1 Andy Haldane, the hawkish chief economist at the Bank of England, is quitting to join the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. His impending absence from the monetary policy committee is raising questions about how quickly the Bank will be willing to respond to inflation rises in the future.
2 HMRC has cut payments to hundreds of thousands of claimants of universal credit during lockdown — an aggressive raid on some of Britain’s poorest families who were mistakenly overpaid tax credits as long as 17 years ago.
3 Babcock International is under new management, and in an unscheduled statement just a few weeks before a planned update on a review of the business, it has identified £1.7 billion of “impairments and charges” — sending the defence giant £1 billion into the red and resulting in 1,000 redundancies, 850 of them in the UK.
4 Terry Smith is set to earn as much as £125 million from his Fundsmith asset management business last year. The Mauritius-based stock-picker will rake in much of that payment via his administrative and research firm — dwarfing the £30 million he earned in 2020 from a profit-sharing scheme.
5 WG Galen Weston, the British-born entrepreneur and philanthropist whose international empire spanned companies from Selfridges to Canada’s Loblaw, has died at the age of 80.
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6 Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street behemoth, is opening the latest outpost of its financial empire ... in Birmingham. It says that the new office will create hundreds of jobs and will function as a software and technology hub in Britain’s second city.
7 Trade between Britain and the European Union has climbed out of its post-Brexit slump, although it’s not all good news: a note of caution was sounded as UK exports to the rest of the world in February fell by 7.5 per cent.
8 JD Sports has resumed paying a dividend and appears to have been a lockdown winner, but its boss is showing no sign of handing back millions in taxpayers’ cash awarded in the form of business rates support and furlough payments.
9 After its stock-market kicking, Deliveroo faces another humiliation: being told how to make a profit by Jitse Groen, chief executive of arch-rival Just Eat Takeaway.com.
10 Philip Day’s Edinburgh Woollen Mill has been bought out of insolvency by his right-hand man, Steve Simpson, in a controversial move known as “phoenixing”. Day’s brands might be re-emerging from the flames — but it’s out-of-pocket creditors who are getting hot under the collar.