Morning Digest: What’s shaping the business agenda today
Here’s what’s shaking up markets and the business agenda today.
Still top of the (European) tree: The UK remains the globe’s second biggest financial services centre but Asian markets are closing fast – that’s the verdict of the closely watched index from New Financial. Brexit has punched a dent, but it doesn’t appear to be anything like fatal. Some good news to start your Thursday.
Special Relationship: Boris Johnson and Joe Biden will meet in Cornwall today ahead of the G7 summit to sign off a new “Atlantic Charter” modelled, so we are told by No.10, on the 1941 UK-US agreement. The pact includes a commitment to reopen UK-US travel as soon as possible and to start talks on a tech access deal.
Keep it going: Airlines have called for the furlough scheme to be extended on a sector-by-sector basis, with workers in aviation kept on the paid sidelines until May next year. Government has a decision to make – unless they open Fortress Britain up again, redundancies on a massive scale are just months away.
A worrying trend: Meat processing giant JBS has dished out around £8m in cryptocurrency as a ransom to rid itself of a major cyber-attack. Colonial Pipeline did similarly a few weeks ago. Not something we’d like to see become the norm, I’d suggest.
Lockdown winner: We’ve all spent more time on our sofas than we’d like this year, and that’s good news for DFS. Total orders were up 92 per cent in the firm’s fourth quarter compared to comparable pre-pandemic periods.
Speaking of lockdown winners: CMC Markets has seen a boost from the rise of new retail investors, more than doubling profits to £224m in the year to the end of March.
Halma: FTSE-100 safety kit firm Halma has also posted a record jump in annual profit, up to £278m.
That’s… not going to hurt: The Premier League has fined the six English clubs who tried to join a breakaway European Super League a combined £22m, or roughly the price of an 11 goals a year striker.
Clashes: Guardian chief exec Annette Thomas is off after just 15 months in the top job amid reports of rows with the newspaper’s editor.
TikTok ticks back on: Biden’s administration also last night said the President would also reverse Donald Trump’s efforts to ban TikTok and WeChat, instead signing an executive order around those firms’ use of data.