- My Posts
- Chat to Authors
Home
Home
Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-04-09T16:00:01Z.
2754 blog posts. 128 comments.
JEANNE WHALEN AND JULIAN MARK
The Washington Post 18/3/2023 Ongoing swings in stock market may be result of short-term reactions
A week after Silicon Valley Bank failed, the stock market showed continuing fears Friday that the banking industry’s turmoil might not be settled even after massive interventions by governments and Wall Street institutions.
Major stock indexes slid Friday — and California’s troubled First Republic Bank declined sharply, falling by more than 30 percent despite a new $30 billion lifeline from big Wall Street firms. Shares in U.S. regional banks such as Pacwest Bancorp and Keycorp also fell by more than the markets overall did, while Switzerland’s troubled Credit Suisse continued to decline.
The parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, meanwhile, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday.
But experts said the financial system did appear to be on firm ground, and the swinging stock prices might simply represent traders reacting to short-term news, not new signs of crisis. More volatility might lie ahead: The Federal Reserve will meet next week and will announce on Wednesday whether it’s raising interest rates again, as officials try to balance their struggle to control inflation against the stresses rapid rate hikes are placing on banks.
President Biden again endorsed the overall banking system’s stability on Friday, but also called for accountability “for those responsible for this mess.” He stressed again that Americans should feel confident that their deposits are safe. The White House said it’s asking Congress to strengthen the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s ability to claw back compensation — including gains from sales of stock — from executives at failed banks, to fine those executives and to ban them from working in the industry.
“No one is above the law,”
Biden said in a statement. “Congress must act to impose tougher penalties for senior bank executives whose mismanagement contributed to their institutions failing.”
The banking sector has undergone a solid week of whiplash.
The tumult began with a bank run on SVB on March 10, followed by a federal intervention over the weekend to guarantee the bank’s deposits. Regulators also closed New York-based Signature Bank and moved to guarantee its deposits.
Tensions then shifted to Europe, where Credit Suisse stock plummeted on Wednesday after the 167-year-old giant bank disclosed problems related to its financial reporting, prompting Switzerland’s central bank to offer up to $54 billion in emergency loans. That intervention, along with Thursday’s rescue effort for First Republic, appeared to calm some fears — but Friday’s trading shows that jitters remain.
Investors clearly don’t believe First Republic is out of danger. The bank’s decline on the New York Stock Exchange reversed a late Thursday rally after the nation’s biggest banks, in coordination with federal officials, announced they would deposit billions in First Republic in an effort to restore confidence. The slide came after the beleaguered bank disclosed additional information about its finances and suspended dividend payments to shareholders.
Stock-price gyrations like those now roiling the banking sector are often driven by shortterm traders and not sober analysis of the underlying company’s health, said Aaron Klein, a Brookings Institution economist and a former Treasury Department official who helped craft financial sector reform after the 2008 crash.
“The broad American banking system is safe,” Klein said.
“The provisions put in place after the ’08 crisis made the
system safer,” he added. “While public confidence has been shaken, people should appreciate that we have a more stable system and that this is not a repeat of 2008.”
Signs of stress coursing through the system were evident in data published Thursday showing a big spike in emergency bank borrowing from the Federal Reserve. Borrowing from the Fed’s discount window, known as the lender of last resort, reached $152.85 billion as of March 15, exceeding the previous record of $111 billion, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.
The previous record came during the 2008 financial crisis that precipitated the Great Recession.
“In typical times, there is little to no borrowing from the discount window,” he said.
Banks tapped an additional $12 billion in loans from a separate Fed program announced this week.
First Republic made up a sig
nificant portion of that borrowing. On Thursday, the bank disclosed that its borrowing from the Fed from March 10 to March 15 varied from $20 billion to $109 billion. It said it had borrowed another $10 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank — the lender of second-to-last resort — since March 9.
On Friday, bank analysts at Wedbush Securities downgraded the bank’s stock. A possible distressed sale of First Republic to a larger entity, as reported by Bloomberg, would probably benefit the banking system as a whole but could be a bad deal for First Republic shareholders, Wedbush argued.
Zandi, the Moody’s Analytics economist, said the banking stock sell-off indicates that investors — not depositors — are most vulnerable in the current environment. Federal pledges to backstop depositors leave them on solid ground, he said. If another bank fails, it’s the shareholders who “might get dinged,”
he said. And investor certainty that banks will prove to be profitable investments in the coming months has dropped.
“There is just generally an ‘I don’t want to be invested in banks’ sentiment,” he said.
The new SVB bankruptcy proceedings involve only the bank’s parent company, SVB Financial Group.
The bankruptcy does not include SVB Capital, a venture capital private credit entity, or SVB Securities, a broker-dealer under its own management. And, at present, Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, the bank created in the wake of the federal takeover, is operating independently and isn’t part of the proceedings.
“The Chapter 11 process will allow SVB Financial Group to preserve value as it evaluates strategic alternatives for its prized businesses and assets, especially SVB Capital and SVB Securities,” said William Kosturos, chief restructuring officer for SVB Financial Group.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
officialsAbha Bhattarai contributed to this report.
The Washington Post 18/3/2023
One week after the stunning collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, policymakers in Washington are confronting the uncomfortable prospect that they could have anticipated the trouble sooner and acted faster to head off financial tumult.
The new scrutiny focuses on the Federal Reserve, its regional bank in San Francisco, the state of California and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, after Washington moved in recent years to dial back oversight of important regional institutions. Roughly a decade and a half after the 2008 financial crisis sent the country into a deep recession, these government officials possessed vast power to probe SVB before it failed — yet they all seemed to miss key opportunities to prevent the meltdown.
For months, at least, SVB seemed to teeter on the precipice: A critical lender, investor and financial steward for the powerful technology set, the bank had grown at a breakneck pace, eventually accumulating a dubious balance sheet that raised doubt about the state of its assets.
But it was only after a swift, mass exodus of its customers — closely concentrated among venture-capital investors — that the government intervened last week. California assumed control of the bank last Friday, before the Biden administration orchestrated a dramatic rescue to make depositors whole while acting to prevent what might have been a widespread run on other institutions. Regulators soon after
closed New York-based Signature Bank and moved to guarantee its deposits, too.
Now, financial experts, lawmakers and former government officials have expressed alarm about the potential lack of rigorous oversight. Some have pointed the finger at the Fed, the nation’s supervisory central bank, arguing it should have scrutinized the books of SVB, which grew at a meteoric pace during the pandemic as the tech industry boomed. And others have raised concerns that past pushes for deregulation — enacted under President Donald Trump — had resulted in laws and political conditions ripe for neglect.
