Hello from London, where we might actually welcome the rain when it arrives.
It’s almost the longest day of the year and no one might be feeling that more than Rishi Sunak. The Boris Johnson psychodrama and rising interest rates are bringing palpable gloom to the prime minister. Rates could hit 6% next year, some economists warn, potentially triggering a sharp recession and a flood of job losses. Mortgage payments could be set to jump by £2,900 a year, the Resolution Foundation said, with fixed-rate deals for millions of Brits ending next year.
It was a long week for Crispin Odey, too, but the hedge fund manager’s downfall was decades in the making, Nishant Kumar and Shelley Robinson report.
Another hedge fund titan, Paul Singer, is taking the London Metal Exchange to court over the 2022 cancellation of billions of dollars in nickel trades as prices skyrocketed. The investor saw the move as a perversion of the free market with few precedents in the modern history of finance.
The London Stock Exchange was primed for its biggest listing this year until WE Soda pulled its IPO, leaving the company’s CEO frustrated. The world’s largest producer of natural soda ash was seeking a $7.5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, but couldn’t get investors to agree to it.
Better news for Amazon.com, whose proposed $1.7 billion deal to buy robot vacuum firm iRobot was cleared by the UK antitrust agency. The next big test for the Competition and Markets Authority is the Vodafone-Three merger.
London was warmer this week than Mykonos, where the property prices can be just as eye-watering. Charles Worthington, who built a fortune in celebrity hairdressing, is looking to list his eight-bedroom villa for €50 million in what would be the biggest-ever deal of its kind on the Greek island.
So, summer is here and we’re already running out of water. In Berlin, the Spree River gets sucked upstream by an array of pumps to ensure the German capital has enough to drink. Reversing the natural flow is set to become more frequent as the country’s exit from coal means a key source of water is lost.