Live policy of businesses, the economy and money markets continues, as stores expect task losses to accelerate.
The pound remained still in August, not surprising given that many investors are taking a break and giant corporate transactions are also calming down, but today there is a bit of life: it has risen 0.6% against the US dollar to $1,3137.
Investors seem to forget about the grim reading of the CBI distribution industry survey (or have already incorporated it), and the dollar has also fallen slightly after positive China-US industry negotiations, which have spurred an appetite for threats.
The pound plummeted against the dollar in March as investors and businesses around the world moved towards the relative security of the global reserve currency. Since then, however, it has recovered for the industry at pre-pandemic levels.
Morten Lund, an analyst at Nordea Markets, told Reuters that “general sentiment” and a weaker dollar had helped sterling.
ING’s forex strata Francesco Pesole warned that the pound’s quote may show that investors underestimate the threat of a Brexit without an agreement. He said:
The positioning of sterling is a smart indication of how investors lately a technique very accommodating to the history of Brexit. While the collapse of the Brexit negotiations at the end of last week will only be reflected in next week’s CFTC positioning report, and we may see the reconstruction of some GBP shorts, the positioning of sterling is still far from the degrees it is in. when markets were evaluating a non-Brexit-related agreement.
In our view, this continues to highlight the extent to which sterling underestimates the threat of unsealed final results from existing INDUSTRIAL negotiations between the UK and the EU, implying a significant threat of increased tension in the pound in the coming weeks. .
A British music generation startup has reached a wonderful $70 million agreement to buy Napster, one of the pioneers of the music streaming revolution.
London-listed MelodyVR, which films and broadcasts concerts that enthusiasts watch with virtual real headphones, takes over Rhapsody International, which operates the So-called Napster and is owned by Nasdaq-listed RealNetworks.
MelodyVR aims to create a music platform that combines Napster, which began life in the 1990s as an illegal download platform, with its immersive live performances. Napster, which has 3 million users, has a library of 90 million authorized tracks.
You can read the full one here:
According to CBI’s senior economist, the worst is about to come for UK retail employees.
There has already been a litany of giant employers that have already eliminated thousands of retail jobs, and many economists expect a sharp rise in unemployment across the economy as winter approaches.
These are the loss of tasks only in the retail and hotel sectors:
Marks and Spencer – 7,000 jobs August 18: The food, clothing and family goods store eliminates jobs in central downtown, regional control and shops.
M – Co – 400 jobs 5 August: M-Co, Renfrewshire-based clothing store formerly Mackays, will have 47 of the 215 stores.
WH Smith: 1,500 jobs 5 August: The chain, which sells products ranging from sandwiches to stationery, will basically eliminate jobs at UK duty stations and airports.
Pizza Express – 1,100 jobs August 4: The restaurant chain plans to close 70 places to eat from a rescue restructuring agreement.
Dixons Carphone – 800 jobs August 4: Electronics store Dixons Carphone is cutting 800 executives at its retail outlets as it continues to cut costs.
DW Sports: 1,700 jobs at risk August 3: DW Sports moved to management, closing its online retail page and risking the closure of its 150 gyms and stores.
Marks and Spencer – 950 jobs July 20: Main Street Pillar executive positions in retail stores, as well as similar to the ownership and operation of a store.
Ted Baker – 500 jobs July 19: Nearly two hundred jobs at the fashion store headquarters in London, the ugly Brown building and the rest in stores.
Azzurri – 1200 jobs July 17: pizzeria chain owner Ask Italian and Zizzi closes 75 restaurants and delivers his Pod lunch
Burberry: 500 jobs worldwide July 15: The total includes 150 jobs at UK headquarters, as the luxury logo tries to reduce prices by 55 million pounds after a drop in sales due to the pandemic.
Boots – 4,000 jobs nine in July: Boots cuts 4,000 jobs – or 7% of its workforce – through the last 48 optics and cutout outlets at its Nottingham headquarters, as well as some visitor checkpoints and service in stores.
John Lewis – 1,300 jobs July 9: John Lewis announced plans to permanently close 8 of his 50 retail outlets, adding entire branches in Birmingham and Watford, with the most likely loss of 1,300 jobs.
Celtic Manor – 450 jobs July 9: The heads of the Celtic Collection in Newport, which hosted the 2010 Ryder Cup golf and the 2014 NATO conference, said 450 of their 995 would lose their jobs.
