LONDON (ShareCast) - Chancellor George Osborne said he would like to proceed "as quickly as we can to get rid of" the government's stake in RBS, writes the Financial Times. However, he said that the size of stake was "massive" and the sell-down of shares could take years to complete.
Whitehall sources have warned that the Treasury is planning to freeze defence spending after the election, "fuelling a growing Tory rebellion over Britain's military budget", writes The Times.
All 31 banks taking part in the first stage of the Federal Reserve's latest round of stress tests cleared the minimum capital requirements, the Financial Times reports. However, the Fed found that in its "severely adverse" scenario, banks would suffer combined losses of $490bn over nine quarters.
According to The Telegraph, EDF has said that Areva's proposed 10% stake in Hinkley Point is "not existential" for the £24.5bn project, giving its strongest hint yet that the reactor maker may pull out of funding the new nuclear plant.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales has said that UK growth is being hampered by a slowdown in business spending, as it lowered its growth forecast for 2015 from 2.5% to 2.4%, says The Guardian.
Management at Trinity Mirror failed to acknowledge its newspapers engaged in phone-hacking, the lawyer representing victims of the practice said on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Women in the UK earned 19.7% less than men on average in 2013, meaning that Britain had the sixth-largest pay gap in the European Union, reports The Telegraph.
According to reports, Apple's new mobile-payment system has seen a wave of fraudulent transactions using stolen credit-card data from big retailers such as Home Depot and Target Corp, writes The Wall Street Journal.
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