An investigation by The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has concluded that Ofgem's failure to regulate energy…

An investigation by The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has concluded that Ofgem's failure to regulate energy suppliers effectively since 2018 – when issues with the financial resilience of energy retailers emerged - has "come at a considerable cost" to British households. The PAC said the energy regulator did not tighten requirements for new suppliers until 2019, or for existing suppliers until 2021, when prices of wholesale gas and electricity began to soar to unprecedented levels. 29 energy suppliers have failed since July last year, the report said, affecting some four million households. It is customers who are left to pay the £2.7bn cost of the failures at an extra £94, the watchdog said, with the price very likely to "get significantly worse through 2023". The regulator "did not strike the right balance between promoting competition in the energy suppliers’ market and ensuring energy suppliers were financially resilient, PAC said, and noting that the price cap was "providing only very limited protection to households from increases in the wholesale price of energy".

High Court Judge Mr Justice Zacaroli has ordered a delay in the sale of collapsed energy company Bulb to Octopus Energy, after rival firms British Gas and Scottish Power raised a legal challenge against Energy Secretary Grant Shapps' approval for the takeover, saying they have not been given enough time to consider the deal. Bulb's administrators said there was "significant commercial urgency to justify going ahead" but a representative for British Gas said there were concerns the proposal could be "unlawful". Bulb was placed into special administration last year – to be run by Ofgem - and Octopus was due to take on its 1.5 million customers to "protect consumers and taxpayers" and "provide a stable new home for Bulb's customers and 650 employees" on 15th November, according to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). The Judge adjourned ordering the start of the scheme, with a hearing now expected around the end of this month.

Ahead of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has said the government must be willing to make politically unpopular choices in areas such as immigration and regulation to boost business investment and economic growth. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to set out a raft of spending cuts and tax rises on Thursday as he seeks to show Britain can fix a hole in its public finances. The CBI said not matching those with measures to tackle labour shortages and productivity, at a time when many businesses are drawing up their 2023 budgets, would likely be damaging in the short and long term. "Changes to immigration, regulation and planning are now critical levers to get firms to invest but will require the government to make political sacrifices," the CBI said, setting out a series of policy proposals which it acknowledged many in the governing Conservatives would find hard to support. These include being more flexible on immigration including for occupations dogged by labour shortages, and adding student and graduate visa routes and visas linked to specific economic projects. It also called on the government to streamline "the slow and inconsistent planning system", and speed-up decision-making for major developments, Reuters reports. "All of us need to accept now that with fiscal and monetary policy tightening, we need many more pro-growth policies for our economy, if we’re to avoid a decade of no growth," CBI Director-General Tony Danker said in a statement, adding that if Hunt's plan for growth was only "warm words and aspirations" it wouldn't stop businesses pulling back from investment. "It must tackle the real barriers we face right now," he said. "We need to make the UK an attractive place to invest," Danker said.

British employers are planning the biggest pay hikes in a decade, yet real-term wages will still grow more slowly than inflation, a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggests. The CIPD found employers expect to raise basic pay rates by 4% on average over the coming year, and by as much as 5% in the private sector - the largest since the CIPD's records started in 2012. However, CIPD labour market economist Jon Boys said: “Pay awards are expected to rise by the highest amount we've seen in our survey for 10 years but it's being outpaced by rising prices…Rather than feeling the benefit of higher pay, most will face a real-terms pay cut."

Property website Rightmove claims that asking prices for British residential properties dropped 1.1%, or by £4,159 month-on-month between 9th October and 5th November, after a 0.9% rise over the previous month.

Housebuilder Redrow has reported a rise in the average selling price of its homes to £483,000, a 6.9% increase in the average selling price of the group’s private reservations for the first 18 weeks of the financial year, meaning its homes now cost £31,000 more. Nevertheless, the company cut its revenue forecast for 2023, saying the value of net private reservations in the same period was down 19% because of recent instability in the financial markets.

