Sunday newspaper round-up: China, Central Banks, Sainsbury's

The markets guru who was credited with predicting the 2008 financial crash has warned that Britain faces rampant inflation if businesses keep getting hammered by lockdowns. Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and onetime chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said businesses could keep raising prices if they face heavy costs from repeated lockdowns, and find they can successfully pass on those costs to consumers. He said central banks would be watching prices closely in the next year and could be forced to raise interest rates rapidly if they felt inflation would spiral out of control. - Financial Mail on Sunday

An American hedge fund controlled by a billionaire surfer was forced to give up on its huge bet against Sainsbury's after the grocer's shares soared last week. Third Point – controlled by Dan Loeb, a Wall Street hedge fund manager, surfer and philanthropist – was stung when Sainsbury's shares soared 15 per cent to £3.40. The rise was driven by rumours that US private equity buccaneer Apollo was weighing a takeover bid of more than £10billion. - Financial Mail on Sunday

BT will issue a message this week: our offices are important — use them. As the holiday season ends, the telecoms giant, which employs 100,000, is starting to fill up a new base in Birmingham and making preparations to move into a new London HQ at the end of the year. Alison Wilcox, BT’s HR director, will publish a blog on Tuesday, timed to coincide with the end of school summer holidays, spelling out why work-from-home cannot last forever. “Our offices will be the place our graduates and apprentices learn from more senior colleagues and where new joiners will learn the ropes, meet new team-mates and bring fresh thinking to drive growth in our business,” she will say. She will also spell out the importance of offices to the “surrounding micro and local economies”. - Sunday Times

Britain's car industry is on the cusp of a new golden age of manufacturing that will rival the production boom of nearly a century ago, the Investment Minister Lord Grimstone has said. The former Barclays and Standard Life chairman – who was also an adviser to Margaret Thatcher – said the surge would be driven by billions of pounds of foreign investment into electric cars as manufacturers race to meet soaring demand. - Financial Mail on Sunday

A powerful consortium of investors is closing in on a blockbuster £2 billion takeover of a logistics empire that owns 12 ports and distribution hubs stretching from Teesside in the northeast to the Thames Estuary and the Isle of Wight. A deal would be seen as a big vote of confidence in chancellor Rishi Sunak’s project to develop low-tax freeports across the country in the hope of attracting investment and “levelling up” deprived areas. - Sunday Times

Rishi Sunak may be trying to chivvy workers back into the office, but Marks & Spencer foresees a certain reluctance among its customers to to give up home working - or at the very least the shift towards more forgiving workwear. It has been revealed that Marks & Spencer, which has led the market for men’s suits since 1939, now stocks suits in only 110 of its 245 clothing stores. The director of menswear at the highstreet giant, Wes Taylor, said that this dramatic reduction - with fewer than half of stores stocking suits - is a result of the company adapting to “customers’ rapidly changing needs” during the pandemic. - Sunday Telegraph