Graeme Wearden 

Oil price rises for fifth day running amid Middle East tensions; Russian rouble hits three-month low – as it happened

Brent crude hits $80 as tensions betwen Israel and Iran rise, while rouble slides after Ukraine’s incursion into Russia
  
  

A Saudi Arabia Oil Refinery at Sunset.
A Saudi Arabia Oil Refinery at Sunset. Photograph: Alamy

Closing post

Time for a recap, after a rather quiet start to the week (well, it is August….).

  • Oil prices have risen for a fifth consecutive session today. Brent crude gained more than $1 per barrel to $80.70 per barrel, the highest since the start of this month.

    Analysts attributed the gains to easing fears over the US economy, and concern that tensions in the Middle East could lead to supply disruption.

  • The oil price shrugged off the news that Opec, the oil cartel, has cut its forecast for demand growth this year.

  • Russia’s currency has weakened after Ukraine launched an incursion into Russian territory. The rouble has lost 2.25% to 90.87 roubles to the dollar, the weakest since late May.

  • A Bank of England policymaker has warned that wage growth and price pressures could stay elevated in the months ahead. Catherine Mann argued that means cenral bankers should be careful, and that the UK should not be “seduced” into thinking the battle against inflation is over.

Over in California, Disney delighted its superfans at its “Ultimate Fan Convention” last weekend, with announcements and footage of upcoming film releases:

Wall Street opens higher

The New York stock exchange has made a positive start to trading.

The Dow Jones industrial average is up 0.17% at the open, gaining 68.5 points to 39,566 points, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both gaining 0.25%.

Oil is extending its earlier gains, despite Opec lowering its forecast for demand growth this year.

Brent crude is now up almost $1 per barrel, or 1.1%, at $80.55/barrel.

Easing US recession fears eased and Middle East supply risks are providing support too the oil price.

“Support is coming from last week’s better than expected U.S. data, which eased fears of a U.S. recession,” said IG markets analyst Tony Sycamore, who adds:

“There is also a great deal of anxiety about when Iran might look to avenge Israel’s assassination of key Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. Feels like a matter of when, not if.”

Updated

Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, has trimmed its forecast for profit margins this year, blaming rising costs.

Vestas now expects to make an EBIT margin before special items of between 4% and 5%, down from a previous forecast of a 4%-6% margin.

It says:

Inflation indexation remains a key mechanism to protect profitability in the order backlog. However, adjustments to planned costs impact current profitability in Vestas’ Service segment.

Disorder on UK streets and warnings of further rioting last week led to a 10% drop in hospitality sales, according to new industry figures.

As businesses closed and consumers stayed at home amid predictions of widescale disorder last week, sales fell by up to 40% in some areas and footfall was down by as much as 75%, UK Hospitality reported.

Coastal towns were particularly affected by the cancellation of coach and day trips, while city centres also saw significant disruption, with many employees advised to work from home.

UK Hospitality chief executive Kate Nicholls said:

These figures are startling and show the enormous impact the riots, and threat of further disorder, have had on our high streets and communities.

Updated

While there’s drama in the oil, currency, and coffee markets today, equities are calm.

European stock markets have rallied slightly this morning, with the Stoxx 600 index up 0.2% thanks to gains in London, Frankfurt, Milan and Madrid.

That follows gains in Asia, where most markets rose (although Japan was closed for the Mountain Day national holiday).

Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, says “The markets have seemingly caught their breath after the recent wild swings”.

Investors are also waiting for Wednesday’s US inflation report, which is expected to show a small slowdown in the pace of price rises.

Key event

Coffee prices are rising today, amid concerns that frosty weather in Brazil could hit supplies.

A contract for Arabica coffee rose by over 6% today.

Bloomberg explains:

Pockets of frost occurred in southern Brazil over the weekend, but temperatures didn’t decline enough to damage sugarcane, coffee or small grain crops, according to Michael McDougall, managing director at Paragon Global Markets.

Back in the UK, 200 jobs are being lost at a flooring business that was dependent on collapsed carpet retailer Carpetright.

The Floor Room, which operated within 34 John Lewis department stores, has fallen into administration, and appointed administrators from PwC.

Its concessions and one flagship store on London’s Tottenham Court Road have closed immediately, PA Media reports.

