Why fear of growth setback has spooked investors
News of a potentially fast-spreading new coronavirus variant has already triggered a violent reaction on markets and in a number of different asset classes.
While much attention has naturally alighted on equity markets, with big falls in the FTSE-100 and continental European indices such as the DAX in Germany and the CAC-40 in France, probably the most significant move has been in the oil price.
At one point this morning, the price of a barrel of Brent crude fell to $77.28 – a level it has not seen since 24 September.
And, while a new coronavirus variant is undoubtedly unwelcome news, the fall in the price of oil may be one piece of good news emerging from the situation.
For a start, because oil prices move in close correlation to the price of other energy sources such as natural gas, a big decline will relieve inflationary pressures.
News of a fresh coronavirus variant has triggered a violent reaction on markets, including the FTSE 100
These, as was shown by this week’s co-ordinated release of crude reserves by the US, China and others, have been exercising governments in a number of countries.
It has also been exercising policy makers. The Bank of England has been dropping ever heavier hints of a looming increase in interest rates and, while it surprised the markets by not raising its main policy rate this month, at least one rise was being priced by the end of February next year.
But a sustained decline in the price of oil – and the threat to growth posed by the new variant – will relieve pressure on the Bank of England to act quickly and especially at a time when a number of members of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee are still extremely wary of the possible impact of even a modest increase in Bank Rate.
That is also the calculation markets have been making this morning about the US. Yields on US Treasuries (US government IOUs) have fallen this morning – the yield falls as the price rises – as investors started to reconsider the likely timing of the next rise in US interest rates.
The odds against an early rate hike from the US Federal Reserve had been shortening since, on Monday, President Joe Biden reappointed Jay Powell as chairman of the Fed rather than going for the more dovish Lael Brainard.
Those bets have now started to unwind as some investors calculate the spread of a new coronavirus variant could push back the timing of the Fed’s first hike.
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Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey explains why it decided to hold interest rates at 0.1% – despite predicting inflation will hit 5% next year
A bigger concern, when it comes to the potential impact of another COVID variant, will be Europe. The main European economies have not rebounded from the pandemic as rapidly as the United States, as borne out on Thursday by confirmation of weaker-than-expected GDP growth in the third quarter of this year in Germany, the continent’s biggest economy.
Those concerns also apply to the UK, whose economy is further away from recapturing its pre-pandemic levels than any other country in the G7, other than Japan.
What is particularly striking about market reaction to this new variant is that it has been far more violent than the response, earlier this week, to new COVID lockdowns in Austria, Slovakia and other parts of continental Europe. On that occasion, investors calculated that spending prevented from taking place due to lockdowns would be merely deferred, not postponed altogether.
Markets around the world were down on Friday as news of a worrying new variant spooked investors
With the new variant, as so little information is currently available about the speed with which it can be transmitted and the impact it will have on sufferers, the same assumption cannot be made.
That explains the punishment meted out this morning to aviation stocks, such as International Airlines Group (IAG) and Lufthansa and tourism-related stocks, such as TUI, Intercontinental Hotels and Whitbread, the owner of the Premier Inn chain.
But it cannot be stressed how unknowable the situation is.
As Neil Shearing, group chief economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, put it in a note to clients this morning: “It goes without saying that it’s still too early to say exactly how big a threat the new B.1.1.529 strain poses to the global economy.”
Mr Shearing said there were three key points to make, though, the first of which is that – as Delta showed – it is very hard to stop the spread of virulent new variants. Secondly, it is the restrictions imposed in response to the virus, rather than the virus itself, that causes the bulk of the economic damage.
Thirdly, he said, the global economic backdrop is different than in previous waves, with supply chains already stretched, while labour shortages are widespread.
He added: “All of this will complicate the policy response. At the margin, the threat of a new, more serious, variant of the virus may be a reason for central banks to postpone plans to raise interest rates until the picture becomes clearer.
“The key dates are 15 December, when the Fed meets, and 16 December, when several central banks, including the Bank of England and European Central Bank, meet.
“But unless a new wave causes widespread and significant damage to economic activity, it may not prevent some central banks from lifting interest rates next year.”
Much will depend on what information comes from the World Health Organisation in coming days and how governments respond.
As Jim Reid, head of global fundamental credit strategy at Deutsche Bank, noted today: “At this stage very little is known. Mutations are often less severe so we shouldn’t jump to conclusions but there is clearly a lot of concern about this one.
Also South Africa is one of the world leaders in sequencing so we are more likely to see this sort of news originate from there than many countries.
