Friday newspaper round-up: Theresa May, Black Friday, Mike Ashley, OBR

Theresa May is facing a growing backlash over her flagship business reforms after leading company bosses and the Bank of England’s chief economist urged her to reverse plans on executive pay. Senior finance and corporate figures, including the BoE’s Andy Haldane and GlaxoSmithKline’s chief executive Sir Andrew Witty, have rejected two of the prime minister’s main corporate governance proposals. – Financial Times

Twenty years ago, the City trading floor of the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was jammed with traders in bright jackets buying and selling millions of derivatives contracts. Now, what was once a key institution in the Square Mile is run from a bank of servers in Basildon, and 50,000 square feet of the former trading floor is about to be taken over by the fast-growing digital food delivery start-up, Deliveroo. – Financial Times

Britons are expected to embark on a record-breaking £1.3bn online spree as Black Friday kicks off the biggest shopping weekend of the year. The US import has taken the UK by storm, with retailers launching discounts even earlier than usual this year as the battle for Christmas shoppers intensifies. Some of the high street’s biggest names, including Tesco, Argos, Currys PC World and Amazon have upped the ante: offering more discounts, spread over more days, and, in Tesco’s case, opening its largest stores at 5am. – Guardian

The average cost of a home in London is more than 14 times average earnings – the highest level on record, according to figures from property consultancy Hometrack. Oxford and Cambridge are not far behind, the company’s latest index of city prices indicates, with house prices at 13.5 and 13.6 times local earnings respectively. A lack of homes for sale combined with demand fuelled by low mortgage rates has pushed up average prices in London by 86% since 2009, according to Hometrack, to an average of £482,000. The increase is far in excess of wage growth and means prices are 14.2 times the average London wage packet of £33,720 a year – the highest multiple since 2002. – Guardian

British shares look more overvalued and more vulnerable to a crash than equities in most other major global markets by one measure, according to the European Central Bank. In its twice-yearly analysis of factors that could lead to financial instability, the ECB said: “Valuation measures . . . are in some regions hovering at levels which, in the past, have been harbingers of impending large corrections.” – The Times

Mike Ashley is to invite MPs to a live televised debate at Sports Direct’s Derbyshire complex in a move he hopes will draw a line under the recent “spygate” scandal.In a letter sent yesterday to Iain Wright, chairman of the business, energy and industrial strategy committee, the billionaire founder of Sports Direct said that the politicians needed to return and face the retailer’s staff, some of whom he claimed were “deeply traumatised”. – The Times

Britain’s official economic forecasts are regularly wrong and should not be taken seriously when they predict a negative impact from Brexit, according to Boris Johnson's former economic advisor Gerard Lyons. “The margin of error on these budget forecasts is very high. They are sensitive to economic forecasts and also, as the OBR itself has previously stated, its judgment on fiscal policy,” he said in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. - Telegraph