Pret a Manger: 1,000 jobs July 6: Pret a Manger will have to permanently close 30 branches and could eliminate at least 1,000 jobs after suffering ”significant ”significant operational losses’ after the closure of Covid-19
Casual Dining Group – 1,900 jobs July 2: Restaurant chain owner Bella Italia, Café Rouge and Las Iguanas collapsed in management, with the rapid loss of 1,900 jobs. The company stated that there were several offers on the table for parts of the business, but that buyers wanted to get all the existing sites and that 91 of its 250 outlets would remain permanently closed.
Arcadia – 500 jobs July 1: Arcadia, sir Philip Green’s troubled organization – Topshop owner Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins, Burton, Evans and Wallis – said in July that 500 jobs at the 2500 headquarters would be eliminated in the coming weeks.
SSP Group – 5000 jobs 1 July: The owner of Upper Crust and Caffe Ritazza will eliminate 5000 jobs, or about part of its workforce, with cuts to his head and operations in the UK after the pandemic blocked domestic and foreign travel.
Harrods – 700 jobs July 1: Branch organization is cutting one in seven out of its 4,800 workers due to the “continued impacts” of the pandemic.
Harveys – 240 jobs June 30: Administrators made 240 layoffs at the Harveys furniture chain, with more than 1,300 jobs at risk if a customer could be found.
TM Lewin – 600 jobs June 30: ShirtmakerTM Lewin has permanently closed its 66 outlets, with the loss of some 600 jobs.
Monsoon Accessorize – 545 jobs June 11: Fashion brands were bought from management through its founder, Peter Simon, in June in an agreement in which 35 retail establishments closed permanently and lost 545 jobs.
Mulberry – 470 jobs June 8: The fashion and luxury accessories logo will reduce 25% of its global and has started consulting with the 470 employees at risk.
The Restaurant Group – 3,000 tasks June 3: The owner of restaurant chains such as Wagamama and Frankie-Benny’s has closed chiquito’s maximum outlets and 11 of its Food and Fuel pubs, and 120 places to eat must close permanently. The total number of tasks lost can reach up to 3000.
Clarks – 900 jobs May 21 : Clarks plans to eliminate 900 jobs internationally as he struggles with the expansion of online footwear purchases as well as the pandemic.
Oasis and Warehouse: 1,800 jobs April 30: Fashion brands were purchased through Hilco’s corporate restructuring in April, with all outlets permanently closed and 1,800 jobs lost.
Cath Kidston – 900 jobs 21 April: More than 900 jobs were eliminated without delay at the outdated cath Kidston retail brand after the company announced the permanent closure of the 60 UK stores.
Debenhams – 4,000 jobs April 9: At least 4,000 jobs will be lost in Debenhams at their head and outlets will close after their collapse in management in April, for the time being in a year.
Laura Ashley – 2,700 assignments March 17: Laura Ashley collapsed into the administration, with 2,700 missed tasks, and said rescue talks had been thwarted by the pandemic.
Howard Archer, a leading economic adviser to EY Item Club, a forecaster, said the survey showed a loss of momentum.
A little more knowledge of the CBI retail industry survey: retail sales fell during the year in August, and a sharper drop is expected next month, adding to considerations of the UK’s economic recovery.
Overall, 6% of stores reported a drop in sales for the year through August, with a positive balance of 4% in July, the CBI said. Expectations for next month are much worse, with a store balance of 17% predicting a decline.
The deterioration of the outlook occurs when the UK is preparing to finalize the employment maintenance programme which is the salary of licensed staff. This has helped the finish, but employers are now forced to contribute to staff payments, and the plan will completely avoid by the end of October, raising questions about a wave of loss of tasks in the meantime.
Online sales provided positive growth with continued growth and a balance of 46% of stores that reported increases. This is roughly equivalent to the long-term average of 45%.
Among the distribution occupations studied, the CBI stated that:
Retail employment fell at the fastest rate from February 2009 to August, and an even steeper decline is expected from the year to September, with a pandemic of a wave of layoffs, according to a survey of primary retailers.
A negative 45% of the 63 primary stores said employment had fallen, a serious deterioration of 20% in May, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).
A decline in the next quarter (-52%).
Alpesh Paleja, senior economist at CBI, said:
The licensing programme has proven effective in isolating staff and businesses in some of the sectors most affected by the pandemic, but these effects reinforce considerations that many lost tasks have been delayed on the calendar rather than avoided.
In fact, the most recent survey shows that the retail advertising situation remains difficult, even in a context of slow business recovery. Companies will be wary of the deterioration of family income and the threat of additional local closures that can hit them in the pocket for a moment.
So how will Ant Group be worth it?
The company was founded through Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, and holds a leading position in China’s monetary sector.
