Higher yields at home, a third good week abroad

Britain's borrowing costs, and the bills behind them

Hamish McRae's Sunday column for This is Money carries a plain enough claim in its title: Britain pays a higher rate of interest to fund its debt than any other large developed country, and Burnham is on borrowed time. The framing is comparative rather than absolute. It is not that the cost of funding the state has reached some particular level, but that it sits above every peer of comparable size.

Running alongside it, the Guardian reports that a new cost of living crisis looms in the UK, with soaring energy bills forecast to lift inflation. Two pressures, then, pointing the same way: the price of household energy and the price at which the government borrows.

Groceries supplied the third strand. This is Money published both a news piece and a signed comment from Aldi's chief executive, Giles Hurley, the comment appearing shortly after eleven on Saturday night. Hurley blasts rivals' "phoney" loyalty deals and says Burnham is right to challenge phoney bargains, arguing that Britain's supermarkets should compete on the price of the whole shop rather than the size of the discount badge.

Burnham's name recurs elsewhere in the day's coverage. City A.M. examined what his Sporting Events Bill means for brands and media owners, a question of where televised sport sits and who may sell around it. Three separate files, three separate subjects, one politician in each headline.

A third consecutive week

The S&P 500 logged a third consecutive weekly gain on Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal's close-of-week report. That is the whole of the fact as reported: three weeks up, without drama attached.

Friday evening also brought Berkshire Hathaway's disclosure of portfolio changes. The Journal records that Berkshire added to its Alphabet stake, bought home builders, and exited Constellation. Home builders are a new direction in the list; the Alphabet position, having been established earlier, was enlarged rather than begun.

Two of the weekend's fund pieces looked at what investors get for their money. One reports that stock-picking funds are performing as poorly as ever — the construction of that headline, "as ever", doing the work of saying nothing has improved. The other collects readers' responses to an earlier article on funds that promise access to pre-IPO shares, with the risks of those vehicles the stated subject. Readers wrote in; the Journal published what they said.

In shipping, Diana Shipping dropped its bid to acquire Genco Shipping & Trading, ending an approach between two listed dry bulk owners.

Two reports from the South China Morning Post covered the mainland. Luxury home sales have rebounded, though analysts quoted there consider a broader recovery in the property market unlikely. Separately, the home province of the founders of DeepSeek and Moonshot is working to retain and attract the next cohort of artificial intelligence talent — a retention problem rather than a recruitment one, at least in the way it is described.

Companies in dispute

Aston Martin is locked in a row with investors over what This is Money calls a "secret" offshore debt deal, the paper putting the quotation marks around the adjective and running the piece under the line that the wheels have come off at the James Bond car maker. The dispute is with the company's own shareholders, not with a counterparty or a regulator.

At HSBC, a senior Conservative has called for an urgent investigation into the bank freezing customer savings, which the paper frames as an attempt to appease Beijing. The demand is for a probe; nothing has yet been established.

Grainger's chief executive, Dame Helen Gordon, was profiled as the queen of the property scene and described as unruffled by both Mike Ashley and the raider Boaz Weinstein — two names now attached to the register of a British residential landlord. Reckitt, meanwhile, faces a court showdown over baby formula claims.

One further number, of a sort. Tesco's chief executive, Ken Murphy, has regained the pay gap crown, meaning the widest ratio between chief executive and worker among the companies compared. The Guardian, on a lighter note, marked the weekend's hundredth birthday and asked whether "skiveday Fridays" and hybrid working have spoiled it, while the BBC reviewed a hit new game in which the player survives two years as prime minister before the cabinet deserts them. In the United States, a large egg recall was issued across the south and south-west after a salmonella outbreak.