Aurelia Butler

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) said new job postings fell by 25% in the last week of March from a week earlier, returning to the kind of increase seen in mid-January.”The jobs market has been super-heated in the first few months of this year, and was always likely to stabilise in the spring. We may be seeing the first signs of that now,” REC chief executive Neil Carberry said.”Over the next few weeks, we will see whether this is the cooling we expected, or a slower market developing as employers factor rising inflation into their plans.”Staff shortages are a worry for the Bank of England which has raised interest rates at each of its last three meetings to try to stop the jump in inflation to a 30-year high of 6.2% from turning into a longer-term price growth problem.REC said demand was for hairdressers and barbers as well as security and bar staff and there were also big increases in adverts for other skilled occupations such as veterinarians and crane drivers. The total of 1.83 million active jobs ads had been stable since early March, it said. More

At least 53 cultural sites in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed since Russia invaded in February, and the destruction continues in towns besieged or bombarded by Moscow’s forces, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.“We have a damage control meeting every day and the list is lengthening,” said Ernesto Ottone, assistant director-general for culture, at Unesco headquarters in Paris on Friday. “We are very worried about the situation, not only humanitarian but also for the protection of cultural heritage. Humanity’s heritage is indeed in peril.”Ottone and Lazare Eloundou Assomo, director of Unesco’s world heritage centre, said they had named only those sites where damage had been verified. So far none of Ukraine’s seven listed world heritage sites, which include the St Sophia cathedral in the capital Kyiv, were known to have been hit.Audrey Azoulay, who heads Unesco, wrote to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov last month to remind Moscow of its obligations to protect cultural sites under the 1954 Hague Convention, to which both Russia and Ukraine are signatories. Unesco said Lavrov had replied that “the Russian Federation is well aware of its obligations under international humanitarian law, including the 1954 Hague Convention”.The Ukrainian sites damaged or destroyed include 29 churches, several museums and war monuments, and theatres in Mariupol and Kharkiv. Kharkiv is the worst-hit region in terms of affected sites, followed by Donetsk.Little information has come out of Chernihiv, another heavily bombarded town, but Eloundou Assomo expressed concern about the historic town centre and its buildings dating back a millennium.Deliberate destruction of cultural heritage in time of conflict is considered a war crime under international law, the Unesco officials noted.This post has been updated to include a reply from Sergei Lavrov More

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian home prices are slowly coming back to earth as the sky-high markets of Sydney and Melbourne lose some heat, though there is still plenty of lift in the smaller cities and regions.Figures from property consultant CoreLogic out on Friday showed prices in the combined capital cities edged up only 0.3% in March, from February, as Sydney dropped 0.2% and Melbourne 0.1%. Brisbane fared much better with a rise of 2.0%, while Perth rose 1.0% and Adelaide 1.9%.Values in the regions jumped 1.7% amid a shift to country living and greater space. For the whole March quarter, regional prices climbed 5.1% compared to just 1.5% for the cities.Combined, prices nationally rose 0.7% in March, to be up 18.2% on the year.”Virtually every capital city and major rest-of-state region has moved through a peak in the trend rate of growth some time last year or earlier this year,” said CoreLogic’s research director, Tim Lawless.”The sharpest slowdown has been in Sydney, where housing prices are the most unaffordable, advertised supply is trending higher and sales activity is down over the year.”The median price of a home in Sydney is A$1.1 million ($823,240.00), well above the national median of A$739,000, while a house would set you back A$1.4 million.The market had its strongest year ever in 2021 with the notional value of Australia’s 10.8 million homes rising by A$2 trillion to A$9.9 trillion.The boom was a windfall for household wealth and consumer spending power, but also caused concerns about affordability that will be hot-button issue for Federal elections due in May.An explosion in mortgage debt also led regulators to tighten lending standards and is adding to the case for a rise in interest rates from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).($1 = 1.3362 Australian dollars) More

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s central bank decided on Wednesday to postpone payments to financial institutions for resources held in accounts from the Pix instant payment system, underscoring mounting risks from striking workers despite the relatively small impact for banks.The payment, which was to add interest at the bank’s Selic benchmark rate for the time the funds were held, was due to be made for the first time on Friday.According to the central bank analysts association ANBCB, financial institutions will no longer receive around 2 million reais ($422,030) per day.”The central bank’s workers are carrying out daily partial stoppages and will go on strike from April 1, which affects the performance of various processes,” Monetary Policy Director Bruno Serra said in a vote supporting the decision on Wednesday.To preserve the security of the systems and the maintenance of essential activities ahead of the strike, Serra said it was considered appropriate to postpone the payments, adding they would be again proposed “when the issues are overcome.”Brazil’s central bank employees voted on Monday for an indefinite strike starting on April 1 in the face of unanswered demands about a wage increase. Until now, partial shutdowns have been affecting the release of economic indicators and other data.The central bank said the measure aims to preserve the proper functioning of IT systems considering “the potential risks” imposed by the strike.The financial industry group Febraban called the decision “prudent” adding that policymakers had avoided implementing new features on more sensitive days. ($1 = 4.7302 reais) More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Export-Import Bank’s board of directors on Thursday voted to formalize the bank’s withdrawal from any further business in Russia and approved financing and guarantee deals worth up to $381 million for Iraq, Sri Lanka and Albania.The U.S. government export credit agency said its board also voted to notify Congress of a proposed renewal of a $450 million credit guarantee to Citibank that backs a $500 million facility to allow 365 suppliers of aircraft maker Boeing (NYSE:BA) to receive accelerated receivables payments related to export sales of Boeing aircraft. The notification is require for any transaction over $100 million. After 35 days, the board can hold a final approval vote.EXIM said the board, meeting for the first time under new president and chair Reta Jo Lewis, approved a $48 million loan guarantee to support the sale of 12 U.S.-made Wabtec Corp locomotives to Sri Lanka Railways. Wabtec, which acquired General Electric (NYSE:GE)’s locomotive business in 2019, won the $56 million contract over Chinese competitors, EXIM said.The lender also approved a preliminary commitment for a nearly $33 million energy efficiency authorization for Albania’s national electric utility to rehabilitate its metering capabilities.For Iraq, the board approved a resolution that authorizes EXIM bank officers to approve, deny and amend requests for insurance coverage on letters of credit used by the Trade Bank of Iraq for up to $300 million on purchases of U.S. goods and services.The formal closing of Russian business follows an announcement last week by EXIM and export credit agencies in Britain and Canada to withdraw all support from Russia and Belarus in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. EXIM previously had an administrative hold prohibiting Russian business since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. EXIM still has $410 million in prior credit exposure to Russia, primarily for aviation sector loan guarantees that were granted before Crimea’s annexation.”EXIM is working expeditiously to resolve those transaction repayments,” the bank said. More