“It’s just hard for me to believe that a big piece of this was not a failure of the supervisors to look more closely at a fast-growing bank, which of course parallels the failure of the bank to adequately assess its funding risk,” said Daniel Tarullo, a professor at Harvard Law School who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board from January 2009 to April 2017, overseeing supervision and regulation.
Appearing Thursday on Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that more examination was warranted: “I think we need to look into the regulators — to exactly what happened to create the problems that these two banks that failed faced — and make sure that our regulatory system in supervision is appropriately geared so that banks manage their risks.”
For now, the Fed has announced an internal investigation to determine what it may have missed, while the state of California has opened its own probe into the matter. The Fed inquiry — led by Michael S. Barr, the board’s vice chair of supervision — aims to deliver its findings by May 1.
“The events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank demand a thorough, transparent, and swift review by the Federal Reserve,” said Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, in a statement earlier this week.
But some financial watchdogs have demanded a more independent investigation, arguing that the Fed’s failures were so significant that an internal review won’t suffice. And lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate have signaled Congress could follow suit: Late Thursday, a bipartisan group led by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) demanded answers from the Fed, noting it is “gravely concerning” that the bank missed key warning signs that private investors had identified before the collapse.
“It’s inexplicable that the Federal Reserve did not act here,” said Dennis Kelleher, the president and chief executive at the advocacy group Better Markets, who served as a top aide to Senate Democrats during the debate over banking reforms after the 2008 financial crisis, a law known as Dodd-frank.
The Fed is working to be “completely thorough, completely transparent and let the chips fall where they may” with its own inquiry, but officials there would “very much welcome” other external reviews, said a person familiar with the central bank’s plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing matter.
On the eve of its collapse, SVB had an unusually high amount of uninsured deposits — large accounts exceeding $250,000 — that reflected its popularity among the well-heeled tech set. As deposits flowed in, the bank invested the cash to earn higher returns than it was paying out in interest.
A significant portion of those assets were long-term government bonds, typically considered quite safe. But those bonds, mostly purchased at low interest rates, became less valuable when the bank needed them most: As interest rates rose, the market value of the existing bonds issued at lower rates fell. That meant the bank couldn’t easily sell its investments in the face of a cash crunch. Compounding its trouble, the tech industry faced a downturn, so many of its customers began making withdrawals to meet their own cash needs. In other words, the higher rates squeezed SVB from both sides.
The bank’s failure triggered a frenetic 72 hours in government and throughout Silicon Valley, as the Biden administration raced to shore up the country’s financial system. But some congressional lawmakers began to question why state and federal regulators hadn’t noticed the underlying problem sooner.
Chartered in California and a part of the Federal Reserve System, SVB had submitted to both state and federal oversight — meaning regulators could have reviewed its finances and prodded the bank using their supervisory powers.
Aaron Klein, a former top official at the Treasury Department now serving as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the Fed and its regional bank in San Francisco should have spotted a number of “massive red flags.” That included the “explosive growth” at SVB, its high degree of uninsured deposits and its effort, months before it failed, to borrow money against its investment holdings — a move meant to create liquidity that it could return to depositors seeking withdrawals — from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. By the end of last year, SVB was the biggest borrower at what is seen as a lender of nextto-last resort. U.S. officials and Wall Street banks had to rescue the second-largest borrower there, First Republic Bank, on Thursday, with larger institutions placing $30 billion on deposit there to ease concerns.
Instead, Klein said there is no evidence that the Fed ever intervened in SVB’S case. “You have a lot of authority to slow the institution’s growth,” Klein said. “How the Fed supervised them seems to be under greater lock and key than Area 51,” the secretive U.S. military base some believe is where the government stores evidence of alien spacecraft.
Adding a potentially uncomfortable wrinkle, the since-ousted chief executive at Silicon Valley Bank, Gregory Becker, served as a director at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco until last week. A spokeswoman for the San Francisco Fed, Jennifer Chamberlain, said Becker “had no input or involvement on oversight activities.”
The fiasco came as a shock to many in Washington, roughly 15 years after the financial crisis resulted in the Dodd-frank bank
ing law. That 2010 act empowered regulators and cracked down on banks, limiting their trading and investing while subjecting the largest firms to enhanced oversight, including periodic checkups known as “stress testing.”
While banks chafed at these rules as too restrictive, the regulations ultimately helped stabilize the financial system and restore consumer confidence. By 2018, however, Congress seized on the relative calm to ease the law.
That year, GOP lawmakers led a bipartisan push to adopt the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which revised Dodd-frank to loosen some of the requirements for stress tests on banks with less than $250 billion in assets — essentially all but the largest. That marked a dramatic weakening of the law, since banks at the time with assets above $50 billion would have been subject to higher scrutiny. Despite protests from some Democrats, the bill passed with support from both parties, and Trump signed it into law.
Even before it was implemented, it carried significant weight: The bipartisan agreement “had the effect of just changing the perception among regulators and supervisors about what the goal is,” said Todd Phillips, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former official at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He cited the resonance of the overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the usually gridlocked Senate. “You had two-thirds of the Senate voting to deregulate, basically, and that was just a vibe shift,” he said.
The banking industry cheered the measure, which some companies, including SVB, lobbied for months to advance. The firm then was just barely big enough to qualify for enhanced federal oversight, with roughly $51.2 billion in assets by the end of 2017, according to its annual reports. With the new law in place, it stood to avoid heightened scrutiny the following year, when it reported assets around $56.9 billion. (By the end of last year, several years into the looser regulatory regime, the bank reported more than $200 billion in assets.)
As the Fed implemented the law in 2019, it further eased scrutiny of banks with between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets. Even those who supported the spirit of the idea — meant to spare community banks — still warned about the potential for repercussions. Lael Brainard, now a senior economic adviser to Biden who then served on the Fed board, expressed fear that the deregulatory approach would “weaken core safeguards against the vulnerabilities that caused so much damage in the [financial] crisis.”
Despite her warnings, top Fed officials also pitched the public on a hands-off approach. Explaining the philosophy at a June 2021 conference, Randal K. Quarles, then the vice chair for supervision, emphasized his goal to create “more flexibility” in a bid to benefit the economy — and stressed that the government “should choose the [approach] that is less burdensome for the system.”
“The zeitgeist coming out of 2018 was to trust the banks to manage their own risk,” said Peter Conti-brown, a professor of financial regulation at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, recalling the longterm impact of the Trump administration and its actions. “The message from Congress to the Fed was: Back off.”
