Latest news with #Peru
Times
12 hours ago
- Business
- Times
Mildly disappointing — but don't think of calling it stagflation
Everybody has their own way of registering higher prices. For me, without sounding too poncey about it, or minimising other people's struggles with inflation, it is the price of coffee. No, not those horrible paper cups and gruesome flavour combinations you see everybody carrying around, but ground coffee for home use. The one I like, available in all good supermarkets, is from Peru and goes under the name Machu Picchu. Whether any of it is grown near that Inca architectural treasure, I cannot say, but the coffee is good — and recently it has been expensive. The discounts regularly offered by the supermarkets, which can knock a third or more off the recommended retail price, have been absent. It is enough to make you switch to water. I mention this because higher food and drink prices, partly driven by increases in commodity prices, helped push inflation higher, to 3.6 per cent last month. I have high hopes for future cups of coffee, though, because wholesale prices, which peaked in February and again in April, have come down quite sharply since then. But that does not mean we will soon see a sharp drop in inflation. Second-quarter inflation was a touch higher at 3.5 per cent than the 3.4 per cent expected by the Bank of England in its most recent monetary policy report in May, though some of that was due to an error in the April data. It expected then that inflation will trundle along at close to 3.5 per cent for a few months more, peaking at 3.7 per cent in September. A big increase in air fares, and the fact that petrol prices fell less last month than a year earlier, were enough to tick the rate up to 3.6 per cent last month. Markets are probably right to conclude that this will make next month's decision on interest rates by the Bank closer than it might have been, but also right to think that it will not get in the way of a cut in official interest rates from 4.25 to 4 per cent. The basis for this, unless the Bank has had a significant change of view, is that inflation will be back below 2.5 per cent in a year's time, and below 2 per cent in two years. The case for a rate cut was reinforced by the latest labour market statistics, which showed that its gradual softening continues and pay pressures are easing. Total and regular pay growth has slowed to 5 per cent, from nearly 6 per cent earlier this year, despite the potential upward pressure from a big increase in the national living wage in April. Private sector pay growth, most responsive to market pressures, is running below 5 per cent. The labour market statistics are an object lesson in not rushing to judgment. The headlines were generated by a rise in the unemployment rate from 4.6 to 4.7 per cent. But, as I have written before, it is important to take the unemployment and inactivity rates together. That 4.7 per cent unemployment rate in the March-May period was up from 4.4 per cent a year earlier. Over the same period, however, there was a much bigger fall in the inactivity rate — the proportion of people in the 16-64 age group unavailable for work — which dropped from 22.1 to 21 per cent. This explains why rising employment on the Labour Force Survey measure, including an increase of nearly 100,000 in self-employment over the latest 12 months, went hand in hand with a small rise in the unemployment rate. People who were economically inactive have been making themselves available for work. The number of economically inactive, just over nine million, is still high and above pre-pandemic levels, but is down by 400,000 from its peak early last year, which is good news. Another lesson in not rushing to judgment was provided by the Office for National Statistics in its latest release. A month ago, it said that payroll numbers had slumped by 109,000 in May. This was reported as something close to Armageddon in the labour market, a consequence of the increase in employers' national insurance (NI) announced by Rachel Reeves in her budget last October, which took effect in April. There was always something odd about that figure, which did not square with survey evidence, and sure enough, it has been revised down to just a 25,000 fall. Over April and May together, payrolls dropped by 49,000, which is more of a gentle deflating of the tyres than a blowout. Finally, when it comes to not rushing to judgment, some people were quick to describe the UK's situation following the release of the inflation figures as 'stagflation'. I realise that many doing so were too young to remember genuine stagflation. The term was invented by Iain Macleod, who became Tory chancellor in 1970 but sadly died a few weeks into the role. Stagflation was a popular description in the 1970s when the UK's inflation rate, based on the retail prices index, peaked at 26.9 per cent in 1975, at the same time as the economy was in recession (the stagnation bit of stagflation), an unusual combination. Inflation averaged 12.6 per cent in the 1970s and the unemployment rate was on its way to almost 12 per cent in the 1980s. We would have given our eye teeth then for inflation at 3.6 per cent, or 4.4 per cent on the retail prices index. The economy is not growing as fast as we would like, and the April and May monthly gross domestic product (GDP) readings were mildly disappointing, but there is no reason to talk it down by more than justified. Language matters. Just as it is silly to talk of recession if you have two consecutive quarterly falls in GDP, each of just 0.1 per cent, so it is silly to talk of stagflation when inflation is at current levels and the economy is merely continuing the slow growth pattern that set in a decade and a half ago. Above all, turning the dial up to 11 in these circumstance leaves no room for when and if things get really bad. They were quite bad for inflation three years ago, when the rate hit 11 per cent, and they were very bad for growth in 2020, when Covid-hit GDP fell by 10.3 per cent — its biggest drop since 1709. We are in calmer waters now and things are mildly disappointing, no more than that. • The deepest recession, but also easily the weirdest Chancellors are always guaranteed a polite reception when they deliver their annual speech at the Mansion House in the City, which these days is