Business

On another bruising day for Britain’s retail sector, five thousand jobs are at risk at Poundworld as the company prepares to appoint administrators. Six thousand more could be in jeopardy at House of Fraser, which is closing more than half its stores around the country. That includes its flagship branch in London’s Oxford Street – leaving staff in…

President Trump has fired the opening salvoes in a trade war, but the European Union hasn’t quite returned fire yet. While retaliatory tariffs have been proposed, but not so far imposed, the EU Trade Commissioner had firm words, calling the US levies on European steel and aluminium “protectionist” and “illegal”. She wasn’t alone… France’s President Macron…

Susan Danger is from the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU in Brussels, and Robert Scott is from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

British steel and aluminium will be priced out of the American market, after President Trump delivers on his campaign promise. Canada and Mexico join Europe as the latest targets. A retaliation is now unfolding as we speak, and there are fears tonight of a wider trade conflict.With Europe and America already at loggerheads over trade…

Labour MP Stephen Kinnock tells us that President Trump’s ‘blunderbuss’ approach to trade is ‘utterly reckless’.

TV presenter Noel Edmonds took his legal battle with Lloyds Bank into the company’s AGM today.  He believes he was the victim of fraud by former staff inside HBOS.  That bank was taken over by Lloyds at the height of the financial crisis, and Mr Edmonds now wants compensation from them.  At today’s meeting in…

A firm which was “reckless in the pursuit of growth” and a board either “negligently ignorant of the rotten culture or complicit in it”. That’s just a couple of the scathing conclusions from MPs on the collapsed construction giant Carillion, which went bust in January with more than a billion pounds in debt and the…

The death of high street shopping has been predicted many times. But figures out today do appear to confirm a marked change in how we buy things. The last couple of months have seen visits to shops drop by almost five percent, the worst March and April since the recession almost ten years ago. Several…

The Bank of England has held interest rates and revised down its growth forecast. Helia Ebrahimi talks to Governor Mark Carney.

BT is set for a major shake-up. 8,500 of its UK workforce and over 4,000 of its overseas staff are to lose their jobs. The total is 13,000 jobs. Mostly in middle management and back office operations. BT says it is shifting strategy – moving towards super fast broadband and 5G  – plus heading towards…

Ashington in Northumberland was once a thriving mining town, but the thousands of jobs there have long gone – leaving a population struggling to find decent work and stay connected with the wider region and the country as a whole.

RBS has had to agree to a £3.6 billion penalty with the US Department of Justice to end the investigation into sales of financial products – some of them toxic mortgage bonds – just before the 2008 financial crisis. Channel 4 News has seen a damning internal review into Lloyds’ disastrous takeover of HBOS in…