The central bank allotted 100.885 billion pounds ($139.22 billion) in 7-day funds to banks in return for collateral
International News via Reuters:
The Bank of England allotted more than 100 billion pounds to banks in its weekly short-term repo on Thursday for the first time since the programme started in 2022.
The central bank allotted 100.885 billion pounds ($139.22 billion) in 7-day funds to banks in return for collateral, up from 97.876 billion pounds last week and passing a previous record of 99.300 billion pounds on January 15.
Usage of the BoE’s weekly and longer-term repo facilities has been growing as the BoE unwinds its past quantitative easing bond purchases and shifts towards a repo-led system for providing liquidity to the British financial system.
($1 = 0.7246 pounds)
Reporting by David Milliken, editing by Andy Bruce
The greenback edged down against a basket of currencies as uncertainty over U.S. economic policies and geopolitical moves weighed on sentiment
International News via Reuters:
The pound hovered near multi‑year highs against the dollar on Thursday, with U.S. policy uncertainty keeping the greenback on the back foot as markets looked ahead to next week’s Bank of England decision and to developments on the UK political front.
The decision to keep Bank Rate unchanged this month may be less hotly debated given recent news of the strongest private sector business growth since April 2024 alongside unexpectedly strong retail sales and inflation rising further from the MPC’s 2% target, according to economists polled by Reuters.
The greenback edged down against a basket of currencies as uncertainty over U.S. economic policies and geopolitical moves weighed on sentiment.
Sterling was roughly unchanged at $1.3802, after hitting $1.36645 early this week, its highest since September 2021.
Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at global financial services firm Ebury, noted that in the last few days “domestic news in the UK, namely expectations for Bank of England rates and the brewing civil war within the Labour Party,” has been completely overshadowed by headlines elsewhere.
British Labour Party politician Andy Burnham was on Sunday blocked from trying to return to parliament, with lawmakers on the left of the party accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his allies of a political move to keep out a potential leadership rival.
Labour is trailing in opinion polls to Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK ahead of bellwether local elections in May.
The pound lost 0.05% against the euro to 86.60 pence.
“UK politics may well take its toll on sterling again over the coming months,” said Chris Turner head of forex strategy at ING, mentioning a UK by-election on 26 February.
There looks to be no upside for Starmer from a by-election in the pipeline in the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton, as the Labour Party could lose a seat it won with a big majority in 2024.
“Sterling is also vulnerable to any further bond market pressure emanating from Japan or the U.S. In short, we think sterling is near the top of multi-quarter ranges,” ING’s Turner added.
reporting by Stefano Rebaudo; editing by William Maclean
Research, public consultation and bipartisan input will shape a policy framework with timelines before any legislation is drafted, and completion is targeted for September 2026
Full press release from the Government of Bermuda:
The Government welcomes public interest in electoral reform. This is an issue that belongs to the whole country and deserves thoughtful discussion, not rushed conclusions.
From the outset, the Government has been clear about its approach. Electoral reform must be grounded in research, consultation, and careful policy development before legislation is drafted. That position was stated during the Budget Debate in May and has guided the work ever since. Consultation is not a delay tactic, nor is it a “rubber stamp”, it is how durable and effective reform is achieved.
The town halls were deliberately designed as part of a structured consultation phase. They were intended to listen, test ideas, and surface practical considerations across the full electoral system, not to present a finished policy before the public had been heard. This process has included public meetings, engagement with overseas students, ongoing work with the Parliamentary Registrar, and discussions with civil society and political stakeholders.
It is important to recognise that consultation is meant to shape policy. The Electoral Reform Policy Framework will be published once this phase is complete, and it will include clear timelines and next steps before any legislation is brought forward.
Regarding the final town hall, Minister Rabain was unavoidably delayed by an unusually long-running Cabinet meeting. However, it must be recognised that he attended all 7 of the previous sessions and remains fully engaged in this work. The final session followed the same presentation, format, and opportunity for feedback, all of which have been captured and will inform the policy framework.
The Government remains on track to complete this reform programme by September 2026. That timeline reflects both the scale and importance of the work and the need to get it right.