The insolvency means 196 staff have been made redundant, based across its shops, head office in Purfleet, Essex, and those providing in-home services, PwC said.

Some employees in Purfleet will be retained for a short time to support in winding down the company’s operations.

Adam Seres, joint administrator at PwC UK, said The Floor Room “depended on its sister company, Carpetright, for much of its trading infrastructure”, and that the firm’s “financial position meant that it was impossible for the business to continue trading”.

Updated

Opec, the oil cartel, has cut its forecast for demand growth – citing concerns over China’s economy.

In its latest monthly report, just released, Opec has cut its prediction for world oil demand growth to 2.1 million barrels per day, down from 2.25 million barrels per day before.

Opec says:

This slight revision reflects actual data received for 1Q24 and in some cases 2Q24, as well as softening expectations for China’s oil demand growth in 2024.

Gas prices are also rising today.

The day-ahead contract for UK gas is up 6%, at 87p per therm, the highest level since June. The month-ahead contract is up 3.6% to an eight-month high of 102.3p/therm.

The European month-ahead contract is 2.4% higher, at €41.38 per megawatt-hour, the highest since last December.

Updated

The pay packages handed out to Britain’s top bosses have “spiralled out of control”, the New Economics Foundation has warned.

After new data showed that FTSE 100 chief executive pay has hit at record high (see earlier post), Hannah Peaker, director of policy at NEF, says:

“The pay of top CEOs continuing to rise to eye-watering heights while millions of people struggle to earn enough to even cover the essentials shows how inequality is baked into our current economic model.

“Most people expect CEOs to be well-paid but their pay packages have spiralled out of control. With top CEOs earning 120 times more than the average worker – this isn’t a fair distribution of the wealth workers are responsible for generating.

“We need a new approach to ensure everyone can benefit from the wealth they help create, including promoting more democratic forms of ownership, like co-ops and publicly-owned utilities, and boosting the rights of trade unions and workers’ bargaining power.”

Rouble hits three-month low

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion has also knocked the rouble lower.

The rouble is down 2.2% this morning, at 90.6 roubles to the dollar, and has lost 5% so far in August.

That’s its lowest level since May, as currency traders react to reports that Ukrainian troops have advanced up to 30km inside Russia

Updated

Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk province last week is also adding to geopolitical tensions today.

Susanah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, says its another factor pushing up the oil price:

For the moment, oil prices are rising, offering immediate support to energy giants, with BP and Shell on the front foot in early trade.

The benchmark Brent Crude has risen back above $80 a barrel, sparked by fresh supply concerns, driven by rising tensions in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine.

This flurry of upwards momentum follows a considerable decline since the start of July, partly driven by concerns over the US economy. But more positive US jobs data released last week eased concerns about an American recession

Although the EU has banned imports of crude oil from Russia, Moscow has redirected oil shipments to China, and also used a ‘shadow fleet’ of vessels to evade Western sanctions.

Brent crude rises over $80 amid Middle East tensions

The oil price is rising for the fifth day in a row – dampening hopes that cheaper energy will keep inflation down.

Brent crude is up 0.75% this morning at $80.26 per barrel, the highest since Friday 2 August.

This is the first time in over a week that Brent has traded over $80/barrel. It hasn’t risen for five days in a row since February.

Rising energy prices feed through to goods inflation – bolstering Catherine Mann’s warning this morning that the fight against UK inflation isn’t over.

Ricardo Evangelista, senior analyst at ActivTrades, says tensions in the Middle East are lifting oil prices, as are fading concerns about the US economy.

Both supply and demand factors are bolstering oil prices as the outlook for the US economy becomes more positive and fears persist of an all-out war in the Middle East involving Iran and Israel.

Last week’s US economic data eased fears of a recession in the world’s largest economy, improving the outlook for oil demand. Simultaneously, there are growing expectations that Iran may launch a military operation in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Tehran’s regional allies.

If this occurs, it will likely lead to a rapid escalation that could engulf the world’s main oil-producing region in a conflict, severely disrupting the global crude supply. Against this backdrop, there may be further scope for oil price gains.

Yesterday, the Pentagon said US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered the deployment of a guided missile submarine to the Middle East amid escalating tensions in the region.

Our Middle East liveblog has more details:

Updated

Building products supplier Marshalls continues to be hit by the weak UK house-building markets.

