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    Wall Street bonuses climb to record $257,500 per worker last year, New York's fiscal chief says

    The average bonus paid to securities industry employees in New York climbed 20% to a record $257,500 for last year, according to state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
    The projection, released Wednesday in the annual report from New York’s top fiscal officer, includes cash bonuses for 2021 work as well as deferred awards paid out recently, according to DiNapoli.
    The fact that Wall Street pay came in higher than New York had projected “should help the city exceed its expected revenue from income taxes,” according to the report.

    People walk along Wall Street in the financial district of Manhattan on September 29, 2021 in New York City.
    Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    The average bonus paid to securities industry employees in New York climbed 20% to a record $257,500 for last year, according to state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
    The projection, released Wednesday in the annual report from New York’s top fiscal officer, includes cash bonuses for 2021 work as well as deferred awards paid out recently, according to DiNapoli.

    The higher compensation figures aren’t unexpected: Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase posted eye-popping revenue increases in January, fueled by booming mergers, public listings and strong trading activity. In November, pay consultants said they expected banks to post the largest increase in bonuses since 2009.
    But DiNapoli’s report highlights the outsized role Wall Street employees have in New York’s financial health. Securities industry jobs make up just 5% of private sector roles, but accounted for 18%, or $14.9 billion, of state tax collections in the 2021 fiscal year, he said.
    That’s because Wall Street workers make almost five times the $92,315 average salary in the private sector excluding finance, according to the report. Securities workers saw overall compensation climb 7.7% to $438,370 for 2020, the latest data the comptroller had.
    There were 180,000 workers in New York’s securities industry in 2021, roughly unchanged from the previous year but 10% below its peak twenty years ago. New York remains the country’s financial capital, although its share of finance jobs has fallen as firms create new offices in Florida, Texas and other low-tax states.
    The fact that Wall Street pay came in higher than New York had projected “should help the city exceed its expected revenue from income taxes,” according to the report. However, the city’s financial planning assumes that markets activity cools off this year, and that bonuses for the industry will drop by 17%.
    “Wall Street’s soaring profits continued to beat expectations in 2021 and drove record bonuses,” DiNapoli said. “In New York, we won’t get back to our pre-Covid economic strength until more New Yorkers and more sectors — retail, tourism, construction, the arts and others ­­— enjoy similar success.”

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    UK announces urgent fuel tax cut to fight cost of living crisis

    Rishi Sunak announced that fuel duty will be reduced by 5 pence per liter for 12 months, a cut he told Parliament will be worth £5 billion ($6.6 billion), starting from 6 p.m. U.K. time on Wednesday.
    The level of fuel duty, a substantial contributor to British public finances, has been frozen at 57.95 pence per liter since 2011.
    Sunak also revealed plans to double the government’s household support fund to £1 billion for those affected by higher energy costs.

    Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves 11 Downing Street to announce the Treasury’s one-year spending review in the House of Commons in London, England, on November 25, 2020.
    David Cliff/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    LONDON — U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday announced an immediate cut to fuel taxes and a longer-term tax reduction for workers in a bid to mitigate the country’s historic hit to living standards.
    In his Spring Statement, Sunak announced that fuel duty will be reduced by 5 pence per liter for 12 months, a cut he told Parliament will be worth £5 billion ($6.6 billion), starting from 6 p.m. U.K. time on Wednesday. The government hopes the cut will reduce the cost of gasoline at the pumps amid a surge in global oil prices.

    The level of fuel duty, a substantial contributor to British public finances, has been frozen at 57.95 pence per liter since 2011.
    Sunak also revealed plans to double the government’s household support fund to £1 billion for those affected by higher energy costs.
    Solar pumps, heat pumps and other similar measures will be subject to zero value-added tax (a tax on goods and services), down from 5%.

    Cost of living crisis

    The pressure had been on Sunak to address the spiraling cost of living crisis in the U.K., with households facing record rises in energy bills and inflation running at multi-decade highs and expected to worsen as the fallout from the Russia-Ukraine conflict intensifies.
    U.K. inflation came in at 6.2% in February, new figures showed on Wednesday, its highest since March 1992 and well ahead of consensus expectations among economists.

