Financial news

• 'Strong economy through 2020': Trump advisers insist recession is not coming

  18-08-2019 19:19
  Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow dispute market indicatorsTariffs are hurting China not US, trade aide insists Donald Trump’s chief trade advisers insisted on Sunday the US is not facing a recession which markets appear to fear and which could cost the president dearly at the polls next year. Related: Less boom, more bust? Economic fears threaten Trump's 2020 messageContinue reading...
  
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• Iran tanker at centre of diplomatic row set to leave Gibraltar

  18-08-2019 16:36
  Iran’s ambassador says vessel is expected to leave after Gibraltar rejects US request to detain it furtherThe supertanker at the centre of a six-week diplomatic row between Britain and Iran is expected to leave Gibraltar on Sunday night, Iran’s ambassador to the UK has said. Hamid Baeidinejad said on Twitter: “With the arrival of two specialised engineering teams to Gibraltar … the vessel is expected to leave tonight.” Continue reading...
  
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• Sajid Javid denies floating idea of stamp duty for sellers

  18-08-2019 15:45
  Chancellor had suggested he could look at various options, saying he was ‘a low-tax guy’Sajid Javid has quashed speculation that he could shift stamp duty on to sellers rather than buyers, just two days after suggesting he could look at the idea.The chancellor had appeared to float the idea in an interview with the Times, as he prepares for his first spending review. Continue reading...
  
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• From the lottery to Nobel prize: meet workers who make life-changing phone calls

  18-08-2019 15:35
  What’s it like to make uplifting calls that change lives? Ammar Kalia spoke to the people whose job is to spread joyFor 12 years now, Anita Pires has been working at the call centre for Camelot, the company that runs the UK’s national lottery. She is one of a staff of 30 who answer calls from potential lottery winners, checking their numbers for prizes that range from £5 to the multi-millions. “In 2009, I had one of my biggest winners, who won £45m,” she says.
  
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• BBC using strong-arm tactics over iPlayer, say independent producers

  18-08-2019 14:11
  Small TV companies claim BBC trying to get them to lease shows for longer for same feeThe BBC has been accused of trying to strong-arm independent TV producers into extending the availability of their shows on the iPlayer from 30 days to one year without paying millions in additional licensing fees.Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, this month gave the green light for the biggest expansion of the BBC iPlayer since its launch in 2007, to enable the corporation to fight back in the streaming war a
  
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• G7 leaders need some clear-the-air talks rather than fake smiles | Larry Elliott

  18-08-2019 13:05
  The Beatles kept up their pretence but world leaders must face up to their differences and find solutions to potentially corrosive threatsIn 1975 the French president, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, had a brainwave. The great powers of the west were reeling from their first postwar recession, which had led to both higher unemployment and rising inflation. America had just suffered the twin blows of Watergate and defeat in the Vietnam war.Giscard thought it would be a good idea at this tr
  
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• Food after oil: how urban farmers are preparing us for a self-sufficient future

  18-08-2019 13:00
  Bristol is at the head of a food phenomenon that is helping residents better connect with their cities and each otherIf you travel by train into Bristol from north of the city, there is a point two miles from the centre when you can catch sight of a tiny farmyard. Nestling at the bottom of a railway embankment between houses, builders yards and a car rental depot, it has sties, snoozing Gloucester Old Spot pigs, a paddock with caramel-coloured Dexter cattle grazing and vegetable plots in which y
  
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• Paint the town: an illustrated celebration of London shopfronts

  18-08-2019 12:30
  From Italian delis to the city’s oldest coffee stall, Eleanor Crow’s new book documents small food businesses fighting for survivalA lot of it was based on appearance,” says Eleanor Crow on choosing the food shops and cafes to draw for her new book, Shopfronts of London. To meet her criteria, an establishment would need to have “great typography and signage, striking colours, nice tiles, lots of good architectural detail. It would catch my eye as I cycled past and make me
  
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• Brexit: leaked papers predict food shortages and port delays

  18-08-2019 12:26
  Medicines will also be subject to shortages, according to ‘realistic assessment’The UK will face a three-month meltdown at its ports, a hard Irish border and shortages of food and medicine if it leaves the EU without a deal, according to government documents on Operation Yellowhammer.The documents predict severe extended delays to medicine supplies and shortages of some fresh foods combined with price rises as a likely scenario if the UK leaves without a withdrawal agreement, which i
  
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• Where did all the cod go? Fishing crisis in the North Sea

  18-08-2019 12:10
  With an international council now on the brink of declaring the species unsustainable – and Brexit looming – what is the future for one of the nation’s favourite meals?By 7.30am all the cod at Peterhead fish market had been sold, snapped up by competing buyers wearing thick fleeces, woolly hats and rubber boots against the chill of the vast indoor warehouse.A gaggle of middle-aged men clutching books of brightly coloured “tallies” followed the auctioneer alongside c
  
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• A bunch of Nimbys won’t let a Denver business owner sell his diner – is that fair?