called the financial and professional services dinner. The last rumpus I can remember was when Gordon Brown turned up in a business suit, arguing that it was a working engagement so he was wearing working clothes. Everybody who has attended since is glad that he did. The old dress code of white tie and tails, which most of us don't have in our wardrobes, was uncomfortable, particularly on a hot evening. Rachel Reeves pressed most of the right buttons in her speech to the bankers, accountants, brokers, lawyers, financial advisers and others. She wants to cut the red tape currently applied by the regulators, soften some of the restrictions put on the banks in the wake of the financial crisis more than a decade and a half ago, and boost investment by retail investors in riskier but more productive assets. • Reeves tells regulators to loosen up to boost share investment Whether that includes a cut in the current £20,000 cash Isaallowance, as was mooted before her speech but did not make it into the final version, we shall see. The economics of this are quite straightforward. The cash Isa was introduced in 1999, replacing other tax-exempt savings accounts. At launch, the allowance was £3,000, where it remained for nearly ten years. It then rose gradually to £5,760 in 2013-14, before jumping sharply to £15,000 during 2014 and £20,000 in 2017-18, where it has remained. The period in which the allowance was rising sharply, as you will have noticed, was one of near-zero official interest rates, and paltry savings rates. A more generous allowance did not cost the Treasury much. But the return to more normal interest rates means the exchequer cost of the cash Isa has risen, to more than £2 billion in 2023-24. A lower allowance, as part of a strategy to encourage more retail investment in UK risk assets, is the right thing to do. Whether it will work, though, remains to be seen, not least because more equity investment need not be more investment in UK equities. As chancellor, you can press a lot of buttons and find that nothing much happens.
Daily Mail
18 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Hammer of justice! Drug dealers watch in bewilderment as police dressed in superhero costumes smash down door and shut down narcotics operation
This is the moment Peruvian police officers in superhero costumes arrive at house being used to run a drug-dealing operation and smash down the entrance using a sledgehammer. The caped crusaders then force their way into the building and seize packages of cocaine and marijuana, as the suspects watch on in bewilderment. Click above to watch the video in full.
Times
20 hours ago
- Business
- Times
‘Redundancy was the kick I needed to found Tootilab curly haircare'
Redundancy on her first day back at work jolted Gaia Tonanzi out of her honeymoon haze, pushing her into founding her own business, which saw revenues of more than £500,000 in its first year. After a month-long adventure trekking the Inca trail in Peru and relaxing on the Galapagos Islands with her husband, Davide, Tonanzi returned from her honeymoon to find a meeting with her employer in her diary. She knew something was wrong. They were letting her go. 'I came back to reality and it was a strong comeback to reality,' Tonanzi said. Less than a month after losing her job, she was registering Tootilab, a curly haircare brand, with her co-founder and friend, Julio Quintana, over a glass of wine at the kitchen table. She is philosophical about her unexpected redundancy, and also the chance it gave her to test out her abilities as an entrepreneur. 'It felt like a sign from the universe. You don't have the safety net any more. You can go around for other jobs, spend a few months sending CVs, or just do it, just try it. We don't have kids, we're renting, we don't have a mortgage, we have literally no commitments.' Tonanzi, 31, wasn't a stranger to the haircare industry. In 2019 she became the first member of staff at Curlsmith, a curly-hair-focused UK start-up. She spent three years in the company working on marketing, and left just one week before Curlsmith was sold for over £118 million in 2022 to Helen of Troy, an American consumer products group. Working at Curlsmith made her consider starting her own company, one which sold products she would be more interested in buying as someone with curly hair. But she didn't feel ready at the time. 'I was too young. I didn't have the experience. I've never worked for a big-brand corporation. I didn't know how things worked. I felt I needed to build my experience a bit more before doing something like that. I was expecting a bigger company to be a lot more structured and organised than a start-up and I saw that it's not necessarily the case,' Tonanzi said. Tonanzi and Quintana, 37, spent 18 months researching and refining the product before launching Tootilab officially in May 2024. It started with a curl cream and a gel, but has since introduced a shampoo and conditioner. The duo decided to offer only a few products to make it easier for people who had never looked after their curly hair before. They also opted to use packaging with gender-neutral colours, as they felt curly hair products are often targeted at women. 'There was an appetite for people to have something simpler because most of the brands out there have a lot of products, sometimes they have odd names, you're not sure what they're supposed to do for you, and it's hard to navigate,' Tonanzi said. The products are manufactured in the UK, but shipped worldwide, with Tootilab now using warehouses in the UK, Europe and the United States. The products aren't cheap compared with standard supermarket haircare, with a 400ml bottle of shampoo costing £32, but Tonanzi said 50 per cent of customers return to Tootilab. Tonanzi said her goals for the company moving forward were to get the product in retail and to start targeting hairdressers to stock Tootilab. Looking back on her experience, Tonanzi said it still served as motivation. 'I'm pretty stubborn. To be told by someone, 'you're not good enough', it's a catalyst. It is like, 'you think so? I'm gonna prove you wrong.' It pushes me to do better. It was the kick that I needed, but also the motivation that keeps pushing.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
They planned their wedding. They weren't even engaged yet.
