Thursday newspaper round-up: Shop closures, BoE cuts, Chinese hackers, Post Office
The UK lost about 37 shops a day during 2024 in yet another brutal year for the high street, data suggests. Almost 13,500 retail stores closed for good in the last 12 months, a rise of 28% on 2023 – although the losses were below the levels seen each year between 2019 and 2022, according to provisional figures compiled by the Centre for Retail Research. - Guardian
White-collar graduates are earning thousands of pounds less in real terms than before Covid as Britain faces a “brain waste” overqualification crisis. Accountants, civil engineers and scientific researchers are among the graduates earning far less than if they had entered the job market in January 2017, two years before the pandemic struck, according to Telegraph analysis of Indeed data. Many professions regarded as safe bets for young people have suffered big hits to pay over this time, with some set to make scarcely more than the minimum wage next year. - Telegraph
The Bank of England will be forced to cut interest rates at least four times this year to boost flagging economic growth, according to economists polled by The Times. The majority of the 51 economists taking part in The Times’s eighth annual economists survey said the base rate will fall to at least 3.75 per cent in the year ahead, from 4.75 per cent, implying four quarter-point rate cuts. - The Times
Chinese government hackers breached the US Treasury office that administers economic sanctions, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, identifying targets of a cyber-attack Treasury disclosed earlier this week. The Treasury letter earlier this week said hackers compromised third-party cybersecurity service provider BeyondTrust and accessed several employee workstations and unclassified documents. - Guardian
The Post Office has been accused of wasting millions of pounds on lawyers involved in a much-delayed compensation scheme for victims of the Horizon scandal. A total of £136m has been spent on legal fees relating to redress schemes for Horizon, a bug-ridden IT system that resulted in a string of subpostmasters wrongly being jailed for fraud. This is equivalent to more than one-quarter of the £499m so far paid out to victims, according to MPs on the Business and Trade Committee. A total of £82m has gone to just one law firm, Herbert Smith Freehills. - Telegraph