“Suffice to say at this stage no one in markets will have any idea which way this will go.”
Exactly. At the moment, travel bans have only been imposed to and from six southern African countries. It may well be that, if the new variant has already taken hold elsewhere, there may be little point in imposing new travel restrictions.
But this is not a situation many investors either expected or wanted to return to. They have seen this story before. And they do not wish to be caught out in the way they were during earlier waves of the pandemic.
Nvidia has signalled no drop in demand for its flagship chips among big artificial intelligence (AI) spenders despite the low-cost challenge posed by Chinese rival DeepSeek.
The leading AI chipmaker said it expected Blackwell sales to continue to grow after its latest earnings beat market expectations.
Nvidia forecast revenue of around $43bn (£34bn) for its first quarter after achieving a figure of $39.3bn (£31bn) over its last three months – up 12% from the previous quarter and 78% from one year ago.
Just a month ago, its shares took a hammering when it emerged DeepSeek‘s primary chatbot, which uses lower-cost chips, had become the most popular free application on Apple’s App Store across the US.
Nvidia’s shares lost almost $600bn in market value in a day.
It also prompted investors to question whether the AI-led stock market rally of recent years was overblown.
There was anxiety ahead of Nvidia’s earnings report though shares only fell fractionally in after-hours dealing.
Market analysts suggested demand from Microsoft, Amazon and other heavyweight tech companies racing to build
AI infrastructure remained robust, given Nvidia’s revenue guidance even though the bulk of it is accounted for through data centres.
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Who will win the AI battle?
Read more: What is DeepSeek?
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said Nvidia has ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell and achieved “billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter”.
“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law – increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter.
“AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionise the largest industries,” he said.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said of the report: “The longer-term investment case for the driver of the AI train is looking difficult to pick holes in, with Meta’s $200bn just one of the latest mega investments in data centres to be unveiled recently.
“By virtue of scale, growth may be slowing a little but upgrades to analysts full-year numbers can be expected off the back of today’s results. At a around 30x forward earnings, the valuation still doesn’t look overcooked.”
How much have America, Britain and the rest paid Ukraine in aid since the Russian invasion? And do they have any hope of getting money back in return?
These are big questions, and they’re likely to dominate much of the discussion in the coming months as Donald Trump pressurises his Ukrainian counterparts for a deal on ending the war. So let’s go through some of the answers.
First off, the question of who has given the most money to Ukraine rather depends on what you’re counting.
War latest: Ukraine agrees minerals deal with US – source
If you’re looking solely at the amount of military support extended since 2022, the US has provided €64bn, compared with €62bn from European nations (including the UK).
But now include other types of support, such as humanitarian and financial assistance, and European support exceeds American (€132bn in total, compared with €114bn from the US).
Divide Europe into its constituent nations, on the other hand, and none of them individually comes anywhere close to the US quantity of aid.
That being said, simple cash numbers aren’t an especially good measure of a country’s ability to pay.
Look at US support as a percentage of gross domestic product and it comes to 0.5% of GDP. That’s almost precisely the same as the aid from the UK.
Looked at through this prism, it’s other countries which are clearly the most generous: Denmark, Estonia and much of the Baltics providing around 2% of their GDP – a far bigger amount versus their ability to finance it.
Still, compare the aid this time around with previous amounts spent in other conflicts and they are nowhere close.
Lend-Lease during WWII, aid during the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and even the first Gulf War, involved significantly bigger outlays than currently being spent on Ukraine.
That goes not just for the US but also for the UK, Germany and Japan, all of which provided more aid to the Kuwaitis and other affected nations during the first Gulf War.
Even so, it’s clear that the US and others have put significant resources towards Ukraine.
President Trump has been talking recently about recouping $500bn from Ukraine in the form of revenues from mining rare earth metals.
This is, on the face of it, slightly odd. Rare earth metals represent an obscure corner of the periodic table and play a small if important role in electronics and military manufacturing.
The entire market is small – making it essentially implausible that, even if Ukraine suddenly produced the majority of the world’s supply, the president could expect that amount of revenue back in return.
More to the point, while there are a couple of rare earth deposits in Ukraine, they have languished, unexploited, for years. They are so expensive to mine no-one has worked out how to extract the elements and make a profit at the same time.
And even if you presumed they could do, Ukraine would still be a relative minnow in global rare earths production.
Read more:
What minerals does Ukraine have?
Assuming, as one probably should, that Donald Trump didn’t just mean rare earths, but was talking more broadly about “critical minerals” (the two are different things, but let’s not get too pedantic here), there are also one or two other promising mine sites in the country.