Katelin Morales and her partner, Jeff Beqiri, began wedding planning in February 2024. The Philadelphia-based couple booked flights to Peru to meet with a wedding planner, look at venues and start to lock in vendors for their destination wedding. Now there was just one thing left for Beqiri to do: propose. 'I knew that I needed a long runway for the type of wedding that I want. And my fiancé wanted more time to buy the ring that he wanted to buy me,' Morales, a 33-year-old lawyer, tells Yahoo. 'So we had the wedding planner, the venue, the photographer and also the videographer booked all before we got engaged.' The pair met on an app in May 2023, and their timeline quickly fell into place. 'We both said that we were dating with the intention of marriage,' Morales says. 'We were official two weeks after we met, and by July, we were saying, 'I love you.' Pretty organically, we were talking about marriage.' They decided to get a head start on wedding planning without waiting for the formality of Beqiri getting on one knee. They're in good company. Planning nuptials before an official proposal is a trend that's been gaining momentum over the last few years, now inching toward common practice. A 2024 survey by the wedding planning website Zola found that a majority of couples were doing some ideating about their wedding day, like creating a mood board or curating a registry, prior to a formal engagement. But the smaller percentage of those who went so far as to decide on a wedding date, book a venue and start a wedding website (where friends and family can check out wedding details) more than doubled by 2025. Here, couples discuss why they decided to tackle the 'I do' before the 'Will you marry me?' — and how it saved them from extra wedding stress. Why plan early A few factors played into Morales's decision to plan early. 'I knew it was going to be a destination wedding and I wanted to give people a full year's notice of when we were getting married,' she says. 'We also had a conversation about kids very early. … We would like to have our first kid when I'm 34, so we wanted the wedding in early 2026.' Then there's her job as a bankruptcy lawyer. 'The workload ebbs and flows a lot. There are months when I can't even go to a dinner,' she says. 'I wanted to make sure that there would be enough downtime in my job to take advantage of for planning, instead of having to do everything in the six months before my wedding when I can't control work.' Having ample time for wedding planning was her main concern. And with that under her control, she could leave the timing of her engagement up to Beqiri. Devin Short felt similarly. The 29-year-old, who lives in Westchester, N.Y., tells Yahoo that both she and her then-boyfriend Nick had already set their sights on a particular wedding venue in Florida, which she was anxious to secure. 'The venue is notoriously booked out in advance, and the place is special to us,' says Short. So, when she was sure by July 2022 that her partner was preparing a proposal — 'I knew he had asked my dad for his blessing and that the ring had been ordered' — she gave the place a call. 'I called to inquire about the next year, and they only had one date left in December,' she says. 'I really wanted a Florida-in-Christmas moment, so I asked for a contract.' Short and her mom immediately started working on getting more details of the big day together. Nick was aware of it, but not yet involved — he was busy putting together a proposal, after all. Once the venue was set, Short booked a wedding planner, as well as a photographer and videographer. 'I waited to pick our band because that was his one request,' she says. Both Short and Morales's priorities were in line with others who have gotten a head start, according to the 2025 Global Wedding Market Report by Think Splendid, a wedding consulting firm. Among 53,493 newlyweds who were polled, 31% started looking at venues before getting engaged, while 32% and 18% started the same process with photographers and wedding planners, respectively. Jenny McDonough, a Colorado-based planner and founder of Stargazed Weddings, tells Yahoo that getting a call from a couple that isn't yet engaged isn't out of the ordinary. 'People want to make sure that they get their preferred date, their preferred venue and their preferred photographer. And they have friends telling them that it books up quickly,' she says. Hence, most of those who get a head start on planning are specific about what they want. With less time comes less choice, in most cases, which is exactly what Caroline, 30, (who asked to keep her last name private) from New Jersey wanted to avoid. She and her now-husband Brendan had a particular date in mind for their wedding long before he proposed. 'We wanted our wedding to be on my grandparents' anniversary,' says Caroline, who planned to honor her family by getting married in their native Ireland. 'I also wanted my other grandmother to be at our legal ceremony [in the United States]. She was older, so we were racing a bit against the clock. … She was able to be there to witness before she passed away, which I'm extremely grateful for. Planning ahead of time gave me that sentimental moment.' 