German producer prices fall 1.3% y/y in June
Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a 1.3% decline.
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The Sun
3 minutes ago
- The Sun
Is good coffee the secret to a happy office? Nearly 100% of employers believe a brew is vital for staff wellbeing
GOOD coffee is regarded as a workplace essential to fuel businesses with 98 per cent of employers saying it plays a vital role in the wellbeing of their staff, according to a new poll. 82 per cent of employees say access to good coffee improves their mood and productivity. 3 3 More than two thirds (70 per cent) also highlighted coffee machine chats as the most sociable moment of their day - with 91 per cent viewing them as a hub for camaraderie and collaboration. Research showed this is important as 27 per cent of workers say they feel lonely or isolated, while 83 per cent say their workplace is an enjoyable space to be in and they feel happy at work. But happiness falls to just 22 per cent if the environment is not right And 45 per cent of hybrid workers say they would come into their place of work more often if there were more opportunities to socialise with colleagues. Despite these benefits, two thirds of survey respondents said they only have access to a kettle at work. Clare Hancock, Managing Director of Thrive London, which commissioned the research of 1,000 staff and 100 employers, said: 'When budgets are tight, investing in premium coffee may seem like a luxury but our research shows it's a priceless investment in people. 'The kettle hasn't moved with the times and the best workplaces are built around moments of connection. 'What we see from this research is that great, speciality coffee facilitates this.' She added: ' Coffee is the small thing that powers the big things — connection, creativity, performance.' Her company Thrive London - which she runs with her sister Emma - provides speciality high end coffee. 3
Daily Mail
3 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Rodgers insists Celtic's transfer business is far from finished... but there's no word on a new deal for Daizen
Brendan Rodgers last night insisted Celtic still have 'a lot of work to do' in the transfer market — as he revealed he is not aware of any movement on a new deal for Daizen Maeda. The Parkhead boss saw his side hammer Newcastle United yesterday through an Arne Engels penalty and efforts from Johnny Kenny, Yang Hyun-jun and Liam Scales. New Japanese striker Shin Yamada, the club's sixth top-team signing of pre-season, was also paraded pre-match, but Rodgers is insistent that he needs more goals in his side and needs his team to be strengthened all across the front line before the end of next month. With Maeda now entering the last two years of his current contract, there have been rumours of a breakthrough on a new deal after a period of limbo amid interest in his services from elsewhere, but nothing concrete as yet. Celtic are on the trail of Royal Antwerp attacker Michel-Ange Balikwisha as well as being linked with Louis Munteanu of Romanian outfit Cluj — and Rodgers is clear on the fact plenty has to be addressed in terms of bolstering the squad in the wake of selling Kyogo Furuhashi to Rennes for £10million in January and hauling in £17m from Como for Nicolas Kuhn earlier in the month. 'We've still got a lot of work to do, but the guys that are training and working with us are doing so well,' he said. 'You saw that today. 'I would expect us, by the end of the window, to have brought in players in certain areas of the pitch that we need to go through a really long season. 'I think it's about bringing goals to the squad. When you've just scored four goals, that seems to be OK, but we lost an important player in January in Kyogo and we've lost Nicolas Kuhn, a lot of goals again. Even Matt O'Riley last summer. 'Even though we scored a lot of goals last season, we still want more, and our ambition is to have more, so I think, all across the front areas, we have to be active in order to give us that depth.' Asked if there had been any progress on negotiations with Maeda and his advisors, Rodgers replied: 'Not that I'm aware of. But he's a professional and his focus is very much on here.' Despite looking for added striking power, Rodgers has stated that new boy Yamada will bring more pace to the team than buzzbomb Maeda. 'His profile suits how we play,' he said. 'He's one of the quickest players from the Japanese league. He's even quicker than Daizen and Kyogo in terms of statistics, and that's how we play, with that speed in the top line. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he can bring.' Rodgers was also delighted to see Kieran Tierney, who set up Scales for his goal with an excellent cross, receive a thunderous reception when coming on in the second half. 'I wanted him to get a specific welcome back, because, at his age, he could easily be playing at the top end of the (English) Premier League,' he said. 'To get a player of that level is amazing for us.'
