Italian bank Popolare Sondrio records 19% rise in first-quarter net profit
The logo of Banca Popolare di Sondrio bank is pictured outside a company's branch, in Monza, Italy, February 5, 2020. REUTERS/Flavio Lo Scalzo/File photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab
May 6 (Reuters) - Italy's Banca Popolare di Sondrio (BPSI.MI)
, opens new tab on Tuesday posted a 19% rise in its first-quarter net profit, citing a good performance in its core banking business.
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.
"The reported results constitute the best way forward in the implementation of the new business plan 2025-2027," CEO Mario Alberto Pedranzini said in a statement.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
The bank also appointed director Pierluigi Molla as chairman until the end of his mandate in 2026.
($1 = 0.8816 euros)
Reporting by Philippe Leroy Beaulieu in Gdansk; Editing by Jan Harvey
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab
Share X
Facebook
Linkedin
Email
Link
Purchase Licensing Rights
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
ALEX BRUMMER: If this is a fixed economy, I'd hate to see a broken one
Nearly half a century has passed since Margaret Thatcher skewered the incumbent PM James Callaghan at the 1979 election with her famous ' Labour Isn't Working' poster, which showed dole queues stretching across the horizon. We are not quite there yet. But after years of low unemployment in Britain, Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have brought chaos – in just 11 months – to what was one of the strongest labour markets in Europe. Last October's Budget and its central and perhaps most hated policy – an increase in employers' National Insurance to 15 per cent – added no less than £23 billion to bosses' wage bills. And for all this Government's promise not to raise taxes on 'working people', it's now clear that this misguided and self-defeating pledge is having a vicious impact on jobs. Companies are proving reluctant to take on new workers, are deliberately not replacing colleagues who move on and are taking the opportunity to cut costs by making people redundant. The only silver lining is slowing wage increases, at least in the private sector, should make it possible for the Bank of England to lower interest rates by a further 0.25 per cent this summer to 4 per cent – making mortgages and borrowing cheaper. The public sector is another matter, of course, and has enjoyed lavish raises at the expense of the productive part of the economy – to say nothing of its far more generous gold-plated pensions, paid out of direct taxation. But overall the picture is dire. The National Insurance increase, along with a hugely generous rise in the minimum wage – now one of the highest on the planet – surging fuel costs and rising business rates, have shattered business confidence. Companies are shedding jobs at an alarming rate. Figures collected by HMRC show that 55,000 jobs were lost in April alone and numbers 'were notably weaker' than expected, according to bankers Goldman Sachs. Vacancies are tumbling, too – these stood at 736,000 in the three months to April, down from 760,000 in the previous period, and were at 1.4 million as recently as 2022. The unemployment rate, which was 3.6 per cent of the workforce prior to the pandemic, has now zipped up to 4.6 per cent. And the worst part? There's more to come. Businesses are steeling themselves for socialist firebrand Angela Rayner's beloved Employment Rights Bill, currently grinding its way through Parliament, which will make hiring new workers even more expensive. To peals of outrage (and a front-page Daily Mail headline: 'Deluded'), this week Sir Keir claimed to have 'fixed' our public finances, thus making possible his Government's U-turn on snatching the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. Well, if this is what 'fixed' looks like, Sir Keir, I'd hate to see the economy 'broken'. Rising unemployment is a menace. It inevitably raises the cost of Britain's already gargantuan welfare bill – and it simultaneously reduces Government revenues due to lower income tax and National Insurance receipts. In 1979, unemployment stood at 5.3 per cent – and, despite the Iron Lady's famous poster, it rose to a staggering 11.9 per cent by 1984 on her watch. We are a long way from those days. Yet as I have said before, Ms Reeves – with last year's £40 billion tax-raising Budget, locked Britain into a doom loop of plummeting business confidence, rising unemployment and reduced job choices. Yesterday's multi-year public-spending review will splash the cash on investments in nuclear power, science and technology, roads and railways. As helpful as all that may be, it will mean more Government borrowing and debt that will take years to pay off. Expect unemployment to keep on rising until the Government changes course.
