Swiss Re posts 24% increase in 6-month profit, maintains targets
The net profit of $2.605 billion in the period compares with a profit of $2.097 billion a year earlier.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
3 minutes ago
- The Independent
Rail campaigners say potential 5.5% fares rise would be ‘ripping off' passengers
A potential 5.5% rise in England's train fares next year has been described by public transport groups as 'outrageous'. July's Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation – which is often used to determine increases in the cost of train travel – will be announced on Wednesday. The Government has not confirmed how it will determine the cap in regulated fare rises for 2026, but this year's 4.6% hike was one percentage point above RPI in July 2024. Banking group Investec has forecast this year's July RPI figure will be 4.5%, which means fares could jump by 5.5%. Bruce Williamson, spokesman for pressure group Railfuture, told the PA news agency 'it would be outrageous' if fares rose by that much. He said: 'What would be the justification for jacking up fares above inflation? There isn't any. 'It's ripping off the customer, driving people off the trains and onto our congested road network, which is in no-one's interest.' Mr Williamson said he would support the Government marking its nationalisation of train operators by freezing fares. He continued: 'One would hope that there would be some efficiency savings and economies of scale that you get from having a more integrated railway. 'But of course, I strongly suspect that if there are any savings to be had, they'd be swallowed up by the Treasury and not passed back to the passengers, which I think is wrong.' Ben Plowden, chief executive of lobby group Campaign for Better Transport, said: 'Rising fares are not just burdening passengers, they are putting people off rail travel. 'Our survey found that 71% of people would be more likely to take the train if fares were cheaper. 'Public support for nationalisation plummets if fares continue to rise, so as the Government progresses plans for Great British Railways (GBR), it must take the opportunity to reform fares and make rail travel more affordable.' GBR is an upcoming public sector body that will oversee Britain's rail infrastructure and train operation. About 45% of fares on Britain's railways are regulated by the Westminster, Scottish and Welsh Governments. They include season tickets on most commuter journeys, some off-peak return tickets on long-distance routes, and flexible tickets for travel around major cities. The Department for Transport (DfT) said there will be an update on changes to regulated fares later this year. Operators set rises in unregulated fares, although these are likely to be very close to regulated ticket increases because their decisions are heavily influenced by governments. A DfT spokesperson said: 'The Transport Secretary has made clear her number one priority is getting the railways back to a place where people can rely on them. 'The Government is putting passengers at the heart of its plans for public ownership and Great British Railways, delivering the services they deserve and driving growth. 'No decisions have been made on next year's rail fares but our aim is that prices balance affordability for both passengers and taxpayers.'
Auto Car
33 minutes ago
- Auto Car
A Corvette designed in England? Inside GM's new Leamington Spa base
GM's new European design base was set up by director Julian Thomson Close Ashbourne Drive sounds a bit more like a street full of retired bank managers than the location of an imposing, all-new General Motors advanced car design studio. But then Spa Park, through which Ashbourne Drive runs, isn't your usual British industrial estate either, missing out on shabby factories, Portakabins selling burgers and cars badly parked on every footpath. Instead, GM's new European design base, quietly set up around three years ago on the outskirts of busy Leamington Spa by its director, Englishman Julian Thomson, is a tribute to the designer's art in itself. It is one of those impressive industrial buildings of the modern era designed for maximum interior flexibility – in this case, spacious mezzanine floors front and rear for offices and meeting rooms, a covered working area on one side of the ground floor for around 30 people and huge windows on the other to flood the working area with light. The whole thing provides 25,000 square feet of space, dedicated to unbridled creativity, and outside is a high-walled yard for exterior viewings, complete with its own dark Tarmac, because cars look different on real roads. In the centre of the building – occupying the approximate space of two tennis courts – are spaces for half a dozen full-sized car models in development, overhung by automated milling machines that can shape designs, according to digital instructions, even when the human staff are asleep or away for the weekend. All rooms are sparsely but expensively furnished: this place may have started life as an industrial unit, but there's an aura of warmth and homeliness about it that encourages pride and feeds creativity. 'The amount of work we've done in the past couple of years is immense,' says Thomson. 'We've touched every brand, we've made lots of good friends and contacts in GM and we're already very much part of the process.' Still, the question hangs: why does GM need a design operation in Europe? After all, in the medium term, it will sell only electric Cadillacs, Corvette sports cars and some top-end commercial vehicles here, and these will very much be American cars. There used to be an impressive GM design studio at Luton, back in the heyday of Vauxhall, and an even bigger one at Rüsselsheim in Germany when Opel became the senior brand, but those were swept away when the PSA Group bought Opel-Vauxhall eight years ago. Thomson has no doubts about his usefulness. If you run a multi-branded car company such as GM, he contends, more than anything else you need good ideas. And plenty of them. 