Tuesday newspaper round-up: Archegos, retailers, Liberty Steel

Financial regulators across the world are monitoring the collapse of the New York-based billionaire Bill Hwang’s personal hedge fund. The sudden liquidation of Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management sparked a fire sale of more than $20bn assets that has left some of the world’s biggest investment banks nursing billions of dollars of losses. - Guardian

Some of Britain’s best-known fashion and retail names are campaigning for the government to launch a ‘shop out to help out’ scheme to aid beleaguered independent shops as they prepare to reopen on 12 April. The retail consultant Mary Portas, the beauty mogul Charlotte Tilbury, the designers Charlie Casely-Hayford and Henry Holland, who has also designed the campaign’s logo, are among those calling for a stimulus package. They argue support should take a similar structure to last summer’s eat out to help out scheme, with the government covering 50% of the cost of goods bought at physical stores with fewer than 10 employees, capped at £10, every Monday to Wednesday, for a month this summer. - Guardian

London is poised to lead a national crunch in house prices as Covid and the stamp duty holiday risk pushing the market up to unsustainable levels, top economists have warned. The pandemic sparked the deepest recession in 300 years, but the housing market was spared the expected slump by unprecedented measures to prop up incomes, via furlough, and support property sales with a tax cut. - Telegraph

Transatlantic exports including gold necklaces, kitchen tables and chess boards could face US tariffs after Washington drew up plans to target a £236 million catalogue of British goods. Having inherited a spat over online taxation from the Trump administration, President Biden has opted to hold Britain’s feet to the fire. His officials concluded that Britain’s unilateral digital services levy on the big technology groups was “unreasonable or discriminatory” and placed a burden on companies in the United States. - The Times

Liberty Steel UK, the British business that is part of Sanjeev Gupta’s industrial group GFG Alliance, will go back into production after Easter as talks continue with the administrators of Greensill, its collapsed main backer, in an attempt to refinance the company. The announcement that Liberty Steel UK, which employs 3,000 people, half of them at Rotherham and nearby Stocksbridge in Yorkshire, is going back to work next Tuesday came as Gupta released a podcast to his employees to reassure them the company can survive. - The Times