    The Bank of England expects inflation to reach 8% in the second quarter, and has cautioned that double-figure prints are not inconceivable before the end of the year if Russia’s assault on Ukraine and subsequent global supply shortages persist.
    A planned 10% increase to National Insurance (a tax on earnings) kicks in for many workers in April, while at the same time the U.K.’s energy price cap soars 54% to accommodate higher costs of oil and gas, exacerbating the squeeze on household income as consumer prices continue to head north.
    In Wednesday’s speech, Sunak announced that he would be raising the threshold at which workers begin paying national insurance by £3,000.
    He also vowed to cut the basic rate of income tax from 20% to 19% in 2024, telling Parliament that this represented a “£5 billion tax cut over over 30 million people.”

    During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Sunak launched a series multi-billion pound economic support packages, fueled by the country’s largest peacetime borrowing levels in history.
    In interviews over the weekend and in his annual Mais lecture given last month, however, Sunak has indicated that ever-expanding fiscal accommodation is not a strategy he wishes to sustain.
    The U.K.’s Office for Budget Responsibility projects that for the fiscal year 2022/23, the underlying public debt to GDP ratio will be 83.5%, an improvement on October’s forecast of 85.4%. The U.K.’s budget deficit is projected to reach 5.4% of GDP in 2021/22 before tapering off to 3.9% in 2022/23, 1.9% in 2023/24 and 1.3% in 2024/25.
    The country’s debt interest bill will reach £83 billion in 2022/23, Sunak cautioned.
    The OBR also slashed its GDP growth forecast for this year from 6% to 3.8%
    Measures may not be enough
    “The Chancellor probably managed to avoid being tagged with the phrase ‘talking a good game on tax cuts’ by moving to increase the threshold on National Insurance and promising that the basic rate of tax will be cut in 2024,” said Neil Birrell, chief investment officer at Premier Miton Investors.
    “However, middle earners will still feel the squeeze. The reduction in growth forecasts and inflation predictions are probably not that reliable for this year given the uncertainty abounding, but the direction of both is clear; growth is going lower and inflation is going higher.”
    Although Sunak set forth a number of measures to help households weather the cost of living crisis, these “likely will not go far enough” to protect consumers given how drastic the outlook has become, according to Richard Carter, head of fixed interest research at Quilter Cheviot.
    Carter said the rise to the national insurance threshold and basic income tax may “put more pounds in the pockets of voters ahead of the next general election,” but may do little to help in the here and now as the war in Ukraine continues to push up oil prices, utility bills rise sharply in the spring and inflation begins to bite for businesses and households.
    “While the unemployment rate is expected to be unaffected by the slowing of economic growth, it does feel as if we are entering a stagflationary period,” Carter said.
    “It will be difficult for the economy to emerge from this without some additional stimulus, but with interest rates on the rise it is a tricky balancing act for the government and the Bank of England.”
    Carter said the government will be hoping the improvement in public finances is not blown off-course by geopolitical events. However, he added the uncertain outlook “could get even foggier in the months ahead.”

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    Beyond Meat and PepsiCo launch meatless jerky as the first product under their partnership

    Beyond Meat and PepsiCo announced Wednesday they will launch meatless jerky as the first product under their PLANeT Partnership joint venture.
    The two companies announced the joint venture nearly a year ago with the goal of creating plant-based snacks and drinks together.
    Beyond’s grocery sales have suffered as the company focused its energy on big fast-food launches.

    PLANeT Partnership’s new meatless jerky alternative
    Source: Beyond Meat

    Beyond Meat and PepsiCo announced Wednesday they will launch meatless jerky as the first product under their PLANeT Partnership joint venture.
    The new product is rolling out to grocery stores this month in three flavors: original, hot and spicy, and teriyaki. Protein from peas and mung beans serves as the base for the jerky.

    Beyond and Pepsi announced the joint venture nearly a year ago with the goal of creating plant-based snacks and drinks together. The partnership gives Beyond, a relative newcomer to the food world, a chance to leverage Pepsi’s production and marketing expertise for new products.
    At the same time, Pepsi can deepen its investment in plant-based categories — which are growing increasingly crowded — while working with one of the top creators of meat substitutes. It also helps Pepsi work toward its sustainability and health goals.
    Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown teased the product release on the company’s earnings call in late February.
    “We have a major product, which I actually have in my hands right now and I’ve been snacking on during the call,” Brown told analysts. “That took an enormous amount of time and energy to get ready, and it’s a fantastic product.”  
    Beyond’s grocery sales have suffered as the company focused its energy on big fast-food launches. In its fourth quarter, the company’s U.S. retail sales fell 19.5% to $49.98 million.

    Brown said on the conference call that new product launches usually boost grocery sales, so the jerky represents an opportunity to rejuvenate that segment.

