Thursday newspaper round-up: Ebola, Fed, RBS
The Ebola outbreak in west Africa could have reached a turning point, according to the director of the Wellcome Trust, the Guardian reported on Thursday.
FTSE 100
8,139.83
17:09 26/04/24
NATWEST GROUP
307.40p
16:40 26/04/24
Dr Jeremy Farrar, the director of the trust, which is funding a series of fast-tracked trials of vaccines and drugs against the virus, said that while the short-term future remained extremely difficult, the response from the international community was cause for cautious optimism.
“The progress made is preliminary and uncertain; even if ultimately successful it will not reduce mortality or stop transmission for some time," he said.
"We are not close to seeing the beginning of the end of the epidemic but [several] developments offer hope that we may have reached the end of the beginning.”
The US Federal Reserve has brought its $4.5trn (£2.8trn) quantitative easing programme to an end, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The programme, introduced more than five years ago to steer the US economy through the financial crisis, signalled a drastic change for US monetary policy, hugely swelling the Fed’s balance sheet in a bid to prop up a financial system that was in complete disarray.
“The committee judges that there has been a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labour market since the inception of its current asset purchase programme," the Fed said in a statement.
People applying for pay-day loans have had a total of more than £1m taken from their bank accounts by “middlemen” during the last few months, the Financial Times reported.
Royal Bank of Scotland has warned that over 16,000 of its customers and at its subsidiary NatWest have seen money withdrawn from their accounts by brokers offering payday loans since July 2014.
"We’ve seen large numbers of customers incurring charges they don’t expect when using a payday loan broker since July this year," said Terry Lawson, head of fraud and chargebacks at RBS and NatWest.
“We are reaching out to customers to warn them of these fees and taking steps to block the transactions altogether, but these are sophisticated organisations."
The number of households in the UK which moved from having no adults in work to having at least one employed dropped by 1.4% in the second quarter when compared with the previous year, to reach 271,000.
That marks the largest drop since records began 18 years ago and constitutes the fourth consecutive year in which they have fallen, The Guardian writes.
Rising property prices and increased job security are expected to yield an unexpected dividend for retailers this Christmas, according to consulting group Verdict. It also means that shoppers should ready themselves to face packed pavements this holiday season.
The total amount of spending is forecast to rise 2.6% to £90.7bn. Commenting on the figures, Verdict analyst Patrick O’Brien said: “It’s not a spectacular picture but it’s a positive one,” The Times reports.
Over the year to September only 0.22% of adults in Britain became insolvent, the least since 2006. Bankruptcies thus dropped to a 15-year low and were off by 19% in the third quarter. That is the lowest rate since before the financial crisis, according to the Insolvency Service. The main reason for that decrease are the continued low interest rates, writes The Times.