Britain defeated as ECJ upholds ban on short selling January 22, 2014 Britain’s attempt to overturn the EU’s ban on short selling of shares in market emergencies has ended in failure after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) dismissed the case.The UK had argued that the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) was given greater discretion than was justifiable under EU law.The court rejected all four of [...]
BT breaks record for fastest ever broadband January 22, 2014 Alcatel-Lucent and BT have achieved the fastest ever broadband speeds in real world conditions. The speeds of 1.4 terabits (Tbps) per second were recorded in a field test conducted on a 255 mile fibre cable between the BT tower and Ipswich. The trial recorded spectral efficiency of 5.7 bits per second per Hertz. This is [...]
London to see bigger property deals this year after City’s record quarter January 22, 2014 Not long ago there used to be a thing as too large a scheme in London, even for overseas investors and risk-takers in the property sector. But size, as demonstrated by Kuwaiti firm St Martins’s £1.7bn acquisition of More London last month, is no longer a hurdle. And this will become an even more apparent [...]
The book Goldman Sachs doesn’t want you to see January 22, 2014 It’s official, the person behind @GSElevator, one of the greatest spies to come our way since 007, has got themselves a book deal. The anonymous tweeter, who claims to give the world snippets of conversations from the Goldman Sachs elevator, has wrangled a deal with publisher Simon & Schuster. Here are [...]
Bitcoin bears outnumber bugs four to one January 22, 2014 Close to half of international investors are bearish on Bitcoin, according to a Bloomberg Global Poll. 47 per cent of those polled said they would sell the digital currency, with only 11 per cent saying they would buy it. Seven per cent said they would hold the cryptocurrency and 35 per cent said they did [...]
Coal’s lost decade is coming to an end. Here’s why January 22, 2014 The dark days could be coming to an end for coal – or at least to some extent. Thermal coal (the kind used in power generation) has felt a decade of rising investment and a growing labour force hitting returns on production (in four key countries it declined at a rate of three per cent per [...]
Forward guidance is crumbling – what comes next? January 22, 2014 Two years ahead of the Bank of England’s original schedule, forward guidance is circling the drain, with unemployment now within 0.1 percentage points of the threshold for reconsidering a rate hike. With productivity and wage growth still much diminished, and without significant improvements to exports or investment, the Bank is expected to alter forward guidance [...]
Collapsed UAE deal talks will not be revived, says BAE’s King January 22, 2014 BAE Systems chief executive Ian King today confirmed that collapsed talks to sell its Eurofighter Typhoon jets to the UAE would not be revived, but insisted the deal’s failure would not impact its ability to sell to other nations. King told reporters at a London event that the defence giant’s aircraft “met the UAE’s very [...]
EU backs down on binding targets for renewable energy January 22, 2014 The EU has confirmed that it will not set binding national targets for renewable energy provision. The announcement came as the European Commission set out its plans to tackle climate change over the next 16 years. Countries such as the UK and Poland had lobbied strongly against binding renewable targets, arguing the measures would drive [...]
Everything you thought you knew about the global banking crisis was wrong January 22, 2014 You thought the crisis was global. You thought the problem was banks’ losses on boom-era loans. You were wrong, according to these startling four charts from Oliver Wyman. Banks in Latin America and Asia-Pacific are doing just fine, the consultancy’s numbers show. Drivers of changes in banking returns 2006-12, for the largest banks in Latin [...]