Time to recap…

The shock news that martial law has been declared in South Korea has rocked its currency, and hit shares in the company’s stocks.

The won has fallen to a two-year low today, as traders react to president Yoon Suk Yeol’s stunning decision to challenge the left-wing parliamentary group that controls the national assembly, by banning political activity.

Shares in South Korean ETFs tumbled, while Samsung’s stock fell over 5% in London.

Here’s the latest:

The worrying news from Seoul took the shine off a rally in European stocks today, where the FTSE 100 is on track for a six-week closing high.

In Germany, the DAX index climbed over the 20,000 point mark for the first time, sparking talk that a Santa Rally may be taking off in Europe.

In London, anti-Barclays protesters have gathered at a banking summit….

….where its former CEO accused the UK government of a “get those fuckers” attitude towards bankers.

Luxury carmaker Jaguar has unveiled its much-anticipated concept electric car, to a better reception than it may have feared.

The boss of the Japanese bank Nomura has apologised and taken a voluntary pay cut after a former employee was charged with robbery and attempted murder of a customer.

Labour will miss its manifesto target of building 1.5m homes in England before the end of this parliament without more radical reform to the planning system, the thinktank the Centre for Cities has warned.

The Office for National Statistics has conceded it may not be ready to replace its defective employment survey with a more accurate series until 2027, despite complaints from policymakers about the quality of the existing data.

Exports of British food to the EU have dropped by nearly £3bn a year since Brexit, a trade thinktank has said, with new physical and documentary checks at the border complicating trade.

South Korea’s finance minister has declared that the government will deploy all possible measures to stabilize financial markets if needed.

Following an emergency meeting with top economic officials in Seoul, Choi Sang-mok said:

“We will mobilize all possible financial and foreign exchange market stabilization measures, including unlimited liquidity injections.”

Back in London, ex-Barclays CEO Bob Diamond says one of the reasons that UK banks are struggling compared to their US counterparts, is that the UK government doled out “biblical justice” in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

This, he says, resulted in a “get those fuckers” attitude towards bankers.

Diamond said the US had a relatively pragmatic response to the crisis, which amounted to three rules: one, that the banks had to repay their government bailouts; two, that they couldn’t repay those government debts until they passed stress tests; and three, until they repaid the government, those banks could not pay bonuses to bankers or dividends to shareholders.

Across the pond, it was a very different story. Diamond told the FT Banking Summit:

“In the UK and in Europe, it was biblical justice: ‘Let’s get those fuckers. Let’s get those banks. Let’s really hurt them’.

“And I think the result of that has been very, very apparent, which is Royal Bank of Scotland is still owned by the government, and Barclays is still under pressure because they didn’t take money from the government. So my view is it was very, very different in the US than it was in the UK and Europe. And I think the US economy has been a beneficiary.”

Great Britain’s energy generators were called on to ramp up their electricity output after the energy system operator warned that the country faced an energy supply crunch this evening, before dropping the warning.

The National Energy System Operator (Neso) triggered an official warning over Britain’s power supplies shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, just hours before an expected squeeze on the country’s electricity forecast for 17.30pm (as covered earlier).

It later removed the warning notice saying it had “enough electricity generation to meet demand and continue to operate the system as normal”.

Power supplies were expected to be tight due to a drop in wind power generation which has coincided with higher demand due to the cold snap. In the early afternoon wind power contributed just 7% to the UK’s electricity supplies, while gas-fired power plants made up 55% of all power generation, according to Neso data.

As a result by the early evening Britain’s electricity supplies were expected to be less than 1% above the forecast peak in power demand. This is well below the threshold set out in market rules to operate the power system safely.

Neso raised a red flag weeks after predicting that the risk of winter blackouts in Great Britain had tumbled to its lowest in four years – even after the shutdown of the UK’s last coal plant, thanks to investments in low-carbon electricity sources.

In its winter outlook report Neso said it expects Britain’s winter power supplies to outstrip demand by almost 9% this year in its base case scenario, the greatest margin since the winter of 2019 to 2020.

The capacity market notice is intended to spur generators to step in to sell electricity to the grid at short notice, often for lucrative fees, or encourage companies that use energy to reduce their demand in return for payments.

Exchange traded funds which track South Korean shares are also falling sharply.

The MSCI South Korea ETF is down 5.1%, while the Franklin FTSE South Korea ETF has dropped by 3.9%.

