British capitalism seems to be on a roll. A million job vacancies were advertised in July, a new monthly record. Early signs are that unwinding the furlough scheme, now under way, is not going to cause a rise in unemployment.

House prices are rising at the fastest rate since 2004. Public borrowing in July halved compared with last July. Many new companies are being created. Business confidence is rising. The recovery is moving so fast as threats of lockdown recede that the UK on average will get back to pre-pandemic levels of output before the year is out. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, can indulge his boss’s tantrums; his political position could hardly be stronger.

Sceptics, pretty much everyone, including me, have been confounded. In fairness, nobody foresaw, or could foresee, the incredible development of effective vaccines and the rapid speed of rollout. Also, more than 7 million people have cascaded out of furlough, using it as it was intended, protecting...

It was supposed to be a deal no UK prime minister could ever agree to, an Irish sea border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Half a year on from Boris Johnson doing exactly that, while denying the fact, the economic consequences are becoming clearer.

Figures published by the Irish government last week indicate that a heavy toll for British trade can be added to the political turmoil unleashed by Johnson’s signing up to the Northern Ireland protocol. The data shows evidence beginning to emerge of deeper economic unity on the island of Ireland, at a time when shipments between Britain and Northern Ireland have been disrupted by the Brexit border checks the prime minister promised would never happen.

With Northern Ireland effectively remaining a member of the EU’s single market, the value of goods sent to the republic soared to €1.8bn (£1.5bn) in the first six months of 2021, an increase of 77% over the same period in 2020. Irish goods exports to the...

Once, the leaders of British towns and cities found it hard to imagine a future for their centres that wasn’t retail and more retail. In Hastings, a shopping centre was built over a picturesque county cricket ground. In Hull, attractive docks were filled in. Developers and chain stores were wooed, often at the expense of independent businesses. Urban life was conceived as shopping and little else.

Now those same malls and precincts have become a liability. Covid has hastened a decline that was already evident, thanks largely to the rise of online shopping.

They are going the same way as the abandoned factories and warehouses of former industrial zones, with the difference that they threaten to desolate the historic hearts of the towns in which they are located. It’s been clear for a while now that different futures have to be imagined for these places.

All of which makes Stockton-on-Tees a heartening example. Here, the council has striven to bring uses...

In a Politburo group study session on 23 November 2015, China’s president, Xi Jinping, recommended the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty. “The rich data he used demonstrated that … unrestrained capitalism accelerates wealth inequality … [His] conclusion is worth us pondering on.”

Back then, Piketty’s work on inequality was reported all over the world and sparked soul-searching among elites from Wall Street to Main Street. Some were surprised that Xi was paying attention, too.

Since his ascent to power in 2012, Xi has discussed the issue of inequality on several occasions. Early this year, he told his provincial ministerial-level cadres that achieving common prosperity was “not just an economic issue, but a significant political one that matters to the party’s basis to rule”.

In the four decades since Xi’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping enabled economic liberalisation, booms in manufacturing and technology have...

Not so long ago it may have seemed more like a futuristic vision of the workplace – or a hospital.

But the hands-free door handles, self-cleaning surfaces, antimicrobial paint, air-monitoring display tools, UV light disinfection robots, and 135 other measures at an office block in Bucharest are here to stay, say the creators behind what they are touting as one of the world’s most virus-resilient workplaces, which they hope will become the new normal in office design.

Entering H3, a five-storey building in a western neighbourhood of the Romanian capital, is like learning the steps to a new dance. A flick of the wrist opens the door, and a red line marks the spot at which to stand from where a thermal body camera 2 metres away scans arrivals for signs of fever. Those who are “green-lighted” can follow the tracks to the self-clean lift, step on one of two foot pads and be transported through the building, safe in the knowledge that a UV lighting disinfection...

The City of London will be the target of a new round of Extinction Rebellion protests aimed at highlighting the role of high finance in the climate crisis, starting next week and carrying on for at least a fortnight.

Thousands of protesters are expected to take part in a series of actions in the City, details of which are under wraps. These will target businesses headquartered in the Square Mile financial district, and will include site occupations. There are no plans to disrupt public transport, as has occurred during some previous actions.

Extinction Rebellion said the protests would be “joyous” and have a “celebratory” air while highlighting the billions poured into fossil fuels and high-carbon activities by financiers based in London’s financial districts.

Businesses listed on the London Stock Exchange or financed from the UK account for about 15% of global carbon emissions, according to the activist group, and if London’s financial markets were a...

It is already the UK’s largest mortgage lender, and now Lloyds Banking Group aims to become one of its biggest private landlords, with a target of buying 50,000 homes in the next 10 years.

Lloyds is the latest big name on the high street to move into the property market: last month it emerged that the retailer John Lewis was considering plans to build 10,000 rental homes over the next decade. According to accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, “everyone wants to become a landlord”.

Lloyds has made no secret of its aims: early last month it announced its entry into the private rental market, becoming the first major British high street bank to make such a move. It revealed its first development would be Fletton Quays in Peterborough, where 45 flats would be available for rent over the coming weeks.

