The leader of West Dunbartonshire Council has claimed the local authority could face bankruptcy within several years, as a council tax rise of 7.8% was confirmed for the region, BBC.com reported. Martin Rooney urged political parties and independent elected members to work together to solve a £9.2m deficit facing the local authority. Rooney said that the only options available for the council to raise money were increasing council tax, increasing sales fees and taxes, using reserves, management adjustment and savings.

The interest rate on student loans is a lightning rod for criticism and should be cut, according to the architect of fees trebling to £9,000 under the coalition government, The Times reported. Lord Willetts, the former universities minister, said the interest rate and salary repayment thresholds needed regular reviews to ensure the survival of the student loan system. “There will always be economic and political changes," he said. "The system to survive has to be sensitive to political pressures. Instead we’ve had a series of ad hoc changes, in both directions.

Britain’s unemployment rate has surged ahead of Italy’s for the first time since the depths of the financial crisis, The Telegraph reported. Fresh data on Italy’s jobless rate show it has now fallen below the UK’s, as Sir Keir Starmer steers his economy in a radically different direction to that of Giorgia Meloni, his counterpart in Rome. The jobless rate in Britain hit 5.2pc at the end of last year, its highest level since the worst moments of the pandemic. That is up from 4.4pc a year earlier.

Private investors facing multimillion-pound losses in the £2 billion collapse of a UK mortgage lender have met to discuss “collective action” to protect their interests, The Times reported. Individual investors and Wall Street and City institutions have been caught up in the failure of Market Financial Solutions, a provider of bridging loans and buy-to-let mortgages. The Mayfair-based group was placed into administration last week after a High Court judge said insolvency practitioners needed to investigate claims of fraud.

Unions have expressed their anger at the way hundreds of Brewdog staff were told they had lost their jobs during a 15-minute conference call, BBC.com reported. Parts of the Aberdeenshire-based independent brewer and pub chain were bought by beverage and cannabis firm Tilray for £33m on Monday after Brewdog went into administration. But 484 staff were made redundant as the company announced the closure of dozens of bars which were not included in the rescue deal. The announcement came after Tilray bought the company's UK brewing operations, brand, and 11 pubs.

British and U.S. regulators are divided over how to ​test blockchain-based versions of financial securities, with Britain pushing for a more cautious approach in talks aimed ‌at boosting crypto collaboration, Reuters reported. The U.S. and Britain announced in September a taskforce for reducing regulation for companies seeking to access each other’s markets and to improve digital asset cooperation. The split shows how financial regulators globally have to contend with a pro-crypto U.S. under President Donald Trump. The ​U.S. has eased crypto regulation and encouraged cryptocurrency adoption.

The U.K. government is on track to cut borrowing and reduce its debts, although the attacks on Iran by the U.S. and Israel have made the outlook more uncertain, Treasury Chief Rachel Reeves said Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. In the first of two annual presentations to lawmakers, Reeves cited new forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility that estimate the budget deficit for the fiscal year ending early next month will be 4.3% of annual economic output, the smallest gap between expenditures and revenues since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

British dealmaking reached a 26-year high in the first two months of the year as foreign buyers raced to snap up UK companies, The Telegraph reported. Almost $90bn (£68bn) worth of deals were agreed in January and February this year, including a number of major foreign takeovers such as a multi-billion-dollar deal for insurer Beazley. The $89.9bn of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity marks the highest total for the two months since the same period in 2000, when the value of deals reached $131bn.