23m Brits on £2.4bn spending spree today as the nation tunes in for the Women’s Euro final July 31, 2022 Nearly 23m Brits are expected to spend money today as they will be celebrating England Women’s first appearance in a major football final since 2009. The EURO final today is expected to generate an average spend per person of over £46.08 before, during and after the match with the top purchases being food delivery (62%), [...]
Eurozone inflation surges to fresh record high dialling up pressure on ECB July 29, 2022 Prices are rising are the fastest pace on record in the eurozone, figures published today revealed. Inflation surged to 8.9 per cent, up from 8.6 per cent in June, the highest rate since the creation of the euro in 1999. The fresh figures dial up pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) to hoist interest [...]
NatWest ups dividends as profits surge on the back of interest rate hikes July 29, 2022 NatWest today upped its dividend after its pre-tax profits increased 13 per cent to more than £2.6bn for the first half of 2022. Higher lending incomes on the back of the Bank of England’s interest rate hike lifted NatWest’s finances and saw the bank raise its full-year revenue forecast to around £12.5bn, up from previous [...]
Hefty £1.5bn trading error legal charge erodes Barclays profits July 28, 2022 A £1.5bn legal charge for a trading error has eroded British bank Barclays’s profits, it announced today. Hefty litigation and regulatory costs to deal with selling too many financial products dealt a major blow to Barclays’s first half earnings. Pre-tax profits dropped by a quarter to £3.7bn in the six months to June, down from [...]
Cost of living crisis prompts almost a third of UK workers to take second job July 28, 2022 Nearly third of workers in the UK are seeking to work two jobs to support themselves as the cost of living crisis sends prices of essentials soaring. 32 per cent of workers are aiming to take on a second job in addition to their current job to make more money, a national survey of 2000 [...]
US plunges into technical recession as rest of world braces for similar fate July 28, 2022 The US economy has plunged into a technical recession in a sign of things to come for the rest of the world, figures published today revealed. The American economy unexpectedly shrank 0.9 per cent in the three months to June, marking the second successive quarter the economy has contracted, meeting the common definition of a [...]
Surge in loan-loss reserves poison Santander profits July 28, 2022 Funds set aside to deal with an expected jump in loan defaults caused by borrowers’ being squeezed by a historic inflation surge has whacked Spanish bank Santander’s profits. The lender, which has a big presence in the UK, banked over €500m (£420m) in loan-loss reserves over the three months to June, up 25 per cent [...]
The Big-Bang 2.0 fails to make City rules fit for an era of crypto and email not Telex July 28, 2022 THE Financial Services and Markets Bill 2022, introduced last week, failed to usher in the “Big Bang 2.0” of financial services regulation we were promised. It is true that many of the initiatives contained within the bill are sensible, welcome, and necessary – but they are nowhere near as radical as what is required to [...]
We should question the mandate of the Bank of England – not its independence July 28, 2022 ONE OF the most surprising things to come out of the race to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party has been the space the Bank of England has taken up in the discourse. One unsuccessful candidate argued the government should have more oversight of the Bank’s activities and current frontrunner Liz Truss [...]
One in three UK bosses on brink of burnout: ‘Years of 19-hour work days nearly put me in hospital’ July 27, 2022 More than a third of UK bosses are on the brink of burnout, while nearly one in five are currently experiencing it because of rising energy prices, rocketing inflation and supply chain delays. Rising costs are already one of the main causes of burnout, with 36 per cent of SMB owners citing that as a [...]