Business

Technology stocks have lifted Wall Street to record highs after the US Federal Reserve’s dovish comments eased fears of a sudden tapering in monetary stimulus and boosted optimism around an economic recovery. Apple jumped 2.3% to an all-time high, while Microsoft, Amazon and the Google owner Alphabet, rose between 0.9% …

UK firms perform better under foreign ownership, says the trade minister Gerald Grimstone. “All our research shows that overseas invested companies in the UK are more productive … they generate more jobs than UK companies, they generate more intellectual property and they export more,” he told the BBC. It is …

Retailers are warning of further disruption on Britain’s high streets from shortages of stock caused by Covid and Brexit, after official figures revealed an unexpected fall in sales last month. Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said there were mounting problems for the industry after a month …

Last August, Rishi Sunak was so confident that Covid was banished he said the furlough had to go. About 4 million workers would have either been forced to return to their jobs or found they had no job at all. “It’s wrong,” Mr Sunak told the BBC, “to keep people …

The smartest deal, in hindsight, done in recent years by a FTSE 100 company must be Flutter Entertainment’s purchase in 2018 of a majority stake in FanDuel, a US business running online sports-based fantasy games for prizes. It was a punt that leadership in the fantasy market could be converted …

KPMG has been fined a near-record £13m and severely reprimanded by an independent tribunal for misconduct, in a long-running case relating to the sale of the bedmaker Silentnight to a private equity group in 2011. The tribunal determined that one of KPMG’s partners helped push Silentnight, which was a client …

Public investors in the private equity firm that owns a majority stake in the Israeli spyware company NSO Group are in talks to transfer management of that fund to Berkeley Research Group, a US consulting firm. A person familiar with the matter told the Guardian the talks, which are at …

Boris Johnson has rejected Brussels’ latest attempt to iron out problems with the post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland, insisting that the withdrawal agreement signed last year must be renegotiated. A series of proposals published by the European Commission on Monday with the aim of easing implementation of the Northern Ireland …

Ministers have sought to help people trapped in flats they cannot sell or remortgage by changing advice on fire safety paperwork for lower-rise blocks, although Labour and leaseholder groups warned the plan was too vague. In a statement released at the same time as a Commons debate on the building …

In yet another twist in a fishy tale, the fast-food chain Subway is pushing back once again against its tuna critics, launching a website in defense of its popular sandwich. The site, subwaytunafacts.com, declares in block capitals “Subway tuna is real tuna”, with real underlined, with the company countering a …