Economy

Magistrates in England and Wales have been told to stop approving warrants that allow energy companies to forcibly fit prepayment meters, following an intervention from a senior judge on Monday. Lord Justice Andrew Edis, senior presiding judge of England and Wales, issued guidance to magistrates courts to halt listing applications for permits of entry until further notice, after energy markets regulator Ofgem opened an investigation into the practice.Ofgem last week ordered British Gas to suspend forcible installations after it emerged that debt collection agents acting on behalf of Britain’s biggest suppliers had been breaking into the homes of vulnerable people to fit prepayment devices. Grant Shapps, UK business secretary, said he had been “appalled” by the treatment of energy customers. The regulator had asked suppliers to voluntarily stop such activities while it carries out two separate investigations into British Gas and the wider prepayment meter market.Ofgem rules dictate that suppliers cannot fit pre-pay meters under a court warrant in the homes of people either considered to be in “very vulnerable situations”, or who would find the experience “very traumatic”.Magistrates courts had previously been routinely issuing installation warrants in bulk. Most applications for such permits are not contested by the householder who must be notified that a warrant has been sought.Edis said in a letter to magistrates on Monday that, in light of the Ofgem investigation, “applications for warrants of entry for the purpose of installing a prepayment meter should, with immediate effect, cease to be listed”.He added that “no further such applications are to be determined until further notice”.Edis noted that the courts must act proportionately and with regard to the human rights of people affected, particularly those who are vulnerable.He said that the decision to recommence listing such warrants will depend on the progress of Ofgem’s investigation and any legislative review. Edis added that the direction did not effect other cases, such as applications for warrants in commercial cases. The Ministry of Justice is to urgently consult with energy companies on the next steps.The Magistrates Association, an independent association that represents magistrates in England and Wales, said it welcomed the new guidance. “As well as highlighting that magistrates have, thus far, been following the correct procedures with regards to such applications, it reiterates that energy companies must follow due process regarding vulnerability assessments,” it said.British Gas owner Centrica has apologised for the “deeply disturbing” behaviour of agents installing prepayment meters in the homes of vulnerable customers on its behalf, which was uncovered by a Times investigation. However, fuel poverty campaigners said the allegations against British Gas were likely to be the “tip of the iceberg”. The End Fuel Poverty Coalition, a group of charities, trade unions and local authorities, had called for a review into the role of magistrates in granting permits to forcibly fit the devices.The use of prepayment meters has raised concerns as they require customers to top up in advance, which tends to be more expensive than paying for electricity and gas via direct debit. Fuel poverty campaigners warned that they also lead to vulnerable households “self disconnecting” if they cannot afford to pay. Citizens Advice, a charity, said that in 2022 more than 27,500 people could not afford to top up their prepayment meter, a higher figure than for the entirety of the previous 10 years combined. More