Schneider Electric has upped its takeover offer for London-listed software firm Aveva to around £9.86bn. The French industrial group has now agreed to buy the roughly 40% of Aveva it does not already own for 3,225p per share in cash, up from a previous offer of 3,100p.

Bloomberg reports that BT has told its staff it could offer extra financial support for those hit hardest by the cost of living crisis as it frees up cash thanks to the government's energy subsidy for businesses, which runs until the end of March. CEO Philip Jansen says he will table a new proposal to the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents about 40,000 of the company's 100,000 employees, to end talks over a pay deal that has seen the two sides at loggerheads for months and the first national strike action at BT in 35 years. Just last week however, BT warned of further job cuts after in response to the need for more than £500m in extra savings due to soaring inflation and energy bills. The company's energy bill will be £200m higher year on year.

Crypto exchange FTX has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US after several tumultuous days when traders rushed to withdraw $6bn (£5.08bn) from the platform in just 72 hours after rival exchange Binance abandoned a proposed rescue deal for the struggling firm. FTX, its affiliated crypto trading firm Alameda Research, and about 130 of its other companies have commenced voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware, the company said in a statement on Twitter on Friday. The drama then ramped up a notch on Saturday, when FTX said it had detected unauthorised access and analysts said hundreds of millions of dollars of assets had been moved from the platform in "suspicious circumstances". In its bankruptcy petition, FTX Trading said it has $10bn (£8.48bn) to $50bn (£42.42bn) in assets, $10bn to $50bn in liabilities, and more than 100,000 creditors. Founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned and John J. Ray III - a restructuring expert who oversaw the liquidation of Enron - has been appointed to take over. FTX was “once a darling of the crypto industry,” Reuters says, having raised $400m (£339m) from investors in January, valuing the company at $32 billion. Investors included Singapore state investor Temasek and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan as well as celebrities and sports stars. 30-year old Bankman-Fried, whose net worth was estimated as high as $26.5bn (£22.47bn) by Forbes a year ago, has now morphed from being “the poster child of crypto's successes to the protagonist of the industry's highest-profile crash”. "The shock was that this guy was the face of the crypto industry, and it turned out that the emperor had no clothes," said Thomas Hayes, managing member at Great Hill Capital LLC in New York. FTX is under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to a source familiar with the investigations. Bitcoin has hit a two-year low since FTX's announcement, down 4.3% at $16,803 (£14,250) on Friday afternoon. Shares of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related firms also dropped sharply. The reverberations went beyond financial markets: Mercedes' Formula One team suspended its partnership with FTX ahead of the season's penultimate race in Brazil. US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat who has previously criticized the crypto industry, tweeted that the implosion of FTX was a wake-up call for Congress and regulators to hold the industry and its executives accountable. "Too much of the crypto industry is smoke and mirrors. It's time for stronger rules and stronger enforcement to protect ordinary people," she said.

Debt levels among low-and middle-income countries rose sharply in 2021, with China accounting for 66% of lending by official bilateral creditors, World Bank President David Malpass has said. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Western officials have become increasingly vocal about their frustration with China, according to Reuters, which is now the world's biggest official bilateral creditor. The World Bank also criticised private sector lenders for not moving forward fast enough. Preliminary data released by the Bank in June showed the external debt stock of low- and middle-income countries rose, on average, 6.9% in 2021 to $9.3tr (£7.89tn), outpacing the 5.3% growth seen in 2020.

China eased some of its strict Covid rules on Friday, shortening quarantines by two days for close contacts of infected people, and from seven to five days for inbound travellers. The requirement for three further days in home isolation after centralised quarantine remains. Reuters says the CCP also removed a penalty for airlines for bringing in too many cases, and announced it would stop trying to identify "secondary" contacts - a major annoyance for residents of cities who are caught up in sweeping contact-tracing efforts when a case is found - while still identifying close contacts. The yuan extended gains to a seven-week high after the news and the blue chip CSI 300 Index rose 2.8% in afternoon trade, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index jumped more than 7%, its biggest daily gain since March. However, many experts are warning that the measures were incremental and reopening probably remained a long way off.