Aurelia Butler

LONDON (Reuters) – Starting salaries for permanent staff grew at the slowest rate in over three years last month and spending on temporary workers fell by the most since July 2020, recruiters said on Monday, adding to signs of a slowdown in Britain’s job market.March’s survey from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation may help convince Bank of England policymakers that underlying pay pressures in the economy are easing sufficiently to keep inflation at its 2% target.Official measures of pay growth have been rising at an annual rate of around 6%, roughly double the pace most BoE officials think is consistent with on-target inflation.”The data here should support a decision by the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee to loosen its grip on growth in the near-term future. Pay growth has slowed significantly, and is now below the survey’s long-term average for new permanent roles,” REC Chief Executive Neil Carberry said.However, the BoE has been reluctant to put too much weight on REC data in recent months, as the trends it has shown in the recruitment market have been slow to translate into lower wage growth for the broader workforce.Last week a BoE survey of employers showed firms expected to raise pay by 4.9% over the next 12 months.Financial markets predict the BoE will start cutting rates in June or August, with nearly 0.75 percentage points of cuts priced in for 2024.REC said overall demand for staff fell for a fifth month in a row in March, and by almost as much as in February, when demand dropped by the most in more than three years.Downward pressure on pay was caused by a greater supply of candidates, partly because of increased redundancies, it added.REC’s data is based on a survey of around 400 recruitment agencies between March 12 and March 22. More

LONDON (Reuters) – Concern among large British companies about economic uncertainty has fallen to its lowest since mid-2021 but the improved mood is not yet translating into stronger investment, a Deloitte survey showed on Monday.Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession in the second half of last year although recently published surveys have suggested there will be a modest return to growth in the first quarter of 2024.”Uncertainties driven by Brexit, the pandemic and inflation that have clouded the business scene for much of the last eight years seem to be clearing,” Deloitte chief economist Ian Stewart said. Profit margins were forecast to rise for the first time in three years and overall optimism increased for a third quarter in a row to levels similar to those just before periods of relatively strong growth in 2010, 2014 and 2021.Despite this, businesses were more focused on reducing costs and building up cash reserves than longer-term investment.”Expansionary strategies, such as capital spending and bringing in new products or services, are on the backburner. Given the challenges of recent years it is perhaps unsurprising that … a degree of caution persists,” Stewart said.Geopolitics remained the biggest worry of large companies, due to fears of increased cyber attacks or higher energy prices and a general fall in demand.Concern about British productivity and competitiveness rose to second spot – the highest in a decade – displacing disquiet about inflation, energy prices and labour shortages.Executives expected inflation in a year’s time to fall to 2.9%, down from a prediction of 3.5% three months ago, allowing the Bank of England to cut interest rates to 4.25% from 5.25% over the next 12 monthsThe survey is based on responses between March 12 and March 25 from chief financial officers at 64 large British companies and subsidiaries of multinationals. The British companies have a market capitalisation of 200 billion pounds ($252 billion), equivalent to 8% of the stock market.($1 = 0.7946 pounds) More

LONDON (Reuters) -Some of Britain’s top financial firms pay women 28.8% less on average than male counterparts, salary data from 21 companies reviewed by Reuters shows, even though they say they are striving to hire more females for higher-paid, senior roles.Banks, asset managers and insurers across the UK have committed to narrowing long-standing gender pay gaps, which they largely attribute to there being more men in top jobs that come with generous bonuses, while a greater proportion of women are in lower-paid, part-time or junior jobs, with smaller bonuses or none at all.The gap for the top financial services firms has narrowed by two percentage points from a year ago, according to Reuters calculations based on the salary data, but remains far higher than the mean average for all industries in Britain which was 10.7% last year, based on a UK government survey.Since 2017 businesses with more than 250 employees in Britain have been required to disclose the difference between the pay and bonuses of male and female staff. They had a deadline of April 4 to disclose data for April 2023.Many of the big finance companies struggle to attract and retain female talent in high-powered roles, hampering the rate of change across the industry and in some individual cases the situation has not improved.At Goldman Sachs’ international division in London the mean pay gap between men and women rose to 54% in 2023 from 53.2% the prior year and remains the largest among the 21 major finance employers whose data was reviewed by Reuters.