News

Your daily news update straight from the City PM newsroom in London

WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING FROM THE PRE-BUDGET REPORT?

December 6, 2009

MICHAEL SAUNDERS CITIGROUPThis would be a good time to detail a phased fiscal consolidation for the next few years. However we do not expect this to happen in the PBR. Fiscal policy in the PBR will aim to reinforce Labour’s pre-election political strategy, rather than to re-establish fiscal sustainability.SIMON HAYES BARCLAYS CAPITALThe report provides the [...]
Battle for the festive pound is under way

December 6, 2009

THE high street price war has heated up as shops focus both on luring shoppers away from the internet and beating competition from neighbouring shops. London’s West End shopping district enjoyed its best trade for two years over the weekend as 2m shoppers flocked to a traffic-free Oxford Street, spending over £200m in one day [...]
Tesco takes the gloves off as Christmas price war hots up

December 6, 2009

Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco has launched its most aggressive Christmas discount drive, designed to blow its upmarket rivals out of the water. The supermarket giant is slashing the prices of more than 200 products in its Finest range in a bid to stop shoppers defecting to Waitrose and Marks & Spencer for luxury food treats. [...]
Habitat set for a new home as management plans to go it alone

December 6, 2009

HABITAT, the home furnishing retailer is set to be placed in the hands of its management after a lengthy battle for control with restructuring specialists Hilco. It is understood that new investors have agreed to back chief executive Mark Saunders and finance director Sebastian Drouillet to turn around the business after it was put up [...]
Rio and BHP seal deal

December 6, 2009

MINING giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto shook hands on their proposed $116bn (£67.8bn) iron ore tie-up over the weekend, putting paid to reports that competition bodies would interfere with the deal. The agreement, which is expected to produce synergies of $10bn, has been a bone of much contention for Chinese customers, who say it [...]
Nothing to fear but over-optimism itself

December 6, 2009

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side.” The above quote comes not from one of [...]
CITY TYPES FANCY A FLUTTER ON RACE GAME

December 6, 2009

AN ENTERPRISING businessman, a barrel-load of twenty quid tickets, the chance to win a lucrative prize of your dreams… sound familiar? It may well do, given ex-Nomura banker Andrew Paul’s recent venture selling tickets for the chance to win his mansion, Aston Martin and power boat, which is now going to be made into a [...]
BILL OF THE WEEK

December 6, 2009

A BIT of an unusual one this week from the St Pancras Grand Champagne Bar, whose proprietors must have been rubbing their hands together with glee after a City commuter got carried away before his journey home recently. Having stopped by for refreshment, the chap in question spied a Dom Perignon vintage 1995 white gold [...]
Spencer: ICAP will leave if Labour regains power

December 6, 2009

INTERDEALER broker ICAP has warned it may move its domicile from the UK to a more competitive tax jurisdiction if the Labour party wins the 2010 general election. Chief executive Michael Spencer, who is also treasurer of the Conservative party, said the prospect of higher taxation could push the trading giant to find an offshore [...]
UK to lose top economy rank

December 6, 2009

THE UK is set to slide out of the world’s top 10 economies by 2015, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Although the International Monetary Fund and World Bank both ranked the UK sixth in 2008 based on GDP, the CEBR reports that this year the country fell behind Italy to [...]