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Welcome to your on-line financial newsletter. This service is regularly updated to bring you news of important developments in financial matters.

The news stories on this page have been written and produced by a third party and neither nor its representatives can be held responsible for the accuracy of the content/information contained within these stories.


BBC News

  • Ghana 2-1 Tunisia (AET)
    Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:51:50 GMT
    Ghana qualify for the semi-finals of the Africa Cup of Nations after edging past Tunisia 2-1, following extra-time.
  • Capello opposes FA Terry decision
    Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:49:20 GMT
    England coach Fabio Capello says he disagrees with the Football Association's decision to strip John Terry of the national team's captaincy.

BBC Business News

  • Greek leaders pause bailout talks
    Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:01:42 GMT
    Party leaders in Greece's ruling coalition end talks on details for a crucial 130bn-euro EU rescue plan without agreement.

BBC: Robert Peston

  • Peston Picks is moving
    Thu, 12 May 2011 12:20:59 +0000
    Cardboard Boxes on a trolley

    My blog is dead. Long live the new blog. Or to put it another way, my page - and those of other BBC bloggers - is having a makeover. So if you don't want to read on, and you simply want to read my latest post, click here.

    The reason for the change is to bring together more of my output in one place. So on the new page, you'll find many of my TV and radio pieces, and (soon) my tweets.

    If I go mad and decide to do other social media, that'll be there too.

    Fingers crossed that you like what you see. I can't hope that all of you will love all the changes. And in particular, I am sure some of you will be frustrated that (for cost reasons) there is now a 400 character limit on the comments you can leave.

    Please don't let that put you off expressing yourselves. I can't tell you how much I value your opinions and the debate we have.

    As for the posts I've written since Picks was launched in January 2007, the best place to find them is here. For future posts, the best URL for me is still bbc.co.uk/robertpeston


  • HSBC banks on UK
    Wed, 11 May 2011 09:43:37 +0000

    For all HSBC's mutterings that it's fed up with having the UK as its home base - because of the incremental tax it pays here and what it perceives as an anti-bank climate - there is no evidence from today's strategy review that it is growing any cooler on having a big presence in the UK.

    A branch of HSBC bank near Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament

    In fact, if anything, the opposite is implied by its assessment of where best to allocate its capital and expertise over the coming decade. The UK is categorised by HSBC as a "strategic market", which is HSBC's highest accolade, partly because it has a massive presence in retail banking here and partly because it wants to be "the UK's leading bank for international businesses".

    Interestingly, and in spite of the superior growth rates of emerging economies, HSBC expects the UK to still be the sixth largest economy in the world in 2050, only a fraction smaller than Germany, but bigger than Brazil, Mexico and France.

    The British economy is expected by HSBC to grow faster than the US, Japan, and France over the coming 40 years - and a bit slower than Germany (but, of course, massively slower than China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey). Some of that British momentum, compared to the eurozone and Japan for example, is presumably due to an expected faster rate of population growth in the UK - which is not universally popular.

    But even so, income per capita in the UK in 2050 is predicted to be $49,000, 6.5% below German income per head and almost 20% greater than French per capita income.

    For HSBC, the important trends are expected annual growth of world trade of 8.9% in the coming 10 years and the persistence of huge financial imbalances between the saving and exporting nations (China, India, Germany, and so on) and the consuming and borrowing nations (the US and much of Europe).

    Interestingly, HSBC expects the UK to be a rare example of a country moving from deficit into surplus, by 2020 (or rather it buys into the analysis of the consultants McKinsey and the World Economic Forum to that effect - although there is a bit of a mystery here, because HSBC attributes the forecast to McKinsey, but it's not in the relevant McKinsey document).

    The point, for HSBC, of analysing the world in these terms is that it wants to be the leader in financing those swelling trade flows between emerging economies and developed ones, and also in the related businesses of shipping China's and India's and Taiwan's surplus capital to the US and Europe.

    Which means that what it calls Global Banking and Markets (and others call investment banking) together with its Commercial Banking arm will be the focus of future expansion.

