Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock finishes day down 5.3% on Wall Street, as ex-president’s stake falls from $6bn to $5.6bn

Donald Trump’s paper fortune dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars on Friday as shares in his media firm came under pressure in the wake of his conviction in his New York hush-money trial.

Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock finished the day down 5.3% on Wall Street, denting the value of the former president’s vast stake in the business.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Nationwide have also dug into their data, and found that past general elections do not appear to have generated volatility in house prices or resulted in a significant change in house price trends.

Their chief economist Robert Gardner says:

“On the whole, prevailing trends have been maintained just before, during and after UK general elections. Broader economic trends appear to dominate any immediate election-related impacts.

BCC calls for improved relations with the EU to cut the costs for business, while sticky inflation worries markets

Those IT problems at TSB appear to be solved!

A TSB spokesperson tells us:

“We’re aware some customers had issues logging into our app and online banking this morning. This issue is now resolved and we’re sorry for any inconvenience it caused.”

ECB policymakers indicates June rate cut is a done deal, while IT glitch which prevented some NatWest customers accessing accounts has been fixed

• Inflation in UK shops falls amid price cuts on furniture and TVs

NatWest says that customers who need to complete a transaction can use their Telephone Banking service, or visit a branches or an ATM.

Assuming you can find a branch, of course….. NatWest is closing 98 this year.

Concerns London listing of retailer facing forced labour allegations goes ahead while parliament is dissolved

Senior politicians, including three parliamentary committee chairs, have called for more scrutiny of Shein as the fast-fashion retailer founded in China sets its sights on a London stock market listing.

Shein is reportedly in talks to float on the London Stock Exchange after an attempt to float in New York faced regulatory hurdles.

The infrastructure company easily raised almost £7bn in a rights issue – because it has its balance sheet in order and plans to invest

So much for the idea that the woes of the water sector, and Thames Water in particular, would kill investors’ appetite for all British infrastructure assets. Here comes National Grid, which will probably be the UK’s biggest-spending infrastructure company over the next decade, with a mammoth fundraising that would not be possible if the stink from Thames had infected everything in the vicinity.

National Grid’s near-£7bn rights issue, to back a five-year, £60bn spending programme in the UK and US, is the biggest by a London-listed company since 2009. It is larger than expected and comes before the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, has nailed down the price control regime for the 2026-31 period. Throw in the supposed uncertainties created by Thames, plus a general election, and you might assume the safe option would have been to wait a while.

Growth across British businesses has cooled noticeably this month in an early blow for PM Rishi Sunak’s election campaign.

• ‘The vet presented it as: if you care, you pay’: who really profits from poorly pets?

Happy news from Europe: the eurozone economic recovery is gathering pace with new orders rising at the fastest rate in over a year, new data shows.

The latest survey of purchasing managers shows that eurozone companies are growing at the fastest rate in 12 months, with business activity, new orders and employment growing at a more rapid pace in May.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as deputy governor Ben Broadbent gives his final speech at the BoE

The UK and its financial services sector cannot afford to give the “cold shoulder” to China, the City minister has warned.

Speaking at the CityWeek conference in London this morning, Bim Afolami told attendees that it was “crucial” to engage with strategic competitors like China.

“Like with any bilateral relationship, we don’t agree on everything.

We are very clear that you simply cannot give the cold shoulder to an economy that is home to a fifth of the world’s globally systemically important banks, four of the world’s largest banks, and almost a third of the world’s leading global financial centres.

“There is no point in us having the safest graveyard.”

Companies are deserting the FTSE because of a shortage of investment – but there is a solution

Britain had it in its power to be a genuine hi-tech superpower. Instead, the opportunity slipped through our fingers, as we have been “tech-stripped” on a monumental scale. On one estimate, up to half the FTSE 100 could now be populated by vigorous British tech companies but those are all now foreign owned with one exception, Sage. The implications for our industrial, business, services and even defence base are dire – one of the most important condemnations of the last 14 years.

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, complacently declared last week that this was just how capitalism operated – even as we learned that another 21 companies worth £24.6bn had joined the exodus from the UK’s public markets this year alone. It was a variant of Philip Hammond’s comment in 2016 on Japanese SoftBank taking over yet another of our tech jewels, the chip designer ARM. What was obviously an exercise in technological vandalism was instead proof positive that Britain was “open for business”, a view echoed at the time by that other high priest of wealth generation, Nigel Farage. This reflex mantra of Tory ministers and Brexiters alike is a necessity: to say anything else would reveal the paucity of their world view.