Tuesday newspaper round-up: Tax cuts, Linkedin, Carillion
The government has no room for unfunded pre-election tax cuts despite having pushed through a “colossal” £52bn a year stealth raid on household incomes on Rishi Sunak’s watch, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned. Britain’s foremost economics thinktank said the dire state of the public finances meant that attention-grabbing tax cuts risked stoking inflation, leading to higher Bank of England interest rates and a lengthy recession. – Guardian
Microsoft’s LinkedIn said on Monday it would lay off 668 employees across its engineering, talent and finance teams in the second round of job cuts this year for the social media network for professionals amid slowing revenue growth. The cuts, which affect more than 3% of the 20,000-strong staff, add to the tens of thousands of job losses this year in the technology sector in the face of an uncertain economic outlook. – Guardian
An Isle of Man bank owned by Brexit backer Jim Mellon has won a City licence that will allow it to accept deposits in the UK. Conister Bank, a subsidiary of Mr Mellon’s Manx Financial Group, has been granted permission by the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to accept deposits in a bid to boost its balance sheet. – Telegraph
The government dropped its pursuit of five former Carillion non-executive directors late last week, hours before a High Court “test case” was due to begin. The Insolvency Service had been seeking disqualification orders that would have prevented five former board members of the construction group, including Philip Green, the long-serving chairman, from acting as directors, but it dropped the civil action on Friday afternoon. A 13-week trial had been due to begin yesterday. – The Times
Power cables long enough to reach from the Earth to the Moon 200 times over will need to be built globally by 2040 to hit countries’ climate goals, according to a new analysis. The International Energy Agency warned that a failure to deliver the approximately 50 million miles of new and replacement electricity grids that will be needed in the next two decades could jeopardise the transition to clean energy. – The Times