'Where's the ring?' Morales calls herself an 'open book' with family and friends, so when she and Beqiri discussed their February 2026 wedding two years ahead (and 10 months before they were even engaged), she shared the news. Her family was skeptical. 'I don't see a ring on your finger,' was the response she got from relatives who were wary of Morales being hurt. 'I had previously been in a seven-year relationship that didn't end up in a marriage, so they didn't want me to go through that again.' She was confident that this was different. 'I knew it was going to happen, I didn't feel any trepidation about any of it,' says Morales. 'It was just a matter of when, not if.' She attended a few wedding-related pop-ups and spoke openly about wedding planning in front of co-workers. 'People would be like, 'Where's your ring?' So I would find myself saying, 'Oh, it's getting cleaned,' even though I didn't have it yet,' she says. 'It can be kind of embarrassing when you go somewhere talking about your wedding and they don't see a ring on your finger. That's the first place that your eyes go.' However, that hasn't been a problem since Beqiri pulled off a surprise proposal to Morales last December. 'I definitely was surprised, and that was important to him,' she says. 'Although I knew it was going to happen, I didn't know the circumstances, when it would happen or what the ring would look like.' And better yet, the couple feels that they've been better able to enjoy the start of their engagement era because their plans for next year are already set. 'Most couples are planning right after they get engaged, and we had already done that stuff,' she says. 'Despite people being skeptical, at the end of the day, I was right. It turned out exactly how I said it [would], and it gave me more faith in myself and us as a couple too.' No stress or ruined surprises Caroline also says that the surprise of her early 2024 engagement wasn't ruined by wedding planning for six months prior. 'I let him plan [the proposal] on his own time,' she says. And data suggests that proposals aren't quite the surprise they're built up to be, anyway. Zola found that 53% of couples getting married in 2025 have shopped for rings with their partners, while 70% have discussed when they would be getting engaged. Asking 'Will you marry me?' is more of a formality. 'Even with all the planning, Nick managed to surprise the f*** out of me when he eventually did propose,' says Short. 'So it was a win-win because I was prepared, but also caught off-guard.' She has nothing but good things to say about planning early for her big day. 'I didn't stress about not having anything done, I had all my choices or preferences for vendors. I felt so in control from start to finish,' she says. 'It was the best choice ever.'
News.com.au
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Widow twerks on cardboard cutout of dead husband at his funeral
In an unbelievable video, a widow twerks against a cardboard cutout of her dead husband - just next to his open casket. A reggaeton singer hired for the funeral provided the upbeat music the grieving woman danced to while funeral-goers cheered her on. Dressed in black, the widow is captured rubbing her behind on the life-size printout of her late partner in Peru. Onlookers are heard whooping and cheering her on at the funeral. And even the sad event's entertainment - a singer known as El Cangri del Callao - was egging on the widow during his performance. He even encourages fellow mourners to join in the raunchy dance at the wake. The singer later shared the unbelievable clip on his Instagram page, where it went viral with 4.3 million views and thousands of comments. One local said: 'Hi bro, I'm going to die on 23 July. 'Are you available?' Another added: 'They are very young, but in my time we cried at funerals.' 'Widow finds five new loves... at the wake', someone joked. And: 'We can see how that stupid music makes people stupid.' One other comment pointed out how a 'farewell should be joyful, not sad'. While a fellow performer said: 'I've performed funerals and wakes, but always from a very different tone to what this video shows. 'I've never had the opportunity to capture a farewell from such a luminous, vivid perspective.' Meanwhile, a mere few days ago, the haunting moment a teen gave a tearful funeral eulogy to her slain mother and stepdad that later made her the prime suspect in their murder was captured. Sarah Grace Patrick, 17, now faces two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault in connection with the shootings of Kristin Brock, 41, and James Brock, 45. The chilling video of Patrick's eulogy shows the teen in a pale blue dress, standing before mourners at the lectern of the Catalyst Church in Carollton, Georgia. She said: 'I just wanted to say goodbye to my mum and James since we never got the chance to.' Patrick called her mother a 'beautiful kind soul' and told mourners she'd always be her 'sunshine'. Now, the same speech that drew tears from the crowd is drawing scrutiny from law enforcement.