London-listed depository receipts in South Korean tech giant Samsung have tumbled by 5.4%, Reuters reports.

Those depositary receipts are financial instruments that represents shares of a foreign company that are traded on a local stock exchange. It’s a sign that stocks on the South Korean stock market may fall sharply when trading resumes on Wednesday.

Newsflash: the South Korean won has dropped to a two year low after the country’s president stunned citizens by declarinig martial law is in place.

In an unannounced late night TV broadcast, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared he would eradicate “shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces”.

Reuters reports that he did not cite any specific threat from the nuclear-armed North, however, instead focusing on his domestic political opponents instead.

Yoon said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure in order to safeguard free and constitutional order, insisting:

“I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order.”

Lee Jae-myung, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, which has the majority in parliament, warned in response that “The economy of the Republic of Korea will collapse irretrievably”, adding:

“My fellow citizens, please come to the National Assembly.”

Britain’s power supply margins could fall below target tonight, partly due to low wind speeds hitting renewable power generation.

The National Energy System Operator has reported that the country’s electricity supply margin could drop below the threshold set out in its capacity market rules by 1730 GMT on Tuesday.

Under the capacity market scheme, generators are paid to make sure power generation is available at times when demand is high.

National Grid’s Electricity System Operator said on its website that expected aggregate capacity was 47,166 megawatts (MW), compared with a transmission demand and operating margin of 46,717 MW.

ESO added:

“No definitive information regarding additional capacity is currently available to the Electricity System Operator.”

Currently, wind is only providing 14.5% of the UK’s power generration, with over half coming from gas.

The CEO of BBVA says he has not yet decided whether he will sell UK high street lender TSB if his bank succeeds in its $13bn hostile takeover of rival and TSB owner Sabadell.

Onur Genc told the FT Banking Summit that he was “neutral” about whether to keep TSB in any future combined banking group:

“We have to see once we complete the deal.”

He insisted that his main focus is on bolstering its operations across Spain.

“Local scale is important and that’s why we are doing the deal”

Last week, the European Commission said it did not have any objections to the takeover of Sabadell – the Spanish lender that was created in 1881 by 127 families in Catalonia – after completing a foreign subsidies review.However, the bid still faces a longer antitrust review by Spain’s competition watchdog, the CNMC, that could extend the process well into next year.

A sale of TSB would mark the third major ownership change for the UK bank, which was hived off from Lloyds in 2013 as part of efforts to boost competition following its £20.3bn government bailout in 2008.

TSB returned as a standalone high street bank nearly 20 years after it was snapped up by Lloyds in 1995. Led by chief executive Paul Pester, the new TSB spanned 631 branches and boasted 8,500 staff.

It eventually floated on the UK stock exchange in 2014, but was bought by Sabadell a year later, marking one of the biggest cross-border banking deals since the financial crisis.

Sabadell explored a potential sale of the bank in 2020 but later abandoned those plans, even as it continued to nurse the fallout of a major IT meltdown in 2018.

Here’s the moment the German DAX share index hit a new all-time high this morning, hitting 20,000 points for the first time:

The rally means the DAX has now risen by around 3,000 points over the course of 2024, after cracking the 17,000-point mark in December 2023.

A Santa rally may be building in Europe’s financial markets today, despite worries about the economic outlook and political instability in France and Germany.

In London, the FTSE 100 share index has risen to a six-week high this morning, up 56 points or 0.7% at 8369 points.

Budget airline easyJet is the top riser (+4%), after a stock upgrade from UBS, with mining company Antofagasta (+2.3%) and banks Barclays (+1.9%) and NatWest (+1.8%) not far behind.

In Berlin, Germany’s benchmark DAX stock index has broken through the 20,000-point barrier for the first time, despite the recent government collapse that has led to a new election being called for next February.

Paris’s CAC 40 has gained 0.6% today; risers include luxury goods makers Hermes and LVMH, on hopes of more stimulus measures in China.

Europe’s gains follow a strong day on Wall Street, where the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq finished at new all-time closing highs last night.

Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, says:

December is Santa rally territory and so far, it’s got off to a good start. European equity markets are a sea of green on Tuesday, and French markets are bouncing back.

For now, the markets are ignoring the geopolitical risks bubbling around the world. The French government is poised to collapse at some point this week, and China has decided to ban the export to the US of some items that can be used for military purposes, including gallium, geranium and other superhard materials.