'It's no longer good enough to design cars for one territory or another,' he says. 'Your designs must be understood everywhere. You need diversity among designers too – different backgrounds and ages. If you had a studio in just one area, you would get a very strong viewpoint reflecting specific trends, aspirations, lifestyles. GM knows this, and it knows it needs to gather influences from Europe. That's why we're here.' Other foreign locations leave no doubt that GM's global intentions are as strong as ever: there are two studios in the US (Detroit and California), plus one in South Korea and another in China. The establishment in Ashbourne Drive seems to have been driven by when Thomson became available and the empathetic relationship he has developed with Michael Simcoe, GM's vice-president of design. Thomson is very experienced: he trained at the Royal College of Art in London, where he was sponsored by Ford, then joined Lotus, where he took the top job after Peter Stevens left, and famously designed the original Elise. After a couple of years at Volkswagen advanced design in Barcelona, he moved to Jaguar Land Rover, where he formed a happy partnership with Ian Callum, taking the top job when Callum departed. Then came GM. 'They said I could put this place anywhere in Europe,' says Thomson, leaning back contentedly in his Warwickshire office, 'so I suppose we could now be in Nice. But I like this area. It's a real hotbed of car design talent; there are half a dozen other big studios in the area. And I wanted to get things up and running quickly, to make a good impression. I had friends in design here who I absolutely knew were the best in the business so I was able to put a team together quickly. We've got 35 people – designers, engineers, digital designers and clay modellers – and we're a great team.' Thomson acknowledges that he's no architect, but he devised the studio layout himself, using prior experience of other studios, advice from experts and by talking to designer friends in the pub. He sent a detailed proposal off to GM and the bosses agreed to build something very much like it – a decent start. 'Of course there were some tough times,' says Thomson. 'I remember being in Thailand once, turning on a Teams [video conferencing] call late at night and being confronted by a grid of about 10 angry builders wanting to talk about drains and electrical supply. But we worked it out. That was just a low point. We're really happy with what we have now. It's working brilliantly.' Easily GM Design Europe's best-known piece of work so far is their concept for a Corvette C10 – one model beyond the C9 that is approaching production as a replacement for today's C8. It is one of three concepts commissioned by Simcoe as a way of influencing the C9. It's an unusual way of doing things, but the UK effort has evidently been well received across the pond. One of the challenges for Europe is dealing with the issue of Americanness, says Thomson: 'When we did the Corvette, some people thought we would just do a European car with a Corvette badge on it. "But that would have completely missed the point. Corvette has a tremendous history; it's the world's most successful sports car. We had to respect that – but hopefully give it some freshness and some features that would make people think.' The key to this new challenge of doing American cars in Europe, believes Thomson, is to recognise the things Europeans value in American design: 'Everyone watches American films and TV and buys American clothes. Ideas of optimism, of confidence, of entertainment are seen a lot of American design. "You see it in engineering projects like Nasa's Apollo programmes. Our job is to present this from a new viewpoint and not to be stuck in a groove.' The fact that Thomson has been involved in advanced design for much of his career – at VW, at Ford and now at GM – makes him more confident than most might be about the British studio's job of presenting designs that probably won't make production but will probably affect those that do 'We need a certain naivety to be valuable,' he explains. 'We don't know what a [Chevrolet] Silverado is like the Americans do. It wasn't bred into us. We have an impression, but that's a different thing. Our value, part of our brief, is to play the role of the customer and look at the product with fresh, questioning eyes.' I suggest that it's hard not to imagine American design teams, who might be working on their third generation of some well-known model, being irritated by a bunch of British upstarts. But Thomson bats the idea away: 'Our aim is to be surprising with no surprises. We don't want just to annoy people but to stretch their thinking a bit and to present new ways of reaching design goals. Sometimes we're there to shock people.'Thomson has in a long career seen unfortunate examples of an absence of this 'stretching'. He recalls an event at VW when no fewer than 18 full-sized concepts for the next Passat were presented, most of whose creators were intent on 'winning' by anticipating what other teams did rather than presenting their best work. At Jaguar, he recalls, a constant comment on advanced design proposals was: 'That's not a Jag.' This experience is the main reason why Thomson always involves his entire team in formative discussions about every new project. He has seen the value of diverse ideas and the dangers of not hearing them. 'A lot of our younger people are better than me,' he says cheerfully. 'I know how to design a car, but I'm not one of them. There are plenty of times when I don't represent the customer as well as they do. Why would I employ a designer who has just done five years' training just to scribble down what I think? Thomson can't say when – or even whether – a car designed at Ashbourne Drive will ever appear in showrooms, and in a way he doesn't care. But if he comes to recognise certain lines on the C10 Corvette (and on other models that can't be named), he will know that he has fulfilled the brief. Join our WhatsApp community and be the first to read about the latest news and reviews wowing the car world. Our community is the best, easiest and most direct place to tap into the minds of Autocar, and if you join you'll also be treated to unique WhatsApp content. You can leave at any time after joining - check our full privacy policy here. Next Prev In partnership with