Conti-brown said he agreed with Brainard’s opposition to the 2019 rules. He said Fed supervisors must have been aware of the large pool of bonds SVB held that would lose value if interest rates rose. Fed supervisors also had the tools to intervene, Conti-brown said, yet they didn’t.
“A supervisor should have been hyper-keyed into this fact and should have been saying ‘If you do not diversify this asset class, we are going to have to take dramatic steps,’ including possibly shutting the bank down, which it had the power to do,” he said.
The Federal Reserve has also now commenced an investigation into its oversight of midsize banks worth between $100 billion and $250 billion, according to a source familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The result could be tighter capital and liquidity requirements, as well as more strenuous “stress tests,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
But the uncertainty still has sparked new, fierce debate on Capitol Hill.
Some Democrats have pushed to repeal the 2018 law that deregulated the industry — and signaled the government needs other, tougher rules to probe banks and penalize their top executives.
“If they had been in place, they may have prevented this from happening,” former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.) said in a recent interview.
Republicans, meanwhile, have blasted Democrats for seizing on SVB to advance a policy agenda. Rep. Patrick T. Mchenry (R-N.C.), the leader of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, pledged in a recent interview to “get to the bottom of what happened here,” as he warded off new calls for regulation.
“What we did not have was a deficiency of regulation,” he said. “It was a deficiency of regulators.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
DANIELLE ABRIL
The Washington Post 18/3/2023 Workers will be able to chat with artificial intelligence called Copilot in apps like Word, Microsoft says
it is embedding artificial intelligence into its apps, such as Word, Excel and Outlook.
If you ever wished you could speed through some of the more tedious tasks of your job, such as creating a Powerpoint presentation, analyzing the latest sales data or even getting caught up on what happened in meetings you missed, you could soon get some help with an AI tool.
Microsoft on Thursday unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, which embeds artificial intelligence into apps like Word, Outlook, Teams and Excel. The AI assistant combines natural language processing, based on Openai’s CHATGPT technology, with Microsoft Office tools and capabilities to help workers automate or accelerate some of their more mundane work. Copilot is debuting with 20 enterprise customers, with the expectation of testing and tweaking the software. Microsoft said it expects to make it available to its larger user base in the coming months. It did not release details regarding whether the capabilities will come at an additional cost.
“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. This will happen with help from “copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs.”
The move follows the company’s debut of the new version of its search engine Bing, which integrates the conversational AI tool, CHATGPT. It also comes just days after Google said that it’s adding AI into its workplace software, Google Workspace.
But experts have cautioned that generative AI tools such as CHATGPT can introduce problems to work, as it can sometimes get facts wrong, misinterpret text or even generate content that doesn’t make sense. They also caution people about sharing sensitive data with generative AI tools, which could then repurpose the data to train its tech.
In its demo of Copilot, Microsoft acknowledged that sometimes its AI might get things wrong or exclude important details, emphasizing that workers can choose to review, edit or even discard results produced by the tool. It also adds some citations that show which of your files or conversations it used for its answers and suggests prompts you may want use to continue working with Copilot. Microsoft said that Copilot follows the customer’s security, compliance and privacy policies for Microsoft 365, and that it doesn’t use company data to train its systems.
Here are some of the ways to use Copilot at work.
Use business chat to work across apps
Workers who don’t know where to start can turn to a new tool called business chat, which will work across Microsoft’s apps and be embedded into Teams, on the Microsoft 365 website and in the new Bing platform for work.
You can prompt the chat to give you milestones of a project you’re working on, and it will search across apps and documents to present you with answers, offering citations of where it got those answers, for example. You can then continue the conversation and ask it to summarize its answer or infer what risks might be related to the project. Then you can turn that into an action by asking the chat to draft an email to specific colleagues including the summary and risks. If you like the draft, you can click to make the chat open Outlook and transfer all the data to the right fields, so that the subject moves to the subject line and the content is automatically pasted into the body of the email.
Workers can also use Microsoft’s collaborative chat tool Loop to create prompts for and work with the AI together as a group.
Draft documents, emails and speeches
Workers can prompt Microsoft Copilot to generate text on a specific topic in an Outlook email, in a Word document, in a Teams message or on Onenote. It will either pull from its library of information, which includes information from Openai’s GPT technology as well as items or conversations within your Microsoft apps, or from the documents or materials you specify.
For example, you can tell Copilot to write a message on Teams, Microsoft’s group chat and video tool, debriefing them on the latest customer interactions. From a drop-down menu, you can pick which documents have those interactions and add those to the prompt. Microsoft will then generate text. You can ask it to generate a new response, shorten it, change the style of communication to be more professional or casual, or include or exclude specific details. You can also manually edit the text Copilot gives you before sending it to the team.
Quickly build Powerpoint presentations
You can also use Copilot to speed up how long it takes to build a Powerpoint presentation.
If you already have notes or a briefing saved in a Word document, you can ask Copilot to make a presentation based on the existing file or create a file based on your presentation. You can also prompt it to include images saved on Microsoft’s cloud service, Onedrive. For example, if you wanted to create a presentation that includes the latest sales of your company’s product, you could ask it to include images you saved of that product, and it will automatically drop them in. You can edit or remove anything that Copilot adds.
You can ask Copilot to include speaker notes, so that you have a script to follow when you give a presentation. You can also ask it to add transitions between slides, make slides more visual or add animations related to your topic to a slide.
Get insights on Excel spreadsheets
On Excel, users can quickly analyze large data sets or zero in on specific data points.
So if workers have a spreadsheet showing this quarter’s sales, they can ask Copilot to give them the key trends from the data. They can ask it to visualize what led to a sales decline, and Copilot will highlight key figures. They can also ask it to break down a specific month, and Copilot will create a new sheet further analyzing specific figures based on the original data. It can also create growth models for the future.
Catch up on work communications
Workers can quickly get a recap of emails or meetings, even if they weren’t there.
If you miss a meeting, you can ask Copilot to tell you to give you the key points, which it pulls from the meeting’s transcript. You can also ask it to surface questions or comments made by a specific participant. And it can tell you what outstanding items are left and offer action items for the future. It can also help you prioritize your emails.
Automate work flows
If workers wanted to ensure that their customer service colleagues were flagged on urgent issues, they could ask Copilot to automatically send a Teams message with a summary of an urgent customer complaint and tag specific people once that message is sent. In this case, the action will be triggered every time an urgent request is received.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
The Independent 16/3/2023
For a short time, the “experienced” Jeremy Hunt is the most famous 56-year-old around. He mentioned his own age in his Budget speech and, chronologically at least, he is on a par with Gordon Ramsay, Chris Evans and Roman Abramovich, as it happens.
