Britain's banks and building societies have until the end of August to justify to regulators why some of their savings rates are low or face sanctions, the markets watchdog said on Monday, as Bank of England rates look set to rise to their highest since 2008, Reuters reported. While the sector has been passing on higher interest rates rapidly to mortgage customers, lawmakers have criticised lenders for not upping rates on savings worth around 1.5 trillion pounds ($1.9 trillion) at a similar speed, amid a cost-of-living crisis.
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Nigel Farage, who helped mobilize the pro-Brexit vote in 2016, was marginalized in Britain, then consumed by the pandemic. No longer: For three weeks, Mr. Farage, has been back on the front pages of British papers, with an attention-grabbing claim that his exclusive private bank, Coutts, dropped him as a customer because of his polarizing politics. Early on Wednesday, after Farage’s allegations were largely vindicated, the chief executive of his bank’s parent, NatWest Group, resigned after she admitted improperly discussing his bank account with a BBC journalist.
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The Bank of England forecast on Tuesday that it would make a net loss of just over 150 billion pounds ($193 billion) over the next 10 years as it unwinds its quantitative easing (QE) gilt purchases, up from 100 billion pounds projected in April, Reuters reported. That loss will need to be funded by the government, at a time when public finances are already under pressure from rising interest rates and inflation, and members of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party want tax cuts before a likely 2024 election.
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City AM, the London-based business newspaper, is close to calling in administrators after a weeks-long search for a buyer failed to produce a solvent deal, SkyNews.com reported. Sky News has learnt that the directors of the title's parent company are preparing to appoint BDO, the accountancy firm, to commence an insolvency process in the coming days.
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A proposed 2.7 billion pound ($3.5 billion) mass lawsuit against major banks including JPMorgan and Citigroup over alleged foreign exchange rigging was revived by a London court on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The case was originally brought by Phillip Evans, a former inquiry chair at Britain's Competition Markets Authority, on behalf of thousands of asset managers, pension funds and financial institutions.
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Britain's data regulator said on Tuesday it will examine Worldcoin, a project by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman where users provide their iris scans in exchange for a digital identification and free cryptocurrency, Reuters reported. "We note the launch of WorldCoin in the UK and will be making further enquiries," a spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office told Reuters. Worldcoin launched on Monday with two million users from its trial, with the crypto project scaling up eyeball-scanning operations in 20 countries, including at sites in London.
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British homebuilders are building fewer homes, cutting down on land purchases and offering more incentives as high mortgage rates and the lack of any immediate support from the government make homes less affordable for first-time buyers, Reuters reported. Top UK residential builder Barratt said this month it would build around 20% fewer homes in its fiscal year 2024, while high-end builder Berkeley expects annual sales to fall by a fifth. Midcap firms Bellway and Crest Nicholson have also pointed to high mortgage rates hampering demand from first-time buyers. And that's not all.
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UK job vacancies rose for a fifth month, boosting salaries and signaling tightness in the labor market that’s likely to fan inflation, data from the search engine Adzuna showed, Reuters reported. The jobs search site listed 1.06 million vacancies across the UK in June, up 0.78% from the month before but 12% lower than a year ago. It said advertised salaries rose 3.6% from a year ago to £37,807, and the number of days to fill open positions fell to a record low.
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A millionaire 'magic circle' lawyer who sailed the seas on a £17 million superyacht is facing bankruptcy after failing to hand a £19 million investment fund back to a Saudi princess, the Daily Mail reported. Former lawyer Ronald Gibbs has been locked in a court fight with the Saudi Royal Family after he agreed to set up and manage the multi-million-pound investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2011.
Consumer prices in Britain rose 7.9 percent in June from a year ago, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday, the slowest pace of inflation in more than a year, the New York Times reported. The slowdown, which was greater than economists had expected, will bring some relief to the government following months of inflation repeatedly turning out higher than forecast. The annual rate of price growth slowed from 8.7 percent in May. The decline was driven by a large drop in the price of motor fuels. Food prices rose 17.3 percent in June from the year before.