Category: News Wire

The Treasury Select Committee has taken the drastic step of publishing a special report into the Government’s “defective” banking reforms to help the House of Lords hold the authorities to account.

More companies are successfully “spinning out” of UK universities, official figures show, as education institutions get better at identifying the commercial applications of innovation, but funding problems remain.

Crisis in the eurozone is hitting small companies’ confidence and cash flow, experts have warned, with European suppliers demanding cash up front for orders while exporters are being caught by customers delaying payment.

Bank of England policymakers will meet on Thursday to decide whether to change interest rates or to pump in more money through quantitative easing (QE).

Cancelling the Olympics in the event of a terrorist strike or natural disaster would cost the insurance industry as much as $5bn (£3bn), one leading insurer has estimated.

Proposals designed to stop taxpayers’ money being used to bail out failed banks will be unveiled by the European Commission later.

Britain’s banks are sitting on a £40bn black hole of undeclared losses that are preventing them from making vital loans to businesses and households.

The Nasdaq stock exchange is to take the first steps to compensating shareholders who invested in the disastrous Facebook flotation, according to reports.

Spain’s economy minister has dismissed talk of it seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as “senseless”.

Shareholders in Royal Bank of Scotland will never recover the money they lost in the wake of the lender’s collapse more than three years ago, according to the taxpayer-backed bank’s chairman.

Greece handed 18 billion euros (14.39 billion pounds) to its four biggest banks on Monday, the finance ministry said, allowing the stricken lenders to regain access to European Central Bank funding.

A new government internet service allowing people to check how their income tax and national insurance is spent, has struggled on its first day.

Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond has attacked the Government for causing the bank “unnecessary damage” in its handling of a multi-million pound tax row.

Britain’s biggest business group has called on the government to underwrite a larger number of infrastructure projects in order to encourage the private sector to shoulder the bulk of the cost of updating the nation’s creaking road, rail and air networks.