Should we be worried about AI market concentration? October 16, 2025 An interesting statistic caught my eye this week on reading the IMF’s report into global financial stability. The report cited a decades-old measure known as the Herfindahl-Hirschman index. While hardly catchy, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index is a simple tool for assessing the dominance of certain players within the market. The higher the number, the greater the [...]
Ousted CEO and mounting debts: the lawyers behind £36bn BHP lawsuit October 16, 2025 The law firm behind the most significant litigation to ever hit the English High Court has been lighting up headlines recently due to allegations around internal issues at the group. Back in 2018, in Liverpool, barrister Tom Goodhead and US lawyer Harris Pogust founded a law firm using an alternative business structure that focused on large-scale group [...]
Reeves faces ‘Groundhog Day’ as Budget tax hikes loom October 16, 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves risks having to hike taxes ever higher in forthcoming budgets if she leaves herself with £9.9bn in headroom, a joint report by Barclays and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned. The research has suggested that spending cuts would send a “crucial” signal to the bond markets that the government had [...]
Centrica CEO: Regulate energy bosses like top bankers October 16, 2025 The boss of the UK’s largest energy supplier has called for the sector’s chief executives to be regulated like bankers, despite the government’s high-profile drive to slash red tape in a bid to boost the economy. During an evidence session with the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, Centrica’s Chris O’Shea told MPs he was [...]
Banker bonus rules are getting watered down. Will anyone shed a tear? October 16, 2025 When the European Banking Authority published its guidelines on executive pay in 2015, the report pronounced on 126 separate rules spread across 173 pages. Any banker able to get through the whole rulebook without falling asleep surely deserved every penny of the eyewatering bonus they received – provided it met the guidelines. The EBA’s voluminous [...]
We have to get serious about major spending cuts October 16, 2025 Speculation over the contents of next month’s Budget has reached fever pitch, and it’s only going to ramp up from here. This is not idle curiosity; with businesses still adapting to the confidence-sapping and job-smothering fallout from last year’s Budget, there is now a genuine fear that what remains of our economic resilience could be [...]
Autumn Budget: Reeves must focus on growth, not ‘gimmicks’ October 16, 2025 Ahead of the Autumn Budget, City Reporter Samuel Norman sits down with top industry names for a Budget Briefing. This week, the chief executive of founders club Helm calls for bold innovation policies took take centre stage. Chancellor Rachel Reeves should use her second Autumn Budget to make bolder swings for the UK’s innovation economy [...]
Sports Minister ‘deeply concerned’ at British basketball governance crisis October 15, 2025 Sports Minister Stephanie Peacock says she is “deeply concerned” by the governance crisis in British basketball that has seen the men’s national team frozen out of the world game. The sanction was announced on Monday by international governing body Fiba, which has suspended the British Basketball Federation’s membership after electing to intervene in its long-running [...]
Wall Street banks toast to $130bn revenue in deal making boom October 15, 2025 Wall Street banks raked in bumper profits, comfortably breezing past analyst expectations in the third quarter, driven by the continued strength of trading desks and a sharp revival in deal making. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup brushed past estimates on Tuesday, with Jamie Dimon’s banking juggernaut collecting $14.4bn (£10.8bn) in profit – a 12 [...]
Leading economist slams ‘myth’ that landlords are under-taxed October 15, 2025 Tax hikes for landlords will be damaging to the economy and are based on a lack of understanding about investors, according to a leading economist. Paul Johnson, the former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said that the UK “need[s] to think very carefully about how to tax housing and how to tax rental [...]