It will also use implement a stricter screening process for graphite exports to the US, which is a crucial input to produce lithium batteries. It will be interesting to see how Elon Musk reacts to this, and it suggests that the rest of the world will meet President Trump’s war on global trade blow for blow.

French stocks are rallying despite the prospect of Michel Barnier’s government falling this week.

Yesterday, leftwing and far-right parties lodged motions of no confidence after Barnier decided to push through a belt-tightening budget without a vote.

Mujtaba Rahman. managing director of Eurasia Group, reckons Barnier has only a 20% chance of surviving the censure vote on Wednesday afternoon. If his government falls, all Barnier’s unfinished legislation—including the rest of the 2025 budget plan—falls too.

Rahman says:

France now faces its second period of political turmoil in less than five months at a time of gathering international crisis; President Emmanuel Macron will have to appoint a new Prime Minister rapidly—just possibly Barnier again but more likely a stopgap figure—in order to pass emergency tax legislation to keep the French government functioning beyond 1 January.

Protesters are out in full force ahead of an appearance by Barclays CEO CS Venkatakrishnan at the FT Banking Summit in London this morning.

Dozens of activists are gathered outside of the Convene Centre near St Pauls - next to the London Stock Exchange - where Venkatakrishan is due to be interviewed as part of the FT Banking Summit at 10:15am.

They’re protesting what they claim is the UK bank’s support for arms companies supplying Israel in its attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

Barclays has long been a target for both climate and anti-war campaigners, some of whom have vandalised Barclays branches across the UK in protest. Venkatakrishnan has continued to condemn their behaviour, and said this summer that he believed public opinion was more balanced that the protesters would lead some to believe.

NatWest CEO Paul Thwaite says the bank is on a “fast trajectory to private ownership”, with the government likely to fully exit its stake within the first half of 2025.

Kicking the FT Banking Summit at the Convene Centre near London’s St Paul’s Cathedral this morning, Thwaite said this will be “symbolic” for both NatWest staff and the entire banking sector, allowing the industry to close another chapter of the fallout from the 2008 banking crash.

The Treasury spent nearly £46bn to bailout NatWest - back when it was known as Royal Bank of Scotland - at the height of the financial crisis. The resulting nationalisation left taxpayers owning around 84% of the lender.

But a rapid sell-off over the past year has cut the remaining public stake in Natwest from 38% in December 2023 to just under 11% today.

Thwaite says:

“Absent some big kind of dislocation and economic events, you know, we’ll be back to private ownership next year, maybe as early the first half of the year, and that will be a great moment”

And reaching that point will mean the bank can draw a line under a tumultuous chapter in the bank’s near-300 year history, Thwaite explained:

“It means we can talk about the future of the bank and the potential of the bank, rather than having to talk about its past. So yeah, all, as you say, All things being well, but I think we’re on a very fast trajectory to private ownership, and I’m very proud of that”

Jaguar’s new concept car has been given the thumbs up, by the Daily Telegraph. And, er, the thumbs down too.

Despite not usually being a fan of change, El Tel is hailing the new electric car as “a design triumph” in an early review this morning.

Their motoring correspondent, Andrew English, writes:

Certainly Jaguar has traditionally been at its best when it’s done something different, but this strategy is also fantastically risky – even if it is perhaps the only path left open. For all the misleading and occasionally barbed PR and social media, it’s all window dressing until the new car is in the showrooms and they’re trying to sell it. Then the truth will out.

One can’t help wishing them luck and hoping that McGovern is right when he says in uncharacteristically modest tone: “We’re taking Jaguar back to a time when it was truly loved, because it was unique.”

The bodywork of the concept car, English reports, is “largely unadorned”, but with details including “almost industrial slatted ventilator panels at front and rear”, and the raw brass hinge-out panels at the base of the front wings containing the rear-view cameras.

The two-seat interior is “ voluptuous” with a suitcase rack behind.

English got a peek at Jaguar’s concept car yesterday at Gaydon, the company’s headquarters (The Guardian declined to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), so couldn’t go).

He reports that the new car has a long, untreated brass interior door handle, which will react with the sweat on hands to produce “a distinctive odour”.

That, apparently, is a good thing. Mary Crisp, chief of materiality design, explains:

“It’s about how car materials age.

