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Europe
BBC Business

I've spent 30 years in recruitment - this is how to get a job

If you've sent off dozens of job applications and heard nothing back, the silence can be as infuriating as a rejection. Part of the problem is the shrinking number of entry-level jobs. Reed, the recruitment firm, says that graduate vacancies on its website have fallen from around 180,000 three or four years ago to 50,000. James Reed, chair and chief executive of Reed, has spent 30 years watching how employers make decisions and, like many, is frustrated at how difficult the process has become. Here, the recruitment veteran gives some pointers on how to get noticed in a tough jobs market. Many employers use artificial intelligence (AI) systems to screen applications before a human lays eyes on them. But if AI is being used, Reed suggests it is probably comparing the job description with your CV or cover letter so you should "try and mirror the job description with your skills and experience". That doesn't mean pretending to have skills you do not have. "It's really important you don't lie," says Reed, but if the job asks for communication, organisation or customer service, make sure your application clearly shows where you have done those things. It is one of the most frustrating parts of job-hunting: being told you need experience for an entry-level role. Reed says the problem is worse at the moment because employers are hiring less, so often look for candidates who already have some know-how. He advises building experience wherever possible - "even if it's temporary, casual or part-time" - through work, volunteering, community projects or free online training, such as Anthropic's AI academy. If you get in front of an employer (and are feeling brave) it can be worth making the point directly: "Someone gave you your first opportunity, that's all I'm looking for." Reed is not against using AI to help with applications as it's a "wonderful tool" that cam improve your application.

I've spent 30 years in recruitment - this is how to get a job
Europe
BBC Business

VAT cut on theme parks and kids' meals comes into force

Image source, Getty ImagesByFaarea MasudBusiness reporterPublished4 hours agoFamilies are expected to get cheaper access to theme parks, zoos and museums as well as kids' meals as a temporary VAT cut comes in to force on Thursday for the school summer holidays. Ticket prices at various attractions are among the activities where VAT will be reduced from 20% to 5% in what the goverment said would help with the cost of living. The cut begins on 25 June, in time for schools breaking up in Scotland at the end of this month, followed by Northern Ireland, England and Wales in July, until 1 September. But families, charities and firms said the measure will do little to help squeezed budgets, with some doubting the tax saving would be passed on to customers. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the summer holidays could be quite expensive, and the purpose of the temporary cut to VAT on family-related activities was to "help people make those precious memories during the summer holidays, but not having to fork out too much for it". Alan, 42, from Brighton goes to theme parks with him family regularly but he does not expect much from the VAT cut. "These kind of attractions are quite expensive in the first place," he said, adding that the savings, if passed on, would be "negligible" and only benefit those who go to theme parks as a one-off. He said the best option for his family was having a theme park pass, which they use to go to Legoland, Chessington World of Adventure and Sea Life centres. Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, previously said the measures would lead to some savings, but estimated they would equate to an "average saving of around £10 per UK household". Alan says that more useful measures would be if energy and fuel costs were addressed. "How the government can say this is going to result in any household saving is a mystery," he said. Asked whether the savings would be meaningful, Reeves told the BBC the government was focused on helping families.

VAT cut on theme parks and kids' meals comes into force
Europe
BBC Business

Texas family sues Tesla over fatal crash into home

Image source, ReutersImage caption, Elon Musk has repeatedly boasted of Tesla's self-driving capabilities. Jennifer Barbour filed her lawsuit in a local court on Tuesday, just days after her 76-year-old mother Martha Avila died from injuries she sustained after a Tesla Model 3 sped into their shared home. The Tesla driver told police that he was using the car's autonomous or "full self-driving" technology at the time of the crash. In the lawsuit Barbour accuses Elon Musk's electric vehicle company of defective design and negligence by promoting technology that is unsafe, while Musk on social media denied the technology was to blame. Musk took to X, the social media platform he owns, to refute the idea that Tesla's self-driving technology was to blame for the crash because it happened at a high speed. Tesla's vice president of AI software Ashok Elluswamy followed up on Musk's comment with more apparent detail on the accident. Elluswamy wrote that the driver was going at 73mph (117 km/h) and had overridden the car's self-driving mode "by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%." He also claimed that the driver "had the accelerator pushed even after the crash". Barbour's complaint, filed with her husband Justin Barbour, puts forward a different explanation. It argues that the driver was operating his Tesla on "in a reasonably foreseeable manner" with full self-driving engaged when the car's technology "failed to detect the end of the street", went into "sudden unintended acceleration" and crashed into the Barbour residence. In addition to the death of her mother, Barbour claims her husband also suffered severe and grievous injuries as a result of the crash. Monetary damages being sought include those for anguish, injury and medical expenses, as well as "exemplary" damages because Tesla's actions have been "grossly negligent."