Using his own recent experiences in jocular fashion – early retirement on the backbenches followed a few years later by the surprise “new career in finance” – Hunt was keen to highlight how valuable older and more experienced workers can be, not least to prime ministers in a tight corner, and how important it is to keep them in the workforce and, if possible, to return to it. Hence the more generous tax allowances for pension savings (albeit of most use to the super-rich and better-off NHS consultants); the genuinely significant boost to childcare costs for working parents; and new support for people with disabilities and with long-term illness.
So, will the new measures solve Britain’s chronic labour and skills shortages – which have been holding back employment, growth, pushing up inflation in wages (and thus business costs) and generally been a nuisance for anyone trying to get served in a bar or seen by a GP?
The answer is that they will undoubtedly help, but they’re unlikely to trigger a step-change in economic growth. They will not, in short, replace the flexibility and ready supply of workers of all sorts of types that the UK enjoyed with membership of the EU single market. There are common-sense reasons for this.
First, Hunt argues that, leaving students out of it, there are seven people currently not in the labour market for every vacancy. This is true, but there is a huge mismatch between the areas and skills where there is a demand for labour, and the kinds of people who have, say, retired early. Admittedly, in some cases the “match” is fairly precise – the GP who reduced their hours can now fairly easily go back to full-time and keep working indefinitely now that there’s no tax penalty on the size of their pension pot.
In other cases, the match is less encouraging. Someone who has been pushed out of the workforce through long Covid (as hundreds of thousands have been), is not going to able to take up a role in the nation’s would-be booming hospitality sector, or its burgeoning network of giant online retail warehouses.
Another person who is jobless in, say, Hartlepool, is going to find it difficult to move to Cambridge (for example) – even for a relatively well-paid post, simply because the cost of housing in the south is so prohibitively expensive: a long-standing factor that has become even more acute in recent years.
Then there is the substantial cadre of the early-retired. To put it at its bluntest: they are too rich to need to work. These over-50s are now downsizing and cashing in on multiple house price booms over their working lives, as well as drawing on guaranteed, inflation-proof occupational final-salary pension schemes. Or, they may have taken advantage of George Osborne’s “pension freedoms”, grabbing up to 25 per cent of their cash pension pot to buy a new kitchen, world cruise or fancy car.
It is a perverse downside of the long years of relatively strong non-inflationary growth that the economy is now facing stagnation, partly because this fortunate generation is so welloff. No doubt they worked and saved hard for it, but a few retraining allowances and tweaks to the pension system are not going to get them back into the rat race. When they hang the sign “Dunworkin’” on the bungalow, they mean it.
It’s also true that Hunt failed to offer potential employers any great incentive to rehire the silver surfers. PageGroup, a recruitment company points out that “offering flexible benefits that allow people to build packages that suit their stage in life – for example, the ability to top up pensions and buy holiday allowance – could also help attract this group”.
Perhaps the best thing that could be done to coax people of all ages back to work is to encourage the trend to working from home and “hybrid” patterns of employment. Obviously, it’s not universal (plumbers and roofers tend to work in and on other people’s homes), but eliminating transport costs and being more on hand for childcare makes a huge practical difference for families needing flexibility – and can increase productivity as well.
On balance, then, the reforms to child care and pensions and getting people back to work should make a modest but not revolutionary difference to the trend growth rate. Hunt is therefore right to look at fixing the UK’s poor productivity rate, so that its slowly growing working population can produce more per hour and per year, for the same cost via greater efficiency.
This is what all the tax breaks for investment and targeted chunks of money targeted at AI, life sciences, quantum computing and the like are all about. Yet the investment incentives look distinctly short-term, seemingly aimed at a preelection investment boom, while the cuts to big public infrastructure schemes such as HS2 and trunk roads suggest costs are becoming a serious obstacle. In that context, the ambitious approach to nuclear power is encouraging; the continuing reluctance to invest in onshore wind or relax planning restrictions is correspondingly disappointing.
In short, all the measures announced since Brexit – including the few genuinely new trade deals concluded since – cannot make up for the loss of friction-free access to the EU’s vast single market, supply claims, labour, skills and investment. The giant Chinese electric car and battery maker BYD only this week said Brexit was why they wouldn’t be locating their European
base in Britain – proof of how easily the UK has lost this potential growth engine.
This is why reason, as well as the debt overhand from the global financial crisis, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, why growth over the next few years will be sluggish, and living standards will decline by around 5.7 per cent this year and next – the biggest in modern times. But Brexit is “done”, and there’s no going back for a while. Hunt, too, knows this.
For a man who has made no secret that he thinks leaving the EU was a terrible idea, Hunt is upfront about how and why Britain now needs to make the best of a bad job. As Hunt put it in his speech: “Brexit was a decision by the British people to change our economic model. In that historic vote, our country decided to move from a model based on unlimited low-skill migration to one based on high wages and high skills. Today, we show how we will deliver that with a major set of reforms”.
Hunt certainly tried his best to show how the new business model can be made to work, and there will undoubtedly be success stories – such as the rapid decline in inflation this year and the semblance of order in public finances are solid foundations.
The economy will adjust, over time, to the new economic model. However, as in the painful and disruptive adjustment process in the Seventies and Eighties, after the UK joined the EU, this change of direction will take decades and be correspondingly onerous and costly.
Hunt will probably still be around to see whether it works, but perhaps not in his current line of work. He and the government are asking the country for an unprecedented amount of patience, as well as a work ethic not readily visible in the easy years.
Want your views to be included in The Independent Daily Edition letters page? Email us by tapping here letters@independent.co.uk. Please include your address
BACK TO TOP
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Martin Beckford Policy Editor
Daily Mail 16/3/2023
GREATER Manchester and the West Midlands will benefit from ‘deeper devolution’ deals confirmed in the Budget.
The regions, controlled by highprofile mayors, will receive more control over spending.
They will be handed funding settlements lasting several years to provide more certainty and help plan major housing, transport and regeneration projects.
And they will also be allowed to keep all of the business rates raised in their regions rather than hand them to the Treasury.
These same powers will eventually be expanded beyond the two ‘trailblazers’ to cover all areas of England which have directly elected mayors.
Both Labour’s Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and the Conservatives’ West Midlands mayor Andy Street welcomed their new packages.
Greater Manchester said its deal would create the first ‘integrated technical education city-region’, provide £150million of brownfield funding and be another step towards a London-style public transport system.