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    His words didn’t soothe investors, though, and shares hit an all-time low of $35.74 on March 15, although the stock has since reversed those losses in recent days. In the last 12 months, the stock has shed roughly 63% of its value, dragging its market value down to $3.07 billion.
    Wall Street analysts have voiced doubts about Beyond’s growth potential. Among their top concerns are competition, market saturation and an overall slowdown in demand for plant-based meat alternatives.
    Even when it comes to the new jerky, Beyond faces competition for customers. Several other food companies, including Conagra Brands’ Gardein, already make jerky alternatives.

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    Apple buys UK fintech start-up Credit Kudos

    Apple has acquired British fintech start-up Credit Kudos, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.
    Credit Kudos develops software that uses consumers’ banking data to make more informed credit checks on loan applications.
    The company operates in a nascent space in the world of fintech known as “open banking.”

    Customers walk past a digital display of the new green color Apple iPhone 13 pro inside the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, in New York, March 18, 2022.
    Mike Segar | Reuters

    LONDON — Apple has acquired British fintech start-up Credit Kudos, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC, confirming an earlier media report.
    The deal was finalized earlier this week, the person said, preferring to remain anonymous discussing commercially sensitive information.

    The news was first reported by crypto-focused media outlet The Block, citing three sources familiar with the matter. The deal values Credit Kudos at around $150 million, The Block reported.
    A spokesperson for Apple said the U.S. tech giant “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” Credit Kudos was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
    Based in London, Credit Kudos develops software that uses consumers’ banking data to make more informed credit checks on loan applications. It is a challenger to the big credit reporting agencies, which include Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
    The deal could have serious implications for some of Credit Kudos’ clients, which include the London-based fintech firms Curve and Fronted.
    Credit Kudos had been in discussions about a possible sale as early as January, two people familiar with the matter previously told CNBC. They spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the talks.

    The company operates in a nascent space in the world of fintech known as “open banking,” where third-party firms securely link to people’s bank accounts to extract information and make payments on their behalf, provided they’ve got consent to do so.
    The trend has gained momentum in Europe in recent years thanks to fintech-friendly rules introduced in 2018 that aim to increase competition in the payments industry.
    It has ignited huge interest from investors, with Silicon Valley start-up Plaid being valued at $13.4 billion in a funding round last year.
    Plaid had previously agreed to be bought by Visa, but scrapped those plans following an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. government.
    Visa subsequently acquired Tink, a Swedish company that competes with Plaid, for $2.1 billion.
    It is not yet clear what Apple has planned for Credit Kudos. The company has made significant inroads into financial services over the years through its Apple Pay mobile wallet and the Apple Card, a credit card the firm launched in partnership with Goldman Sachs in the U.S.
    Credit Kudos, which last received venture capital funding in early 2020, has raised a total of £7.8 million to date, according to Crunchbase data. The firm racked up losses of £4.5 million ($5.9 million) in its 2020 financial year, double the £2.2 million it lost in 2019, according to a Companies House filing.
    – CNBC’s Sam Shead contributed to this report

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    Moderna Covid vaccine for kids under 6 years old was up to 44% effective against omicron infection

    Moderna on Wednesday released interim data on the effectiveness of its vaccine for children under 6 years old.
    The shots were about 44% effective at preventing infection from omicron in kids 6 months to under 2 years old.
    Moderna will ask the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization for the vaccine for children under 6 years old as soon as possible, CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
    The company also asked the FDA to authorize its vaccine for children 6- to 11-years-old.

    With her husband Stephen by her side Erin Shih hugs her children Avery 6, and Aidan, 11, after they got their second Moderna COVID-19 vaccines at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center on Friday, June 25, 2021.
    Sarah Reingewirtz | MediaNews Group | Getty Images

    Moderna’s two-dose Covid vaccine was about 44% effective at preventing infection from omicron in children 6 months to under 2 years old and about 38% effective for children 2- to 5-years-old, according to data released by the company Wednesday.
    None of the children developed severe illness from Covid and the majority of breakthrough cases were mild, according to the biotech company. Moderna will ask the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization for the vaccine for children under 6 years old as soon as possible, CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

    Moderna’s vaccine is currently FDA approved for adults ages 18 and older. Moderna has also asked the FDA to authorize its vaccine for children 6- to 11-years-old, the company announced Wednesday.
    The highly mutated omicron variant has significantly reduced vaccine effectiveness from its high-water mark of around 94% when the shots were first authorized for adults in December 2020, causing many more breakthrough infections. However, Moderna said the vaccine effectiveness for children under 6 years old against omicron was consistent with the currently approved vaccine for adults 18 and older.

