The Government has a jobs problem and business has decided to help solve it.

UK unemployment is rising and youth joblessness has hit 16%. With nearly 1 million young people out of education, employment or training, and long-term sickness benefits having jumped by almost 700,000 since the pandemic, waiting for a policy fix clearly isn’t an option for some of Britain’s biggest employers. So they’ve decided to act. A new Employer Taskforce has brought together around 30 companies — including BT, Shell, Marks & Spencer and Pret — to tackle the UK’s worsening labour market head-on.

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The war isn’t just a foreign policy problem — it’s an economic one. The Middle East conflict is hitting the UK economy harder and faster than many expected.

The inflation problem was already bad. Then the war started.

UK inflation came in at 3% for the year to February — flat on January and still well above the Bank of England’s 2% target.

Tesla is done waiting for chip suppliers. It’s building it’s own factory.

Elon Musk has unveiled Terafab — a massive semiconductor manufacturing facility that would give Tesla, SpaceX and xAI control over their own chip supply. Investors liked what they heard: Tesla shares climbed around 3.5% to approximately $381 on Monday. The project signals that Tesla’s future is increasingly defined by AI and robotics rather than electric vehicles — a bet Musk is making explicit: “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips.”

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The private credit market is in trouble and Apollo is the latest sign. 

Private credit was supposed to be one of finance’s great growth stories. Now it’s in crisis mode. Apollo Global Management has become the latest major asset manager to cap withdrawals from a flagship fund — blocking $1.6bn in redemption requests after investor demand to exit surged to more than double the fund’s permitted quarterly limit. With Ares, BlackRock, Blackstone, Blue Owl, JP Morgan and Clearwater all facing similar pressure, this is no longer an isolated incident. The $3 trillion private credit sector is under serious strain.

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Bitcoin had a rough start to 2026 and retail investors noticed. Bitcoin is down nearly 19% since January, and the retail investor love affair with crypto is cooling fast. A new survey from Finimize shows that optimism around bitcoin’s price has fallen sharply — and planned investment into digital assets has followed suit. The pivot? Mainstream assets, particularly ETFs. It’s less about panic-selling and more about a quiet re-rating of risk — and it tells you quite a lot about where investor sentiment sits right now.

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