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
A UK headline wealth tax? It may be simpler to put up existing taxes
Pressure to go further on wealth taxes – by creating new modes of clawing at hoards of hard-to-reach cash – is mounting. For starters, the fiscal picture is looking fairly bleak, with economists estimating that Rachel Reeves must raise £20bn – or even as much as £50bn – to meet her goal of balancing day-to-day spending against the revenue raised from taxation. On the government backbenches, meanwhile, MPs want the chancellor to squeeze the richest in society harder. They even put forward an early day motion last month calling for a 2% annual tax on individual assets over £10m. Yet introducing these kinds of taxes is often not straightforward, with the behaviour of the wealthy being hard to monitor and harder still to predict. The first significant problem is working out where the assets are and who holds them. That has always been difficult and has become even more challenging after one of the most important economic surveys, the household wealth data series, was suspended by the Office for National Statistics because of its low quality. The upshot is that HMRC simply does not know how many millionaires or billionaires there are in the UK. Without reliable figures, it is extremely hard to write policies, cost them and administer them. There is also a battle to be had with an 'old guard with set views' in Whitehall. Whitehall sources paint a picture of a Treasury led by figures influenced by economists whose thinking was prominent at Oxford University in the 1980s and 90s – such as James Mirrlees, Christophe Chamley and Tony Atkinson – leading to something of an orthodox view. In a nutshell, that position is that if you tax capital too much, it will stop investment and hamper growth. Or, in Chamley's words: 'Tax rate on capital income tends to zero in the long run.'. Since this era, the debate within economics has become more nuanced. A growing body of research suggests that some taxation on capital, even at relatively high rates, could lead to greater investment. As it becomes less attractive to hoard wealth because of taxation, risk appetites would then increase in pursuit of higher returns. You might be less tempted to keep your money in a vanilla savings account that can be taxed hard and easily if you can get a much better rate of return – even with a bit more risk – elsewhere. Treasury insiders argue that Reeves has followed the more modern logic, having already taken steps to widen the scope of inheritance and capital gains tax (IHT and CGT). They posit that her reluctance to pursue a headline wealth tax does not mean she has pulled her punches when it comes to taxing wealth. Hostile backbenchers, on the other hand, suggest she follows the old orthodoxy too closely. They often cite her decision to go for relatively small changes in the amounts of tax paid via CGT, rather than bring it more closely in line with income tax at the last budget, which also upset more senior political colleagues. What the debate about how to handle changes to IHT (which have been fiercely opposed by farmers) or CGT illustrates is that if the government really wants to tax wealth more effectively then it has all kinds of ways to do so before opting for a politically – and potentially economically – sensitive route with a headline wealth tax. Yet even changing existing mechanisms might not be easy, when the UK already has one of the highest rates of tax on property and wealth among developed economies, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Political pressure may make it harder to maintain a more gradualist approach, however. Figures on the left of the Labour parliamentary party are attracted to totemic wealth taxes of the kind introduced in Spain – its so-called solidarity tax – and Switzerland. They see it as part of showing a commitment to rebalancing the economy. Reeves is critical of international examples, saying that Switzerland does not have IHT, and that Spain's wealth tax is so riddled with exemptions that it raises too little money. Some developed economies that had comparable wealth taxes have dropped them, too. 'We have inheritance tax. We have capital gains. We've just got rid of the non-dom tax status that doesn't exist anymore in our tax system. So we do have taxes that tax the wealthy,' Reeves said in a recent interview with LBC. Other measures that go further are not yet proven to work, she claims, saying that those who 'come up with simple solutions' must do more to 'explain exactly how it would work, whether it's an ongoing tax, what it would do to tax avoidance, what it would do about people moving or changing the way that their wealth is stored'. Economists argue that the government should focus its energies on raising existing taxes, such as equalising CGT with income tax, for example, or changing gifting rules around IHT first, rather than introduce a novel wealth tax. The Treasury is already examining gifting rules among other possible IHT changes. Yet while Reeves might agree with some of these arguments, it's less clear whether her cabinet colleagues will tolerate a slow and steady approach, particularly if the fiscal picture sours.
