businessSee all
A picture

Bank of England chief warns of ‘worrying echoes’ of 2008 financial crisis

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has warned recent events in US private credit markets have worrying echoes of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that kicked off the global financial crash of 2008.Appearing before a House of Lords committee, the governor said it was important to have the “drains up” and analyse the collapse of two leveraged US firms, First Brands and Tricolor, in case they were not isolated events but “the canary in the coalmine”.“Are they telling us something more fundamental about the private finance, private asset, private credit, private equity sector, or are they telling us that in any of these worlds there will be idiosyncratic cases that go wrong?” he asked.“I think that is still a very open question; it’s an open question in the US.”He added: “I don’t want to sound too foreboding, but the added reason this question is important is if you go back to before the financial crisis when we were having this debate about sub-prime mortgages in the US, people were telling us: ‘No it’s too small to be systemic; it’s idiosyncratic

A picture

Pizza Hut administration: the 68 restaurants that will close

The locations have been revealed of 68 Pizza Hut restaurants that will close after the company behind its UK venues fell into administration.They are across the country, from Finchley Lido in London to Carlisle in Cumbria and Rhyl in north Wales.Eleven delivery-only Pizza Hut sites will also close as part of a restructuring, putting 1,210 workers at risk of redundancy.DC London Pie, the company running Pizza Hut’s UK restaurants under a franchise deal, appointed administrators from the corporate finance firm FTI on Monday.The US company Yum! Brands, which owns the global Pizza Hut business as well as KFC and Taco Bell, has bought the UK restaurant operation in a pre-pack administration deal, saving 64 sites and securing the future of 1,276 workers

A picture

UK borrowing reaches five-year high for September at £20.2bn

UK government borrowing was the highest for five years in September after rising debt interest costs and higher welfare payments pushed the public finances deeper into the red.Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed public sector net borrowing – the difference between public spending and income – hit £20.2bn last month, up £1.6bn from the same month last year and the highest September borrowing since 2020.The ONS said a rise in tax receipts was unable to offset the jump in debt interest costs this year and a rise in welfare costs, which have mostly increased in response to rising inflation

A picture

Reeves has mountain to climb in budget after borrowing rise

Rachel Reeves has already seen the most significant numbers setting the backdrop for next month’s budget – the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) forecasts for five years’ time, when her fiscal rules are judged.But September’s public finances data, published on Tuesday, will hardly have lightened the mood in No 11 as she draws up plans for tax rises and spending cuts.Even before the impact of the U-turns on winter fuel payments and disability benefits hits, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the deficit in the first six months of the fiscal year was £7.2bn higher than the OBR predicted at its last forecast in March, at £99.8bn

A picture

Amazon says Web Services are recovering after outage hits millions of users – as it happened

AWS has issued another update, saying that is continues to “observe recovery across all AWS services.”It added that it is succeeding across multiple “Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions.”AWS went on to say: “For Lambda, customers may face intermittent function errors for functions making network requests to other services or systems as we work to address residual network connectivity issues. To recover Lambda’s invocation errors, we slowed down the rate of SQS polling via Lambda Event Source Mappings. We are now increasing the rate of SQS polling as we experience more successful invocations and reduced function errors

A picture

Labour’s clean energy plan needs a revamp: get real on costs and ignore the artificial deadline | Nils Pratley

“I know my job is to get bills down by £300,” said Ed Miliband, the energy security secretary, in his BBC interview at the weekend, acknowledging that the government is on the hook for its pre-election promise to reduce energy bills by 2030.The problem, though, is that the bill-cutting task also seems to be falling by default to Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. It is beginning to look as if the only sure way to make energy bills fall by £300 by 2030 is to shuffle a chunk of the expense into general taxation. Miliband hinted the 5% VAT charge on bills could be removed in next month’s budget, which would cost the government £2.5bn

trendingSee all
A picture

Why thousands are queuing for hours in central Sydney to buy gold

Prakas buys a bit of gold every year, always on a Saturday, for the Hindu festival Diwali. This year, thousands of gold-hungry Australians and a record-breaking price surge got in the way.“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just buy a smaller version … if I can’t afford [it] … just to fulfil the tradition.”The Nepali Australian man made the hour-long trip into Sydney’s CBD on Saturday to buy gold – then turned around when he saw the 400-person queue snaking across Martin Place

A picture

UK office, shop and warehouse construction plunges to 11-year low as costs soar

Construction of offices, shops and warehouses in the UK has fallen to the lowest level in more than a decade amid rising build costs and general uncertainty.All commercial sectors have been hit, with construction across office, retail and industrial sectors down by 21% to 5.85m sq metres (63m sq ft) in the third quarter compared with a year earlier, according to the latest data from CoStar.This is the lowest commercial construction since 2014 and comes as housebuilding is also slowing, in a blow to the Labour government, which last year announced an ambitious target of building 1.5m new homes over five years

A picture

Salesforce’s CEO backtracks after saying Trump should send troops into San Francisco

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host and editor, Blake Montgomery. What I’m watching this week: South Park’s caricature of Peter Thiel and his obsession with the antichrist. Read our reporting on the show’s inspiration: Thiel’s bizarre off-the-record lectures on the subject. And now, let’s get into things

A picture

UK women in tech: we would like to hear from you

The Lovelace Report 2025 in collaboration with WeAreTechWomen has found that between 40,000 and 60,000 women leave the UK’s tech sector every year, costing the economy an estimated £2 billion to £3.5 billion annually.They either exit the industry altogether or move to a new tech employer. An estimated £1.4 billion to £2

A picture

Louis Rees-Zammit recalled to Wales squad after NFL experiment

Louis Rees-Zammit is in line for an international comeback for Wales next month, 21 months after abandoning the sport to try his luck in American football. Rees-Zammit, now 24, is among 39 players named in the first squad to be picked by the new national head coach, Steve Tandy.The British & Irish Lions wing, who won the most recent of his 32 caps at the 2023 World Cup, made the switch to American football in January 2024 but ended up not featuring in a competitive NFL game. He returned to union in August when he joined the English Prem side Bristol.Rees-Zammit has missed his club’s past two games with a foot injury but he is not expected to be a long‑term absentee

A picture

Jack Nicklaus wins $50m verdict in defamation case over LIV Golf allegations

Jack Nicklaus, the 18-time major champion, has won a $50m verdict in a defamation case against his former company, bringing an end to one of golf’s most bitter business feuds.A jury in Palm Beach County, Florida, found that Nicklaus Companies – the firm he founded and later sold – defamed him by spreading false claims that he had considered a $750m offer to become a public face of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League and that he was no longer mentally fit to manage his business affairs. The six-person jury ruled that the company’s actions damaged the 85-year-old’s reputation and exposed him to “ridicule, hatred, mistrust, distrust or contempt”.The verdict came after four and a half hours of deliberation. Nicklaus embraced family and friends in the courtroom after the decision