Author: LoveWorld UK

Roughly one in three furloughed workers in Britain returned to their jobs during the first two weeks of July as the hospitality industry reopened to the public, an official survey suggested on Thursday. Some 7% of workers at businesses surveyed by the Office for National Statistics between June 29 and July 12 had returned to work within the previous two weeks, reducing the proportion who remained on furlough to 17%. The sector with the largest number of workers returning was accommodation and food services businesses – which reopened to guests on July 4 – where 18% returned to work, though…

Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY.L) swung to a rare pretax loss in the first half of 2020, after setting aside a bigger than expected 2.4 billion pounds second-quarter provision to cover a potential hike in bad loans due to the coronavirus. The hefty provision, which was 60% higher than an average of analyst estimates, came as it drastically revised its models for the worst-case scenario for Britain’s economy as it grapples with the fallout from the pandemic. The United Kingdom’s biggest domestic bank, seen as a bellwether for the wider economy, said it had adopted a gloomier outlook and estimated the…

Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) said on Thursday that it was wrapping its global markets and investment banking divisions into a single unit, as Chief Executive Thomas Gottstein puts his first major strategic stamp on the bank. Switzerland’s second-biggest bank also posted a 24% rise in second-quarter net profit to 1.162 billion Swiss francs (981.39 million pounds), blowing past the mean estimate for 700 million Swiss francs in the bank’s own poll of 17 analysts. “We are today announcing a series of strategic initiatives to improve effectiveness and to generate efficiencies,” Gottstein, who became CEO in February, said in a statement, as…

Sterling rose against a weaker euro but fell versus the dollar on Thursday after the $1.30 level reached late in the previous session did not hold, with Brexit and the economic fallout from coronavirus weighing on the currency. Global market sentiment was boosted late on Wednesday after the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said the bank would “do what we can, and for as long as it takes” to limit the coronavirus damage to the United States’ economy, but optimism was tempered by record-high COVID-19 infections. The dollar fell while Powell was speaking, with the pound reaching…

Google and Facebook took particularly sharp jabs for alleged abuse of their market power from Democrats and Republicans on Wednesday in a much-anticipated congressional hearing here that put four of America’s most prominent tech CEOs in the hot seat. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives antitrust panel holding the hearing said afterwards that the four CEOs had acknowledged concerning behavior. “What we heard from witnesses at the hearing confirmed the evidence that we have collected over the last year,” Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat, told Reuters. Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) Jeff Bezos, Google owner Alphabet Inc’s…

France will continue to take a tough line on defending the rights of French fishermen in Brexit talks but a deal with the United Kingdom is still possible, France’s new European affairs minister Clement Beaune said on Wednesday. “We will not accept a deal at any price,” he told France Inter radio in his first public comments on Brexit since his appointment on Sunday. “Better no deal at all than a bad deal,” he said while adding that a deal was nevertheless the best outcome for all concerned. Britain and the European Union clashed last week over the chances of…

The chief executives of four of the world’s largest tech companies, Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), Facebook Inc (FB.O), Apple (AAPL.O) and Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), plan to argue in a congressional hearing on antitrust on Wednesday that they face intense competition from each other and from other rivals. The testimony from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, which was released Tuesday, portrays four chief executives who are looking over their shoulders at competitors who could render them obsolete. Pichai argued that search – which Google dominates by most metrics – was broader than just typing…

British property website Rightmove said a mini housing market boom was gathering pace after a tax cut by finance minister Rishi Sunak. The number of sales agreed in England — which eased coronavirus restrictions on the market before other countries in the United Kingdom — jumped by an annual 35% in the five days after Sunak’s announcement on July 8, Rightmove said. A recovery had already been underway with agreed sales in England up by 15% in June, it said on Monday. Hoping to give a boost to the economy, Sunak raised the threshold for paying tax on property purchases…

British retailers discounted their goods less in July than the month before, after consumer demand picked up in many sectors as coronavirus lockdown restrictions eased, data from the British Retail Consortium showed on Wednesday. Average shop prices in July were 1.3% lower than a year before, compared with 1.6% lower in June and a record 2.4% fall in May. July’s reading was driven by a smaller price fall of 2.9% for non-food prices in July, down from a 3.4% drop in June. “Sectors which saw a release of pent-up demand, such as electricals and furniture, saw fewer promotions,” BRC chief…

The Bank of England will assess whether to extend a suspension on payouts such as dividends and share buybacks by banks beyond the end of the year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it said on Tuesday. Under pressure from the central bank, Britain’s lenders agreed in March to suspend payouts this year in order to preserve capital to help companies and households hit by COVID-19 lockdowns. Bonuses to senior staff were also scrapped. The Bank of England (BoE) said on Tuesday its Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) would undertake in the fourth quarter an assessment of distribution plans at banks beyond…