Lloyds said at the time that the venture, via a standalone brand called Citra Living, “will initially start small”. However, an internal job advertisement has...

Volkswagen and Toyota have become the latest carmakers to warn about production cuts because of the global computer chip shortage.

German car manufacturer Volkswagen said a semiconductor supply crunch could force it to slow production lines during the autumn, adding to cuts that have been in place since February. Japanese firm Toyota also reported that it would slash output by 40% in September.

Carmakers have struggled after a recovery in demand stretched supply chains earlier this year, with Covid-19 outbreaks across Asia hitting chip production and operations at commercial ports.

“We currently expect supply of chips in the third quarter to be very volatile and tight,” said Volkswagen, the second largest carmaker behind Toyota.

“We can’t rule out further changes to production,” the company told the Reuters news agency.

The Wolfsburg-based carmaker said it expected the situation would improve by the end of the year, and aimed to make up for...

When Fred Schoeps bought a 150-year-old building in downtown Ithaca, New York, a decade ago, he was one of only a handful of building owners dedicated to ending their reliance on fossil fuels and reducing their carbon footprint.

His three-year renovation of the building, comprising three apartments above a skate store, included installing energy-efficient windows and insulation, plus fully electric appliances, heating and cooling systems.

But while that was an achievement on its own, said Schoeps, Ithaca can not address climate change one building at a time. “In order to move the needle, you’ve got to think in terms of a thousand [buildings],” he said.

Luis Aguirre-Torres, Ithaca’s new director of sustainability, is trying to do exactly that. The upstate New York city of 30,000, home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, adopted a Green New Deal in 2019, a big part of which involves decarbonizing thousands of privately owned commercial and...

European financial markets have fallen sharply on fears that central banks will start tapering their emergency Covid-19 support packages, despite slowing growth in the world economy.

In London, the FTSE 100 fell by more than 160 points, or about 2.3%, on Thursday morning to trade at about 7,000 as share prices tumbled across the continent after the US Federal Reserve warned it could start cutting back support for the economy this year.

Stock markets in Germany, France and Italy were down by more than 2%, while the Ibex in Spain was 1.7% lower.

Fed officials signalled late on Wednesday that the threshold for the US central bank reining in its quantitative easing bond-buying programme could be breached in the final three months of the year, sooner than investors’ anticipated.

Indicating that preparations would soon be under way for tapering emergency support, despite the Delta variant of Covid-19 holding back the pace of the global economic...

Fed says it will start reducing the pace of asset purchases this year but interest rates still some way off; oil prices in longest losing streak since February 2020 due to demand fears

The annual pay of FTSE 100 chief executives fell during the pandemic but still equates to what a key worker would earn in a lifetime, according to a report that highlights the UK’s wage divide and the taxpayer support that has kept some companies afloat.

The bosses of companies in the blue-chip share index were paid £2.69m on average in 2020, the High Pay Centre said, with vaccine-maker AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, taking top spot thanks to a £15.45m deal.

The average pay figure fell by 17% compared with the £3.25m recorded in 2019 but is still 86 times the £31,000 that an ordinary British worker can expect to earn in a year.

The centre and the GMB trade union pointed to the gulf between executive rewards and ordinary wages, and raised concerns that some businesses offering bumper pay deals have relied on taxpayer backing during the pandemic.

Across the nine companies that used the furlough scheme for their employees, but have not...

The message lit up her phone late last Thursday afternoon, and as soon as Vicky Alvarez saw it the tears came. She ducked out of her meeting, hurried to the loo and began phoning family.

“We’ve won,” she told them.

“Won what, the lottery?”

“No, bigger than that.”

Much bigger. Alvarez isn’t just a victor in a battle that has swallowed 17 years of her life; she stands now at the intersection of some of the largest questions facing our pandemic-battered cities: how they are run and in whose interests. If you want to gauge where post-Covid, post-Brexit London could go next, Alvarez and her allies are the ones to watch.

You might assume Alvarez is wheeler-dealing at City Hall or flogging penthouses to passing oligarchs In fact, she runs a stall in a market in one of the poorest parts of Britain. Yet Alvarez and 40-odd other traders, most of whom are women from across South America, have created something that amounts to so much more.

The...

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green free steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Downing Street has given its strongest signal yet that the pensions triple lock will be watered down because of the recent surge in average earnings, which under current rules would deliver a rise of more than 8% for pensioners next year.

Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said on Wednesday there were concerns about linking the rise in state pensions to earnings.

“I think we recognise the legitimate concerns about potentially artificially inflated earnings impacting the uprating of pensions,” he said. “Any decision on future changes to the triple lock will be taken at the appropriate time based on the latest data, and of course we will continue to support older people, while ensuring future decisions are fair with pensioners and taxpayers. No decisions have been made.”

In a field in Norfolk, the sight of lush green leaves sprouting from the soil are giving farmer Ed Lankfer cause for optimism. “I think this is one of the best crops we have ever grown,” he says, surveying one of his fields of sugar beet.

