Household Bills
Tuesday newspaper round-up: Water bills, Banks, Greece
Millions told to cut water use; UBS and Credit Suisse shares fall; Greek prime minister says country is not at “war” with EU or IMF.
Millions of people must “drastically” cut the amount of water they use or their prices will rise, a water supplier has warned. MPs have condemned a plan by Thames Water to force Londoners to install smart meters in their homes to limit the amount of water they use and prevent the city running out of water. Thames Water said getting people to use smart meters would encourage them to cut down their use and limit their bills, The Daily Telegraph says.
Shares in UBS and Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s two largest banks, fell sharply on Monday after the Swiss Finance Minister said that the country’s leverage rules, already among the toughest in the world, should be tightened further. Under Switzerland’s existing regulations, both banks need to push their leverage ratios – a measure of a bank’s capital in relation to total assets – above four per cent by 2019. However, in an interview with Schweiz am Sonntag, the Swiss newspaper, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said that this level might be insufficient, the Financial Times reports.
Greece is not at “war” with the European Union and International Monetary Fund, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said on the eve of the latest review by the lenders to decide whether to pay the next tranche of bailout loans. Inspectors from the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank, known collectively as the “Troika”, resume a visit to Athens on Tuesday to check how far the country has come in meeting its bailout commitments, including privatisations, The Daily Telegraph explains.
The cost of borrowing will have to rise a year earlier than planned, a think-tank has forecast, dealing a blow to the Bank of England’s (BoE) key economic policy. In its latest health check of the UK economy, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said that interest rates would rise from their historic low of 0.5% in the second half of 2015, The Times reports.
The president of the UK’s leading business group has attacked “factually incorrect, emotive debates around immigration“, saying that the opposition to migrants entering the UK is affecting the economic recovery. Speaking at the CBI’s annual conference on Monday morning, Sir Michael Rake said Britain must show it is open to immigration, and demanded the UK remain in the European Union, The Daily Telegraph writes.