Monday newspaper round-up: Miss Selfridge, Wrightbus, Hinkley Point
Sir Philip Green’s Miss Selfridge chain posted a £17.5m loss last year as sales fell and it wrote down the value of loss-making stores. Sales at the youth fashion chain fell more than 15% to £102m in the year to 1 September 2018, while pretax losses more than quadrupled from £4.3m a year before. Losses widened after more than £12m in one-off costs mostly related to property writedowns were added, as well as redundancies. The average number of staff working in the chain’s UK stores fell by about 300 to 1,188. – Guardian
About 500 former Wrightbus employees and their families have held a protest outside a church linked to millions of pounds in donations from the owners of the collapsed bus maker. About 1,200 jobs were lost last week when the Ballymena-based producer of the Routemaster bus used in London went into administration. The Unite union has warned a further 1,700 jobs could be at risk in the engineering company’s supply chain. - Guardian
A radical world of “helicopter money” - where central banks fund government spending - is “inevitable” as policymakers run out of ammunition ahead of the next recession, top economists have warned. Central banks are likely to “explore more unconventional policies” in the next downturn and blur the lines between fiscal and monetary policy with radical new tools, such as monetary financing, Deutsche Bank argued. – Telegraph
Confidence in Britain’s economic prospects has sunk to levels not seen since the EU referendum in 2016, a survey being published today suggests. The prospect of a no-deal Brexit on October 31 has shaken business owners, according to the Lloyds Bank poll. The warning will intensify concerns that the deadlock in Westminster is eroding business confidence and damaging the economy. In the second quarter output fell by 0.2 per cent. Despite a small bounce in July, the economy is at risk of going into reverse. – The Times
President Macron’s economy minister has accused the French state-owned company building Britain’s new nuclear plant of “unacceptable” failings as he threatened sweeping change at the group. Bruno Le Maire said yesterday that the French nuclear sector was like “a state within a state” and he denounced cost overruns and delays in the construction of the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset and similar projects in Flamanville in Normandy and Olkiluoto in Finland. “We will not accept this drift month after month, year after year,” Mr Le Maire said.