Texas family sues Tesla over fatal crash into home
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

World Bank approves USD 1.5 billion to boost private sector jobs in India

The initiative builds on India’s recent reforms, including the consolidation of 29 labour laws into four Labour Codes, tax simplification, and regulatory changes, while aligning with the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision and the World Bank’s Country Partnership Framework for India. | Photo Credit: MIKE BLAKE The World Bank's Board of Executive Directors has approved USD 1.5 billion in financing to support India's structural reforms aimed at boosting private sector-led job creation and accelerating economic growth. The financing, provided under the Boosting Job Creation in the Private Sector Development Policy Financing (DPF) Operation, is expected to support reforms that can create employment opportunities for 11 million young Indians entering the workforce over the next two decades. The programme builds on reforms undertaken in recent years, including tax simplification, trade integration, regulatory changes, and measures to improve the business environment, the World Bank said in a statement on Monday. The DPF supports initiatives to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship, strengthen labour market participation, particularly among women, streamline trade and investment processes, and improve access to capital for businesses, it added. In November 2025, the government consolidated 29 labour laws into four comprehensive Labour Codes, aimed at simplifying compliance, modernising outdated provisions, and creating a more efficient framework for businesses while protecting workers’ rights. According to government estimates, employment in India increased from 452 million in 2017-18 to 604 million in 2023-24, adding more than 150 million jobs over six years. During the same period, the unemployment rate declined from 6 per cent to 3.2 per cent, while nearly 9 million women joined regular wage employment. The reforms reflect India’s shift towards outcome-oriented governance focused on transparency, predictability, and long-term economic resilience, it said. The operation is aligned with the World Bank Group’s Country Partnership Framework for India for FY26-31 and supports the government's Viksit Bharat by 2047 vision by improving the environment for firms, encouraging private investment, and expanding productive employment opportunities, it said. The programme will focus on three key areas — improving the business-enabling environment, promoting trade and investment openness, and mobilising private capital for business expansion and job creation, it noted. "India is well paced in its reform agenda to unlock private capital and create jobs in a challenging global context," said World Bank Vice President for South Asia Johannes Zutt. The DPF also complements recent investments by the World Bank Group's private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to increase credit access for MSMEs and underserved communities, including women in rural and semi-urban areas.

World Bank approves USD 1.5 billion to boost private sector jobs in India
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Alan Greenspan, ex-Federal Reserve chief, dies at 100

Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman proclaimed a wizard for guiding a then-record US economic expansion, only to see his luster dimmed by the financial crisis that erupted less than two years after he stepped down, has died. He was 100. He died on Monday at his home, NBC News reported, citing his wife, Andrea Mitchell, its chief Washington correspondent and chief foreign affairs correspondent. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease. Greenspan’s 18 years as Fed chief, from 1987 until his retirement at the start of 2006, were marked by a stock market boom and low unemployment. More so than the four presidents he served under or the seven Treasury secretaries he worked alongside, Greenspan was seen as the maestro who kept the economy humming. “Alan Greenspan deserves to be remembered as one of the great central bankers of the second half of the 20th century, in a global context, not just at the Fed,” said Roger Ferguson, who served as Fed vice chairman from 1999 to 2006. He said Greenspan “was among the first to recognize the impact of technology on increasing productivity in the US, allowing the economy to grow faster than we had thought without inflation.” The bespectacled Fed chairman became an icon of global finance through televised speeches and congressional testimony that often moved markets — once traders and reporters dug through his often cryptic language and zeroed in on a few choice words. In a 1996 speech, Greenspan posed a rhetorical question: “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?” Investors fixed on the phrase “irrational exuberance” and sent stocks briefly lower before they shot higher still. The phrase became part of the national lexicon a few years later when pricey internet shares plunged. Investors grew confident that Greenspan would deploy the tools at his disposal, including interest rates, to buoy the stock market during major declines. That idea — shorthanded as the “Greenspan put,” after the investing maneuver used to limit potential losses — was blamed for creating a moral hazard by making risky market behavior appear safer than it should be. Greenspan’s tenure was the second-longest for a Fed chief, behind that of William McChesney Martin Jr. It coincided with the steadiest period of economic growth since the central bank’s creation in 1913, a 10-year run between a recession that ended in March 1991 and another that began in March 2001. (The expansion of 2009-2020 would eclipse that mark.) The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index almost quadrupled during that stretch, while the US economy grew at an average annual pace of 3.5%. The jobless rate averaged 5.5% and touched 3.8% in April 2000, which at the time was the lowest level since 1969. Some homebuyers were approved for subprime mortgages they couldn’t afford. Others borrowed heavily against their home equity. Investment bankers packaged mortgage-backed loans into securities, and companies sold protection from defaults on that debt. The machine hummed along until its fuel — ever-rising home prices — finally ran out. Transcripts from Fed policy meetings in 2005 showed that central bank staff and officials had identified a housing bubble. Greenspan judged that “whatever froth there is in the housing market is becoming contained at this stage, and it’s getting contained largely because mortgage rates have moved up and are beginning to have an impact.” In mid-2007, lending among banks seized up, setting off events that culminated in the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The crisis thrust the Fed and Greenspan’s successor as chairman, Ben Bernanke, into uncharted territory. Long celebrated for his stewardship of the economy, Greenspan found himself in the unaccustomed position of fending off critics who said that his hands-off approach to financial markets and bubbles — specifically the one in housing that was inflating as he left office — had laid the groundwork for the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. By promoting a boom in productivity as a sign of a so-called new economy, Greenspan “aided and abetted the biggest stock-market bubble in the history of this country,” Paul Kasriel, a former Fed official then with Northern Trust Co. in Chicago, put it in 2010.

