Bitcoin surges through $60,000 in biggest monthly rally since late 2020 – as it happened | Business

Bitcoin has jumped through $60,000, rising 7.5% today, as the cryptocurrency stages its biggest monthly rally since late 2020.

The surge to $60,900 means it is pushing closer to its all-time high of more than $68,000 in November 2021 – which was followed by a spectacular crash in 2022.

The world’s best-known cryptocurrency has been buoyed by flows into new US spot bitcoin exchange traded products (ETFs that track the value of the cryptocurrency), which have driven its price up by around 40% in February.

Our other main stories today:

Thames Water has been lobbying the government and regulators to let it increase bills by 40%, pay lower fines for breaches and keep paying out dividends as part of efforts to avert a taxpayer bailout, according to a report.

The UK’s largest water company was trying to strike a deal with the watchdog Ofwat that would give it permission to charge customers more to avoid having to be taken over by court-appointed special administrators, the Financial Times reported.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care! – JK

Bitcoin has gone through $60,000, rising 6.2% today, as the cryptocurrency stages its biggest monthly rally since late 2020.

The world’s best-known cryptocurrency has been buoyed by flows into new US spot bitcoin exchange traded products (ETFs that track the value of the cryptocurrency), which have driven its price up by around 40% in February.

Traders have piled into bitcoin ahead of April’s halving event, a process designed to slow the release of the cryptocurrency.

Our financial editor Nils Pratley wrote last month:

Cue a fresh whoosh of demand, we are told, from US institutions and private punters who will be able to hitch themselves to the bitcoin wagon without having to go to the bother of opening a digital wallet or dealing with a crypto trading platform. The word “watershed” has been used widely to describe the moment. Giant investment names such as BlackRock will be offering these new ETFs. Ease of access and mainstream respectability have arrived as a package.

The US economy grew at a slightly lower rate than previously thought in the final three months of last year.

GDP rose at an annual rate of 3.2%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in its second estimate. This was revised down from 3.3%. The bureau explained:

The update primarily reflected a downward revision to private inventory investment that was partly offset by upward revisions to state and local government spending and consumer spending.

I’ve spoken to Taylor Wimpey boss Jennie Daly about the company’s results and the regulator’s report on the housebuilding sector, and its new investigation into eight housebuilders after it found evidence they may be sharing commercially sensitive information that could affect the price of homes, in a breach of competition law.

She reiterated that the company would fully cooperate with the Competition and Markets Authority, and said the investigation was likely to last until at least the end of the year.

In its report on Monday, the CMA voiced “fundamental concerns” over the housebuilding market, pointing to the complex planning system and the limitations of speculative private development as the key reasons for the too few homes being built.

Daly said:

We were very pleased with the conclusions and many of the recommendations of the market study. It will help bust some of the myths around land banking and delaying bringing development forward. It does point very strongly to the dysfunctional planning system that we have, the problems that we’re encountering around lack of predictability and the complexity of the process.

The watchdog was also critical of the quality of homes built by some developers, and that homebuyers spent weeks or months to try and get them fixed. Daly said:

We were early adopters all new homes, code and the new homes ombudsman back in 2022, and we’ve been doing a lot of work around quality.

We’ve been working hard to improve our customer service and our engagement with customers… and for many, many years, we’ve been working on improving build quality, and we’ve led the industry in the measures of build quality for many years, which I’m very proud of, and we’re not done yet and we’ll continuously improve that.

Sometimes we don’t get it right, and it’s our responsibility then to properly and positively engage with our customers to ensure that that we are correcting any issues at all.

Shares in the UK insurer Direct Line rocketed after the Belgian insurer Ageas confirmed that it was considering making a takeover offer for the company.

Direct Line shares jumped nearly 26% to 205.41p, valuing the company at £2.7bn, while fellow UK insurer Admiral rose 2.1%. Shares in Ageas fell 2.2% in Brussels.

Ageas said that Direct Line shareholders would receive 100p in cash for each Direct Line share, and one newly issued Ageas share for every 25.24 Direct Line shares. This would value each Direct Line share at 233p, and the company at £3.1bn, Ageas said.

It said the deal would

lead to the creation of a strong personal lines franchise in the UK with key positions in Ageas’ preferred business lines of household and motor.

Earlier today, Bloomberg reported that Direct Line had rejected an approach from Ageas.