Ant Group was known in the past as Ant Financial. It was created in 2014 and was born from Ma’s Alipay, a hijacked payment service introduced through Alibaba in 2004 to serve buyers and merchants on Taobao, one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites (also owned by Alibaba).
It is still in the early stages of the company’s valuation, however, some reports recommend that it only aim to compete with Paypal, which lately is valued at $233 billion (178 billion pounds).
The Financial Times reported in July that Ant Group was last valued at $150 billion in mid-2018 after raising about $14 billion from investors such as Temasek, General Atlantic, Warburg Pincus and Baillie Gifford.
The IPO prospect suggests that the company may be vulnerable to industry tensions between the United States and China. Donald Trump has shown that he is very interested in the fortunes of Chinese generation companies, with TikTok under pressure.
Ant Group, Alibaba’s financial technology arm and China’s dominant cellular company, has been deployed for the board in the Hong Kong inventory market and the Nasdaq-style STAR market in Shanghai.
The initial public provision can raise up to $30 billion (23 billion pounds), making it the largest in history, Reuters reported.
Already the world’s most valuable unicorn, or an unlisted billion-dollar generation company, Ant has revealed the size, timing or other key points of the offering in its initial prospectus.
But they’re big numbers. Look at this 1058% profit increase:
The early uptick in the inventory market from the start turns out to be fading a little: the FTSE 100 has risen by only 0.1% by mid-morning to 6,111 points.
Germany’s Dax is performing better, with a 0.6% increase after economic signals that a recovery is taking place, even if it is fragile.
Cac in France won 0.8% and the Stoxx 600, which follows Europe, rose 0.5%.
Consumers who spend more on their homes relative to the industries, and the call after the blockade helped boost the DFS Furniture homewares store business beyond corporate expectations.
The store said in a commercial update that its fiscal year had “started well,” with an expansion of orders year after year in more than six weeks to about 70 million pounds in revenue.
However, the chain, which owns about 30% of the UK’s upholstered furniture market according to Jefferies analysts, said it was difficult to expect long-term operations, given the persistent dangers to customer confidence due to the Covid-19 and its potential. have an effect on Brexit.
DFS shares have won 14% on Tuesday after the announcement.
More information on this AstraZeneca trial: the pharmaceutical organization has submitted a clinical trial of a drug to save it and treat Covid-19, and the first volunteers already receive doses.
The company, which develops a possible Covid-19 vaccine in collaboration with scientists at the University of Oxford, said the drug, known as AZD7442, is a mixture of two monoclonal antibodies.
AstraZeneca said the trial, which will include up to 48 healthy volunteers in the UK over the age of 18 to 55, will focus on safety, the body’s reaction to the drug and how it treats it.
You can read the full one here:
Flash information: The co-op bank will have 350 jobs and 18 branches.
This represents about 11% of its total workforce, or about 3,175 people. In addition to the branch staff, discounts will basically be intermediate command posts and job managers.
He blames low interest rates, economic uncertainty, and the bank’s switch from branches to virtual banking.
Andrew Bester, managing director of Co-op Bank, said:
Our workers have shown a wonderful determination and commitment to our consumers over the past few months, so we regret to announce this news today. Unfortunately, we are not immune to the effects of recent events, with the traditionally low base rate affecting the source of income of all banks and an era of widespread economic uncertainty to come, meaning it is vital to reduce prices and have the right business model. in position for the future.
At the same time, we are responding to the continuous movement of more and more consumers who decide to do online banking, with declining degrees of branch transactions, a trend that has been expanding for a long time, the banking sector and more broadly. .
We knew a recovery was looming from the lowest point in April, but economists are conscientiously contemplating the first signs of how the activity will temporarily return.
Claus Vistesen, a leading eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said Ifo’s weather indicator is “a little less optimistic” than the overall improvement suggests. He said:
The largest accumulation in inventory accumulation came from the existing valuation indicator, from 87.9 from 84.5 in July, while the uptick in the expectations index appears to be slowing. […]
However, as with the IMPs, key control in the coming months will be that it is stabilizing at its current level, having already rebounded significantly. If this is the case, it will mean that the recovery is underway.
However, this knowledge actually only confirms what we already know, that economic activity is now recovering after the blockade collapses. We know from reliable knowledge that the uptick was very strong in the last component of the quarter of the moment, but it is almost in fact declining, although knowledge of the survey remains consistent with the right knowledge until July and August.
A bottom line estimate suggests that an uptick of 7% would leave the German economy 3.4% smaller than in the first quarter of the year at the end of the third quarter.
And remember, the German economy was already weak even before the pandemic, flirting with the recession in recent years. Here is the quarterly GDP since the third quarter of 2017.
