Rabu, 10 Mei 2023

John Lewis boss Sharon White wins staff confidence vote; US inflation slows to 4.9% – as it happened - The Guardian

The boss of John Lewis pledged the group would always remain employee-owned “no ifs no buts” after staff members backed her to continue as chairman but expressed their dismay at the retailer’s poor performance last year.

Chairman Sharon White had faced controversy after reports she was considering selling a stake in the company to an outside investor in a bid to raise £2bn. On Wednesday, her leadership was tested at a twice yearly meeting of the retailer’s 60-strong council, which is elected by employees to represent them.

Announcing the result of votes on past performance White’s ongoing mandate, Chris Earnshaw, president of the partnership council, said

The Council voted in support of the Chairman to progress the Partnership in relation to its purpose, principles and rules. The Council did not support last year’s performance, in which we reported a full year loss and no Partner Bonus.

The department store and Waitrose supermarket owner reported hefty losses for 2022, which meant staff did not receive an annual bonus.

Our main stories today:

The boss of John Lewis pledged the group would always remain employee-owned “no ifs no buts” after staff members backed her to continue as chair but expressed their dismay at the retailer’s poor performance last year.

Sharon White had faced controversy after reports she was considering selling a stake in the company to an outside investor in an attempt to raise £2bn. On Wednesday, her leadership was tested in a confidence vote at a twice-yearly meeting of the retailer’s 60-strong council, which is elected by employees to represent them.

Announcing the result of votes on past performance and White’s ongoing mandate, Chris Earnshaw, president of the partnership council, said: “The council voted in support of the chairman to progress the partnership in relation to its purpose, principles and rules. The council did not support last year’s performance, in which we reported a full-year loss and no partner bonus.”

The department store and Waitrose supermarket owner reported hefty losses for 2022, which meant staff did not receive an annual bonus.

The price of goods and services in the US remained stubbornly high in April, rising 4.9.% from a year ago, the labor department reported on Wednesday.

The annual rate of inflation has fallen sharply since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% last June. April’s rise nearly matched the 5% rise recorded in March. It was the 10th consecutive month that the rate had declined but prices are still rising at a rate that is more than twice the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% a year.

The latest consumer price index (CPI) – a widely followed measure of the costs for goods and services in the US economy – showed prices rising 0.4% over the month, up from a 0.1% increase in March.

Longer lorries are to be fully permitted on Great Britain’s roads after the government said it would introduce laws to allow their use, despite warnings that the move will increase the number of fatal road accidents.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said lorries measuring up to 18.55 metres long – 2.05 metres longer than the current standard size – would be allowed from the end of this month.

Asos has dived £291m into the red after sales slumped in what the online fashion retailer called a “challenging trading backdrop”, with shoppers returning to physical high street stores and cutting spending on non-essentials.

Sales fell by 8%, including a 10% drop in the UK, in the six months to 28 February – far worse than the 3% forecast by the City. The company said it had deliberately shifted away from unprofitable sales and suffered from weak consumer demand and the December postal strikes.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Bye! – JK

Here is our full story on John Lewis:

The boss of John Lewis pledged the group would always remain employee-owned “no ifs no buts” after staff members backed her to continue as chairman but expressed their dismay at the retailer’s poor performance last year.

Chairman Sharon White had faced controversy after reports she was considering selling a stake in the company to an outside investor in a bid to raise £2bn. On Wednesday, her leadership was tested at a twice yearly meeting of the retailer’s 60-strong council, which is elected by employees to represent them.

Announcing the result of votes on past performance White’s ongoing mandate, Chris Earnshaw, president of the partnership council, said

The Council voted in support of the Chairman to progress the Partnership in relation to its purpose, principles and rules. The Council did not support last year’s performance, in which we reported a full year loss and no Partner Bonus.

The department store and Waitrose supermarket owner reported hefty losses for 2022, which meant staff did not receive an annual bonus.

The John Lewis Partnership’s council is meeting today where its chairman Sharon White faces a confidence vote.

The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong tweeted:

Retail analyst Maureen Hinton tweeted:

The investor Jeroen Blokland noted that US inflation has dropped below 5% for the first time in two years.

The Washington Post’s economic columnist and editorial board member Heather Long tweeted:

Neil Shah, executive director at Edison Group, said the US economic picture remains complex.

These CPI [consumer price index] figures will be of little help to forecasters. US April inflation figures remained stubbornly high at 4.9%, though very slightly lower than expected. Core CPI, the Fed’s main guideline for monetary policy, has also come down slightly year-on-year, though sticky services inflation will remain a concern.