Mr Burnham said: ‘Ittakes devolution further and faster than ever.’ The West Midlands said it was getting a ‘landmark housing deal’ worth up to £500million along with ‘six levelling-up zones’ worth the same amount.
Mr Street said it provides ‘guaranteed devolved funding to spend how we choose’.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Mail Reporter By Adele Cooke
Daily Mail 16/3/2023
HOUSE prices are to fall by 10 per cent – but mortgage rates will not rise as high as feared last year, forecasts suggest.
The average rate of all outstanding home loans had been expected to hit 5 per cent next year.
But the figure is now predicted to be 3.8 per cent, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
On a £250,000 mortgage taken out over 25 years, that is the difference between payments of £1,292 per month instead of £1,461, according to mortgage broker London & Country – a saving of £169 per month or £2,028 a year.
Nevertheless, the OBR is predicting that Britain is heading for the biggest decline in living standards on record. This is pummelling consumer confidence and likely to lead to a 10 per cent fall in house prices compared with their peak at the end of last year.
‘Low consumer confidence, the squeeze on real incomes, and the expectation of mortgage rate rises
to come are expected to contribute to continued falls in house prices and a reduction in housing market activity,’ the OBR said.
The Bank of England has been increasing its base rate since December 2021 in an attempt to control spiralling inflation, which hit a 40-year high in September. The base rate increases have helped
drive up the cost of borrowing for millions at a time of squeezed household budgets.
However, experts – and the OBR report – suggest inflation may now be falling, meaning further rate rises may not be necessary.
Around 80 per cent of home loans are fixed and 1.4million of these will expire this year.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
The Guardian 16/3/2023 Key points from the speech
Growth
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said Britain was no longer forecast to enter recession this year. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) is predicting the economy will shrink by 0.2% in 2023 (better than the 1.4% drop in GDP it was forecasting in November) before growing 1.8% in 2024, 2.5% in 2025 and 2.1% in 2026.
Inflation
Headline inflation is expected to fall sharply, from its current level of 10.1% to 2.9% by the end of this year, more than meeting Rishi Sunak’s target of halving it. The OBR is forecasting inflation to hover around zero in the middle of this decade, before returning to the Bank of England’s 2% target in early 2028.
Government borrowing
Hunt boasted that by the end of the forecast period, the government’s current budget deficit – day-to-day spending minus tax revenues – will be in surplus. He said the OBR is expecting that he will meet his fiscal rule of keeping public sector net borrowing below 3% of GDP, with £39.2bn to spare, by the end of the forecast period.
Cost of living support
After a vigorous campaign from the consumer rights champion Martin Lewis and many charities, Hunt confirmed support for energy bills would be extended by three months, with the energy price guarantee to remain at £2,500 until July – it had been set to rise to £3,000.
As expected, he extended the 5p cut to fuel duty made by Sunak last March, for another year.
Hunt also announced extra help for those with prepayment meters, saying he would “bring their charges in line with comparable direct debit charges”.
A £63m fund to help leisure centres and pools afford their energy bills was confirmed, and £100m extra will go to charities facing soaring costs.
Employment
Measures designed to encourage more people to work, such as a new apprenticeship, called “returnerships”, for over-50s wanting to return to work in a new sector.
The tax-free allowance for pensions was increased from £40,000 to £60,000 a year and the tax-free cap was abolished. The controversial “fit for work” tests for disabled claimants were also abolished.
Levelling up
Plans to create a dozen new investment zones that could become “12 potential Canary Wharfs” were confirmed. Areas include the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Teesside had been identified as possible hosts. Successful applicants would be given £80m of support as well and allowed to retain some local taxes.
Hunt also announced an extra £400m for “levelling up partnerships” in areas including Redcar and Cleveland and Rochdale, as well as confirming the next round of city region transport settlements, which will be worth £8.8bn over five years.
Childcare
Parents of children aged nine months to three years will be offered 30 hours a week of free childcare in term time – as long as both parents are working at least 16 hours a week. The change will be phased in gradually, by September 2025. Universal credit claimants will be able to receive childcare funding up front, instead of in arrears, and the amount available will increase. Local authorities will be given more funding for wraparound care, from 8am-6pm, with an ambition that all schools will offer it by September 2026.
Energy and climate
A £20bn investment in carbon capture was confirmed, which the chancellor said would kick off with projects including Merseyside and Wales. He said nuclear power would be classed as environmentally sustainable, giving it access to investment incentives. Great British Nuclear will be created to ease the creation of nuclear projects.
Business tax and incentives
A planned rise in corporation tax from 19% to 25% will go ahead in April. In an attempt to win over business Hunt announced a £9bn a year policy of “full capital expensing”, initially for the next three years, which allows firms to write off all investment against their tax bills.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
LAURIE MCGINLEY
The Washington Post 13/3/2023
When Norman E. Sharpless, a former director of the National Cancer Institute, talked to members of Congress about exciting new developments in immune therapy, “their eyes would immediately roll around to the back of their heads,” he recalled.
But when Sharpless described the treatments as “‘ that drug that Jimmy Carter took,’ boom, they knew exactly what I was talking about,” he said.
In December 2015, news that Carter, then 91, had recovered from advanced melanoma — previously a death sentence — riveted the nation. Instantly, he became the face of a pathbreaking approach to battling cancer, which kills more than 600,000 people a year in the United States. Here was a beloved figure, apparently cured of a deadly disease by a medication that had harnessed Carter’s own immune system.
“For the public, Carter put immunotherapy on the map, period,” said Drew M. Pardoll, the director of the Bloomberg-kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins. “Patients started asking for it.” It was called “the Jimmy Carter effect.”
Even some oncologists were surprised by Carter’s recovery. “It was like, ‘Holy smoke, this stuff actually works,’ ” Sharpless said.
Carter was given a diagnosis in August 2015 of metastatic melanoma — skin cancer that had spread to his liver and brain; he said later he assumed he had just weeks to live. But along with radiation therapy, he received a new intravenous drug called a “checkpoint inhibitor.” Such drugs target proteins — checkpoints — that keep the immune system under control but also can blunt the body’s cancer-fighting response.
The result put the spotlight on cancer drugs that do not target cancer directly but instead unleash the immune system to attack malignancies. In Carter, all signs of cancer were gone by the end of 2015, and his treatments were stopped soon after.
Carter, now 98, recently entered hospice care, which is designed to make patients comfortable at the end of life while eschewing efforts to cure illness. He did not provide details about his medical condition or say whether his cancer had returned. But several immunotherapy experts said it was unlikely that the disease had come back, considering that he was cancer-free for several years.