Alan Greenspan, ex-Federal Reserve chief, dies at 100
Europe
BBC Business

Baroness Mone among individuals sued to recover PPE Medpro millions

Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman are among individuals being sued in an attempt to recover some of the millions owed to the government by his collapsed company, PPE Medpro, the BBC understands. The government was awarded £122m plus interest from PPE Medpro last year, after a court ruled the firm had breached a contract to supply sterile surgical gowns during the pandemic. The joint liquidators from the firm Interpath Advisory have launched a case against six individuals and five companies linked with the firm, after PPE Medpro was put into liquidation. PPE Medpro was set up in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic as the government struggled to secure supplies of protective equipment to protect health workers during the acutest phase of the outbreak. It won its first government contract to supply masks through a so-called 'VIP lane', after a recommendation by Baroness Mone, who sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. However by the end of 2022, the government sued the firm, claiming the medical gowns supplied did not comply with relevant healthcare standards. Last year the High Court found in the government's favour, ruling that PPE Medpro had failed to prove whether or not its surgical gowns, which were to be used by NHS workers, had undergone a validated sterilisation process. While the government had won its case, it wasn't immediately clear how it would get its money back. The company itself had less than £1m on its balance sheet, and was put into liquidation in December 2025. But the Health Secretary at the time, Wes Streeting, accused PPE Medpro of putting "NHS staff and patients in danger with substandard kit whilst lining their own pockets with taxpayers' money at a time of national crisis." He pledged to pursue the company with "everything we've got" to recover the money. Barrowman and Mone were not directors of PPE Medpro - and for a long time they denied any connection with the firm. However in 2023 Barrowman confirmed in a BBC interview that he was the ultimate beneficial owner of the company.

Baroness Mone among individuals sued to recover PPE Medpro millions
Europe
The Guardian

Record profits, terrible service: something’s got to give for US consumers

Consumers are bearing the brunt of sweeping developments in the business landscape. Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenConsumers are bearing the brunt of sweeping developments in the business landscape. Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty ImagesConsumedBusinessRecord profits, terrible service: something’s got to give for US consumersExperts say consolidation and market power have left consumers paying more for less When Delta Airlines charged Marie Duggan, an economic historian visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, $1,200 to change a scheduled flight to the United States, she was so angry she cancelled and booked a cross-border nighttime bus ride instead. Duggan thought Delta’s price increase to fly to Phoenix instead of San Francisco, at twice the price of a one-way flight to Phoenix, was an insult and a rip-off. So she took a $250 flight on Aeromexico to Hermosillo, in the north-western state of Sonora, and then a $59 bus across the Mexico border. Sonora is on the US tate department’s ‘reconsider travel’ list because of terrorism and crime, Duggan acknowledged, and she was “exhausted” after the trip. But she was also pleased not to have to pay Delta the money. “I thought, ‘Ha! You think I have no choice, but I know that there is a bus,” she said in an interview. “So I will slip out of your grasp.” For the past 100 years, US consumers have powered the US economy, their $21tn in annual spending supported by the business ethos that the “customer is king.” Today, that idea is as outdated as a Norman Rockwell painting, say consumer activists, historians, analysts, executives and customers themselves. Instead, consumers are bearing the brunt of sweeping developments in the business landscape. Decades of mergers have limited consumer options. Companies are so big they can push industry-friendly regulation and charge what they want, safe in the knowledge that disgruntled customers have nowhere to go. No wonder consumers feel so squeezed, disrespected and preyed upon. As a result, they are becoming “reactive”, said Alexander DePaoli, a Northeastern University marketing professor who studies consumer anger. They’re starting to see brands as “a rival or an adversary” and are trying to beat them at their own game. The power dynamics are out of whack, though, that dangerous bus rides and product boycotts are no answer. A broader fix may be necessary if the United States is to return to its customer service glory years. “Asking why [companies] went ‘bad’ is like asking why a company that sells reasonably priced goods on the near side of the TSA checkpoint is charging $15 for water on the far side of the TSA checkpoint,” at an airport, said Cory Doctorow, author of Enshitification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. “It’s not because they’re evil, it’s because you can’t go anywhere else to buy your water.” A feeling of forever being ripped off helps explain why consumers have never felt more pessimistic, even though the US economy, by the numbers, continues to perform well. US consumer sentiment, tracked for over 60 years by the University of Michigan, has hit a new low, thanks to cost-of-living increases many say are eroding their personal finances. At the same time customer complaints about goods and services are at record levels, and surged 16% in the first quarter, according to the university’s American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which has tracked the figure since 1994.