“Importantly, this gender pay gap report does not account for pay in similar role or tenure, but we know that we need to do more to increase representation of women at the senior-most levels of the firm,” a spokesperson for Goldman said.Insurer Admiral reported a mean pay gap of 13.5% in 2023, the smallest gap of the data reviewed.SLOW PROGRESS The slow pace of progress has prompted questions as to why the gap is not shrinking more quickly.”Finance sector employers need to ask themselves some hard questions about why women are not reaching their top ranks – and earning the pay that goes with those jobs,” Ann Francke, CEO of the Chartered Management Institute, told Reuters.HSBC disclosed a mean pay gap of 43.2% in 2023, across all its UK entities. In 2022, it reported a 45.2% mean average gap between female and male earnings. More than half the bank’s staff are female, 62% of which are in junior roles, HSBC said. Just under a third of its senior leadership team were women at April 5, 2023, up 1.4 percentage points on 2022.The mean pay gap across Morgan Stanley’s UK workforce narrowed to 40.1% from 40.8%, while Barclays closed its mean pay gap by 2.3 percentage points to 33.6% in 2023.JP Morgan disclosed a 1.5 percentage point fall in its mean pay gap to 26.1%. The U.S. bank said representation of women in senior UK roles stood at 29.5% as of February 2024, its highest level since 2018.Standard Chartered (OTC:SCBFF)’s mean pay gap narrowed the most percentage points across the banks reviewed by Reuters, to 22% in 2023 from 29% the year prior.The Asia-focused bank reported a positive trend in women taking leadership roles, up from 25% in December 2016 to 32.5% at end-December 2023.Among insurers and asset managers, Aviva (LON:AV) said its mean pay gap dropped to 21.3% in 2023, from 24.3% the year prior. Abrdn disclosed a 3.9 percentage point narrowing to 24.8% in 2023. But Legal & General said its pay gap widened, coming in at 21.3% in 2023 from 20.9% the year prior. ‘CHILD PENALTIES’All companies said in their gender pay gap reports that differences reflected the under-representation of women in senior roles and that they were taking steps to address this.The UK government launched the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter in March 2016 to encourage the financial services industry to improve gender balance in senior ranks. The charter now has more than 400 signatories covering about 1.3 million employees. An annual review published last month with think tank New Financial showed that the signatories had increased female representation in senior ranks to 35% on average in 2023, from 34% in 2022. At this pace, the average of those who signed up to the Charter should reach parity in 2038 but not in every sector, the report said.Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) suggests that most UK gender pay gaps reflect “child penalties”, with female average earnings falling sharply after becoming a parent. The IFS found that seven years after the birth of a first child, women’s earnings were on average less than half of men’s. The CMI’s Francke said all industries needed to face bigger consequences of slow or erratic progress in tackling pay inequity, such as fines, restricted access to government or public sector work or “naming-and-shaming”.”The evidence tells us firms that represent the wider population – at every level including the top table – make better decisions and deliver better results,” said Francke. “That alone should be motivation enough to prompt the changes we need to see to close the gender pay gap.”Reuters also reviewed gender pay data for Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche, Lloyds (LON:LLOY), Nationwide, NatWest Bank, UBS, M&G, Phoenix, Schroder Investment Management and St James’s Place. More

LONDON/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Shell and Saudi Aramco (TADAWUL:2222), which are competing to buy the assets of Temasek-owned liquefied natural gas (LNG) trading firm Pavilion Energy, are now locked in price negotiations after completing the due diligence process, three sources with knowledge of the matter said. The potential sale comes a decade after the Singapore state investment firm set up Pavilion Energy to focus on LNG-related investments. The assets could fetch more than $2 billion, two of the sources said.Pavilion Energy, Temasek, Shell (LON:SHEL) and Barclays, which is advising Temasek, all declined to comment. Saudi Aramco, whose gas unit is overseeing its negotiations, did not respond to a request for comment.Aramco believes the deal would position it as a global LNG player. It is accelerating its gas exploration and aims to boost production by more than 60% from 2021 levels by 2030. It is also looking at investing in liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects abroad, after last year buying a minority stake in MidOcean Energy for $500 million.LNG trading accounted for nearly a third of Shell’s profit in the fourth quarter of last year, The company, the world’s largest LNG trader, has operations worldwide that allow it to benefit from regional shifts in demand and pricing.Shell has said it believes gas and LNG will play a critical role in the energy transition by replacing more polluting coal in power plants.As one of four firms appointed by Singapore’s Energy Market Authority to import LNG, Pavilion Energy supplies one-third of the city state’s power and industrial gas demand with LNG and piped natural gas, according to its website. It also supplies LNG to ships in Singapore, the world’s top bunkering port.The company invested about $1.3 billion in three gas blocks in Tanzania in 2013, soon after it was set up, and gained access to Europe with its 2019 purchase of Iberdrola (OTC:IBDRY)’s LNG assets, including regasification capacity in the United Kingdom and Spain.The unlisted company posted profit after tax of $438 million for the year to March 2023, reversing a year earlier loss of $666 million, Temasek’s website showed, while revenue rose 38% to $9.09 billion. Shareholder equity value was $3.63 billion as of March 2023, the website showed. More