Higher education for older adults is “seriously at risk” in England as fewer people chose to invest in learning due to the rising cost of living, university leaders have warned. In an attempt to raise national skills levels, the Conservative government has committed to boosting training throughout a person’s lifetime following years of falling participation.Central to its plan is a life-long loan entitlement, which will allow universal access to loan funding for short courses post-18 from 2025. A bill legislating for the change was introduced in parliament last week. But the heads of England’s leading universities for adult learners fear the reforms do not go far enough. They are braced for mid-career learning to decline further as more people stay in work rather than take on debt to finance training.“Life-long adult education provision is seriously at risk,” said David Latchman, vice-chancellor of Birkbeck, University of London, one of the UK’s largest adult learning institutions. Birkbeck and other providers of adult higher education are losing part of a “core market” because people are limiting their spending as the country enters recession, he said. David Latchman: ‘Normally recessions are good for Birkbeck. This one is different — it’s not about not having jobs, it’s about not having the money to pay the electricity bill’ © Isobel EdwardsUK inflation stood at 10.5 per cent in December, with households expecting a 7.1 per cent fall in living standards over the next two years, according to the fiscal watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility. Rather than take time out to invest in courses, people are looking to take advantage of a tight labour market to work more and increase their earnings.“Normally recessions are good for Birkbeck,” said Latchman, referring to the tendency for enrolment in education to rise with unemployment. “This one is different — it’s not about not having jobs, it’s about not having the money to pay the electricity bill.”Birkbeck, which also specialises in offering degrees for older people on flexible schedules, and has about 10,600 students, saw its intake fall more than 10 per cent in the last academic year compared with 2020-21.It identified a £13mn deficit, requiring cuts of around 140 jobs, which it hopes to achieve mainly through voluntary redundancies. The Open University teaches about half of the UK’s part-time undergraduates, with around 150,000 enrolled last year according to official figures. But its total number of students fell 14 percent in the last academic year after jumping by nearly a quarter after the pandemic began. Tim Blackman, its vice-chancellor, said adjusting to declining numbers after a rapid expansion meant the university would have to cut its operating budget by 16 per cent cut over the next four years. Both Birkbeck and the Open University said their financial constraints were intensified by inflation and the need to keep fees low. The pressures on both institutions sound the alarm on what could be further declines in life-long learning, after a decade of falling participation. Analysis of government figures by the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank shows that take-up of level 4 or 5 qualifications — often taken as part-time courses and at a standard between A-levels and full degrees — each fell 34 per cent between 2015-16 and 2020-21. In the decade up to 2020, the number of part-time undergraduates in England nearly halved.Ben Waltmann, an IFS economist, said this was “almost certainly” due to reforms to student finance in 2012 that replaced government grants for university teaching with student loans.That increased fees and shifted the burden of paying them to students. The changes also meant loans were only available for full-length qualifications, not modules, so interest in short courses plummeted. Older people with financial obligations, caring responsibilities and existing work commitments, also became less likely to study because it would mean taking on debt, Waltmann said.At Birkbeck academic staff, who opposed job cuts, said the removal of direct public funding had damaged institutions that provide life-long learning and called for more support. “The opportunities to see higher education as something you might engage with as you would a community centre or a church are becoming very marginalised,” one lecturer said.

Birkbeck students in the earth and planetary sciences department © Birkbeck

The government hopes to fix the problem with its Lifelong Loan Entitlement, which will allow students to access loan funding for modules within courses, rather than full qualifications. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, called the policy a “profound shift in the way students of all ages can obtain funding for further and higher education”. Latchman said the entitlement could make a “huge difference” by making it simpler to take out a loan. However, others are concerned that the plan will repeat the problems of the existing system, by offering another loan.Blackman feared adult learners would still be dissuaded by the prospect of debt. A lack of maintenance funding would make it impossible for them to study in a cost of living crisis, he said. “If there are economic problems it’s even more unlikely to work.”

While the Open University was “here to stay”, he said, the economic climate meant that potential students would need more incentives to enrol in courses.“Our potential students are not coming to us because they are focusing on their family, getting a second job paying the bills,” he said. “But that’s exactly when they need to focus on . . . improving their skills.” More