Here’s a chart showing this “V shape” that everyone expects.
However, the white line “business climate” has still recovered to the point observed before it hit the pandemic.
If the IFO’s forecast of a quarterly GDP expansion of 7% in the third quarter is correct, then the eurozone’s largest economy will lose nothing in the quarter in which the virus hit hard.
The German climate took a step forward in August, according to the very-observed Ifo index.
The index rose from a reading of 90.5 in July to 92.6 in August, the institute of studies said. That’s higher than the 92.2 reading expected by economists.
Ifo expects GDP to recover by about 7% in the third quarter, reuters told one of its economists, Klaus Wohlrabe.
The economy is on a track record of recovery, the economic recovery is still fragile, he warned.
Good news for Devon: Infrastrata, the company that intervened to save Belfast’s Harland-Wolff shipyard, bought the historic Appledore shipyard on the Torridge River.
Appledore had been threatened with the closure and loss of two hundred jobs after defense company Babcock International failed to renew its lease in 2018.
Infrastrata will pay 7 million pounds for the shipyard, which will be renamed H-W (Appledore). Expect to travel on small boats for the Marines, while Belfast will travel on larger ships over 300 metres in size, such as cruise ships.
The Appledore shipyard aligns its history in 1855 and played a role in the shipbuilding effort of World War II.
Finablr, the troubled payments group, has delayed its accounts amid an investigation into irregularities.
The corporation announced on June 23 that it had replaced its accounting reference date to February 28, giving its monetary statements until August 28.
The company has not lately met this deadline and will provide an update on the expected release date when it does so.
Finablr named a legal corporation last month to investigate a billion pounds of un revealed debt. The company owned the Travelex exchange service, but lost in April after nearly collapsing.
Last week, the company announced that its Indian founder, BR Shetty, had resigned with immediate effect. Shetty is also the founder of NMC Health, the former FTSE hospital corporation that collapsed in administration in April after reporting billions of dollars in more unreleased debt.
The recession in Germany was not as deep as thought in the past, according to revised GDP figures, however, it was the worst in the history of the reunified country.
Production fell 9.7% quarterly, compared to 10.1% in the past reported through the German Federal Bureau of Statistics.
The decrease is significantly greater than that observed even in the 2008-09 currency crisis.
Carsten Brzeski, leading economist at Investment ING, said:
The contraction of the economy has been smoother than in the first estimate, illustrating how complicated it is to dominate the blockade-induced fluctuations in any economy with classical macroeconomic models. […] The only smart thing about all this knowledge is that it provides one last look at the rearview mirror.
Looking ahead, you don’t need to be a rocket specialist to expect the economy to have one of its quarterly capabilities in the third quarter.
At the same time, however, the structural effect of the crisis is also surfaced, over-restricting enthusiasm for growth.
Hello and welcome to our business policy, economy and money markets.
Investors seem to have welcomed the easieness of industry tensions between the United States and China, after officials on both sides reaffirmed their commitment to reach an agreement.
U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Liu He pledged to succeed in a Phase 1 agreement in their first formal discussion since early May.
The tone of the talks, after months of deteriorating diplomatic relations, has helped bring global stock markets to life. The FTSE 10 rose by 0.6% in the first minutes of trading, while the German Dax and the French Cac 40 rose by 0.7% and 0.5% respectively. Japan’s Topix index rose 1.1%, Australia’s ASX 200 rose 0.5% and Korea’s Kospi won 1.4%. Tracking China’s CSI blue tokens three hundred in Shenzhen and Shanghai zero.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, economists referred to industry tensions between Donald Trump’s administration in the United States and China as the biggest risk to the global economy. Even now, positive news about dating has the strength to move markets.
But optimism about the possible progress of the talks is likely to dim through the wisdom that Trump is most likely to place appointments with China amid his re-election efforts ahead of the November election.
This election war is now in full swing, with a Republican conference full of grim warnings about America’s long-term as it began last night. Daniel Strauss of The Guardian reported:
Monday night’s theme was officially “the promised land,” but the collection of speeches presented an almost apocalyptic view of what’s at stake in the November elections.
German GDP, on the other hand, was higher than expected in the last reading of the quarter. However, it still recorded a staggering 9.7% drop in production between April and June, compared to 10.1% at first reading. This has been corrected.)
In British corporate news, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca stated that it had introduced phase 1 trials (with a small number of participants) for a “combination of monoclonal antibodies for the prevention and remedy of COVID-19”. The remedy, classified AZD7442, was funded through the U.S. government. And the company expects it to mimic herbal antibodies to provide six-month coverage of the virus.
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