Pound news - live: Sterling briefly soars as Merkel raises hopes of 'practical solutions' to Brexit backstop
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The pound shot up after German chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU would consider practical solutions to an impasse over the backstop.
Sterling briefly rose sharply in a volatile day's trading, erasing losses caused by Boris Johnson's latest attempt to make progress on renegotiating a Brexit trade deal.
The prime minister wrote to European Council President Donald Tusk to propose replacing the Irish backstop with “alternative arrangements” and dismissed potential food and medicine shortages as “bumps in the road”. EU officials reacted with dismay, with one French diplomat calling Mr Johnson's border plan “a joke”.
Ms Merkel's comments later in the day then caused sterling to spike before it fell back against the euro, dollar, yen, Swiss franc and Australian dollar.
Good morning and welcome to The Independent's coverage of global business and economics events.
The pound has fallen against the dollar, euro and other major currencies after EU officials rubbished Boris Johnson's latest attempt to re-negotiate Brexit.
The UK prime minister proposed scrapping the backstop, which is designed to prevent a hard border in Ireland, in favour of "alternative arrangements".
Sterling is down 0.34 per cent against the dollar to $1.208, 0.32 per cent against the euro to €1.09 and 0.5 per cent against the yen to 128.6.
Thousands of children are being exposed to social media ads for unlicensed e-sports gambling which break advertising regulation, a new study suggests.
Researchers looked at more than 800,000 tweets relating to traditional gambling, as well as betting on e-sports - computer games tournaments played competitively.
Using publicly available data, an algorithm assessed that 41,000 accounts that interacted with these tweets likely belonged to children aged under 16.
Huawei's founder says he expects no relief from US export curbs due to the political climate in Washington but expressed confidence the company will thrive because it is developing its own technology.
Ren Zhengfei also said he doesn't want relief from the US sanctions if it requires China to make concessions in a tariff war, even if that means his daughter, who is under house arrest in Canada on US criminal charges, faces a longer legal struggle.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Ren said Huawei expects US curbs on most technology sales to go ahead despite Monday's announcement of a second 90-day delay. He said no one in Washington would risk standing up for the company.
Associated Press
Are companies finally going to act in the interests of customers, employees and wider society rather than just shareholders?
That's the promise of one of America’s most powerful business lobby groups.
The Business Roundtable updated its statement of the purpose of a corporation on Monday. Businesses should now promote ‘an economy that serves all Americans’, the group says.
There has been a lot of talk today about ditching the “greed is good” mantra or how “shareholder democracy failed the people” but what does this statement mean in practice?
The statement isn’t binding but it’s significant that 181 chief executives who have signed it, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, have jettisoned the idea - dominant for the past several decades - that the only aim of a company should be to enrich its owners.
While it remains to be seen how closely those CEOs stick to the new line, it appears to show that they are coming round to the idea that politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Jeremy Corbyn may have a point when it comes to the need for a change in the way companies do business.
Energy regulator Ofgem has launched an investigation into large-scale power cuts on 9 August that left rail passengers stranded for hours and more than a million people without electricity.
Ofgem says it will look at whether National Grid, the private company which operates Britain's electricity network, had enough back-up supply.
Jonathan Brearley, executive director of systems and networks at Ofgem says:
The power cuts of Friday 9 August caused interruptions to consumers’ energy and significant disruption to commuters. It’s important that the industry takes all possible steps to prevent this happening again. Having now received National Grid ESO’s interim report, we believe there are still areas where we need to use our statutory powers to investigate these outages. This will ensure the industry learns the relevant lessons and to clearly establish whether any firm breached their obligations to deliver secure power supplies to consumers.”
What has Boris Johnson said that has annoyed EU officials?
Boris Johnson has been accused of having “no negotiating strategy” after repeating his Brexit demand for the Irish backstop to be scrapped in his first letter to Donald Tusk.
Just hours after one EU leader said the withdrawal agreement “cannot be reopened”, the prime minister described the deal negotiated by Theresa May’s government as “unviable”.
Full story here from political correspondent Ashley Cowburn:
In the words of Labour's Keir Starmer:
Long-suffering Persimmon homeowners will not be sad to hear that the housebuilder's profits fell in the first half of the year.
Persimmon, which has generated huge profit margins from building often substandard homes said it spent more this year in dealing with its problems, including a 40 per cent increase on customer service.
The company, its shareholders and several of its executives have been the biggest beneficiaries of the government's Help to Buy scheme.
The scheme was supposed to assist first-time buyers with their deposit but has been heavily criticised for bumping up house prices while handing vast unearned windfalls to housebuilders.
Persimmon's profits dipped 1.4 per cent to £509.3m in the six months to 30 June
Recession is a word being uttered with increasing frequency by analysts, particularly after the yield curve inverted for US and UK government bonds last week.
Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management thinks those fears are "overdone".
But investors should prepare for a more sustained period of lower interest rates. We would caution against seeing the inversion of the yield curve as an infallible predictor of an economic contraction or a bear market. Added to this, we do not see signs of an imminent recession in US data despite a weakening of business investment. US GDP expanded at an annualized 2.1% in the second quarter, with strong consumer spending helping to compensate for declining business investment.
Greene King, Britain’s biggest pub owner, has agreed to sell its entire business to CKA, a real estate group run by Hong Kong’s richest family.
Shares in the pub owner and brewer surged after it announced the £2.7bn deal on Monday afternoon.
The Suffolk-based business owns roughly 2,700 pubs, restaurants and hotels across the UK and employs more than 38,000 staff.
Full story:
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