Direct Line was Royal Bank of Scotland’s insurance arm, and floated on the stock market in 2012. (The selloff was demanded by the EU in return for the £45bn taxpayer bailout of RBS.) The former boss Aviva’s UK & Ireland general insurance arm, Adam Winslow, joins Direct Line as chief executive on Friday, replacing Penny James.

Direct Line has struggled in recent years. James stood down in January 2023 after the company ditched its final dividend, as a big increase in weather-related claims caused a loss in underwriting. Last September, it said it would pay £30m to customers who were charged more than they should have been to renew car and home insurance policies. Its half-year loss widened to £76.3m at the time. The firm has been run by Jon Greenwood as acting CEO.

Ageas, headquartered in Brussels, is one of Europe’s largest insurers and operates in Europe and Asia, with 44,000 staff and annual inflows of more than €17bn in 2023.

Shares in Reckitt Benckiser have fallen sharply, making it the second-biggest loser on the FTSE 100 behind the wealth manager St James’s Place, after the consumer giant reported sliding sales.

Reckitt, which owns well-known brands including Nurofen, Durex condoms and Dettol disinfectant, said purchases of cold and flu remedied as well as infant formula had fallen, contributing to a drop of 1.2% in like-for-like sales in the three months to December. Profit before tax fell by 22% to £2.4m.

The business was also hit by an investigation into its Middle East business. “Following investigation, we concluded a small group of employees had acted inappropriately and we are taking necessary disciplinary action,” the group said.

The year before, Reckitt had benefited from a shortage of infant formula in the US. Sales at its nutrition business fell 14.3% year-on-year in the fourth quarter.

Reckitt had to recall some batches of Nutramigen stage 1 and stage 2 hypoallergenic formula powders in January because of the possible presence of Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria that can cause illness.

The Reckitt share price dropped 11.4%. Chief executive Kris Licht described the fourth-quarter performance as “unsatisfactory”, but added:

We look to 2024 and beyond with confidence. We target another year of mid-single-digit growth in health and hygiene, driven by a more balanced contribution from price, mix and volume. We expect nutrition to return to growth late in the year.

Analysts at RBC Capital Markets said:

We had feared that the results wouldn’t be great, but we certainly hadn’t anticipated the reporting anomaly that in our view means that Reckitt’s results were really grim rather than just poor.

Bitcoin has jumped for a fifth day and is trading at close to $60,000, and is on track for its biggest monthly rally since late 2020.

The world’s best-known cryptocurrency has been buoyed by flows into new US spot bitcoin exchange traded products, which have driven its price up nearly 40% February. It has gained 4.5% today.

Ben Laidler, global markets strategist at retail investment platform eToro, said:

Bitcoin is being driven by the support of consistent inflows into the new spot ETFs and outlook for April’s halving event and June’s Fed interest rate cuts.

Traders have piled into bitcoin ahead of April’s halving event, a process designed to slow the release of the cryptocurrency.

The value of all the bitcoin in circulation has topped $2 trillion this month for the first time in two years, according to the crypto platform CoinGecko, while the price of the token itself has doubled in just four months.

The latest reshuffle of the FTSE will happen after 5pm today, and could see EasyJet join the blue-chip FTSE 100 index. Endeavour Mining, which owns and runs gold mines in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal, is expected to be relegated from the top flight.

Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets, Hargreaves Lansdown, said:

While recovering pre-pandemic form is still proving highly elusive, easyJet’s continued progress has cheered investors, with shares up 9% year to date. The ‘revenge travel’ trend is still proving strong, with people still determined to see more of the world again after being cooped up at home during the Covid crisis.

Consumers still appear to be ring-fencing chunks of disposal income to spend on airfares, seat upgrades and treats on board, with the desire to travel higher up wish-lists than home purchases like furniture and TVs. The company has shown particular prowess at selling extras to customers on flights, and that helped first quarter revenue jump 22%, with losses narrowing again. It’s also managed to largely ride out the turbulence caused by flight disruptions in the Middle East with summer bookings building well.

With signs that the UK economy may dip only briefly into a mild recession and interest rate cuts eyed on the horizon there are hopes that travellers will stay confident and keep bookings brisk.

Turning to Endeavour Mining, she said:

Endeavour Mining which has operations in West Africa is about to drop out of the big league after the company was left reeling from the abrupt departure of CEO Sébastien de Montessus. He was fired for serious misconduct in January for making an irregular payment instruction for $5.9m, in relation to an asset disposal.

