Catch up on the latest news from the business world. The top story this week was Apple becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company. The Bank of England has raised interest rates to the highest level in nearly 10 years. The London Stock Exchange has proceeded with its ‘no-deal’ Brexit contingency plan and Rolls-Royce has been hit by a huge £1.26bn loss for the first half of the year. Finally, Trump is increasing trade tensions with China with the threat of higher tariffs.
Apple has become the world’s first trillion-dollar company as its share prices rose to $207.05. The company’s share price has grown fourfold under Tim Cook’s leadership.
The London Stock Exchange has started to execute contingency plans in case there is no Brexit transition deal. These plans include the creation of new entities within the EU but the LSE warned that “the complexity and the lack of clarity of the application of a hard Brexit may decrease the effectiveness, or applicability of some of these contingency plans.”
The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 0.75%, the highest level since March 2009. The Bank has said that rates will continue to rise, but only gradually. The markets have forecasted one or two further rises of 0.25% by 2020.
Rolls-Royce has suffered a pre-tax loss of £1.26bn for the first half of the year due to a problem with its Trent 1000 engine. The engine is used on aircraft such as the Boeing Dreamliner range and airlines have had to stop using aircraft until the problem is fixed.
After easing trade tensions with Europe, Trump has proposed even higher tariffs on Chinese imports. He has threatened to raise duties on around $200bn of Chinese goods to 25%.