Finally, the Government’s position on bipartisan collaboration has not changed. As outlined in correspondence to the Leader of the Opposition on 8 December 2025, this process was always intended to include space for the Opposition’s views before legislation is drafted. That offer remains open, because strengthening Bermuda’s democracy requires cooperation.
Electoral reform is a significant national undertaking. The Government will continue this work in a transparent and consultative manner, focused on delivering reforms that strengthen fairness, accessibility, and public confidence in Bermuda’s democratic system.
Heartbreak for the Lady Gombey Warriors, as Panama edged through to the final following a dramatic 2–2 draw.
Second Half Recap
Bermuda burst out of the gates after the interval, pressing with intent and purpose. Just two minutes into the second half, that energy paid off when substitute Priya Dill made an instant impact, finding the back of the net to give Bermuda a deserved 2–1 lead.
Panama nearly responded in the 59th minute with a golden opportunity to equalise, but the chance went begging, allowing Bermuda to cling to their slender advantage.
However, the Panamanians would not be denied for long. A contentious yellow card led to a dangerous set piece, and Panama capitalised, levelling the score at two goals apiece.
The match finished in a 2–2 draw — enough for Panama to secure their place in the final. Team Bermuda must now wait to see if they advance as the tournament’s best second-place finisher.
Football: U17 women’s Concacaf qualifier in progress
It’s the showdown everyone has been waiting for — and it wasted no time living up to the hype.
With a place in the final on the line, tournament favourites Panama struck first, converting from the penalty spot in the eighth minute to take an early lead. Dominating possession and dictating the tempo, Panama looked poised to cruise toward yet another convincing victory.
But the Lady Gombey Warriors had other plans.
Absorbing wave after wave of pressure, Bermuda’s back line stood firm, refusing to be overrun. And in the 17th minute, one moment of precision was all they needed. A perfectly weighted through ball split the defence, and Daley Outerbridge calmly rolled her finish past the advancing goalkeeper — the first goal conceded by Panama in the tournament — to pull Bermuda level.
Former Premier Dr. Ewart Brown calls for all criminal charges against him to be thrown out; a decision on whether the case should be dismissed could be handed down late February
A judgment in the abuse of process application filed by Dr. Ewart Brown could be handed down as early as the end of next month.
Lawyers concluded their submissions today where Dr. Brown is calling for all criminal proceedings to be thrown out. Jasmine Patterson has more in this report.
The Facebook and Instagram parent expects annual capital expenditure to be between $115 billion and $135 billion, compared with $72.22 billion a year earlier
International News via Reuters:
Meta on Wednesday forecast its annual capital expenditure to increase sharply, as the social media giant builds artificial intelligence infrastructure in the pursuit of superintelligence.
The Facebook and Instagram parent expects annual capital expenditure to be between $115 billion and $135 billion, compared with $72.22 billion a year earlier.
Meta’s ad platform has remained its growth engine, allowing advertisers to automate and personalize their campaigns and help the company support its investments in AI infrastructure to achieve superingelligence – a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance.
The company is laying off about 10% of staff at its Reality Labs group, which has about 15,000 employees, as it redirects resources from some of its metaverse products to wearables.
The unit — which has accumulated more than $70 billion in losses since 2021 — includes Meta’s ambitious metaverse bet that prompted the company to change its name from Facebook.
Meta is building several gigawatt-scale data centers across the United States, including one in rural Louisiana, a project U.S. President Donald Trump said would cost $50 billion. It would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan.
To boost its energy infrastructure, Meta has partnered with companies such as Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower that will position it as one of the leading corporate buyers of nuclear power in the world.
Meta recently appointed Trump ally Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chairman in a bid to drive partnerships with governments and investors for its AI projects. Along with other senior executives she will also focus on the company’s global fleet of data centers.
Last year, Meta signed contracts with Alphabet, CoreWeave, Nebius for additional compute power, signaling pressing need for capacity expansion due to internal constraints.
The spending spree has been prompted by Big Tech’s rivalry in Silicon Valley’s AI race, where Meta has stumbled after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. Now the company is betting on its new AI models, launched internally this month.
The holiday quarter results come as the company’s Advantage+ automated advertising suite is gaining strong advertiser adoption due to its ability to streamline campaign setup and enhance return on ad spend, analysts have said.
