Herbert

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

We need a favour. If you enjoy these morning business briefings/diatribes/hate crimes, consider forwarding to a friend or lover.

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And then subscribe here, handsome devil.

— Ed & Joe

JOBS
The job market is getting more miserable by the day

4.7% of people are unemployed, first of all. And we can’t even blame them for not being go-getting self-starters because the job market hasn’t been this bad in 4 years. 

London is the worst

Where 6.2% of the population is out of work. 

All of which is partly due to the government’s imposition of tax hikes on businesses.

The number of job vacancies has been falling

For graduate jobs, too - for three years in a row. Which isn’t good, chaps. Job vacancies are the lowest they’ve been for 10 years. 

But we can’t entirely blame Keir Starmer for this, which is indeed a shame. ChatGPT must share our righteous vitriol. 

Since the LLM’s launch, one-third of entry-level jobs have been wiped out.  

This might force the Bank of England to cut interest rates

Which even the Governor of the BoE said would happen if the job market continued to drag itself along like a man flu-stricken English gentleman.

This would obviously encourage businesses to take out low-interest loans from the bank - to pay staff, bills and suppliers. In other words: to grow.

CYBERSECURITY
Scottish cybersecurity firm folds

One of Britain’s biggest cybersecurity firms, Adarma, has just gone into administration. 173 people have just been sacked. And it’s all because: 

Its investor, Livingbridge, pulled funding 3 months ago

Leaving the directors struggling to plug enormous funding gaps. 

They tried to seek fresh investment and cover the snowballing costs. But as each new prospective investor withdrew, the operating costs for existing clients snowballed. 

Until the debt was so unmanageable that no one wanted to invite them to the village fete. 

Livingbridge, a private equity firm, claimed it pulled funding because Adarma had lost some major contracts, including one back in 2022, when its biggest client decided to insource all its cybersecurity needs. 

But that might have been Livingbridge’s fault

There are rumours swirling around Reddit threads, particularly from former staffers at Adarma. 

Livingbridge’s investment came at a cost, pumping the price “to ridiculous levels”, incentivising Adarma’s clients to drop them in favour of more cost-effective solutions. 

Which is what private equity does best, from cybersecurity to veterinary practices. 

In short: beware of all Faustian pacts, you glorious beasts.

BANKING
Barclays was fined £42 million

Because it failed to properly vet its clients, one of whom was (unwittingly) up to his neck in a money laundering operation. 

Barclays didn’t conduct basic due diligence

On Stunt & Co, to be precise, a gold bullion merchant, a profession about as high-risk as meeting your Albanian girlfriend’s dad. 

Stunt & Co had received well over £48.6 million into its Barclays account from Fowler Oldfield, a money laundering syndicate based in Bradford. 

Barclays sat on their backsides

For five years. Even after Fowler Oldfield was being investigated, the absolute nutters. 

To make matters worse, they provided a bank account to WealthTrek, an operation tied to money laundering that wasn’t legally allowed to hold clients’ money. 

And, had the geniuses over at Barclays conducted a simple online search, they would have realised. 

This isn’t the first time Barclays has been naughty

Back in 2022, the bank was fined £783,800 for working with an extremely dodgy payments firm Premier FX. In 2015, it was - you guessed it - processing payments for some very dodgy individuals. 

All of which is strange: I thought bankers were the good guys?

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🚺️ 👩‍💻 The Lovelace Report busted some myths about women in tech. Just 3% left their roles due to caretaking responsibilities, while 25% left due to a lack of career advancement, and 17% left because they didn’t feel recognised. An average of 50,000 women leave their tech jobs yearly, costing British businesses nearly £1 billion due to the productivity loss, recruitment costs, and sluggish onboarding. 

• 💰️ 📈 A National Crime Agency (NCA) officer stole bitcoin from a drug lord he was investigating. Paul Chowles (from Bristol, the crazy hippie) had been involved in the arrest of a Silk Road merchant back in 2019. He helped extract the bitcoin from his account but mysteriously, half of it went missing. Meanwhile, Paul funnelled the money into various bank accounts. At the time, it was worth £60,000. Today, it was £4.4 million. Let that sink in… 

• 📊 🏦 Prepare for a pro-investment ad-blizzard. The advertising giant WPP has been tasked by Britain’s banks, the London Stock Exchange, and the government to make stocks and shares investments look super cool, neat and wizard. This comes after Rachel Reeves urged financial risk-taking and promised to put post-financial crisis regulations on a lovely big bonfire. 

• 🫵 🚨 Companies House just banished 11,500 naughty ‘businesses’ after a 2-day crackdown. They visited 11 addresses in person - one of which was home to nearly 5,000 dodgy registrations (bit of a giveaway). The wonderfully named Rachael Herbert (director of the National Economic Crime Centre) estimates that over £100 billion is laundered through our sceptred isle every year.

• 🍼 📝 Sixteen-year-old Brits will now be able to vote, despite not being allowed to die for their country. Which is weird. It’s as if it’s a politically cynical move by an increasingly unpopular government to win votes from an electoral base that disproportionately favours its party (33%) over the likes of Reform (20%).