UK house prices: Mild respite for home buyers as market cools January 8, 2015 House price growth continued to slow in December, but still remained at elevated levels. The climb in house prices was 7.8 per cent year-on-year in December, figures released yesterday by Halifax revealed. It marks a cooling from the peak of the recent boom that, according to Halifax’s figures, saw prices rise 10.2 per cent year-on-year [...]
Credit card borrowing recovers due to more attractive deals January 8, 2015 A record proportion of credit card borrowing incurred no interest in November. Of total credit card borrowing, 43 per cent is interest-free, figures released yesterday by the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) revealed. The number of card purchases in November was six per cent higher than the same month in 2013. There were 216m purchases made with credit [...]
Europe growth hopes boosted by retail sales January 8, 2015 RETAILERS in the Eurozone saw a 0.6 per cent month-on-month jump in sales in November. The figures, released yesterday by official statistical office Eurostat, also report a year-on-year increase of 1.6 per cent. “This offers hope that consumer spending may have made a reasonable contribution to Eurozone GDP in the fourth quarter [October to December],” said [...]
Eurozone confidence remains weak January 8, 2015 THE EUROZONE’s economic sentiment indicator remained unchanged at 100.7 for the third consecutive month, according to figures released yesterday by the European Commission (EC). “December’s EC business and consumer survey did little to alter the picture of weak Eurozone GDP growth at the end of 2014,” said Jessica Hinds of Capital Economics.
Jobs market ends year strongly January 8, 2015 THE NUMBER of people in work increased at a faster rate in December, new figures show. Recruitment consultants reported further rises in permanent staff appointments during December, according to a report from consultants KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Federation (REC). The index for the number of new permanent staff appointments rose to 59 in [...]
Future of Greek banking system dealt funding uncertainty blow January 8, 2015 FURTHER uncertainty has been added to the future of the Greek banking system after a statement by the European Central Bank (ECB). Currently, the ECB accepts collateral from Greek banks despite their low credit ratings. “The continuation of the waiver is based on the technical extension of the European Financial Stability Facility programme until the [...]
Imagination’s FTSE dream on road to reality January 8, 2015 Imagination Technologies chief executive Sir Hossein Yassaie said yesterday that he believed the British graphics chip designer was on the right track to becoming a FTSE 100 business. Yassaie’s confidence came after Imagination signalled in December that the business would begin slowly transitioning from an investment phase into a deployment phase, which Yassaie hoped would [...]
CES 2015: Still the biggest tech show on earth – Bottom Line January 8, 2015 As the global tech industry packs its bags and leaves the neon lights of Las Vegas behind for another year, is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the world’s largest tech convention, still relevant? On one hand, CES boasts that this year it had more than 3,500 tech exhibitors and over 160,000 attendees. The organisers have [...]
Tesco boss Dave Lewis: Drastic he may be but let’s not forget dapper January 8, 2015 Drastic Dave Lewis had his day in the spotlight yesterday, reeling off a list of admittedly quite drastic measures in a bid to save Tesco. But the one question The Capitalist wanted to ask was, how does Tesco boss Drastic Dave Lewis feel about constantly being called drastic? Maybe one day he’d like to be [...]
Battle of the Runways: Gatwick and Heathrow’s war of words January 8, 2015 The gloves have come off in London’s battle for an extra runway. When Heathrow’s chief executive John Holland-Kaye threw an insult at Gatwick in a newspaper interview, naturally Gatwick’s chief Stewart Wingate was ready to throw one back, likening Holland-Kaye to the man behind of the UK’s most famous business gaffes. “In an interview from [...]
