Podcasts related to Economics

The General Election campaign is underway. Labour has set out its Brexit & NHS plans. Theresa May is in Wales targeting voters there. And the front of The Telegraph reads Britain 'faces EU bill until 2020'. It comes as the Prime Minister's preparing to meet the EU's chief Brexit negotiator for the first time since taking office.

Joining Glen Goodman for the main market headlines was Nigel Cassidy, starting with Boohoo, the online fashion retailer, the big story of the morning. We've heard from Metro Bank and also about the UK and it becoming a cashless society.

The findings reveal one in five people in Europe now rarely carries cash, and a third would go completely cashless if given the choice, although people in the UK were the least likely to hold this view. Developments in technology and new payment methods are making the shift to a cashless economy ever more possible, and new findings reveal that society's desire to follow is not far behind.

The BP chief who famously told reporters he wanted his life back after the company's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is stepping down as chairman of the oil and gas company Genel Energy. The Kurdistan venture was seen as a second coming for Mr Hayward. But it hasn't fulfilled its promise on his watch and Genel's shares closed almost 5% higher on his replacement.

A café in south London has become the latest business to go card-only as more turn their back on the “faff” of taking coins and notes. Ross Brown, who owns Browns of Brockley in south east London, stopped taking cash earlier this year, inspired by a trip to Sweden where he “hardly used cash at all and not even noticed.”

A row's erupted after French state-owned rail operator SNCF launched a bid to run new high speed services from London to Birmingham. It joined forces with Virgin Trains to enter the competition for the West Coast Partnership franchise, which will include services on the existing West Coast route from 2019 and initial HS2 trains between the capital and West Midlands from 2026.

With polls suggesting the pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron will emerge as the comfortable winner over the far-right Marine Le Pen in the final run-off election in France, bondholders have begun snapping up French assets once again. For more, Sarah Lowther was joined by Mike Bell, Global Market Strategist at JP Morgan.

Today on the agenda, Georgie Frost and Kevin White, Director at Fortem Financial Management discussed how up to three million children in the UK are at risk because families can't afford to feed them during school holidays. Plus they look into why UK shoe repair and key-cutting business Timpson recruits new staff according to which Mr Men characters their personalities resemble. All these stories and more on The News Review.

The Guardian leads with the story that pro-EU campaign group Open Britain is urging voters to unseat prominent Brexit-supporting MPs, including Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa Villiers and Kate Hoey. Meanwhile, in the Telegraph, polls suggest the Conservatives are on course for a historic Commons majority of up to 150 seats.

Georgie and Nigel began the morning by going through the latest market headlines, starting with Whitbread - the UK's largest hospitality company, owning the likes of Costa Coffee. Elsewhere, we've heard from the UK's largest retailer of carpets - Carpetright. And there's a £10bn takeover of Christian Dior, which is dominating the retail business news this morning.