While the Biden administration has accelerated processing after Trump-era restrictions and a pandemic slowdown, visa backlogs remain large.The flow of immigrants and refugees into the United States has ramped up over the past year, helping to replenish the American labor force after a decline that began with restrictions imposed under the Trump administration and that was compounded by the pandemic.The Biden administration has been accelerating visa processing and broadly using humanitarian parole programs for migrants fleeing war and economic instability. Those efforts have driven a rebound in the foreign-born population — welcome news for the Federal Reserve, which has been concerned that a persistent shortage of workers could send wages higher and lead inflation to become entrenched.Friday’s employment report for January, showing a blockbuster gain of 517,000 jobs, confirms that the economy continues to demand more labor. Moderating wage growth, however, suggests that enough workers are arriving to keep costs in check.“When the unemployment rate goes down, you would normally expect wage inflation to go up, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “So there must be something else moving in the labor force, and there is a very likely explanation here that immigrants are coming in and taking jobs.”But despite the resurgence in the foreign-born labor force — about four-fifths of it are people legally allowed to work in the United States, by one calculation — there are bottlenecks.Legal immigration remains below pre-Trump levels. Hundreds of thousands of people await interviews with U.S. consular officials to obtain immigrant visas. Millions of asylum cases are pending, and getting work authorization for those already here can take years.The uneasy state of immigration policy, a contentious political issue for years, is felt every day by Al Flores, the general counsel at a group of Tex-Mex restaurants in the Houston area and a restaurant owner himself.When the restaurants reduced staffing during the pandemic, many of their workers went to places that were hiring — like the construction industry — and rehiring was a challenge given the sharp immigration slowdown of 2020.The company now employs about 2,500 people, at least 12 percent of whom are able to work under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has been in jeopardy since Mr. Trump decided to terminate it; challenges are winding their way through the courts. Another 10 percent have temporary protected status, a designation granted to people who have fled from countries in turmoil, which often allows them to stay in the United States for years.Alma Moreno, a cook at Hacienda Tacos y Tamales in Houston, is a Salvadoran who has temporary protected status in the United States.Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times“It’s gotten a little bit better, but we’re seeing a drop in permanent visas and an increase in temporary ones,” Mr. Flores said. “At some point those folks have to move on, sometimes to other countries where there’s more open arms. And that’s tough for us, because we need the labor.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Job Trends: The Labor Department reported that the nation’s demand for labor only got stronger in December, as job openings rose to 11 million.Burrito Season: Chipotle Mexican Grill, the fast-casual food chain, said that it planned to hire 15,000 workers ahead of its busiest time of year, from March to May.Retail Industry: With consumers worried about inflation in the prices of day-to-day necessities like food, retailers are playing defense and reducing their work forces.Tech Layoffs: The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.The path of immigration policy will have a substantial bearing on the nation’s supply of workers, which has been expanding more slowly as native-born workers have fewer children. The Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2042, net immigration will be the nation’s only source of population growth.The dip in immigration occurred in multiple ways, beginning with the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president in 2017. The cap on refugees allowed to enter the United States dropped to 15,000 in 2020, the lowest level in decades. Measures like a ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, even though the courts eventually overturned it, deterred people from trying to come.Some of Mr. Trump’s changes were more subtle. The Department of Homeland Security slow-walked visas by asking for more evidence and interviews, said Shev Dalal-Dheini, head of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and then it shut down processing — which is largely paper-based, not electronic — during the pandemic.Even when lockdowns eased, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had a difficult time ramping back up because with no processing fees, it lacked the funds to rehire staff who had left. Staffing at U.S. embassies, which conduct visa interviews in other countries, had also atrophied.“They’ve had to play catch-up with that for a long, long time,” said Ms. Dalal-Dheini, who left the immigration agency in 2019. “Once the Biden administration came in, they reset some of those policies designed to slow down the process, and then were focused on building back up their work force.”The result has been that visas for visitors, temporary workers and permanent immigrants rose to 7.3 million in 2022, up from 3.1 million the previous year but still down from the more than 10 million issued annually in the three years before Mr. Trump took office. President Biden also granted humanitarian parole and temporary protected status to migrants from several more countries, including Ukraine and Afghanistan, allowing hundreds of thousands more people to stay and the opportunity to work in the United States.The number of new citizens hit a 15-year high in 2022. And the cap on refugees was raised to 125,000 in 2022, although the administration managed to process only about 25,000.Those measures increased net immigration to about a million people last year, the highest level since 2017, according to the Census Bureau. The foreign-born work force grew much more quickly than the U.S.-born work force, Labor Department figures show. (According to an analysis by FWD.us, a business-backed group that favors more immigration, 78 percent of the foreign-born labor force has legal work status.)The growth in immigration has helped power the job recoveries in leisure and hospitality and in construction, where immigrants make up a higher share of employment, and where there were bigger increases in wages and job vacancies. More

BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Bank of England rate-setter Catherine Mann on Monday backed further increases in interest rates and warned that pausing, as some of her colleagues advocate, risked a confusing “policy boogie” if it turned out rates would need to rise again. After hiking interest rates to 4% last week, the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) signalled it was close to pausing a run of increases which began in December 2021.Mann, consistently the most hawkish member of the MPC, said the risk of under-tightening policy far outweighed the alternative. “We need to stay the course, and in my view the next step in Bank Rate is still more likely to be another hike than a cut or hold,” Mann said in a speech delivered to the Lamfalussy Lectures Conference in Budapest.Her comments coincided with research on Monday from consultancy Oxford Economics that showed Britain is among the countries most at risk from “monetary overkill” – tightening policy too far. On some metrics, Britain ranked top. Mann, who held chief economist titles at the OECD and Citi, criticised the idea of pausing the rate hike cycle at this juncture, a course of action that two of her MPC colleagues – Swathi Dhingra and Silvana Tenreyro – voted for last week.”In my view, a tighten-stop-tighten-loosen policy boogie looks too much like fine-tuning to be good monetary policy. It is both hard to communicate and to transmit through markets to the real economy,” Mann said.There were upside risks to the inflation outlook, Mann said.”From a risk-management point of view, monetary policy has to lean against these upside biases since wage and price inflation are still so high,” she said.At the other end of the MPC spectrum, Dhingra and Tenreyro say over-tightening risked sending Britain’s economy into an unnecessarily severe downturn, with the full force of the BoE’s rate hikes yet to feed through. The BoE’s own forecasts show inflation falling well below the 2% target in the coming years.On Friday BoE Chief Economist Huw Pill, regarded as a centrist figure on the MPC, said it was important not to raise borrowing costs too high. More

The FBS (Free Switzerland Movement) says cash is playing a shrinking role in many economies, as electronic payments become the default for transactions in increasingly digitised societies, making it easier for the state to monitor its citizens’ actions.It wants a clause added to Switzerland’s currency law, which governs how the central bank and government manage the money supply, stipulating that a “sufficient quantity” of banknotes or coins must always remain in circulation.There is no evidence of moves towards a cashless society by Swiss authorities.FBS said it had garnered over 111,000 signatures in support of the measure, above the 100,000 needed to trigger a popular vote. Under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy, the proposal would become law if approved by voters, though government and parliament would decide how that law was implemented.”It is clear that … getting rid of cash not only touches on issues of transparency, simplicity or security … but also carries a huge danger of totalitarian surveillance,” FBS president Richard Koller said on the group’s website.He also views Switzerland as a European standard-bearer for the defence of cash, as pushing through such guarantees in the European Union would entail the “almost impossible” process of securing approval from all 27 member states.Accelerated by the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, the trend towards increased cashless payments was evident as far back as 2017, when an Ipsos study found more than a third of Europeans and Americans would happily go without cash and 20% pretty much did so already. More