(Reuters) – A look at the day ahead in Asian markets.Asian markets on Monday aim to kick off a week jam-packed with top-tier local economic indicators and policy decisions in optimistic mood, after another set of forecast-busting U.S. job growth figures sparked a sharp rise on Wall Street on Friday.The highlights on Monday’s Asian calendar are trade and current account figures from Japan, industrial production from Malaysia, and an interest rate decision in the Philippines.Japan’s Nikkei 225 will be looking to bounce back from Friday’s 2% slide, which sealed a weekly loss of 3.4%, its biggest decline since December 2022. As ever, the exchange rate and threat of yen-supportive intervention from Tokyo will hold great sway over Japanese stocks.The rebound in risk appetite in U.S. trading on Friday was noteworthy as it came despite a spike in bond yields, a 4% weekly rise in oil prices to just under $92 a barrel, and a further erosion of U.S. rate cut expectations.Geopolitical tensions continue to bubble away too, pushing gold to a record high of $2,330 an ounce on Friday.Will Wall Street’s feel good factor extend into Asia on Monday, or will markets feel the squeeze? The signs point to equities in a period of consolidation at the highs rather than a profit-taking run for the hills.The S&P 500 and MSCI World indexes registered their biggest weekly losses in three months in the face of rising bond yields, but they were less than 0.8%. The MSCI Asia ex-Japan index, which is sensitive to higher U.S. yields, was even more resilient, basically ending the week flat. Much of that resilience is down to improving economic numbers from China, and Beijing releases a batch of key indicators this week including lending, trade and inflation.U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has just completed a four-day visit to China. Yellen said that she and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng agreed to launch exchanges on “balanced” economic growth, an effort to address U.S. concerns about China’s excess manufacturing capacity.She also told Premier Li Qiang that bilateral relations were now more stable because the two sides can have “tough” discussions.The Philippine central bank, meanwhile, is widely expected to keep its key policy rate on hold at 6.50% for a fourth meeting on Monday. Inflation picked up for the first time in five months in February, rising to 3.4%, and the central bank cautioned risks to the outlook remained toward the upside.That suggests the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) may be less inclined to reduce its rate ahead of major peers, notably the Fed. Seven out of 19 economists in a Reuters poll predict a 25 basis points cut to 6.25% either in May or June.Here are key developments that could provide more direction to markets on Monday:- Philippines central bank policy meeting- Japan trade, current account (February)- Malaysia industrial production (February)  (By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Bill Berkrot) More

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Food inflation across rich nations has dropped to its lowest level since before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with a slowdown in price growth easing pressure on millions of households hit by the two-year surge in food costs.The annual change in consumer food prices across 38 industrialised countries eased to 5.3 per cent in February, down from 6.2 per cent in the previous month and well below a peak of 16.2 per cent in November 2022, according to the latest OECD data.Food prices surged in 2022 due to rising energy costs and lower trade caused by the war in Ukraine, while larger than expected droughts and Covid-related supply chain disruptions also took a toll. Higher prices contributed to a record 333mn people experiencing acute food insecurity in 2023, according to the World Food Programme.“We have seen the worst of high food inflation,” said Carlos Mera, head of agricultural commodities at Rabobank.“Agricultural commodity prices have dropped significantly in the last two years, since the peak in prices that followed the invasion of Ukraine, and this is acting as a disinflationary force even at [the] retail level.”“Supply chains have fully normalised, gas prices have come down to levels which are historically considered more normal and Ukraine grain exports have resumed via the Black Sea corridor,” said Tomasz Wieladek, economist at investment company T Rowe Price. “The unwinding of these factors suggests that global food disinflation will probably continue.”The OECD is expected to comment on the food price figure, which is the lowest since October 2021, in its broader inflation update on Monday.Separate figures published on Friday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) showed that the prices of foodstuffs including cereal, sugar, and meat had generally come down from their record peaks in 2022. The FAO food commodity price index increased marginally to 118.3 in March, following a seven-month decline. But the figure was still down 9.9 points from last March.The easing in food price inflation was widespread across industrialised countries in February, with the latest OECD reading halved or almost halved from recent peaks. In the US, annual food price inflation dropped to 2.2 per cent in February, down from a peak of 11.4 per cent in August 2022 and the lowest since May 2021. In the UK, prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 5 per cent in the year to February, the lowest since the start of 2022 and well below the 45-year high of 19.2 per cent in March 2023.  Across the eurozone, the annual rate of food and non-alcoholic beverage prices eased to 2.7 per cent in March, the first reading below 3 per cent since November 2021, according to flash Eurostat estimates. Some countries continue to struggle with higher-than-normal food prices. The March uptick in the FAO index was driven by a surge in prices for vegetable oils such as soy, sunflower and rapeseed, due to a seasonal decrease in output and an unexpected rise in demand from south-east Asia.