Although he was replaced by deputy chair Ian Cockerill pretty swiftly, confidence has still been shaken in the gold miner, which operates in West Africa. Shares have fallen almost 30% year to date. It hasn’t helped that costs came in higher than expected at the last count, even though the company met output targets.

The HS2 contractor Kier Group is set to be promoted from the FTSE Small Cap index to the FTSE-250, while Tullow Oil, an oil and gas explorer founded in Tullow in Ireland, but headquartered in London, is likely to be ejected from the FTSE-250 as operational problems persist. Its shares have fallen 35% so far this year, pushing it into the relegation zone. Streeter said:

Enthusiasm has risen for construction company Kier Group as it unveiled a robust order book and showed strength in dealing with supply chain challenges and inflationary costs. It’s staging a turnaround, and now appears back on track after a highly difficult period when it appeared to be on the brink of bankruptcy and was hit hard by the pandemic. Winning HS2 contracts saved the company from collapse and now its restructuring plan is bearing considerable fruit with balance sheet rebuilding underway. it is considered to be well placed to continue to benefit from UK government infrastructure spending.

Tullow Oil has been affected by operational and financial challenges over recent years and here had been hopes that prospects were looking up with rising production at its Jubilee field, offshore Ghana, with five wells expected to come on stream in 2024. However, it’s been beset by further difficulties after it was forced to stop work on its Kenyan oil fields and its trucking operations due to security issues, adding to fresh investor caution about its resilience.

Customer service levels at HM Revenue and Customs have sunk to an “all-time low”, parliament’s spending watchdog has said.

Users regularly encounter long call-waiting times as the tax department apparently struggles to cope with demand, a report by the cross-party public accounts committee (PAC) has found.

As demands on HMRC grow, the authority has not been given the resources needed to staff its phone lines, the report said.

In 2022-23, 62% of callers waited more than 10 minutes to speak to an adviser – up from 46% the previous year.

On average, it took a little more than 16 minutes for someone to answer the phone – up from a little more than 12 minutes in 2021–22.

However, in December there were reports of some callers facing waits of up to an hour to get through, with some people saying they ended up being cut off before their call was even answered.

The tax office is trying to cope by weaning service users off speaking to a real person on the phone in favour of having them make do with YouTube videos and chatbots, the report found.

Virgin Media O2 customers are facing a “lose-lose choice” between the highest mid-contract broadband and mobile price rises, or crippling exit fees running into hundreds of pounds, the consumer group Which? has warned.

Virgin Media and O2, which merged in 2021, are scheduled to go ahead with price rises of up to 8.8% this April – the latest retail prices index figure of 4.9%, plus an extra 3.9%.

These increases, which come on top of 17% rises a year ago, are the highest increases in percentage terms out of any of the large broadband or mobile firms this year.

Virgin broadband customers will typically see their bills rise by just above £39 a year from April, according to Which?. Customers who do not want to be hit with this price rise face exit fees of as much as £404 if they were to leave their contract 12 months early, it said.

Deep cuts to government funding have led a council in south London to ask its residents to invest their own money, for a financial return, to build cycle hangars, LED street lighting and green upgrades at schools and leisure centres.

Amid a financial crisis hitting town halls across England, councillors in Southwark have resorted to a crowdfunding scheme to raise £6m over the next six years to help fund climate-friendly projects.

In a creative response to the double challenge of financial constraints and maintaining investment required to tackle the climate emergency, the scheme plans to raise £1m for the coming financial year with the offer of a 4.6% return for investors.

An overwhelming majority of English local authorities are planning deep cuts to services and maximum possible council tax rises to remain financially solvent, despite an extra £600m cash injection from the government.

The oil firm Shell cannot be allowed to withdraw from the Niger delta before it takes responsibility for its toxic legacy of pollution and the safe decommissioning of abandoned oil infrastructure, a report says.

Shell plc is preparing to divest from the delta but a report warns that it must remain until it has cleaned up its legacy of pollution.

The report, by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (Somo), says historical pollution remains a serious issue in the area and accuses Shell of trying to avoid responsibility despite the billions of dollars it has earned from the oil.

The allegations come as the Labour MP Clive Lewis said in the House of Commons that the departure of Shell, a British company, from the delta raised serious concerns that its environmental responsibilities and obligations could be evaded.