“The probabilities are low that this was a recurrence,” Pardoll said. In recent years, the former president experienced other health setbacks, including several falls.
Carter’s 2015 recovery from a deadly cancer electrified the public and the oncology world, helping to drive a reprioritization of government grants and pharmaceutical research. Today, checkpoint inhibitors are approved for more than 20 malignancies, including cancers of the kidney, head and neck, and some lung cancers, frequently in combination with chemotherapy and other medications. The percentage of patients eligible for the therapy, first approved in 2011, had risen to about 38 percent by 2019, according to an estimate published in the journal JAMA Network Open. About 1.9 million cancer cases will be diagnosed this year.
Government and private insurers typically cover the medications, for which list prices often are well above $100,000 a year. Patients’ out-of-pocket costs vary according to their health plans.
Although oncologists say immunotherapy has transformed cancer care, curing some patients and extending the lives of many others, they agree that it is far from being a silver bullet. The response rates of patients vary widely — from about 10 percent to 60 percent — depending on their type of cancer and whether the drug is combined with other treatments, according to studies.
“Many of us hoped it would work better,” Sharpless said. “Nobody is throwing in the towel, but it has turned out to be more difficult than we thought.”
Hussein A. Tawbi, a melanoma expert at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, agreed that scientists are making great progress with immune therapies, but he cautioned that “we still leave a lot of patients behind.”
Because of that, researchers are intensifying their focus on why immunotherapy works in some patients — and against some tumors — but not others. Tawbi is focusing on how immunotherapy can be used to treat cancers that have spread to the brain. About 30 percent of cancer patients develop brain growths, which can cause speech difficulties and headaches.
The idea of using the immune system to combat cancer has been around for decades. More than a century ago, the New York surgeon William Coley, now known as the father of cancer immunotherapy, treated patients with dead bacteria to spur the immune system to attack cancer cells.
In subsequent years, scientists explored immunotherapy, but the resulting drugs were largely ineffective and highly toxic; the field was largely seen as a backwater. That changed in 2011, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the first checkpoint inhibitor, called ipilimumab, or Yervoy. The drug blocks CTLA-4, a protein on immune cells that cripples their ability to attack cancer.
The medication was based on the discoveries of the MD Anderson scientist James P. Allison, who received the Nobel Prize in 2018 along with the Japanese cancer researcher Tasuku Honjo. The two won the award for studies leading to groundbreaking drugs that empower the immune system to fight cancer.
The drug given to Carter in 2015, at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, is called pembrolizumab, or Keytruda. It was approved in 2014. The Merck medication, which has become a blockbuster in oncology, blocks a checkpoint called PD-1 and is used to treat many types of cancers.
In recent years, immune therapies have proliferated, becoming the fourth pillar of cancer treatment, alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. In addition to the checkpoint inhibitors, a treatment called CAR T-cell therapy that was approved in 2017 sometimes is used for blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. A patient’s immune cells are removed, re-engineered in a lab to destroy cancer and reinfused into the body.
The checkpoint drugs have had their biggest effect in advanced melanoma. “It has been paradigm-changing,” said Cary P. Gross, a professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. Before the medications were developed, patients typically survived a matter of months. Now, the fiveyear survival rate is about 50 percent.
But the drugs are not a miracle cure. About half of patients with later-stage melanoma do not respond. And the treatments generally have not proved effective in deadly malignancies such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, which affects the brain. Their record is mixed against lung cancer, the leading killer among cancers in the United States.
Gross thinks that “we may have to tone down our expectations” about immune therapies but that they will improve in coming years.
However the drugs evolve, Carter, a longtime Sunday school teacher, has taught the public important lessons about new treatments and the hope they can provide, Gross said. More recently, he added, Carter has underscored the value of hospice by making public his decision about end-oflife care.
By sparking discussion on these critical issues, Gross said, Carter “has taught us so much,” including how he wants to spend his final days.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
MORIAH BALINGIT
The Washington Post 13/3/2023
in Oklahoma are fighting to create the nation’s first publicly funded religious school.
Isidore of Seville was a 6thcentury theologian who wrote one of the world’s first encyclopedias, which led modern-day Catholics to unofficially adopt him as the patron saint of the internet. So when it came time for the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to select a name for its proposed virtual school, it decided St. Isidore would be a fitting tribute.
With the new program, the archdiocese also seeks to become a trailblazer: It is fighting to make St. Isidore the nation’s first religious charter school.
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board is weighing whether to approve the school. If it does, the archdiocese would get public funds to set up and run a school that intends to serve “as a genuine instrument of the Church,” according to its application. By opening the charter school, the archdiocese hopes to fill a need for rural students who want a Catholic education but do not live close enough to a bricksand-mortar one to attend. But it also hopes to force the question of whether a charter school can be religious, and it expects that its efforts will invite litigation. Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt backs the school’s application; he says that denying the school public funding constitutes religious discrimination.
“We do want to operate a virtual charter school, but we also want to press the answer to this question,” said Brett Farley of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma. “If we prevail, it opens up all kinds of opportunities for school choice across the country, not just in Oklahoma.”
What it proposes is a publicly funded religious school that follows some of the laws that govern public schools, such as the requirement that it provide special education services, but exempts itself from many others. Asked whether the school would accept openly gay students, for example, Farley said it would consider admitting them on a “case-by-case basis.”
Mainstream public school advocates in Oklahoma have long been anxious about the charter sector drawing taxpayer dollars away from the state’s financially challenged school system. But this effort raises new concerns that religious charter schools would erode the separation of church and state, opening the door for more religious institutions to open schools that would be free to evangelize and flout civil rights law.
Even some charter school advocates are leery of the notion, saying it violates the spirit of the charter school movement, which was intended to create broadbased opportunities for all students.
“This movement was never about private education. It was about public schools and making them better by making them more responsive to the needs of families,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance of
Public Charter Schools.
The application represents the latest efforts by religious conservatives to push their faith into the public square — and into public schools. They are driven, in part, by those who believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws should reflect that. Christian legal organizations have opposed civil rights protections for LGBTQ students and fought to extend prayer into public schools. Conservatives have in several states expanded voucher programs that give parents funds to send their children to private schools, including religious ones.
Although charter schools are privately run, they are publicly funded and, as such, subject to many of the same laws and rules that govern mainstream public schools. (Critics allege that they find ways to exclude students, such as those with disabilities, in violation of civil rights laws.)