There is an old, shuttered alumina plant seized from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a large lithium resource which could, if all went well, be the single biggest lithium mine in Europe.
Yet even taking this into account, Ukraine would still be a relatively small player in global lithium. Not nothing – but not world changing either. Certainly not enough to generate the hundreds of billions of dollars Mr Trump is seeking.
Then again, Ukraine has other resources at its disposal too: vast seams of coal in the Donbas, large iron ore reserves in the south of the country.
Both of these are in or close to Russian occupied areas – which might, from the Ukrainians’ perspective, actually be the point. Old fashioned as this stuff is, it does actually generate significant revenue. It might be Donald Trump’s best hope for some payback.
The number of convictions linked to a second Post Office IT scandal being investigated for miscarriages of justice – has more than doubled, Sky News has learned.
Twenty-one Capture cases have now been submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) for review.
Before Christmas, it was around eight.
They relate to the Capture computing software, which was used in Post Office branches in the 1990s before the infamous faulty Horizon system was introduced.
Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing after Horizon software caused false shortfalls in branch accounts between 1999 and 2015.
A report last year found that there was a reasonable likelihood that the Capture accounting system, used from the early 1990s until 1999, was also responsible for shortfalls.
If the CCRC finds significant new evidence or legal arguments not previously heard before, cases can be referred back to the Court of Appeal.
Lawyer for victims, Neil Hudgell from Hudgell Solicitors, says the next steps for the Capture cases and the CCRC are still “some months away”.
He said he is also hopeful that the first cases could be referred to the Court of Appeal before the end of this year.
Lawyer Neil Hudgell described victims of the Capture IT system as ‘hideously damaged people’
“Certainly we will certainly be lobbying,” he said. “The CCRC will be lobbying, the advisory board will be lobbying any interested parties, that these are hideously damaged people of advancing years who need some peace of mind and the quicker that can happen the better.”
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In December the government said it would offer ‘redress’ to Post Office Capture software victims
‘We didn’t talk about it’
Among those submitted to the CCRC – Pat Owen’s Capture case was the first.
Her family have kept her 1998 conviction for stealing from her post office branch a secret for 26 years.
Juliet Shardlow shows Sky News paperwork which could explain discrepancies logged by Capture
Speaking to Sky News they have opened up for the first time about what happened to her.
Pat was a former sub-postmistress, who was found guilty and given a two-year suspended sentence.
She died in 2003 from heart failure.
David Owen and his wife Pat in happier times
Her daughters describe her as coming home from court after her conviction “a different woman”.
“We didn’t talk about it,” said Juliet Shardlow. “We didn’t talk about it amongst ourselves as a family, we didn’t talk about it with the extended family.
“Our extended family don’t know.”
Juliet Shardlow said her mum Pat was a different person after her conviction
David Owen, Pat’s husband, said she lost a lot of weight after her conviction and at 62 years old “looked like an old gal of 90”.
Capture evidence never heard in court
Pat’s family kept all the documents from her case safe for over two decades and now a key piece of evidence may turn the tide on her conviction, and potentially help others.
A document summarising the findings of an IT expert described the computer Pat used as having “a faulty motherboard”.
It also stated that this “would have produced calculation errors and may have been responsible for the discrepancies subsequently identified by Post Office Counters’ Security and Investigation team.”
Read more from Sky News:
Sub-postmasters: ‘Still going through hell’
Compensation for victims of Capture
Calls on Fujitsu for compensation
The computer expert was due to give evidence in Pat Owen’s defence at court as part of her trial – but failed to turn up on the day.
The family say they never found out exactly why he didn’t show up at court.
David said there was a computer all set up in the courtroom for the expert to use to show malfunctions.
David Owen said his wife Pat never expected to lose her court case
“I heard, now I can’t remember who from, that he’d done work for the Post Office,” he said.
“If he turned up to be a witness in court for us to he wouldn’t get any more work from the Post Office.”
Despite best efforts the expert has never been tracked down. The Post Office has declined to comment.
David also described how his wife never expected to lose her case.
“She was so confident. She knew she didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
“But when the guilty verdict came out she actually fell to her knees in the dock crying her eyes out shaking.”
He said the judge then asked if he wanted to say anything, and David said he got up in court and spoke at length about his wife’s innocence.
The government announced in December that they will be setting up a redress scheme for Capture victims, similar to Horizon.
So far around 100 people who suffered after being accused of stealing from their branch, while using Capture, could be eligible for redress.
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