It comes hot on the tracks of the government’s new millennial railcard,
  
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• China and US reach 'consensus' on reducing trade gap

  20-05-2018 03:33 via theguardian.com
  China commits to ‘significantly increase purchases’ of US products but no mention of $200bn cut to its trade surplusThe United States and China have reached consensus on measures to “substantially” reduce the US trade deficit with Beijing, but there was no mention of the $200bn target previously touted by the White House.The joint US-China statement on Saturday followed talks in Washington led by US treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and China’s state council vice-
  
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