Times
6 minutes ago
- Times
Mildly disappointing — but don't think of calling it stagflation
Everybody has their own way of registering higher prices. For me, without sounding too poncey about it, or minimising other people's struggles with inflation, it is the price of coffee. No, not those horrible paper cups and gruesome flavour combinations you see everybody carrying around, but ground coffee for home use. The one I like, available in all good supermarkets, is from Peru and goes under the name Machu Picchu. Whether any of it is grown near that Inca architectural treasure, I cannot say, but the coffee is good — and recently it has been expensive. The discounts regularly offered by the supermarkets, which can knock a third or more off the recommended retail price, have been absent. It is enough to make you switch to water. I mention this because higher food and drink prices, partly driven by increases in commodity prices, helped push inflation higher, to 3.6 per cent last month. I have high hopes for future cups of coffee, though, because wholesale prices, which peaked in February and again in April, have come down quite sharply since then. But that does not mean we will soon see a sharp drop in inflation. Second-quarter inflation was a touch higher at 3.5 per cent than the 3.4 per cent expected by the Bank of England in its most recent monetary policy report in May, though some of that was due to an error in the April data. It expected then that inflation will trundle along at close to 3.5 per cent for a few months more, peaking at 3.7 per cent in September. A big increase in air fares, and the fact that petrol prices fell less last month than a year earlier, were enough to tick the rate up to 3.6 per cent last month. Markets are probably right to conclude that this will make next month's decision on interest rates by the Bank closer than it might have been, but also right to think that it will not get in the way of a cut in official interest rates from 4.25 to 4 per cent. The basis for this, unless the Bank has had a significant change of view, is that inflation will be back below 2.5 per cent in a year's time, and below 2 per cent in two years. The case for a rate cut was reinforced by the latest labour market statistics, which showed that its gradual softening continues and pay pressures are easing. Total and regular pay growth has slowed to 5 per cent, from nearly 6 per cent earlier this year, despite the potential upward pressure from a big increase in the national living wage in April. Private sector pay growth, most responsive to market pressures, is running below 5 per cent. The labour market statistics are an object lesson in not rushing to judgment. The headlines were generated by a rise in the unemployment rate from 4.6 to 4.7 per cent. But, as I have written before, it is important to take the unemployment and inactivity rates together. That 4.7 per cent unemployment rate in the March-May period was up from 4.4 per cent a year earlier. Over the same period, however, there was a much bigger fall in the inactivity rate — the proportion of people in the 16-64 age group unavailable for work — which dropped from 22.1 to 21 per cent. This explains why rising employment on the Labour Force Survey measure, including an increase of nearly 100,000 in self-employment over the latest 12 months, went hand in hand with a small rise in the unemployment rate. People who were economically inactive have been making themselves available for work. The number of economically inactive, just over nine million, is still high and above pre-pandemic levels, but is down by 400,000 from its peak early last year, which is good news. Another lesson in not rushing to judgment was provided by the Office for National Statistics in its latest release. A month ago, it said that payroll numbers had slumped by 109,000 in May. This was reported as something close to Armageddon in the labour market, a consequence of the increase in employers' national insurance (NI) announced by Rachel Reeves in her budget last October, which took effect in April. There was always something odd about that figure, which did not square with survey evidence, and sure enough, it has been revised down to just a 25,000 fall. Over April and May together, payrolls dropped by 49,000, which is more of a gentle deflating of the tyres than a blowout. Finally, when it comes to not rushing to judgment, some people were quick to describe the UK's situation following the release of the inflation figures as 'stagflation'. I realise that many doing so were too young to remember genuine stagflation. The term was invented by Iain Macleod, who became Tory chancellor in 1970 but sadly died a few weeks into the role. Stagflation was a popular description in the 1970s when the UK's inflation rate, based on the retail prices index, peaked at 26.9 per cent in 1975, at the same time as the economy was in recession (the stagnation bit of stagflation), an unusual combination. Inflation averaged 12.6 per cent in the 1970s and the unemployment rate was on its way to almost 12 per cent in the 1980s. We would have given our eye teeth then for inflation at 3.6 per cent, or 4.4 per cent on the retail prices index. The economy is not growing as fast as we would like, and the April and May monthly gross domestic product (GDP) readings were mildly disappointing, but there is no reason to talk it down by more than justified. Language matters. Just as it is silly to talk of recession if you have two consecutive quarterly falls in GDP, each of just 0.1 per cent, so it is silly to talk of stagflation when inflation is at current levels and the economy is merely continuing the slow growth pattern that set in a decade and a half ago. Above all, turning the dial up to 11 in these circumstance leaves no room for when and if things get really bad. They were quite bad for inflation three years ago, when the rate hit 11 per cent, and they were very bad for growth in 2020, when Covid-hit GDP fell by 10.3 per cent — its biggest drop since 1709. We are in calmer waters now and things are mildly disappointing, no more than that. • The deepest recession, but also easily the weirdest Chancellors are always guaranteed a polite reception when they deliver their annual speech at the Mansion House in the City, which these days is called the financial and professional services dinner. The last rumpus I can remember was when Gordon Brown turned up in a business suit, arguing that it was a working engagement so he was wearing working clothes. Everybody who has attended since is glad that he did. The old dress code of white tie and tails, which most of us don't have in our wardrobes, was uncomfortable, particularly on a hot evening. Rachel Reeves pressed most of the right buttons in her speech to the bankers, accountants, brokers, lawyers, financial advisers and others. She wants to cut the red tape currently applied by the regulators, soften some of the restrictions put on the banks in the wake of the financial crisis more than a decade and a half ago, and boost investment by retail investors in riskier but more productive assets. • Reeves tells regulators to loosen up to boost share investment Whether that includes a cut in the current £20,000 cash Isaallowance, as was mooted before her speech but did not make it into the final version, we shall see. The economics of this are quite straightforward. The cash Isa was introduced in 1999, replacing other tax-exempt savings accounts. At launch, the allowance was £3,000, where it remained for nearly ten years. It then rose gradually to £5,760 in 2013-14, before jumping sharply to £15,000 during 2014 and £20,000 in 2017-18, where it has remained. The period in which the allowance was rising sharply, as you will have noticed, was one of near-zero official interest rates, and paltry savings rates. A more generous allowance did not cost the Treasury much. But the return to more normal interest rates means the exchequer cost of the cash Isa has risen, to more than £2 billion in 2023-24. A lower allowance, as part of a strategy to encourage more retail investment in UK risk assets, is the right thing to do. Whether it will work, though, remains to be seen, not least because more equity investment need not be more investment in UK equities. As chancellor, you can press a lot of buttons and find that nothing much happens.
