Business confidence falling in UK and eurozone, recruiters warn
Recruitment companies have warned about declining confidence across Europe and the UK, as political uncertainty adds to concerns about economic growth.The FTSE 250 recruiter PageGroup said on Monday that profits had dropped by nearly a quarter in Germany and 17% in France during the last three months of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023.Its UK profits fell by 14%, as companies grew more nervous about taking on new staff.Morgan McKinley, another British recruiter, said the number of job openings in London’s financial services sector dropped by 12% year on year in the final quarter of 2024.The recruiters’ gloom will add to concerns about the prospects for the economies of the eurozone, and the UK.
Europe’s largest economies are struggling with faltering growth,Germany, the EU’s largest economy, has oscillated between growth and contraction every quarter for the last two years, while narrowly avoiding a technical recession,The economic struggles contributed to the collapse of the three-way “traffic light” coalition and an early election next month,France is also going through a period of political instability, with the centrist prime, minister François Bayrou, trying to lead the country’s fourth government of the last 12 months,The UK government under Labour’s Keir Starmer is also struggling to make an impact after six months in charge.
It is trying to work out how to respond to an increase in government bond yields and a decline in the value of the pound prompted by the election of Donald Trump and the possibility of steep tariffs.PageGroup said that “a high degree of macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty remains across the majority of our markets, notably in France and Germany”.The European Central Bank (ECB) is preparing to cut interest rates this year.However, the ECB’s chief economist, Philip Lane, said the central bank needed to find a “middle path” of rate cuts to support the economy, but not going too fast and stimulating further inflation.“What we will have to work out this year is the middle path of being neither too aggressive nor too cautious in our actions,” Lane said, in an interview with Austrian newspaper Der Standard published on Monday.
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Hello, and welcome back to TechScape. Last Tuesday, I predicted Meta would enter a new political era after the departure of Nick Clegg. Two hours after I published last week’s newsletter, Mark Zuckerberg declared that the new conservative phase would begin. It was sooner and more brazen than I had expected – and faster-paced. Zuckerberg announced he would disband Meta’s US fact-checking operation because he believes his fact-checkers have been too politically biased
Google investigated by UK watchdog over search dominance
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Amazon makes ‘largest ever’ UK order of electric trucks to cut carbon emissions
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Ministers consider ban on all UK public bodies making ransomware payments
Schools, the NHS and local councils will be banned from making ransomware payments under government proposals to tackle hackers.In a crackdown on such cyber-attacks, operators of critical national infrastructure will be barred from bowing to demands when criminal gangs hold IT systems hostage.Payouts by private companies will have to be reported to the government and could be blocked if they are made to sanctioned groups or foreign states. Reporting ransomware attacks will also be made mandatory if the proposals become law.The plans, described by one expert as “the most significant intervention against ransomware by any national government to date”, will bring other public bodies into line with government departments, which are already banned from making payments
Meta’s ditching of factcheckers is potentially dangerous and a disservice | Letters
Meta’s move to scrap factcheckers is not about “complexity”, as it says (Report, 8 January), but to support Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s agenda.It is widely agreed that effective, fast and unbiased factchecking is essential for the proper functioning of social media platforms. Similarly, principles of free speech are foundational to fostering communication and public debate in a healthy democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta is to follow X in introducing user-generated notes raises serious concerns.The shift will intensify pressures on vulnerable groups, including children, minorities, gender rights advocates and LGBTQ+ communities, who are already targeted by hate speech
Water shortage fears as Labour’s first AI growth zone sited close to new reservoir
Labour’s first artificial intelligence growth zone will be sited close to the UK’s first new reservoir in 30 years, sparking fears that the AI push will add to the “severe pressure” on water supplies in the area.Keir Starmer announced on Monday that he would hugely increase artificial intelligence capacity and reduce planning restrictions on companies that wanted to build datacentres by setting up “growth zones” with fewer constraints.The first of these will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, only seven miles from a reservoir planned by Thames Water in Abingdon, which was supposed to provide water to people in the severely water-stressed south-east of England. This is the area of the country most at risk of running out of water, according to the Environment Agency. Oxfordshire has faced particular issues, with areas reliant on bottled water during heatwaves
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