Record profits, terrible service: something’s got to give for US consumers
Europe
BBC Business

Why are there holiday delay warnings over the EU's new border system?

There have been warnings of queues at airports in Europe this summer because of the EU's new digital border control system. It is the first summer peak period since the Entry/Exit System, or "EES", came in. It requires UK travellers to register fingerprints and a photo alongside a passport scan. It tracks who enters and leaves the Schengen free movement zone, which covers 29 European countries , external. "Third country" nationals - including UK citizens - must provide fingerprints and a photo at passport control. Brits flying out to a number of popular holiday destinations including France, Spain, Portugal and Italy will be required to do this at automated kiosks after they land. Some passengers, including children under 12, have their passport checked by border staff instead. EES started to be rolled out in October last year and is now fully up and running. The time it takes to register biometric information means people have been told to prepare for a wait at border controls. During the introductory period, queues started to flare up at certain airports at busy times. Since then, the system has been working well in some airports, while waits of several hours have been reported at others. A representative of airline trade body IATA has warned queues in some places could be as long as six hours.

Why are there holiday delay warnings over the EU's new border system?
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Sensex today | Stock Market Live Updates: Sensex reclaims 77,100 level, Nifty crosses 24,100 as US-Iran make 'progress' in talks

Sensex Today, Nifty 50 | Stock Market Live Updates - Find here all the live updates related to Sensex, Nifty, BSE, NSE, share prices and Indian stock markets for 22nd June 2026. Sensex soared 312.03 pts or 0.41% to 77,114.93 at 9.17 am after a positive opening at 77,160.67 from the previous close of 76,802.90. Nifty 50 climbed 104.95 pts or 0.44% to 24,118.05. On Friday, the benchmarks snapped the 5-day winning streak; Sensex settled 607.08 pts or 0.78% lower at 76,802.90; and Nifty 50 dragged 154.90 pts or 0.64% to 24,013.10. Sensex soared 312.03 pts or 0.41% to 77,114.93 at 9.17 am after a positive opening at 77,160.67 from the previous close of 76,802.90. Nifty 50 climbed 104.95 pts or 0.44% to 24,118.05. On Friday, the benchmarks snapped the 5-day winning streak; Sensex settled 607.08 pts or 0.78% lower at 76,802.90; and Nifty 50 dragged 154.90 pts or 0.64% to 24,013.10. Top gainers of NIfty 50: Cipla (+2.27%), Infosys (+1.35%), Reliance (+1.34%), Tech Mahindra (+1.06%) Top losers: Adani Enterprises (-0.61%), Titan (-0.61%), IndiGo (-0.60%), Grasim (-0.41%), Adani Ports (-0.26%) 3i Infotech Software Solutions L.L.C., a subsidiary of 3i Infotech Limited, has received a Purchase Order from a leading UAE-based technology company, for providing professional services contract including the rebadging of IT resources Aurobindo Pharma USA, Inc, received approval from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to proceed with the acquisition of Lannett Company LLC (“Lannett”). The transaction, valued at $250 million on a cash-free, debt-free basis and inclusive of normalized working capital, is expected to close before the end of June 2026. Fall in oil prices and ​positive developments in U.S.-Iran ‌negotiations could lend further support, traders said. Government bonds are likely to begin the new week on a cautious note as focus turned back to oil prices after ‌tension marked the first round of peace talks, with Iran shutting a crucial transit point ⁠and the U.S. threatening to restart attacks. Rupee’s direction this week will hinge on whether lower oil prices hold and on the dollar’s trajectory, while government bonds are likely ​to take cues from the pace of foreign inflows.

Sensex today | Stock Market Live Updates: Sensex reclaims 77,100 level, Nifty crosses 24,100 as US-Iran make 'progress' in talks