Every state that permits charter schools requires them to offer a secular education, including Oklahoma. But before leaving office in January, the state’s attorney general, John M. O’connor, issued a legal opinion calling Oklahoma’s charter school law unconstitutional because it permits charter schools to be run by private entities — so long as they are not churches.
“It seems obvious that a state cannot exclude those merely ‘affiliated with’ a religious or sectarian institution from a state created program in which private entities are otherwise generally allowed to participate if they are qualified,” O’connor wrote, saying the rules violates the Constitution’s free-exercise clause, which protects people’s right to practice their religion. The rules against religious organizations, he wrote, “likely violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore should not be enforced.”
The man who succeeded him, Republican Gentner Drummond, disagrees. Drummond, who took office in January, withdrew O’connor’s opinion in late February, saying it “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion.” He also warned that greenlighting St. Isidore’s application created a “slippery slope” that would force the state to support charter schools run by non- Christian religious institutions.
“While many Oklahomans undoubtedly support charter schools sponsored by various Christian faiths, the precedent created by approval of the ... application will compel approval of similar applications by all faiths,” Drummond wrote, “even those most Oklahomans would consider reprehensible and unworthy of public funding.”
Opponents also see it as a blatant violation of the Constitution’s establishment clause, which holds that the government cannot “establish” a state religion. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State wrote three letters to the board urging it not to grant the application.
“St. Isidore’s application unabashedly demonstrates that the school would violate constitutional, statutory, and regulatory prohibitions against Oklahoma charter schools,” attorneys Kenneth D. Upton Jr. and Alex J. Luchenitser wrote in a Feb. 10 letter. The school would be “teaching a religious curriculum [and] discriminating in admissions and employment.”
In its application, St. Isidore is forthright about its religious education intentions, quoting a church document that describes Catholic schools as “places of evangelization.” While it said it would accept students of “any faith or no faith,” it also said it would cultivate students to “know that Human persons are destined for life with the Holy Trinity . . . but that in freedom, an individual may reject God’s invitation and . . . end up in Hell.” And though it outlines a nondiscrimination policy, it also says it will not abide by any laws or regulations that conflict with the church: “The School complies with all state and federal laws and statutes to the extent the teachings of the Catholic Church allow.”
Still, it would operate in some ways like a public school, its application says: It would follow federal laws that require it to accommodate students with disabilities. Its governance meetings and certain records would be open to the public, as they are in public schools.
Katie Murphree, who works for the Catholic Church and lives just north of Oklahoma City, said the prospect of a free virtual Catholic school excites her. Her eldest three children attended Catholic school until it became clear that one, Kristen, needed special-education services the school could not provide. So all three moved to public school, where Murphree said she lamented they were no longer getting daily lessons on Catholic morality and faith.
Murphree’s youngest daughter, Kelsee, is also a special-education student. Murphree said she loves the idea of being able to give Kelsee a Catholic education without sacrificing the accommodations and services her daughter needs.
“It would be a godsend to so many of us,” Murphree said.
Much of the fight centers on whether St. Isidore would be considered a “state actor,” subject to the same civil rights laws as mainstream public schools. Because they are privately funded, Catholic schools are free to admit only Catholic families and hire only Catholic employees. They are also not bound by laws that require them to offer special education. It means private religious schools can fire teachers for being in same-sex relationships or expel students because their mother has nude photos on the internet.
Charter schools have typically been considered public schools in the eyes of the law. But some are advocating that they be treated more like private schools.
The challenge comes as a North Carolina lawsuit that could upset how charter schools are governed makes its way through the courts. Three girls filed a federal lawsuit against Charter Day School of Leland, N.C., in 2016 over its dress code, which required girls to wear skirts as part of its aim “to preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men,” according to the school’s founder. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the girls, said it was discriminatory. But Charter Day School has argued that it is not a “state actor,” and therefore not bound by the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars discrimination. Charter Day School has the backing of attorneys general in several states, who filed briefs supporting its position that charter schools should be considered private.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled against the school, which then appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court has yet to say whether it will take the case.
But those who back publicly funded religious schools have already made significant political and legal inroads. Over the past six years, conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court have issued rulings that entitled religious institutions to more public dollars.
In a 2017 case, the court ruled that a church-run preschool in Missouri was entitled to a state grant to resurface its playground. Three years later, the court ruled that Montana could not bar recipients of the state’s private school voucher program from using them at religious schools. And last year, the court said that a Maine voucher program that sent rural students to private high schools in communities that had no public ones had to be open to religious schools.
Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, views what is happening in Oklahoma as part of a broader right-wing campaign to destabilize public schools. But it’s not merely an attack on public schools, she said.
Public schools “are the glue for our democracy and teach our children our country’s values, which are secular, and enable us to come together as equals to build a stronger democracy,” Laser said. “It’s like an attack on our public schools is an attack on democracy.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Linda Geddes
The Guardian 11/3/2023
Almost three years have passed since the first work from home mandate was introduced – and many people’s working lives have not been the same since. Some employees have never returned to a physical office, while others are adjusting to hybrid working. So what lessons can recent research teach us about how to make flexible arrangements work better?
Don’t fixate on the number of days
Many companies are still fixated on the number of days that employees should be in the office, with blanket policies for all staff. More appropriate would be to examine the type of tasks employees do and work from there, said Prof Jonathan Trevor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
Based on interviews with managers from 20 companies, Trevor and his colleague Prof Matthias Holweg have developed a framework to help navigate these tensions. They found workplace tasks tend to fall into four categories: focused creative tasks, such as designing a brochure; individual procedural tasks, such as data entry; coordinated group tasks, such as project work; and collaborative creative tasks, such as product development or strategic planning.
Focused creative tasks are the easiest to transition to virtual work, because they require little teamwork and are easily supported by technology, while collaborative creative tasks are the hardest. “If you’re in that mode of work, maybe you should have more time in the office. If you’re doing individualfocused work, the balance may be more weighted towards virtual working,” Trevor said.
Find new ways to build corporate culture and identity
Weaker workplace ties could result in lower levels of staff loyalty and engagement. If staff rarely see senior leaders or socialise with colleagues, it can be difficult to establish a strong organisational culture – the collection of traits that make a company what it is. Weak organisational cultures tend to be associated with higher levels of conflict and mistrust.
Spending time in the physical workplace is therefore desirable – for everybody – and better orchestration of the virtual community is also necessary, Trevor said. “Managers need to develop skills to manage people in a virtual way that still keeps them engaged and helps them identify with the organisation they’re working for,” he added.