Investing.com — The US’s shooting down of a Chinese surveillance balloon on the weekend triggers an angry response and generates a reality check for Chinese assets. The Eurozone’s retail sales in December were awful, but German factory orders picked up, bolstering hopes that the economy may be close to turning a corner. The US stocks are set to open lower, still under pressure from a jobs report on Friday that dented hopes for a quick ‘pivot’ to interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. There’s bid speculation in the air, with gold mining and storage, two unlikely candidates for attention. And oil prices continue to bump along at one-month lows on concerns about the global demand outlook. Here’s what you need to know in financial markets on Monday, 6th February.1. One less red balloon goes byChinese stocks weakened as the US’s decision to shoot down a Chinese surveillance balloon triggered a loud and angry response from Beijing. Benchmark indices lost between 0.8% and 2.0%, correcting after a bullish start to the year.The balloon’s flight over Montana, the state of several US strategic missile sites, had already caused a planned meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Xi Jinping to be canceled.Coming less than a week after reports that the US is looking at tightening restrictions on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, the incident has revived awareness of the risk to markets of a fresh deterioration in US-Chinese relations.2. German orders offer hope after weak end to the year in the EurozoneThere were mixed updates from the Eurozone, with retail sales falling more than expected in December and confirming the picture of a weak end to last year.More forward-looking data were more encouraging: German factory orders, a key indicator of future trends in Europe’s manufacturing heart, posted their strongest gain in a year, bolstering hopes that the alarming slowdown seen last year is bottoming out.The euro has softened markedly since the European Central Bank’s latest press conference last week when President Christine Lagarde’s guidance of further interest rate hikes was taken with more skepticism than usual. Lagarde is due to speak at 13:00 ET (18:00 GMT), while Bank of England Chief Economist Huw Pill may also draw some interest with a speech an hour earlier.3. Stocks set to open lower as retailers, games publishers prepare to update The US stock markets are set to open the week lower, with participants still revising their outlook for US interest rates after Friday’s stronger-than-expected labor market report. The blowout headline number of 517,000 nonfarm job gains arguably overstated the strength of the labor market but, nonetheless, dented hopes of an early ‘pivot’ to rate cuts by the Federal Reserve later this year.By 06:45 ET, Dow Jones futures were down 221 points or 0.7%, while S&P 500 futures were down 0.8%, and Nasdaq 100 futures were down 1.1%. The three main cash indices had fallen by between 0.4% and 1.6% on Friday, with tech stocks – whose value is especially sensitive to interest rate assumptions – underperforming sharply.Earnings have a consumer-flavored theme to start the week, with Tyson Foods (NYSE:TSN) and Loews (NYSE:L) getting the ball rolling early, followed by Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI) and Take-Two Interactive (NASDAQ:TTWO) after the bell. Mall owner Simon Property (NYSE:SPG) is also due to update later.4. Newmont, storage companies breathe life into M&A marketM&A activity is threatening to push earnings out of the limelight at the start of trading, however.Newmont (NYSE:NEM), the world’s biggest gold miner, has offered $17 billion to buy Australian-based Newcrest, a deal that the latter’s institutional shareholders appear to find too low. Newmont stock fell 5.7% on the news.That deal comes at a time when bullion prices are riding high again, supported by hopes of a turn in the US interest rate cycle.Elsewhere, Public Storage (NYSE:PSA) made a hostile $11B bid for rival Life Storage (NYSE:LSI), after having an earlier bid rejected. Life Storage rose 13% in premarket.In smaller deals, Angry Birds developer Rovio (HE:ROVIO) said it will after all talk to Israeli-based Playtika (NASDAQ:PLTK) about a possible sale. Rovio stock rose 13% in Helsinki. Playtika ADRs were still to trade in premarket.5. Oil bumps along at one-month lows; Turkey closes pipeline down after earthquakeCrude oil prices were stuck around their lowest level in a month as bets on a strong rebound in Chinese demand were trimmed. Signs of a slowdown in US drilling activity – notably, the seventh fall in Baker Hughes’ rig count in nine weeks – appear not to have fully compensated for sharp rises in US inventories last week.New European and US sanctions on Russian exports of refined products come into force this week but aren’t expected to have any immediate impact on crude prices.By 06:45 ET, US crude prices were up 0.3% at $73.64 a barrel, while Brent crude was up 0.6% at $80.42 a barrel.Earlier, Turkish pipeline operator Botas said it had closed down the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as a precaution after a massive earthquake that killed hundreds in Turkey and Syria. No damage to the pipeline was discovered. More