They don’t have to stay the same, they can grow and change during the life of the vehicle.”

But…. down the corridor at the Telegraph, Matthew Lynn reckons the ‘Barbie’ relaunch is a disaster for an iconic brand, adding:

And instead of breaking new ground, and revolutionising the way its machines are designed as promised, it looks, well, sort of like a lot of the other upmarket cars on the market. It could be the new Audi, Tesla, or Lexus.

Britain’s economic inactivity problem isn’t quite as bad as feared, the country’s statistics body has revealed.

The Office for National Statistics has updated its assessment of the labour force, based on new population estimates – a calculation that has increased the number of 16 to 64 year olds in the UK by 484,000.

This has lifted the estimated number of people in work by 402,000 in the April-June quarter, while the number unemploywed has been raised by 30,000.

An extra 60,000 people were economically inactive – neither in work nor looking for a job – the ONS estimates.

These changes mean the the employment rate is revised up 0.1 percentage points to 74.6% in April to June 2024, while the unemployment rate is largely unchanged at 4.2% and the economic inactivity rate is down 0.1 percentage points to 22.1%.

These changes, though, won’t fix the wider peoblems with the ONS’s labour force statistics, which have been hampered by low response rates.

It says today it has reweighted data going back to 2019, and will release the results on 17 December with its next jobs report.

Here are more photos of the Type 00 concept car from Miami overnight:

The scale of the backlash last month following Jaguar’s 30-second teaser trailer in which a group of brightly dressed models, but no actual cars, was rather over the top.

The adverts came with a “Copy nothing” tagline, channelling Jaguar founder William Lyons, while signalling a decisive break with the company’s past as an old school luxury brand.

If it was designed to attract attention, it certainly succeeded; critics included Elon Musk and Nigel Farage.

But today, Jaguar is keen to focus on its plan to be “bold and disruptive” with its new electric car and redesign, announced last night in Miami.

Managing director Rawdon Glover told Sky News:

“We’ve certainly gathered an awful lot of attention over the last few weeks, but now I think its really important to talk about the vehicle.”

As Glover points out, few car launches get quite as much attention, adding that the industry is at a crucial point:

We need to make sure that Jaguar is relevant, is desirable, is future proof for the next 90 years of its history.

“At the moment, the industry is going through huge disruption: technology changes, as we all figure out actually what an electrified world means for our brand.

“At Jaguar, we’ve looked at that and we think we have to make a really bold step forward. But actually, the step we’re going to take is completely in keeping in ethos with the brand.”

Glover was also pressed about the backlash against that advert, and insisted:

“We absolutely don’t want to alienate any of our loyal fans.

“Quite the opposite - we want to take as many of our current fans with us on that journey... We need to also appeal to a new audience. That’s what we need to do.”

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

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” as Oscar Wilde reminded us. And carmaker Jaguar has avoided the latter fate, in the build-up to the unveiling of its vision for its new electric car.

After an advertising campaign that led to accusations Jaguar was brusquely ditching its old followers, it now unveiled its Type 00 electric model at Miami Art Week in Florida.

Described as as “design vision concept,” Jaguar says the model is a “concept with bold forms and exuberant proportions to inspire future Jaguars”.

Shown in two colours, Miami Pink and London Blue, it has a long bonnet, 23‑inch alloy wheels, and a glassless rear tailgate. That means you can’t look out through the back window, and must use rear-view cameras installed near the front wheel instead.

But this is just the first step.

Jaguar’s first production car under this new strategy will be an electric four‑door GT, which will be unveiled late next year.

This new model will target a range of up to 770km/478 miles. under the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure testing system, while rapid charging will add 200 miles of charge in 15 minutes.

Jaguar’s chief creative officer, professor Gerry McGovern OBE, says:

Type 00 is a pure expression of Jaguar’s new creative philosophy. It has an unmistakable presence. This is the result of brave, unconstrained creative thinking, and unwavering determination.

It is our first physical manifestation and the foundation stone for a new family of Jaguars that will look unlike anything you’ve ever seen. A vision which strives for the highest level of artistic endeavour.

The agenda

• 8.25am GMT: FT Banking Summit in London, including NatWest CEO Paul Thwaite, Barclays CEO CS Venkatakrisnan, and former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe

• 9:45am GMT: Treasury Committee hearing on Work of the FCA

• 3pm GMT: US JOLTS survey of job openings