    That looks rational for one of the world's genuinely global banks. But it is slightly disturbing for the rest of us, perhaps, because the bank is assuming that the leaders of the G20 most powerful economies will fail in their avowed aim of stabilising the global economy by reducing China's funding surplus and America's funding deficit, the imbalances that were a fundamental cause of the great crash of 2007-8.

    HSBC's success in that sense seems in part to be predicated on the idea that the global financial economy won't become a much safer place.

    Like all sensible businesses, HSBC say it will reallocate capital to where it sees superior growth or where it has substantial market shares. So it will only stay in retail banking in places, like the UK for example, where it is big enough to be a price leader, rather than a follower.

    The new chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, recognises that current returns are too low, partly because the bank's running costs are too high. So it plans to reduce annual costs by between $2.5bn and $3.5bn over the next three years - though it hasn't said how.

    There is one cost that particularly rankles with HSBC - the special banking levy imposed by the British government. What it finds particularly galling, I am told, is that it pays the levy on uninsured deposits outside the UK, which most would see as a stable form of funding that contributes to the perception of HSBC as being a relatively safe bank.

    Given that Treasury said the levy was designed in part to encourage banks to finance themselves in a more prudent way, it is a bit odd that the levy is costing HSBC around £370m this year, almost exactly the same as Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, and £110m more than Lloyds, in spite of HSBC's funding arrangements being widely seen to be much more prudent and stable than those of the other UK banks.

    It is perhaps understandable therefore that HSBC hopes the Treasury will look again at the structure of the levy. Although - as I've said and elucidated before - HSBC's not-very-veiled threat to leave the UK if the levy isn't reformed doesn't look credible.



Sky Business News

  • US Jobs Rise Boosts Hopes For World Economy

    The global economy received a boost after better-than-expected US jobs figures pushed the Dow Jones stock market index to its highest level since before the 2008 financial crisis.

Citywire News


Citywire Money, Tax and Property


Citywire Investment News


Times Online Top Stories

  • Government scales back child worker vetting scheme
    Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:05:54 GMT
    Plans to vet millions of people working with children and vulnerable adults are to be scaled back to ?common sense? levels, the Government announced todayimg width='1' height='1' src='http://feeds.timesonline.co.uk/c/32313/f/440134/s/b2c452c/mf.gif' border='0'/br/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/73199304108/u/0/f/440134/c/32313/s/187450668/kg/45/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/73199304108/u/0/f/440134/c/32313/s/187450668/kg/45/a2.img" border="0"//a
  • Live: Bloody Sunday families shown Saville report
    Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:03:21 GMT
    9.40 BST On a January morning 38 years ago, 13 protesters died at the hands of British paratroopers and 14 were injured, one so seriously he died four months later. For many of their relatives, the years since have been dominated by the search for truth about what happened during 25 chaotic minutes in central Londonderry.img width='1' height='1' src='http://feeds.timesonline.co.uk/c/32313/f/440134/s/b2c072c/mf.gif' border='0'/br/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/73199169760/u/0/f/440134/c/32313/s/187434796/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/73199169760/u/0/f/440134/c/32313/s/187434796/a2.img" border="0"//a

FT.com - Financial Markets News

  • Record global sales of junk bonds
    Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:43:18 GMT
    Junk bond issuance totalled a record $19.6bn last week, including a sizeable chunk of debt that European companies sold in the US

FT.com - Your Investments


FT.com - Equities

  • Positive employment data lift US stocks
    Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:12:45 GMT
    US stocks hit six-month high on news that unemployment fell to a three-year low in January with banks among the main beneficiaries

FT.com - Your Pension

  • Warning over holiday lets for pensions
    Fri, 3 Feb 2012 17:53:36 +0000
    New schemes allow Sipp investors to gain exposure to property investments ? but some administrators are refusing to hold them

FT.com - Your Property

  • Best mortgage rates go private
    Fri, 3 Feb 2012 18:20:07 +0000
    Some private banks will price their mortgage rates relative to overnight Libor, which is closer to Bank of England base rate at just under 0.6 per cent

FT.com - Your Tax

  • News Archive

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