Aurelia Butler

The CBI’s monthly growth indicator – which combines surveys of output from manufacturers, retailers and other services companies – fell 11 points to +21 in the three months to December, the lowest since the three months to April.Growth was expected to slow again in the coming three months as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus weighs on the economy.”Substantial challenges remain for businesses heading into Christmas: labour and materials shortages, rising costs and new COVID measures are restricting businesses’ ability to trade during this crucial period,” CBI Lead Economist Alpesh Paleja said in a statement.Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ruled out new COVID restrictions in England before Christmas but said he might have to act afterwards. Scotland and Wales have tightened controls.Alpesh said finance minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement on Tuesday of 1 billion pounds ($1.33 billion) in support for hospitality and leisure firms would provide a breathing space.”But with the potential of further measures still weighing on firms, the government must monitor the situation closely and ensure that any new restrictions go in lock-step with further targeted cashflow support,” he said.Despite the slowdown, the CBI’s growth gauge remained a long way above its long-run average of +4. Only manufacturers saw an acceleration in growth in the three months to December. Business and professional services, consumer services and distribution firms all reported slower growth, the CBI said.($1 = 0.7510 pounds) More

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan’s government is set to unveil its largest annual budget on Friday with $943 billion in spending for the fiscal year beginning next April, further straining the industrial world’s heaviest debt, a draft plan seen by Reuters showed.The first annual budget to be compiled by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government got a boost from COVID-19 countermeasures, social security spending to support a fast-ageing population and military outlays to deal with threats from China.The 107.6 trillion yen ($943 billion) annual budget underscores the challenge for Kishida to realise “new capitalism” with a cycle of growth and wealth distribution and restore tattered public finances.It would mark a 1% rise from this year’s initial level, rising 10 years in a row.From Europe to America, policymakers globally are unwinding crisis-mode stimulus but Japan’s fragile economic recovery has kept it from following suit, straining public debt that tops twice the size of its economy.In a show of will to improve public finances, Kishida’s government will likely trim new borrowing next fiscal year to 36.93 trillion yen from an initially planned 43.6 trillion yen for this year, the draft showed.Excluding mandatory expenditure such as education and public works, Japan’s budget has been stretched, leaving little room for spending in growth areas like green and digital transformation.The spending plan needs be approved by parliament by this fiscal year-end next March.It will be rolled out along with the first extra budget for this fiscal year as a combined 16-month budget aimed for seamless spending to secure post-COVID recovery.Japan’s economy, the world’s third largest, contracted an annualised 3.6% in the July-September quarter following a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, putting a drag on private consumption that makes up more than half of the economy.In a glimmer of hope, tax revenue is expected to grow by 7.79 trillion yen from this year’s initial estimate to reach a record 65.24 trillion yen, the draft showed, in a sign of rising corporate profit and household income.($1 = 114.1100 yen) More

(Reuters) – The three largest U.S. drug distributors announced on Wednesday an extension to a key Jan. 2 deadline for cities and counties to join a proposed $21 billion settlement resolving claims that the companies fueled the nation’s opioid epidemic.Plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiated the deal with McKesson Corp (NYSE:MCK), AmerisourceBergen (NYSE:ABC) Corp and Cardinal Health Inc (NYSE:CAH) called the three-week extension a positive development that would allow some holdout states and their local governments to sign on. The new deadline is Jan. 26.More than 3,300 lawsuits largely by state and local governments have been filed seeking to hold those and other companies responsible for an opioid abuse crisis that led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths over two decades. The companies deny wrongdoing.The distributors said in September that 42 states, five territories and Washington, D.C., had agreed to participate in the global settlement. A similar number backed a related $5 billion deal with Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ).About $10.7 billion of the overall $26 billion is tied to the extent that cities, town and counties participate, and local government councils have been voting in recent weeks to join and resolve their claims.Peter Mougey, a plaintiffs’ lawyer involved in the settlement, said there had been a “huge groundswell of support” and that he expected nearly 80% of local governments that sued to be on board.But Mougey, a partner at Levin Papantonio, and Paul Geller, a lead negotiator at plaintiffs’ law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, said more time was needed to allow more states to join. New Mexico on Dec. 7 signed on, and Mougey said more are close.”A combination of additional states signing on along with the natural impact of the holidays – which are both positives – led the parties to recognize a short extension made sense,” Geller said in a statement. Geller said he expected a similar deadline extension for J&J, which had no comment.AmerisourceBergen said it “remains optimistic that additional states and municipalities will sign on during the extension beyond the original deadline.” (This story adds missing quote mark in eighth paragraph) More

New York reported more than 28,000 new Covid-19 cases, setting a record for daily cases for the fifth time in six days.A further 28,924 infections were reported to the state, reflecting cases on December 21, governor Kathy Hochul announced on Wednesday.That works out to a statewide rate of about 115 infections per 100,000, Hochul said during a press briefing. “This virus is going vertical; it’s going straight up,” she added.New York’s daily caseload topped 20,000 on December 16 for the first time since the start of the pandemic and has subsequently remained above that level, according to data from the state’s health department. The latest figure surpassed the previous record of 23,391 reported on December 19.The current surge in coronavirus cases in New York and across the US has largely been propelled by the new Omicron variant. About 73 per cent of new Covid-19 cases in the US during the week ended December 18 were estimated to be linked to Omicron, according to data earlier this week from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That makes it the dominant strain in the US.The proportion of Omicron cases is even higher than the national average in a CDC-designated region that includes New York. In the week ended December 18, Omicron was estimated to have made up 92 per cent of cases in the agency’s “Region 2”, comprising New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.“It’s not the number of people infected that keeps me up at night, it’s the number who end up in a hospital,” Hochul said during the briefing. She pointed to decisions in recent weeks to pause elective surgeries at state hospitals and a requirement for nursing homes to provide access to Covid-19 booster shots as part of an effort to pre-emptively protect the health system and lower the risk of it being overwhelmed.Hochul said the number of Covid-related hospitalisations across the state was “creeping up” but, at 4,452, was two-thirds of where it was a year ago. More