In the past year, Meta launched ads on WhatsApp and Threads, creating direct rivalry with platforms like Elon Musk’s X, while Instagram’s Reels continues to jostle with TikTok and YouTube Shorts within the lucrative short-video market.
Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo
The company’s shares plunged more than 7% in extended trading
International News via Reuters:
Microsoft delivered a marginal beat on quarterly revenue expectations for its crucial cloud-computing business on Wednesday, amplifying investor doubts about the payoff from its hefty artificial intelligence spending and highlighting growing competition in the industry.
The company’s shares plunged more than 7% in extended trading.
The company said revenue at its Azure cloud division grew 39% in the October-December period, its fiscal second quarter. That compares with a consensus estimate of 38.8%, according to Visible Alpha.
Total revenue rose 17% to $81.3 billion in the second quarter, while analysts expected $80.27 billion, based on estimates compiled by LSEG.
The Windows maker has long enjoyed a first-mover advantage in Big Tech’s AI race thanks to its early bet on OpenAI, whose technology powers most of its offerings, including M365 Copilot.
But a strong reception for Google’s latest Gemini model and the launch of autonomous agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, have posed risks both to Microsoft’s AI business and the software offerings that have long been central to the company.
That has weighed on Microsoft’s stock as investor doubts persist over whether Big Tech will deliver enough returns to make up for the AI spending. Collectively, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon are expected to spend more than $500 billion on AI this year.
Some analysts have said that mounting losses at OpenAI, in which Microsoft has a 27% stake, could drive up expenses as the company books its share of those losses.
Late October’s major OpenAI restructuring gave Microsoft that stake. And while the overhaul included a commitment from OpenAI to buy $250 billion of Azure services, it also freed the ChatGPT creator to pursue cloud deals with other companies that could lower its reliance on Microsoft.
OpenAI has agreed to a $38 billion cloud deal with Amazon Web Services since then.
Reporting by Deborah Sophia and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona
In keeping rates unchanged, the Fed cited still-elevated inflation alongside solid economic growth, and gave little indication in its latest policy statement of when borrowing costs might be reduced again
International News via Reuters:
Global stocks were on pace to snap a five-session streak of gains on Wednesday, while the U.S. dollar held on to gains after the Federal Reserve kept rates steady, as widely expected.
In keeping rates unchanged, the Fed cited still-elevated inflation alongside solid economic growth, and gave little indication in its latest policy statement of when borrowing costs might be reduced again.
Investors will now turn to comments from Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends in May, for clues on the path of interest rates.
U.S. stocks showed little reaction to the Fed statement, with the S&P 500 posting slight losses after crossing above 7,000 for the first time ahead of earnings from megacap companies Microsoft, Tesla and Meta Platforms after the closing bell, while results from Apple are due on Thursday.
“The Fed didn’t rock the boat. It was widely expected that they’d be on pause. The reality is we probably don’t see any cuts until Powell is out of the Fed sometime after May,” said Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group in Omaha.
“They did cite some positives on the labor market front, but clearly inflation is a worry. Just look at the soaring commodity prices we’ve been seeing recently.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 24.74 points, or 0.05%, to 49,028.15, the S&P 500 fell 4.39 points, or 0.06%, to 6,974.21 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 28.14 points, or 0.12%, to 23,845.24.
MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe fell 0.73 points, or 0.07%, to 1,050.35 after climbing to an intraday record of 1,055.04, marking its third straight intraday record.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index closed down 0.75%, weighed by a drop of about 8% in LVMH after the Louis Vuitton and Tiffany owner reported quarterly results, but CEO Bernard Arnault said he was cautious about the year ahead.
FX WATCH
The dollar showed signs of steadying after its biggest daily percentage drop since August 1, as U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to shrug off its recent weakness, sending the greenback to a four-year low.
The dollar has stumbled recently on expectations of continued Fed rate cuts this year, tariff uncertainty, policy volatility, including threats to the central bank’s independence, and rising fiscal deficits, all of which have dented investor confidence in U.S. economic stability.
The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.79% to 96.66, with the euro down 1.07% at $1.1911 after breaching the $1.20 mark following Trump’s comments.