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    Children under 6 years old received two 25 microgram doses of its vaccine administered 28 days apart, much smaller than 100-microgram shots given to adults. Children 6- to 11-years-old receive two 50 microgram doses.
    Moderna said no new safety concerns were identified in children under 6 years old. No deaths or cases of myocarditis, pericarditis or multisystem inflammatory syndrome were reported, according to the company. Myocarditis and pericarditis are types of heart inflammation that have been observed at elevated rates after the second dose of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines primarily in younger men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
    Moderna said the side effects in young children were mild and more frequently reported after the second dose. About 17% of kids under 2 years old developed a fever of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 Celsius, while slightly more than 14% of kids 2- to 5-years-old developed such a fever. A fever higher than 104 Fahrenheit, or 40 Celsius, was observed in only a few children in each age group, according to the company.

    The data on the youngest children comes from a broader pediatric clinical trial of 11,700 kids under 12 years old in the U.S. and Canada. The trial included 2,500 children under 2 years old and 4,200 kids 2- to 5-years-old. The study was conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health.
    Children under 5 years old are the only age group left in the U.S. not eligible for Covid vaccination. Hospitalizations of kids in this age group with Covid were five times higher during the omicron peak in January compared with last year’s delta wave, according to the CDC.
    The FDA sought to expedite the authorization of the first two doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine for children under 5 years old in response to omicron last month, but the process was delayed because the data did not meet expectations. Pfizer and BioNTech are expected to submit data on a third dose in this age group sometime in April.

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    Tencent 'exploring' a financial holding company for WeChat Pay if Chinese regulators require it

    Chinese giant Tencent is exploring whether regulators will require it to create a financial holding company to house is fintech business.
    The comments come after Bloomberg reported last week that Chinese authorities are considering requiring Tencent to include WeChat Pay in a new financial holding company.
    Setting up a financial holding company would “involve some organizational changes” but Tencent would be able to comply and it should not impact the business, President Martin Lau said.

    An image of WeChat Pay in action.
    Zhang Peng | LightRocket | Getty Images

    Chinese tech giant Tencent is exploring whether regulators will require it to create a financial holding company to house is fintech business, a top executive said on Wednesday.
    The comments come after Bloomberg reported last week that Chinese authorities are considering requiring Tencent to include WeChat Pay, its ubiquitous mobile payments service, in a new financial holding company.

    “We have been continuously exploring the establishment of the financial holding company and looking at the regulation with respect to that and whether there is a requirement for that,” Tencent President Martin Lau said on an earnings call with media Wednesday, after the firm posted its slowest revenue growth on record.
    Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Tencent needs to place its banking, securities, insurance and credit-scoring services into a financial holding company that can be regulated like a traditional bank.
    The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, has long been concerned about technology companies operating banking-like services and the perceived risks that come with that to financial stability. Tencent, via messaging app WeChat, offers services from payments to microloans. WeChat has over 1.2 billion monthly active users.

    In November, regulators suspended the public listing of Ant Group, which would have been the world’s largest, over regulatory concerns. The PBOC has asked Ant Group, which is the financial technology affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba, to restructure as a financial holding company.
    This month, the Chinese central bank approved the establishment of two financial holding companies.

    Tencent’s Lau said the internet giant was watching this development closely for guidance.
    “Recently there have been two financial holding company licenses that have been issued. We felt after that we should have a clearer picture on what are the criteria for inclusion into financial holding company and whether we qualify or not,” Lau said. “We are proactively engaging in that discussion.”
    The Tencent president said that the regulators are trying to “guide a healthier and more sustainable development” of the financial industry.
    Setting up a financial holding company would “involve some organizational changes” but Tencent would be able to comply and it should not impact the business, Lau added.

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    Watch UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak's budget announcement

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    U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak is announcing a new government budget in his Spring Statement.

    A planned 10% increase to National Insurance (a tax on earnings) kicks in for many workers in April, while at the same time the U.K.’s energy price cap soars 54% to accommodate higher costs of oil and gas, exacerbating the squeeze on household income as consumer prices continue to head north.
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    Omicron's 'stealth' subvariant BA.2 could go 'wild' in Europe before going global, top epidemiologist says

    While war rages in Ukraine, not much attention is being paid in Europe to rising Covid cases.
    Germany has been reporting record high numbers of cases of between 250,000 to 300,000 new infections a day in the last week.
    The rise in cases across the continent, from the U.K. and France to the Netherlands and Austria, is being driven by several factors.