And then there’s the backdrop. While the US housing market has seen a significant decline in the first quarter, the US labour market is going from strength to strength, adding a further 253,000 jobs in April. This also marked the 13th straight month where US job creation has surpassed the median forecasts of economists. Finally, let’s not forget the small issue of the small banks crisis which has tightened lending conditions and could provide a significant dampener for inflation in months to come.

All of these variables are complicating the Fed’s path forward, as its tightening cycle is yet to show its full effect. The next set of inflation figures will be significant – they are set to be released the day before the next Fed decision. Until then, the mood remains uncertain.

The annual rate of US inflation has fallen sharply since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% last June but prices are still rising at a rate that is more than twice the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% a year.

April’s rate fell unexpectedly to 4.9%, but nearly matched the 5% rise recorded in March.

US headline inflation has come in slightly better than expected, ticking down to an annual rate of 4.9% in April from 5% in March.

The core rate, which excludes volatile items like food and fuel, eased to 5.5% from 5.6%, as expected.

US inflation figures are out in just a couple of minutes.

We are expecting the headline rate to have stayed at 5% while the core rate, which excludes volatile items like food and fuel, is forecast to have eased slightly to 5.5% from 5.6%.

We will also get the results of the John Lewis confidence vote. Stay tuned….

While spring is on the way… households and businesses in Great Britain saved enough electricity over the winter to power 10m homes by reducing their energy use during peak demand hours in order to help the country avoid blackouts.

About 1.6m households and businesses received payments to help reduce the pressure on the National Grid during the winter months as part of a demand flexibility scheme run by its electricity system operator (ESO).

The energy users were called on about 22 times to reschedule their energy use to avoid peak demand hours, for example, running dishwashers or tumble dryers at night, which saved more than 3,300 megawatt-hours of electricity.

And here’s our full story on longer lorries:

Uber customers in the UK will soon be able to reserve flights through the ride-booking app, as the company aims to offer multiple forms of transport.

The new feature allowing consumers to book domestic and international flights is being rolled out on Uber’s UK app and will be available to all British users by the summer.

Uber said the flight-booking function was part of its ambition to “create a seamless door-to-door travel solution” alongside the car ride-sharing function it was first known for. The company has partnered with online travel agent Hopper to let users book flights, and will receive a small commission from each sale.

Here’s our full story on Asos.

Asos has dived £291m into the red after sales slumped in what the online fashion retailer called a “challenging trading backdrop”, with shoppers returning to physical high street stores and cutting spending on non-essentials.

Sales fell by 8%, including a 10% drop in the UK, in the six months to 28 February – far worse than the 3% forecast by the City. The company said it had deliberately shifted away from unprofitable sales and suffered from weak consumer demand and the December postal strikes.

The £291m pre-tax loss, against a £16m loss a year before, came after writing down £100m on unwanted stock as Asos focuses on a narrow range of products and tries to update its fashions more quickly.

Asos said sales had continued to slide in March and April and it now expected them to fall by at least 10% for the year and to make an underlying profit of no more than £60m.

Andrew Wade, a retail analyst at Jefferies, said Asos now appeared likely to make a pre-tax loss of about £70m for the year to the end of August, well short of the £19m profit anticipated by the City.

“Asos continues to face into significant challenges, with revenue declining more rapidly and net debt higher than anticipated,” Wade said in a note.

Tesco, Aldi and Lidl have followed Sainsbury’s in cutting their bread and butter prices.

Yesterday, Sainsbury’s cut the price of its salted and unsalted butter from £1.99 to £1.89 for 250g packets. The UK’s second-largest supermarket chain also lowered the price of its soft white medium, wholemeal medium, wholemeal thick, and toastie white loaves of bread to 75p – a reduction of 11%.

Tesco, Aldi and Lidl followed suit today, also reducing 250g of butter from £1.99 to £1.89.

Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket group, has dropped the price of its most popular bread, Tesco Toastie white bread, from 85p to 75p. It has cut 10p from the price of its own-brand white, wholemeal medium and wholemeal thick 800g bread, to 75p.

Aldi reduced the price of some loaves to 75p fro 79p. Lidl cut some bread prices to 75p and said it had a loaf priced at 39p.

It shows price wars are still underway – last month, Tesco led on milk price reduction, followed by Sainsbury’s. They cut the price of milk by at least 5p, followed by Aldi, Lidl and Asda.