  18-08-2019 12:00
  Owner accepted $4.8m to knock down diner and build a high-rise, but group applied for historic landmark to block itTom Messina has worked hard over the past 20 years making omelettes and burgers for thousands of loyal customers at his diner – Tom’s Diner – in Denver. Now the guy has an opportunity to sell his business and retire and can you blame him? Unfortunately, a bunch of Nimbys do – and they’re trying to put a stop to his plans.Nimbys – an acronym that s
  
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• Network Rail's Andrew Haines: 'We've stopped the rot a bit'

  18-08-2019 11:44
  A year into the job, chief executive is making cultural changes centred on listening to passengersCall this a crisis? There may be outrage at ever-rising fares on a railway system beset by problems but the last time Andrew Haines, who has just marked his first anniversary as chief executive of Network Rail, took on a fresh job, he made front pages as “the man who closed Britain”.His tenure at the Civil Aviation Authority was marked early on by the ash cloud crisis that shut down UK a
  
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• Plunging peso, grinding poverty: Argentina hears echoes of 2001 crisis

  18-08-2019 10:00
  Fiery ex-president Cristina Kirchner is making a comeback as the number two on a resurgent centre-left ticketFather Guillermo Torre, known as Willy to his parishioners, has been through this before. “I arrived here 20 years ago in 1999, right before the economic collapse of 2001,” he said.“Here” is Villa 31, a giant slum that sprawls beside the luxurious Recoleta and Retiro neighbourhoods of central Buenos Aires, a city within a city of which Torre is the parish priest. &
  
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• Meet the people trying to save enough to retire by 40

  18-08-2019 09:00 via theguardian.com
  Followers of the Fire – Financial Independence, Retire Early – movement say it’s possible to amass enough cash to quit work and follow your dreams in mid-lifeFor many, it is an idea of heaven – shutting down the computer one last time and leaving the office in the full knowledge that you are financially stable enough never to have to return. And all at an age that most people would consider to be barely midway through their working life.But a growing movement is focused o
  
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• Tech giants despise politics? Hardly – they are in the thick of it and being called out | John Naughton

  18-08-2019 08:00
  Silicon Valley’s countercultural aura is gone now that Google develops AI for China and Palantir helps monitor immigrationIf there was one thing that united the founders of today’s tech giants in their early days it was contempt for politics, manifested as suspicion of government and a pathological aversion to regulation (not to mention paying taxes). In part, this was a product of their origins in the counterculture of the 1960s. But the aversion endured as the companies grew. One s
  
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• Persimmon tries to move itself on to firmer foundations

  18-08-2019 08:00
  Results this week should show the housebuilder focusing on the quality of its homes after a period of heavy criticismPersimmon, one of the UK’s biggest housebuilders, has been testing the limits of the phrase “safe as houses” over the past couple of years. Its share price has been up and down as it grappled with two publicity storms.First, there was the outcry over the huge gains it made on the back of taxpayers’ largesse. The state-funded help-to-buy scheme, which helped
  
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• Travellers pay price as rail policy runs out of control

  18-08-2019 07:59 via theguardian.com
  As fares rise again, it would be nice to see some coherent decisions in WhitehallMany commuters will have been on holiday, and off the railways, when large parts of the network were shut down in a power blackout nine days ago. But they were in the dark, or powerless, in other matters too. Last week the government announced a perplexing decision for Britain’s major intercity route, the west coast mainline, on the same day passengers were digesting news of another rise in fare prices.The lat
  
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• UK elderly suffer worst poverty rate in western Europe

  18-08-2019 07:00 via theguardian.com
  Britain’s low basic pension, combined with means-tested supplements, puts thousands of older people at risk
  The proportion of elderly people living in severe poverty in the UK is five times what it was in 1986, the largest increase among western European countries, according to a new study.The rise, from 0.9% of the elderly population to around 5%, is attributable to Britain’s state pension system and its “low basic payments and means-tested supplements”, says the author
  
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• Small energy companies risk going bust in financial shock

  18-08-2019 07:00 via theguardian.com
  Suppliers must pass renewable subsidies to Ofgem in AugustThousands of homes could lose their energy supplier in the coming months as a result of a financial shock looming over the industry’s smaller companies.Suppliers are due to pass on millions of pounds’ worth of renewable energy subsidies, collected via energy bills, to the energy regulator, Ofgem, by the end of the month. Continue reading...
  
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• May I have a word about… commuter woes | Jonathan Bouquet

  18-08-2019 07:00 via theguardian.com
  Bosses can use all the technology they like to monitor our journeys, but what we really want is a bit of human interactionIn the week it was announced that rail fares would be going up yet again, it was reassuring to discover that there is potentially help at hand to ease the lot of the hard-pressed train user, driven inevitably by the power of technology.Mark the words of Trevor Elswood, chief commercial officer at Capita Travel and Events: “By bringing together data sets from around the
  
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• Insights… economists reveal themselves to be as fallible as the rest of us | Torsten Bell

  18-08-2019 07:00
  They portray themselves as impartial and objective but a survey exposed their biases, unconscious or otherwiseMany economists put a lot of weight on the idea that their profession is unbiased and non-ideological. Over time, the discipline has focused on applying complicated maths to data, as part of a “positivist” movement seeking to claim economics as a “real science” where economists show what they have found, not what they think.Such self-perception coexisted with the
  
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• ‘I lost my baby then I lost my job’ – one mother’s fight to change working rights

  18-08-2019 07:00 via theguardian.com
  Amy McKeown explains why her traumatic experience has inspired her to campaign for better employment protection for womenAmy McKeown had been 12 weeks pregnant when she came round on her bathroom floor, blood pooling on the tiles, unable to move. Ten days earlier, in the spring of 2016, she had gone for her first scan with her husband, Matt, and their two-year-old daughter. At the appointment, a nurse told her she had miscarried; the baby had no heartbeat.McKeown opted to let nature run its cour
  
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• Retirement and me: 'On my own with no pension' Why one woman started a business at age 61

  18-08-2019 05:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  RETIREMENT is a time which many people look forward to. In a new weekly series, Express.co.uk takes a look at how pensioners are spending their time and money in later life.
  
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