Marshalls has reported that revenues fell by 13% year-on-year in the first half of this year.

This was principally due to its Landscape Products division, which produces paving slabs, driveways and garden walls, and suffered from low levels of new build housing and less spending on private housing repair, maintenance and improvement.

Marshalls says it remains “cautiously optimistic of a modest recovery in its end markets during the second half of the year”, so long as the macro-economic environment improves.

Last summer, Marshalls cut 250 jobs and issued a profits warning as demand weakened.

UK employers expect to agree smaller pay rises

Catherine Mann will be pleased to hear that employers in Britain expect to hand out the smallest pay rises in two years.

Workers, though, will be disappointed as they try to recover from the impact of the cost of living squeeze.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has reported that that bosses expect to raise wages by 3% over the next 12 months, down from 4% predicted three months ago.

It surveys 2,000 employers to judge their pay plans – discovering that median basic pay increase expectations fell from 4% to 3% in the private and voluntary sectors and from 3% to 2.5% among public sector employers.

James Cockett, senior labour market economist for the CIPD, says:

“Falls in expected pay rises were anticipated now inflation is within a tolerable range for employees.

However, many workers will still feel worse off than they did a couple of years ago, so other benefits like providing flexible working, offering benefits that help boost take home pay, and taking steps to improve job quality, are in employers’ interest to help both support and retain staff.”

Updated

India’s Bharti Enterprises to buy 25% stake in BT from Drahi’s Altice

BT’s shares have soared over 8% this morning, after Indian conglomerate Bharti Enterprises announced it will buy the stake owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi’s struggling Altice.

The move means Bharti will replace Altice as BT’s largest shareholder, with 24.5% of its stock.

The Indian group flattered the new Labour government, saying that it was “a vote of confidence in the UK as an attractive global destination for investment, with a stable business and policy environment attractive for long-term investors”.

Yet the sale – at an undisclosed price – also reflects the difficulties facing Drahi’s empire. It bought the first part of the BT stake in 2021, but is now struggling under a $60bn (£47bn) debt load, after apparently being taken off guard by rapidly rising interest rates, and is also dealing with corruption allegations that prompted a Portuguese criminal investigation.

Bharti says it has no intention of making an offer to acquire the Company, and is applying voluntarily for UK National Security and Investment Act clearance.

In the travel sector, Heathrow has been racking up its busiest weeks ever – despite a new £10 charge for passengers on some routes.

Heathrow says it handled almost 8 million passengers in July – including a record-breaking 1.8m passengers per week, three weeks in a row. There were “no material impacts on flights” from the CrowdStrike global IT outage or from protests, it says.

Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye (who has clearly been enjoying the Olympics) says:

“Team GB’s performance in Paris has been an inspiration to the nation and to Team Heathrow. In July, we were smashing a passenger record almost every single day and we’re chasing down our never before seen goal of serving 8 million passengers in a single month.

I’m proud that although there were a few potential challenges which could have caused us to stumble, our team remained focused on the prize of making every journey better and delivered a medal-winning start to the summer getaway.”

However, Heathrow also reports that it has missed out on 90,000 transfer passengers sine 2023 due to the ETA scheme, which adds a £10 charge for overseas travellers using UK airports to connect to other flights from seven countries.

“This is devastating for our hub competitiveness,” it adds.

Updated

FTSE 100 chief executive pay reaches highest level on record

Britain’s bosses won’t need to worry about rising inflation hitting their wallets and purses.

Pay for the bosses of the UK’s 100 biggest listed companies has increased to the highest level on record, with the average chief executive paid more than 100 times the average full-time worker in Britain.

Analysis by the High Pay Centre showed median pay for a FTSE 100 chief executive increased from £4.1m in 2022 to £4.19m in 2023.

The campaign group said this was the highest level on record, although growth in chief executive pay was slower than in the past two years, when there had been a bounce after the height of the Covid pandemic.

Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of the drug company AstraZeneca, topped the list of highest paid bosses in the FTSE 100 for a second year running, collecting £16.85m, up from £15.3m in 2022.

FTSE 10 claws back all last week's losses

In the City, shares have opened higher, with the FTSE 100 gaining 54 points or 0.66% to 8221.

That’s quite a contrast from last week, when the Footsie tumbled by 2%.