… and spot stress
Individuals tend to express stress or unhappiness in different ways, and managers or teammates may be less able to provide support if they rarely meet in person.
Hybrid working also creates new sources of stress, such as remembering to bring crucial documents or equipment into the office, and not having a straightforward daily routine.
While working from home removes the stress of the daily commute, work days can be more intense. “Remote working is often a highly productive way of working,” said Dr Christine Grant, an occupational psychologist at Coventry University’s Centre for Healthcare Research. “People may feel a pressure to keep on working, or want to keep on working, which impacts on their wellbeing.”
Avoid unnecessary virtual meetings
“Virtual meetings are very different to meeting people in person – they’re often quite focused; you get the meeting done, then move on to the next thing. It’s a very intense way of working,” said Grant.
The temptation to multitask can leach further brainpower, and video-call participants must work harder to send and respond to non-verbal signals compared with meeting face-to-face. It is also unnatural – and somewhat stressful – to watch a recording of your own face, or to hold such prolonged eye contact with other people, research suggests. “It has been said that there are only two types of situation where you would be so close to other people’s faces: one is if you were going to hit them, the other is if you were going to kiss them,” said Prof Gail Kinman, an occupational health psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.
Recognise that not everyone benefits from working at home
Junior staff often don’t have the space at home to make work comfortable. “They also benefit a lot from on-the-ground learning from colleagues, and the socialisation that happens in the office,” said Prof Kerstin Sailer, an expert in the sociology of architecture at University College London. “Senior people often like being in the office and getting that kind of cross-functional overview between different roles and teams, or managing by presenteeism.”
Some staff may find online meetings immensely difficult, such as those with sensory impairments. Yet home working may help some neurodivergent individuals, by limiting social interactions and providing greater control over their environment, said Grant, who has been studying this issue.
Create a virtual commute
A major problem with home working is the blurring of work and personal life. “Although a lot of people don’t like commuting, it provides a kind of physical buffer zone between work and home,” said Kinman. Finding alternative ways to separate the work day from home life, and switch off the brain, is therefore important – whether that’s cycling around the block or dancing around your kitchen.
Rest if you’re ill
“Working while sick is something we’ve found has become much more common during the pandemic,” said Kinman. “In some ways it can be beneficial, because if your colleagues know you’re ill, you may be able to push out some of the unnecessary stuff and be more productive.” But there are downsides: by not allowing yourself time to switch off, you’re more likely to take longer to recover, and be at higher risk of future ill health – including mental health problems. Working while sick can also intensify feelings of detachment from your job, research suggests.
Rethink office design
If your workplace is now predominantly a site for teambuilding and creative group meetings, there may be less need for individual desks, and a greater need for additional meeting rooms and break-out spaces.
“Organisations are increasingly viewing their offices as social and collaborative hubs,” said Sailer, who recently published a hybrid office how-to guide. “It is possible that with hybrid working, companies may need less office space than before the pandemic, but this office space needs to be of premium quality and designed in a way that encourages attendance.”
Rather than reverting to the default “office equals desks, and everyone in five days a week”, Sailer believes organisations should see the pandemic as an opportunity to rebuild the workplace from the bottom up, so every day spent in the office is worth it.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Pratley
The Guardian 03/3/2023
Will the last firm to leave the London Stock Exchange please turn out the lights? Actually, the position is not – yet – as bad as that. Building materials group CRH – which, at £31.7bn, is the 19th largest in the FTSE 100 index – said it would be heading for the exit, but its reasons for planning to switch its primary listing to the US aren’t silly.
Three-quarters of CRH’s sales are in the US these days and it is probably only sensible to try to appear more American when the US is spending squillions to upgrade its infrastructure. In any case, CRH’s links to the UK market aren’t deep. It is an Irish company that only moved its primary listing to London in 2011.
Similarly, other escape plans haven’t been created on a whim. When mining giant BHP tired of its clunky dual-headed Anglo-Australian corporate structure in 2021, unifying down under was logical: the company is Australian by history, culture and operations.
Ferguson, the company called Wolseley for most of its life, had deeper British roots but, like CRH, its US business had become dominant. As for Flutter, the FTSE 100 gambling company contemplating a secondary listing in the US – and perhaps a primary one thereafter – its rationale is similar: a US betting boom is in full swing and the winnings may eventually eclipse those from its Paddy Power and Betfair operations. (The fact that Ferguson and Flutter’s executives should find it easier to pay themselves megabucks American salaries may or may not be coincidental.)
Any fair tally must also include the ones that thought about leaving but stayed. Unilever’s board wanted to go wholly Dutch but ended up unifying in London when its UK shareholders revolted. Shell, the FT reported this week, thought about going American in 2021, but consolidated in London – and, indeed, dropped the “Royal Dutch” bit in its name along the way.
All the same, the sense of decline for London’s status and clout is undeniable. It will only intensify if, as expected, Japanese group SoftBank opts to relist Arm Holdings – London’s one-time technology star – in New York.
Two deep causes are obvious. First, UK pension funds don’t own the UK market like they used to. The Investor Forum, which represents shareholders with about £700bn in UK equities, produced startling data a few months ago to show the changing profile of share ownership. International ownership of FTSE 100 firms rose from 12% to 56% between 1990 and 2020; ownership by UK pension funds and insurance companies, who charged into safety-first bonds, fell from 52% to a little over 4%. It is little wonder that UK-listed firms may feel more footloose if their ultimate owners aren’t tied to the UK. This would be less of a problem were it not for the second factor – the lack of interesting new arrivals on the market.
The real frustration here, though, is the seeming inability to produce a strategy to fight back. Rules were tweaked to encourage the tech sector, but the supposed prize turned out to be less than glittering when the Covid crop of IPOs produced flops such as THG, Deliveroo and Made.com.
Better ideas are in the offing. Julia Hoggett, the new-ish boss of the stock exchange who has spoken about the need to make London “young, scrappy and hungry”, has raised the interesting idea of creating a regulated UK market to allow private companies to trade shares more easily – a sort of halfway house before full listing.
Yes, that might save a few firms from being gobbled by US venture money before taking the leap. But London needs to get on with it. The Financial Conduct Authority is reviewing the listing rules with a view to collapsing the “standard” and “premium” segments. The exchange has its “capital market taskforce”. And the government has its “Edinburgh reforms”.
This parade of consolations and workstreams is all very well, but life moves fast. City advisers warn that the next departees may not be firms that are semi-detached already. The lure of US dollars is strong. The London market needs a strategy before a trickle becomes a flood.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界