European Central Bank policymakers flagged increasing concerns over the euro’s quick appreciation against the dollar, warning it could drag inflation down even as price growth is already set to undershoot the ECB’s 2% target.
The Fed meeting comes as the Trump administration continues a criminal investigation of Powell, an evolving effort to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and the nomination of a new chief.
Markets are not pricing in more than a 50% chance of a rate cut until the central bank’s June meeting, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.
Against the Japanese yen, the dollar strengthened 1.08% to 153.84, while sterling weakened 0.56% to $1.3768.
The United States has a strong dollar policy and that means setting the right fundamentals, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, while denying that the U.S. was intervening in currency markets to support the yen after the Japanese currency surged against the greenback last week.
The recent dollar weakness has given support to other commodities, helping gold hit a record above $5,300 an ounce. U.S. crude rose 1.07% to $63.07 a barrel, and Brent climbed to $68.27 per barrel, up 1.04% on the day after hitting a four-month high of $68.53.
Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak, additional reporting by Pranav Kashyap and Twesha Dikshit in Bengaluru, Dhara Ranasinghe in London and Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Timothy Heritage, Jan Harvey, Alexander Smith, Rod Nickel
The Swedish streaming platform said in a blog post that its payouts in 2025 grew by more than 10% from a year earlier, with independent artists and labels accounting for half of all royalties
International News via Reuters:
Spotify said on Wednesday it had paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry last year, adding that it was the largest annual payment to music from a retailer in history.
The Swedish streaming platform said in a blog post that its payouts in 2025 grew by more than 10% from a year earlier, with independent artists and labels accounting for half of all royalties.
The company has been prioritizing retaining and bringing in new artists to the platform as it faces stiff competition from other major players such as YouTube and Apple in the music-streaming market.
YouTube said in October it had paid out more than $8 billion to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2024 and June 2025.
“Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well,” the blog said.
The company reinvests the money it keeps into the platform, it said, as it looks to grow various content formats such as podcasts, videos and audiobooks.
Spotify recently raised the prices for its premium subscription plans in several markets to boost profits and leverage its large user base to drive growth.
It had 713 million monthly active users at the end of the third quarter.
Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas
Nathan Trott reached a significant milestone at the Cardiff City Stadium as the Bluebirds continued their impressive ascent in Sky Bet League One. The Bermudian international recorded his tenth shutout of the campaign in a dominant 4-0 victory over Barnsley on Tuesday, further cementing his reputation as one of the division’s premier shot-stoppers. Trott’s composure between the posts—highlighted by a stunning first-half save to deny a Davis Keillor-Dunn thunderbolt—provided the foundation for an expansive Cardiff display that left the visiting Tykes with no answer to the hosts’ superior clinical edge.
While Trott celebrated a clean sheet in Wales, there was a different story for Nahki Wells at the John Smith’s Stadium. Luton Town manager Jack Wilshere opted to shake up his starting eleven following a disappointing weekend defeat at Plymouth, leaving Wells on the bench for the trip to Huddersfield Town. Despite the tactical shift, the Hatters struggled to find their rhythm, and Wells was introduced as a 61st-minute substitute to provide a spark. However, the Terriers held firm to secure a narrow 1-0 win, leaving Luton to reflect on a difficult night in West Yorkshire.
Further down the pyramid, Kane Crichlow and Chelmsford City enjoyed a fruitful evening at the Melbourne Stadium. In a tightly contested National League South clash against Tonbridge Angels on Monday, the Clarets managed to edge their rivals 1-0. Crichlow’s technical quality in the middle of the park was vital in helping Chelmsford navigate a cagey affair and secure three valuable points in front of the home supporters.
The evening was less kind to Coleridge Fubler Jr. and Qur’an Raynor, whose Binfield FC side traveled to Kent for a Velocity Cup Quarter-Final. Facing a high-flying Ramsgate at the Southwood Stadium, the Moles found the step up in quality difficult to handle. Despite a spirited effort from the Bermudian duo, with Raynor introduced as a 73rd-minute substitute, Binfield bowed out of the competition following a comprehensive 5-0 defeat. While the cup run ends in disappointment, the experience of reaching the final eight will undoubtedly serve as a platform for their remaining league campaign.
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