BENGALURU (Reuters) – The Indian government will meet its deficit target for the coming fiscal year, according to a Reuters poll of economists who were split on whether New Delhi would undertake all the capital spending it is planning, the most ever.Since taking office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has broadly stuck to its borrowing targets but has come under sharp criticism for not creating enough jobs, especially for young people.Of 39 economists who responded, 34 said the government could achieve Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman’s fiscal deficit target for the 2023/24 fiscal year, 5.9% of gross domestic product (GDP). That would be down from an expected 6.4% in the current fiscal year, ending on March 31.The remaining five economists who stated the government would fail to meet that target said the fiscal deficit would be in the range of 6.0% to 6.2%.A key government objective is to bring the deficit down to 4.5% of GDP by 2025/26. Respondents were evenly split on whether it would succeed. GRAPHIC: Reuters Poll – India Fiscal Deficit- https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/polling/zdvxdnqjqvx/Reuters%20Poll%20-%20India%20Fiscal%20Deficit.pngThe government also announced on Feb. 1 planned record capital expenditure of 10 trillion Indian rupees ($120 billion) for the coming fiscal year, more than the 8.85 trillion expected in a Reuters poll before the budget.But only half of 38 respondents in the Feb. 1-3 poll said the government would meet that spending target. Among those who said it would not, some argued the economy would slow as a series of 2022 interest rate hikes take hold and curb the government’s spending power. “Are the budget numbers overly optimistic? On the margin, we think yes. We expect growth to slow materially in FY 2023/24…(which) means tax revenues are likely to disappoint,” said Sonal Varma, chief economist for India and Asia ex-Japan at Nomura.”The government can still meet its 5.9% deficit target, but it will have to cut back on its projected capex target.”Six economists, who answered a follow up question, expected capex to fall short of budget estimates by a median of 1.25 trillion rupees.GRAPHIC: Reuters Poll – India Capex- https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/polling/movaklwbqva/Reuters%20Poll%20-%20India%20Capex.pngOver the past three years, New Delhi has nearly doubled its capital spending. But it has failed to meet its budget capex target four times over the past nine years and looks like falling short of this fiscal year’s 7.5 trillion rupee target.This is supposed to have promoted employment, but there has been little sign of the lift in public capital spending promoting a matching increase from the private sector.When asked if the measures announced in the budget would significantly affect job creation next fiscal year, 26 of 37 respondents said the measure would, but much would depend on how they were implemented.The other 11 said the government was far from significantly affecting employment.Kunal Kundu, India economist at Societe Generale (OTC:SCGLY), said, “Job creation is unlikely to be of the scale needed.” “The stress in the labour market is very clear, because, despite a much lower labour force participation rate, we still have a pretty elevated unemployment rate,” Kundu said.The unemployment rate was 7.14% in January, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a think tank.($1 = 82.2060 Indian rupees) More

The biggest earthquake to hit Turkey in more than 80 years has killed more than 1,000 people in the south of the country and across the border in Syria.The quake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, caused huge destruction, levelling thousands of buildings and sending people fleeing into the streets. Turkish state media said 912 people were confirmed dead in the quake that hit just after 4am local time, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said thousands more had been hurt across 10 Turkish provinces.An initial Turkish assessment showed almost 3,000 buildings were destroyed across the affected areas, centred on the Turkish province of Kahramanmaraş, in the south of the country near the Syrian border, and spanning at least 500km. Turkey’s government has dispatched rescue teams, with military and cargo planes carrying supplies to the affected regions — with about 9,000 people working on the effort. In Syria, more than 237 people were killed and hundreds more injured in government-held areas, mostly in the provinces of Hama, Aleppo, Tartus and Latakia, according to the country’s deputy health minister. In north-west Syria, the last pocket of the country still under opposition control, the Syria Civil Defence said more than 120 civilians had died.Turkey mobilises rescuers to find earthquake survivorsFive more stories in the news1. China steps up condemnation of balloon shooting by US Vice-minister of foreign affairs Xie Feng lodged a formal protest with the US embassy in Beijing in which he came close to accusing Washington of violating international law.“What the US has done has dealt a serious blow and damaged the efforts and advances in stabilising China-US relations since the Bali meeting,” he added, referring to US president Joe Biden’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November.Beijing’s balloon fleet: After years of research, China is now using its sprawling “lighter than air” programme for military purposes.Opinion: In the long run, the stakes are too high for US-China diplomacy to fall victim to a spy balloon, writes Gideon Rachman.2. Ukraine to replace defence minister In Kyiv’s biggest shake-up since Russia launched its invasion, defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov is set to be replaced by head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov. Reznikov said he did not know of the change and added he would reject a new senior government role.Renewed Russian offensive: Ukrainian forces are preparing for an imminent large-scale attack as the Kremlin seeks to seize the rest of the Donbas region.War smuggling: Moldova’s prime minister has called for more EU help to curb increased trafficking of people and arms from Ukraine.

Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov addresses a press conference yesterday © Oleg Petrasyuk/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

3. Stocks fall as investors worry over US rate rises European stocks and Wall Street futures declined and the dollar strengthened on Monday, after last week’s stronger than expected US jobs report raised the likelihood of further interest rate increases. Data released on Friday showed the US added 517,000 jobs in January.4. Disney cuts ‘Simpsons’ episode with China labour camp reference in Hong Kong The missing programme mentions ‘forced labour camps where children make smartphones’. Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city in 2020, which bans broadly defined crimes including secession and subversion as part of a clampdown on its political opposition and civil society.Hong Kong pro-democracy activists go on trial in landmark national security case Delayed proceedings against 47 defendants could extinguish the city’s opposition5. France and Germany to push back against US green tech poaching France and Germany’s economy ministers will ask the US to stop making “aggressive” overtures to European companies in a bid to lure green investment across the Atlantic, French officials said ahead of a visit to Washington tomorrow. France’s Bruno Le Maire and Germany’s Robert Habeck aim to underscore EU concerns about Joe Biden’s climate bill and push for better co-operation.Gas woes: US energy companies say Europe’s climate goals are stopping them from supplying the continent with natural gas in the long term.The day aheadEconomic data The EU has December retail sales figures, Germany releases factory orders for the same month and S&P Global publishes its construction purchasing managers’ index for the UK.Military meeting The defence ministers of Sweden and Finland meet Nato’s deputy secretary-general and Norwegian military chiefs at a two-day security conference in Oslo to discuss the war in Ukraine.Gold bid Newcrest, Australia’s largest listed gold company, is considering a weekend takeover bid from rival Newmont. Newcrest shares rose more than 9 per cent in Australia.Corporate results Activision Blizzard, Anima, Pinterest and Tyson Foods report.What else we’re reading How the $3.9bn Americanas scandal has shaken corporate Brazil With personal care products and cheap electronics, Americanas stores are a staple of the Brazilian high street. Since last month a multibillion-dollar accounting scandal at the retailer has gripped corporate Brazil, ensnaring some of the nation’s richest men and sparking bitter recriminations and accusations of fraud.Biden makes his case for a second term Encouraging labour figures and a better than expected performance by Democrats in last year’s midterm elections — historically regarded as a referendum on the incumbent administration — have put US president Joe Biden in a much stronger position to launch another general election campaign.Trump’s run: The US donor network led by billionaire Charles Koch said it would oppose Donald Trump’s bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.Barclays chief executive: the life lessons I have discovered during cancer treatment CS Venkatakrishnan gives his personal account of leading the bank while undergoing care for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.“You have to let go and have total trust in your colleagues to handle the responsibilities you are relinquishing temporarily. Senior executive teams comprise high-achieving, opinionated leaders — that is what got them there.”Opinion: Letting the public decide is key to regulating Big Tech The US justice department is quite right that ordinary people should hear arguments on a second major antitrust case filed against Google, writes Rana Foroohar. It is dangerous to allow important decisions on key issues such as corporate power and the rules of surveillance capitalism to be made by technocrats behind closed doors.Opinion: The paradox of financial conditions A gap has emerged between the US central bank and its peers at a time when its policy signals are at odds with financial conditions, writes Mohamed El-Erian. Central banks should be careful to avoid their communication becoming an undue source of economic and financial volatility even as they seek to address the same.Take a break from the newsIn searching for tomorrow’s furniture design classics, how does one go about spotting the Eames lounge chair of the future?

(Clockwise from top left) Cabinet salvaged from a Mayfair jewellery shop by Retrouvius; Bold Chair by Moustache; Lewis Kemmenoe’s Patchwork Cabinet; cabinet by mid-century Czech designer Jiří Jiroutek (mobile view only), at Merchant & Found; oak table by Simon Pengelly; Jupiter chair by Mac Collins; Screen by Casey McCafferty More