Today’s gains mean the index has clawed back all last week’s losses, and is trading at the highest level since Friday 2 April.

Updated

You can hear the podcast here:

On the economic picture, Mann says there’s been “a bit of a reversal of fortunes” between the UK and the US over the last year:

The US economy, it’s still doing quite well, but it has slowed and inflation is a little bit sticky, but not too bad.

And the UK economy, by contrast, has come out of last fall’s technical recession with, I think the best word to use is a resumption of growth because it’s not robust, but it has resumed.

Mann: We must lean against market volatility

The recent volatility in financial markets may be a sign that interest rates should be higher than would otherwise be the case, Catherine Mann argues.

She explains that volatility – in markets, in asset prices, and even in economic data - creates an “inflation premium”.

And that can mean that monetary policy “is not as restrictive as you might think”.

Mann explains:

If we think that we’re into a world where there’s more commodity volatility, where there’s more real-side volatility, where there’s more, in this case, spillover volatility from other places, we have to acknowledge that volatility adds to the situation with inflation. And so we would have to lean against that.

Last week’s market tumble was triggered, in part, by concerns that the US central bank had blundered by not starting to cut interest rates as America’s economy slowed.

Mann argues that if the US economy prospects are less robust than we thought, that would hurt the UK economy.

It should also support sterling – which economic theory suggests would put downward pressure on inflation because import prices are lower.

However, Mann says this isn’t actually true, according to research:

The appreciation does not put downward pressure on domestic prices because demand is relatively stronger than we thought.

Introduction: Bank of England ratesetter warns against being 'seduced' by lower inflation

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

One of the Bank of England’s hawkish policymakers has warned that the UK should not be “seduced” by the recent fall in inflation, given underlying price pressures in the economy remain strong.

Catherine Mann, one of four policymakers who opposed this month’s cut in UK interest rates, argues that services inflation remains too high for comfort, and that UK wages are rising faster than the Bank’s models would predict.

Speaking to the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes podcast, released this morning, Mann explained that while goods inflation has fallen, services prices were still rising at over 5% per year – which, she feels, is not compatible with keeping headline inflation sustainably at 2%.

She says:

Inflation has come down but if we look underneath the headline, we should not be, in the UK — and I think that’s true in the US as well — we shouldn’t be seduced by headline inflation because of the role of energy and external aspects working through both directly energy as well as on the goods side.

Mann fears there is an “upward ratchet” effect within the services sector, as services prices rarely fall. Part of that process is “the desire to maintain certain wage relationships”, she says – once the lowest-paid workers at a company get a pay rise, those above them push for one too

Mann explains:

There was a lot of new wage agreements in April this year. There will be wage negotiations next year, which will be in relationship to the negotiations that just happened. So some people at the bottom got quite a bit of an increase, rightfully so.

But the ones above them didn’t, which means next year they will, because it’s important to keep relative wages within a hierarchical structure, kind of in relationship to each other.

In April the national living wage rose to £11.44 an hour, an increase of almost 10%.

Good producers can also deploy the ratchet technique to push up prices, Mann points out – which may take a long time to “erode away”.

She says:

Firms look at their competitors and their competitors raise their prices a little bit. Maybe they’re more efficient. They raise their prices a little bit, and their competitors raise it too. We do not see that behaviour on the downside.

Mann also anticipates upside risks to goods inflation from higher shipping and transportation and all the issues in the Middle East, while wages keep rising faster than the Bank’s models would predict.

Mann explained:

“It takes multiple years for wages to catch up to all these desired real wages that workers want to have. And when it takes a long time, that means going forward, it’s going to take a long time for wage deceleration to move us into a position where services [inflation] will decelerate.

On a scale where one is ultra-dovish, and 10 is ultra-hawkish, Mann put herself as a 7 – down from a 10 in the days when she was voting to increase interest rates above their recent 16-year high.

She, and three other members of the monetary policy committee, were outvoted by the other five members of the MPC at the start of this month, when UK interest rates were cut to 5% from 5.25%.

Inflation data due on Wednesday is expected to show a rise in UK CPI inflation, from 2% to 2.3%.

However, the latest labour force statistics due tomorrow morning are tipped to show a slowdown in wage growth…

The agenda

  • 9am BST: China’s new yuan loans data for July

  • 1pm BST: India’s industrial production data for June

Updated

 

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