Britain’s inflation rate held steady in May, frustrating expectations that price increases would slow down, according to data released Wednesday, the day before the country’s central bank is widely expected to raise interest rates again, the New York Times reported. Consumer prices rose 8.7 percent from a year earlier, the same as in April, the Office for National Statistics said. Economists had forecast it would dip slightly.

Bedlam in Britain's 1.5 trillion-pound ($1.9 trillion) mortgage market, fuelled by ructions in money markets, threatens to trigger a renewed slump in housing activity and financial pain for homeowners on a par with the late 1980s, Reuters reported. Lenders have repeatedly re-priced and pulled home loan offerings in recent weeks in a scramble to keep up with soaring funding costs, spurred by expectations for more interest rate hikes from the Bank of England as it battles stubbornly high inflation.

With U.K. economic data this week suggesting that the Bank of England has a lot more to do to get inflation under control, the yield spread of sterling investment-grade bonds over their dollar peers has been widening fast, Bloomberg News reported. A 21 basis point jump this week took the spread to the widest since October, when the UK market was recovering from the turmoil caused by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ill-fated budget. The indexes have a one-day lag.

The Bank of England was the first of the world’s major central banks to start raising interest rates to tackle the post-pandemic inflation surge. Money markets are betting it may be the last to stop, Bloomberg News reported. Strong labor-market figures on Tuesday sparked big moves in bond markets, with yields jumping to the highest since 2008. Alongside that, traders dramatically reassessed the UK rate outlook and are now pricing a more than one-in-three chance that the BOE will lift its benchmark to 6% by early next year.

One of Britain’s biggest delivery companies has crashed into administration, putting most of its 2,300 employees out of work and threatening major disruption to thousands of businesses that depend on it, the Telegraph reported. Sheffield-headquartered Tuffnells, founded in 1914 after Harold Tuffnell bought a horse and cart for £100 and began delivering goods, has appointed insolvency specialists from professional services company Interpath to handle its bankruptcy after failing to find new owners for the business.

A second Canary Wharf office block in as many weeks has collapsed into a form of insolvency amid growing financial pressure on commercial property owners, Sky News reported. Sky News understands that Alvarez & Marsal, the restructuring firm, has been appointed as fixed charge receiver over the shares of Cheung Loong Holdings Limited, which indirectly owns the long leasehold of 20 Canada Square. The building has for years been home to BP's oil trading division, while the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's has been among its other tenants.

A Yorkshire-based finance boss has been found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment at Leeds Crown Court, according to a U.K. Insolvency Service press release. An investigation by the Insolvency Service found Liam Francis Wainwright, 61, from Leeds, had falsified documents to mislead investors and spend their money on ventures including a racehorse syndicate and his own failed private businesses. These investors were victims of a classic Ponzi scheme, whereby the returns paid to them were funded by the capital injections from later investors.

The Daily Telegraph, a more than 150-year-old, politically influential British newspaper, has effectively been put up for sale after its parent company entered a form of insolvency proceedings, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move could offer a rare chance to buy a trophy asset with strong ties to the ruling Conservative Party, while signaling the further erosion of the business empire of the Barclay family, once one of Britain’s richest clans.

A London commuter town effectively declared bankruptcy, after a risky investment spree meant to offset a central government funding squeeze backfired and left the local authority — which covers a population of just over 100,000 people — facing a £1.2 billion ($1.5 billion) deficit, Bloomberg News reported. Woking Borough Council issued a so-called Section 114 notice on Wednesday, meaning that all but essential spending will stop due to the financial shortfall, which it blamed on “unaffordable borrowing” triggered by historic spending.

Hogganfield Care operates a 44-bed nursing home, Hogganfield Care Centre, in Millerston, Glasgow, while Skye Care Limited manages Skye View Care Centre, a 24-bed facility specialising in dementia care in Airdrie, Scottish Housing News reported. Insolvency practitioners Mark Harper and Steven John Parker, partners at Opus Restructuring and Insolvency, were appointed joint provisional on June 5.