    Doctor Immanuel Hardtmann holds a syringe with the vaccine Moderna in a temporary vaccination center inside the Excursion boat Alexander von Humboldt on the first day of the #HierWirdGeimpft (Get Vaccinated Here) Covid-19 vaccination campaign on September 13, 2021 in Berlin, Germany.
    Carsten Koall | Getty Images News | Getty Images

    LONDON — While war rages in Ukraine, not much attention is being paid to surging Covid-19 cases across Europe that could soon start to filter out to the rest of the world.
    The rise in cases across the continent, from the U.K. and France to Italy and Austria, is being driven by several factors: The lifting of most — if not all — Covid restrictions, waning immunity from vaccines and booster shots, and the spread of the more transmissible omicron subvariant, BA.2.

    “We all hoped and expected a different turn now at the beginning of spring,” Ralf Reintjes, professor of epidemiology at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, told CNBC this week.
    “But the situation in Europe is a bit bumpy at the moment, and in Germany … the [case] numbers are at a very, very high level, and they’re still increasing and have been increasing for quite some time.”
    Germany is seeing a surge in cases and has reported daily tallies of new infections of between 200,000 to 300,000 a day in the last week.

    Reintjes said that the combination “of everyone thinking and expecting somehow that the pandemic is over now” and the relaxation of what he saw as protective Covid measures gives the BA.2 subvariant “a really good chance to spread extremely wild in many parts of Europe.”
    “It’s difficult to predict but personally I think it’s very likely that this is going to continue its tour around the globe as well,” he added. “That’s what viruses in a pandemic usually do.”

    “There are also quite a few reports that people who have got an omicron infection, or BA.1 variant, then a few weeks later got BA.2 infection,” he noted, adding that there is a good chance that this new variant will spread and act like “some sort of new wave of a new pandemic like seasonal flu.”
    Public health officials and scientists are closely monitoring BA.2, a subvariant of the already highly transmissible omicron variant, as it is accounting for a growing number of new cases in Europe.
    To a somewhat lesser extent it is also accounting for a growing number of infections in the U.S. and Asia.
    The subvariant is estimated to be 1½ times more transmissible than omicron and is likely to usurp it as the globally dominant variant.
    Initial data has shown that BA.2 is a little more likely to cause infections in household contacts when compared with BA.1. It’s not believed currently that the BA.2 variant causes more severe illness or carries an increased the risk of being hospitalized, however further research is needed to confirm this, according to a U.K. parliamentary report published earlier in March.

    ‘Stealth’ variant 

    BA.2 has been described as a “stealth” variant because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the older delta variant using PCR tests, compared with its original omicron parent, BA.1.
    The new subvariant is the latest in a long line to emerge since the pandemic began in China in late 2019. The omicron variant — the most transmissible strain so far — overtook the delta variant, which itself supplanted the alpha variant — and even this was not the original strain of the virus.

    The World Health Organization has said it is monitoring BA.2 closely, which it said had now been detected in 106 countries, and has also noted a rise in global cases after a recent lull.
    In its latest weekly update published Tuesday, the WHO said that after a consistent decrease since the end of January, the number of new weekly cases rose for a second consecutive week last week, with a 7% increase in the number of infections reported, compared to the previous week.
    The WHO also noted that while omicron has a number of sublineages, BA.2 has become the predominant variant in the last 30 days, with 85.96% of the virus sequences submitted to GISAID, the public virus tracking database, being the BA.2 variant.
    The WHO noted that weekly data shows that the proportion of BA.2 cases, compared to other sublineages, has increased steadily since the end of 2021, with the subvariant becoming the dominant lineage by week seven of 2022.
    “This trend is most pronounced in the South-East Asia Region, followed by the Eastern Mediterranean, African, Western Pacific and European Regions. BA.2 is currently dominant in the Region of the Americas,” the WHO said.
    In the U.K., the latest available data from the Office of National Statistics, for the week ending March 13, showed that the BA.2 variant is now the most common variant in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. In the week that was surveyed, 76.1% of all sequenced Covid-19 infections from the survey were compatible with the BA.2 variant, and 23.9% were compatible with the original omicron strain.
    In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that BA.2 cases now account for 34.9% of all cases in the U.S. with the subvariant making up over half the number of cases reported in some northeastern states, but it has noted that the overall number of infections is still declining from the record highs seen in January.

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