Thursday newspaper round-up: Carney, Instagram, Glencore...
“Britain’s first interest rate move in more than six years edged a little closer yesterday as Bank of England governor Mark Carney joined hawk Ian McCafferty in hinting that action may soon be called for,” The Scotsman writes. Carney reportedly said that inflation was still expected to fall under 1% in the near term and “interest rates are going to have to increase” for the economy to balance.
Food Producers & Processors
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FTSE 100
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FTSE 350
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FTSE All-Share
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FTSE Small Cap
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Glencore
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16:35 26/04/24
Mining
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Premier Foods
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Twitter Inc
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With 300m active monthly users Instagram, the photo-sharing app, has overtaken Twitter in terms of user numbers. The announcement comes after its user base swelled by a third in the last nine months. While the company has only just managed to generate revenues the news comes as the mobile advertising market is expected to reach $40bn this year, the Financial Times reports.
Glencore’s executive will be free to offload £1.3bn-worth of shares next May when a lock-up agreement expires, according to The Times. This will be the first time they have been allowed to sell shares since the resource giant’s stock-market flotation in 2011.markets
Top officials at the Financial Conduct Authority, including its boss Martin Wheatley, are to lose their bonuses, The Guardian writes. The move comes as a penalty for a “botched advanced media briefing” about its review of the life insurance inudstry, the paper said.
Following a decision by Ofwat due on Friday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) will set out radical plans to allow local water companies to stop supplying certain customers, The Times reports. That may bring with it a spate of takeovers and see energy companies step back into the fray, resulting in the biggest carve-up of the sector since privatisation kicked off 25 years ago.
More now than at almost any point in the past two decades Britons are living beyond their means, according to the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, Robert Chote. Real consumer spending over the past two years has accelerated beyond inflation-adjusted pay growth at its second fastest rate since the 1990s, he pointed out. Yet that is likely to prove unsustainable, Chotes added, according to The Telegraph.
The world’s largest peer-to-peer lender, Lending Club, is expected to be valued at $5.4bn when it lists on the New York stock market on Thursday, according to the Financial Times.
The Federation of Small Businesses has said that one in five small businesses have fallen victim to bullying by large corporations they supplied in the last two years, writes The Telegraph. The paper says the report emerged after the news that Premier Foods requested payments from suppliers through a so-called ‘pay-to-stay’ scheme.