Sky News
3 hours ago
- Sky News
The spending review: Five things you need to know
Even for those of us who follow these kinds of things on a regular basis, the spending review is, frankly, a bit of a headache. This is one of the biggest moments in Britain's economic calendar - bigger, in some respects, than the annual budget. After all, these reviews, which set departmental spending totals for years to come, only happen every few years, while budgets come around every 12 months (or sometimes more often). Yet trying to get your head around the spending review - in particular this year's spending review - is a far more fraught exercise than with the budget. In large part that's because the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the quasi-independent body that scrutinises the government's figures, is not playing a part this time around. There will be no OBR report to cast light, or doubt, on some of the claims from the government. Added to this, the data on government spending are famously abstruse. So perhaps the best place to start when approaching the review is to take a deep breath and a step back. With that in mind, here are five things you really need to know about the 2025 spending review. 1. It's not about all spending That might seem like a strange thing to say. Why would a spending review not concern itself with all government spending? But it turns out this review doesn't even cover the majority of government spending in the coming years. To see what I mean you need to remember that you can split total government spending (£1.4trn in this fiscal year) into two main categories. First there's what you might call non-discretionary spending. Spending on welfare, on pensions, on debt interest. This is spending the government can't really change very easily on a year-to-year basis. It's somewhat uncontrolled, but since civil servants wince at that idea, they have given it a name that suggests precisely the opposite: "annually managed expenditure" or AME. Then there's the spending the government has a little more control over: spending in its departments, from the Ministry of Defence to the NHS to the Home Office. This is known as "departmental spending". This is what the spending review is about - determining what departments spend. The key thing to note here is that these days departmental spending (actually, to confuse things yet further, the Treasury calls it Departmental Expenditure Limits or DEL) is quite a bit smaller than AME (the less controlled bit with benefits, pensions and debt interest costs). In short, this spending review is actually only about a fraction - about 41p in every pound - of government spending. You can break it down further, by the way. Because departmental spending can be split into day-to-day spending (Resource DEL) and investment (capital DEL). But let's stop with the acronyms and move on to the second thing you really need to know. 2. It's a "zero-based" review. Apparently The broad amount the government is planning to spend on its departments was set in stone some time ago. The real task at hand in this review is not to decide the overall departmental spend but something else: how that money is divided up between departments. Consider: in this fiscal year (2025/26) the government is due to spend just over £500bn of your money on day-to-day expenditure. Of that, by far the biggest chunk is going to the NHS (£202bn), followed by education (£94bn), defence (£39bn) and a host of other departments. That much we know. In the next fiscal year, we have a headline figure for how much day-to-day spending to expect across government. What we don't have is that breakdown. How much of the total will be health, education, defence and so on? That, in a sense, is the single biggest question the review will set out to answer. Now, in previous spending reviews the real debate wasn't over those grand departmental totals, but over something else: how much would they increase by in the following years? This time around we are told by Rachel Reeves et al that it's a slightly different philosophy. This time it's a "zero-based review". For anyone from the world of accountancy, this will immediately sound tremendously exciting. A zero-based review starts from the position that the department will have to justify not just an annual increase (or decrease), but every single pound it spends. It is not that far off what Elon Musk was attempting to implement with the DOGE movement in US government - a line-by-line check of spending. That's tremendously ambitious. And typically zero-based reviews tend to throw out some dramatic changes. All of which is to say, in theory, unless you believed government was run with incredibly ruthless efficiency, if this really were a zero-based review, you'd expect those departmental spending numbers to yo-yo dramatically in this review. They certainly shouldn't just be moving by small margins. Is that really what Whitehall will provide us with in this review? Almost certainly not. 3. It's the first multi-year review in ages What we will get, however, is a longer-range set of spending plans than government has been able to provide in a long time. I said at the start that these reviews are typically multi-year affairs, setting budgets many years in advance. However, the last multi-year review happened in the midst of COVID and you have to look back to 2015 for the previous multi year review. That certainty about future budgets matters for any government department attempting to map out its plans and, hopefully, improve public sector productivity in the coming years. So the fact that this review will set spending totals not just for next fiscal year but for the next three years is no small deal. Indeed, for investment spending (which is actually the thing the government will probably spend more time talking about), we get numbers for four successive years. And the chances are that is what the government will most want to talk about. 4. It's not "austerity" One of the big questions that periodically returns to haunt the government is that we are heading for a return to the austerity policies prosecuted by George Osborne after 2010. So it's worth addressing this one quickly. The spending totals implied by this spending review are nothing like those implemented by the coalition government between 2010 and 2015. You get a sense of this when you look at total public spending, not in cash or even inflation-adjusted terms (which is what the Treasury typically likes to show us), but at those figures as a percentage of GDP. Day-to-day spending dropped from 21.5% of GDP in 2009/10 to 15% of GDP in 2016/17. This was one of the sharpest falls in government spending on record. By contrast, the spending envelope for this review will see day-to-day spending increasing rather than decreasing in the coming years. The real question comes back to how that extra spending is divided between departments. Much money has already been promised for the NHS and for defence. That would seem, all else equal, to imply less money for everyone else. But overshadowing everything else is the fact that there's simply not an awful lot of money floating around. 5. It's not a big splurge either While the totals are indeed due to increase in the coming years, they are not due to increase by all that much. Indeed, compared with most multi-year spending reviews in the past, this one is surprisingly small. In each year covered by the 2000 and 2002 comprehensive spending reviews under Gordon Brown, for instance, capital investment grew by 16.3% and 10.6% respectively. This time around, it's due to increase by just 1.3%. Now, granted, that slightly understates it. Include 2025/26 (not part of this review but still a year of spending determined by this Labour government) and the annual average increase is 3.4%. Even so, the overall picture is not one of plenty, but one of moderation. While Rachel Reeves will wax lyrical about the government's growth plans, the numbers in the spending review will tell a somewhat different story. If you can get your head around them, that is.
BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
US tariff turmoil makes Spain's flagship foods seek other markets
It's lunchtime in a bar in the southern Spanish city of Seville. The kitchen is humming with activity, and behind the bar a member of staff pours cold beer from a tap into a another uses a carving knife to cut slices from a large leg of jamón ibérico, or Iberian ham, placing each one on a plate, to be served as an are few more Spanish scenes. And there are few more Spanish products than jamón ibérico, whose unique salty flavour is renowned across the world, and part of a national cured ham industry worth nearly €750m ($850m; £630m) each year in he watches the jamón being carved, Jaime Fernández, international commercial director for the Grupo Osborne, which produces wine, sherry and the renowned Cinco Jotas brand of ham, describes it as a "flagship" national foodstuff."It's one of the most iconic gastronomic products from Spain," he says, pointing out how the pigs used to make the ham are reared in the wild and fed on acorns. "It represents our tradition, our culture, our essence." But jamón ibérico, like products across Spain and the rest of Europe, is facing the threat of trade tariffs imposed by US President Donald was no tariff on Spanish ham exports to the US until April of this year, when a 20% charge on all European imports was suddenly introduced, dropping to 10% pending in May Trump unsettled European exporters again when he said that the tariff for all EU goods could rise as high as 50% if trade talks with Brussels do not come to a successful agreement. The current deadline for this is 9 July."The United States is one of our top, priority markets," says Mr Fernández. "The uncertainty is there, and it complicates our medium-and long-term planning, investments and commercial development."The tariffs, he adds, "pose a threat to our industry." Spain's overall economy is in rude health. The IMF has forecast growth this year of 2.5% – much higher than the other main EU economies – and unemployment is at a 17-year the tariff issue comes as a blow for the country's pork industry, which represents more than 400,000 direct and indirect jobs, and is Europe's for cured ham in the US has grown substantially in recent years, and it has become the biggest importer of Spanish ham outside the the Spanish industry now faces the prospect of having to raise retail prices for US consumers and therefore losing competitivity to local products, or those not subject to the same tariffs. Spain's olive oil sector is in a similar quandary. The world's biggest producer of olive oil, Spain had set its sights on the US as a burgeoning market whose growth was driven by growing awareness of the health benefits of the the the tariff turmoil comes just as Spanish producers and exporters have recovered from a drought that slashed harvests in the south of the country, and sent prices temporarily US represents half of world olive oil consumption outside the is also the country whose imports of the foodstuff from Spain have grown the most in recent years, increasing from approximately 300,000 tonnes per year a decade ago to around 430,000 tonnes, says Rafael Pico Lapuente, director general of the Spanish association of olive oil exporters (ASOLIVA).Much will depend, he says, on the final tariff set for the EU."If there is a 10% tariff which is permanent, without differentiating between countries of origin, it's not going to create a distortion on the international market," says Mr Pico explains that American consumers might have to absorb the extra cost. And although local US producers of olive oil or similar products would gain a competitive edge, their output is small enough for it not to concern the likes of he says it would be "a different story" if Trump introduced higher tariffs for the EU than for competitor olive oil countries outside the bloc – such as Turkey, the world's second-largest producer, or Tunisia, an emerging grower. That scenario, he says, would have a major impact on the world market and Spanish producers. But variations in tariffs between countries or trade blocs would also lead to a certain amount rule-bending and even chaos, according to Javier Díaz-Giménez, a professor of economics at the IESE business school in Madrid. He suggests two of Spain's direct neighbours as a hypothetical example."If Spain has a 20% tariff and Morocco and Andorra have a 10% tariff, all the Spanish products that can go through Morocco or Andorra… will do so."He adds: "They will be first exported to Morocco and Andorra and from there re-exported to the United States with a 10% tariff."And it's going to be really hard to make sure that these olives came from Andorra proper and not from Spain. Is Trump going to do something about that?" For now, Spanish producers and exporters must hold their breath as EU negotiations take place with Washington. For Mr Pico Lapuente, a big cause of concern is the influence – or as he sees it, lack of influence – his sector wields within the European trade bloc."The negotiations representing the EU's 27 countries are carried out by Brussels," he says. "In these negotiations, industrial products have a much bigger influence than food."I wouldn't like it if, in this negotiation, food products like olive oil were used as mere bargaining chips in order to get a better deal for Europe's industrial products. That worries me. And I hope it doesn't happen."A spokesperson for the European Commission told the BBC that in negotiations with the US it will act "in defence of European interests, protecting its workers, consumers and its industries".Jaime Fernández, of the Grupo Osborne, believes his industry could live with the 10% tariff that is currently in place without suffering too much a 20% charge, he says would cause the industry "to reconsider how to accelerate growth in some other markets, which would eventually lead to the relocation of resources from the US".He says his company is already looking at alternative markets in which to invest, such as China, or proven European ham consumers such as France, Italy and Díaz-Giménez says that is the logical response to the current uncertainty."If I was the CEO of any company with a high exposure to the United States… I would have sent my entire sales team to find other markets," he says."And by now, they would have found them. There would be plan Bs and plan Cs, to make sure that we have reduced this exposure to the US."