The signs are promising so far for this year’s harvest – known in the trade as a campaign – which takes place later than other crops, during the autumn and winter. It would mark quite the turnaround from 2020’s terrible harvest, when bad weather and pests caused yields of the white sugar-yielding root to plummet by as much as 60%, leaving Lankfer with a £12,000 loss.

Sugar beet has been grown on Lankfer’s 225-hectare (556 acres) family farm in the village of Wereham since his grandfather first introduced it in 1928, alongside other crops. However, recent years of falling prices, coupled with risk from weather and disease, have many farmers questioning whether there is a future in growing it.

This is before growers feel...

Half the UK’s fishing fleet is at least 30 years old and uses fuel oil that is particularly polluting, according to a report that examines the outsized impact of British ships on the climate crisis.

UK fisheries are estimated to have emitted 914.4 kilotons of CO2 over a one-year period, equivalent to the annual energy use of more than 110,000 homes, the report by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), WWF and RSPB says.

“Certain types of trawlers use more carbon and emit more fuel emissions than other types of fishing,” said Gareth Cunningham, the head of fisheries and aquaculture at the MCS. “That’s mainly because they use a massive piece of gear and drag it along the seabed. Other types of fishing catch more fish and use a lot less carbon.”

The report calls for policymakers to modernise the British fishing fleet, to move away from carbon-spewing engines and harmful practices such as bottom-trawling, and to demand the same standards from any vessels...

It must have come as a shock to those who make a living frightening homeowners about the imminent rise in their mortgage interest.

Headlines warning of hyper inflation and the threat of higher borrowing costs look a little silly after the inflation rate fell by more than expected in July, easing back down to the Bank of England target of 2%.

Much of the speculation after a rise in June to 2.5% asked whether the UK was heading for a long period of spiralling prices that would force a fundamental review by officials in Threadneedle Street.

Although inflation is still expected to rise further this year, the fall in July means pressure on the central bank to calm down the economy with higher borrowing costs has, for the time being, eased somewhat.

Anyone shopping on the high street for clothes enjoyed a fall in prices. Even car drivers had a good day. While petrol prices remain high at about £1.32 at the pumps, the cost has stabilised in recent months...

Price cutting by clothing and footwear retailers and cheaper electronic goods helped push down the annual rate of UK inflation by more than expected last month from 2.5% to 2%, according to official figures.

The return of the traditional summer sales after the hiatus last year caused by the coronavirus pandemic was a factor in bringing the government’s main measure of the cost of living back to its target rate, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Smaller discounts were on offer in 2020 when retailers were seeking to maximise sales after the prolonged spring lockdown of the economy. The earlier easing of restrictions during 2021 has meant a more normal pattern of July bargains has resumed, although the 2% drop in the cost of clothing was smaller than the discounts recorded in pre-crisis years.

The ONS said there had also been a fall in the cost of recreation and culture, a category that includes computers, recording equipment, computer games,...

Despite a temporary setback in July, UK inflation is unlikely to be far off 3% in August and will probably be fairly close to the Bank of England’s 4% forecast by November. But things are likely to calm down into 2022, and we don’t think inflation will be enough of a concern for policymakers to hike interest rates before late next year.

Woodside Petroleum has not given a guarantee it will pay for billions of dollars in decommissioning and remediation costs linked to a portfolio of oil and gas fields it has agreed to take over from BHP.

Green groups say Woodside lacks credibility in paying for clean-ups after selling a floating rig, Northern Endeavour, for a nominal amount to a company that collapsed three years later without paying decommissioning costs estimated at between $200m and $1bn. Woodside has claimed the sale was reviewed by regulators and approved.

“We are committed to working with the Australian government and our industry peers to collaboratively develop and improve the decommissioning framework so that it strengthens protections for the environment, taxpayers, the government and industry.”

In May’s budget, the Morrison government slapped a levy on the entire offshore oil and gas industry to pay for the decommissioning of Northern Endeavour, sparking outrage among...

Farewell, BHP, one of the largest companies on the London stock market at almost £130bn.

The Melbourne-based mining company has tired of its clunky dual-headed Anglo-Australian corporate structure and wants to unify as a purely Australian entity with a primary listing in Sydney. It’ll keep a listing in London but it won’t be a “premium” version, the only sort that gets you into the FTSE 100. A large hole will appear in the UK’s blue-chip index.

A humiliation for London and its capital markets? A blow for the “open for business” refrain that ministers find so addictive? Well, yes, but only up to a point. Unilever’s failed attempt to go Dutch a couple of years ago was a genuine reason to be indignant, because the consumer goods giant’s logic was flimsy. BHP has a better story, even if it’s not the one it was telling only a couple of years ago.

For starters, the company is obviously Australian by history and culture. Its on-the-ground presence in the UK...

Buying an electric vehicle may seem like the ethical choice but a campaign group has warned that Glencore’s investment in the sector could muddy the waters.

The concerns revolve around multiple corruption investigations into Glencore’s mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, a crucial metal in electric battery manufacture.