Music sales hit by piracy January 7, 2010 Album sales in the UK fell for the fifth year in a row in 2009, highlighting the threat posed to record labels by online pirates and video games, industry figures showed. Sales fell 3.5 per cent to 128.9m in 2009, according to figures from the BPI music industry group.
Ireland confident of bad bank plan January 7, 2010 Ireland is confident of European Union (EU) approval for its “bad bank” scheme by February, resulting in a slight delay to its launch, officials said yesterday.
Brown lays out new plan for growth January 7, 2010 THE Labour government’s efforts to engineer an economic recovery are compatible with tackling the record budget deficit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said yesterday. With the country emerging from its worst recession in decades, policymakers are trying to support the recovery while also reassuring sceptical financial markets that plans to halve the deficit over four [...]
Forget Microsoft, it’s all about Google vs Apple January 7, 2010 IN recent decades, the technology sector has been defined by a clash of titans. In the 1980s Microsoft took on Apple and ended up wiping the floor with it, a feat it repeated with IBM in the 1990s. But Bill Gates couldn’t make it a hat trick; when the firm tried to thwart Google in [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS January 7, 2010 SAGE UBS has switched its rating to “buy” from “netural”, pointing out it is trading at a 23 per cent discount to its FTSE peer group. It believes the current share price ignores the sustainability of Sage’s 2009 cost savings programme. Anticipates a “solid” trading update later this month, and says “patient” buyers will be [...]
£50m payday for Paulson Europe team January 7, 2010 PAULSON Europe, the UK arm of the hedge fund that made £400m betting against British banks during the financial crisis, boosted its revenues by 42 per cent last year. Four directors shared more than £50m for the 12 months to March as profits soared, according to the latest accounts. The highest-paid director, thought to be [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS January 7, 2010 Rathbone Brothers The fund management group has appointed Mike Webb as chief executive of its unit trust business, Rathbone Unit Trust Management. Webb has over 25 years of experience in the retail funds world and joins from Hermes Fund Managers, where he was head of business development. He has also previously held roles as chief [...]
Strong energy stocks fail to offset poor day for Vodafone January 7, 2010 BRITAIN’S top share index inched lower by the close yesterday, as weakness in heavyweight Vodafone offset modest gains from energy stocks. Investors shrugged off a decision from the Bank of England which left interest rates on hold at 0.5 per cent and kept the scale of its asset purchase programme unchanged at £200bn. The FTSE [...]
Wall St inches up ahead of jobs data January 7, 2010 THE DOW and the S&P 500 rose yesterday after Bank of America and General Electric rallied on positive broker comments, but investors were cautious a day before the release of key monthly non-farm payrolls data. US stocks have rallied over the past month as investors have become more optimistic about the economy. Job growth would [...]
Love triumphs on the road to hell January 7, 2010 Film THE ROAD Cert: 18 IT’S hard to imagine a less happy future than the one conjured up by this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In last month’s disaster flick 2012, we had the ultimate Hollywood apocalypse, in all its vapid, digitally-created stupidity. Now we have the serious, literary version of the end [...]