“Generally, food price inflation is coming down in the developed world and emerging markets, but we are seeing pockets where things are still difficult, most notably, countries with exchange rate pressures that rely on imports,” said Kiran Ahmed, lead economist at Oxford Economics. Turkey, an OECD country, registered annual food inflation of 70.4 per cent in March as the lira has continued to weaken against the dollar. Similarly, food inflation accelerated to an annual rate of 37.9 per cent in February in Nigeria, which relies on foodstuffs imports and recently devalued its currency. There has also been a sustained increase in food prices in many countries where rice is a dietary staple, after an Indian ban on rice exports affected supply. Standard rice prices were up 25 per cent annually in February, according to the IMF, and food price inflation has continued to rise in countries that rely on imports of Indian rice, such as the Philippines and Bangladesh, at 3.4 per cent and 9.44 per cent in the same month.However, the fall in wholesale agricultural prices, especially for cereal, points to disinflation continuing in most countries in the months ahead. “In past price spikes, after a delay, [agricultural] producers have shifted to meeting demand,” said Steve Wiggins, principal research fellow at ODI, a global affairs think-tank. “I expect to see that prices will continue to fall.”The fall in the prices of agricultural commodities has not stopped food consumer prices from rising overall because commodities account for a relatively small proportion of the retail costs. The price of bread, for example, also depends on the cost of work, marketing, packaging, energy, distribution, profit margins and promotion. Mera at Rabobank estimates the price of wheat makes up 10 per cent of the total bread cost at most.Commodities prices are also passed to consumers with a time lag, meaning that recent agricultural price declines will be reflected on grocery shelves in the coming year. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Within the overall misery of eurozone stagnation — the bloc’s economy has flatlined since the autumn of 2022 — there are glimpses of good news. The fact that southern Europe has kept up a decent growth pace while the northern core has been slipping is getting well-deserved, if still insufficient, attention.It was about time too. In Europe’s integrated economy, poorer countries should be steadily catching up with richer ones. Economic convergence was one of the big promises of both the single market and the common currency. Yet after 2009, ill-conceived policy responses to debt crises caused divergence rather than convergence for southern Europe (although not, fortunately, for eastern member states). The combined size of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece’s economies is today exactly the same, relative to Germany’s, as at the euro’s birth in 1999.The importance of the return of convergence cannot be overstated: it underpins EU member states’ sense of a common destiny, without which political cohesion is impossible. It is from this perspective that we must see the extraordinary decision in 2020 to create a pandemic recovery fund through which EU states would borrow in common to support investments disproportionately in poorer members.It was the threat of fatal divergence that made Germany accept the “eurobonds” and “transfer union” that had long been anathema for Berlin. Poorer EU nations, it was feared, would not be able to match Germany’s deep-pocketed Covid subsidies to its companies. The resulting advantage for German exporters would undermine faith in the single market itself.Similarly, the convergence we are now seeing must to a large extent be attributed precisely to the recovery fund, which has relieved pressure on poorer countries’ public finances, promised support for productive investments and incentivised long-needed reforms. How leaders judge the experience with the recovery fund is going to loom over a lot of big political decisions to be made in the EU in the next few years. So what are the lessons to be taken on board?First, that the bold decision four years ago has paid off. For all the instances of alleged waste and fraud, the recovery fund has worked as intended. The bigger recipients of the funds have seen the higher growth rates, which have restarted — at least for now — the economic convergence both the single market and the single currency promised. Sustaining this is a prerequisite for Europe as a whole to strengthen its performance as both a political and economic actor.The second lesson is that while the original motivation for the recovery fund may have disappeared along with Covid and its barrage of furlough and business support schemes, something very much like the original argument looks set to stay. The political determination to decarbonise, digitise and defend Europe’s economies will require stronger public incentives for business investment. While there are many dumb ways of doing subsidy policy, the dumbest is not to have any subsidy policy at all, and there is a real risk that the richer and bigger countries will again spend more than others can match.So long as poorer countries feel outspent in the subsidy race, the political sustainability of the single market is at risk. That is, after all, why the EU has a world-class subsidy control system. But like it or not, we live in a world where more of our political goals and challenges are ones that markets on their own are not able to meet, no matter how competitive and level the playing field is. The need for greater public spending on investment is increasingly clear — the question is whether it will be national or common spending.Third, the recovery fund has proved that it is possible to do things differently, and better. While it was the first large-scale transfer to poorer member countries funded by borrowing, it was not the first such transfer at all. There have long been “cohesion funds” which direct funds to the least economically developed regions of the EU, and which make up one-third or so of the bloc’s budget.Some of the largest net contributors to the EU budget are discreetly suggesting the recovery fund’s model of strict and specific “milestones”, which need to be achieved for promised funds to be paid out, is a better way to govern transfers between EU countries. The European Commission has reportedly drawn up plans for making cohesion funding more performance-based.So don’t heed the denials that either cohesion funding could change or the recovery fund be renewed or expanded. As the EU approaches its next seven-year budget cycle, there is more to play for than in a very long [email protected] More