Supermarkets have been criticised for not passing on lower food prices. Wholesale prices for commodities such as wheat and butter have been falling around the world after sharp rises last year, but UK food inflation is still at its highest level for 45 years, pushing up wider inflation.

Tesco’s chief product officer Ashwin Prasad said:

As families continue to watch their weekly spend and budget carefully, we’re pleased to be able to pass on price reductions where we can, and to help with everyday essentials like bread and butter.

The grocer said prices could vary in its Express stores.

In the US, harrowing photos released by the US labor department taken at a slaughterhouse plant in Nebraska show the conditions more than 100 children faced while illegally working for Packers Sanitation Services Incorporated (PSSI) before the department cracked down on the company for violating child labor laws.

The pictures show employees covered in protective gear, using chemicals to spray down and sanitize equipment. In some of the pictures, made public on Sunday by the television news show 60 Minutes, some of the employees appear to be young children, wearing protective face glasses and holding buckets.

In February, the labor department fined PSSI $1.5m for employing at least 102 children ages 13 to 17 across 13 meat-packing plants in eight states. The fine amounts to $15,138 for each child, the maximum penalty under federal law. The Wisconsin-based company is one of the largest food sanitation companies in the US and is contracted by meat plants to sanitize facilities. The company says it works with more than 725 partner plants.

Here’s our full story on Wetherspoons:

The pub chain JD Wetherspoon has reported its highest Easter week sales and busiest-ever Saturday, with cash-conscious drinkers searching out cheaper options amid the cost of living crisis.

Wetherspoon’s, which runs more than 830 branches across the UK and Ireland, said it had benefited from a rise in sales in the past two weeks, both of which included bank holiday weekends.

The outsourcing firm and government contractor Capita has revealed it will take a hit of up to £20m from a recent cyber-attack in which some customer, supplier and staff data was accessed by hackers.

The group, which is a major contractor for local authorities, said investigations into the incident suggest that some data was accessed but that this was from less than 0.1% of its server estate.

It said it has taken “extensive steps” to recover and secure the data contained within the affected server estate, and to “remediate any issues arising from the incident”.

It expects the bill for the cyber-attack to reach between £15m and £20m, covering specialist professional fees, recovery and remediation costs, as well as investment to reinforce its cybersecurity defences and strengthen its IT security.

President Joe Biden and top lawmakers agreed on Tuesday to further talks aimed at breaking a deadlock over raising the $31.4tn US debt limit, with just three weeks before the country could be forced into an unprecedented default.

After about an hour of talks in the Oval Office, Biden, a Democrat, and House of Representatives speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, deputized their aides to hold daily discussions about areas of possible agreement as a default looms as soon as 1 June.

Biden, McCarthy and three other top congressional leaders are set to meet again on Friday.

Biden called the talks “productive” and appeared to offer Republicans some possible compromises, including taking a “hard look” for the first time at clawing back unspent coronavirus relief funds to reduce government spending.

But he repeated that Republicans must take the threat of default off the table. And he did not rule out eventually invoking the 14th amendment to the US constitution, an untested approach that would seek to declare the debt limit unconstitutional. Doing so would require litigation, he said, but is an option he may study in the future.

“There’s a lot of politics and posturing, and that’s going to continue for a while,” Biden said, but political leaders are “getting to work”.

“Everyone in the meeting understood the risk of default,” Biden said.

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https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMinAFodHRwczovL3d3dy50aGVndWFyZGlhbi5jb20vYnVzaW5lc3MvbGl2ZS8yMDIzL21heS8xMC9hc29zLXN3aW5ncy1maXJzdC1oYWxmLWxvc3MtbG9uZ2VyLWxvcnJpZXMtYWxsb3dlLXVrcy1yb2Fkcy1yZWR1Y2Utam91cm5leXMtdXMtaW5mbGF0aW9uLWJ1c2luZXNzLWxpdmXSAZwBaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAudGhlZ3VhcmRpYW4uY29tL2J1c2luZXNzL2xpdmUvMjAyMy9tYXkvMTAvYXNvcy1zd2luZ3MtZmlyc3QtaGFsZi1sb3NzLWxvbmdlci1sb3JyaWVzLWFsbG93ZS11a3Mtcm9hZHMtcmVkdWNlLWpvdXJuZXlzLXVzLWluZmxhdGlvbi1idXNpbmVzcy1saXZl?oc=5

2023-05-10 13:30:00Z
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