Iran’s trade has fallen by between 25% and 35% under the combined pressure of US sanctions and a naval blockade, with imports hit harder than exports, President Masoud Pezeshkian has said. The Iran trade sanctions impact is now being felt across the country’s economy, Pezeshkian acknowledged in a late Friday interview with state television, while Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei separately called for the country to move away from the US dollar.Speaking in an interview translated from a Tasnim News transcript via Google, Pezeshkian was direct about what the figures mean. ‘Our exports have decreased, but imports have decreased more,’ he…
Author: Helen Rourke
Helen Rourke
Helen Rourke trained as a chartered accountant and spent fourteen years in financial services before starting to write. She qualified at a mid-tier firm, moved in-house to a media company's finance team, and spent her last years as a finance director at a creative agency, which gave her an unusual vantage point on both sides of the balance sheet. She writes about personal finance, tax, pensions, and the money questions people ask at dinner parties but never ask their accountant. She explains numbers without condescension and has no interest in making simple things sound complicated. Helen lives in North London. She files her own tax return on the first day it opens and considers this a character flaw.
The US Venezuela oil deal announced by President Donald Trump would give Washington majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves, in what both governments have described as a landmark agreement to reshape the South American country’s energy industry. Trump posted on social media that the transaction ‘more than doubles American oil reserves, greatly increases our oil supply, and will substantially lower gas prices for all Americans’.Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world, estimated at 303 billion barrels, though production has fallen sharply since its peak in the late 1990s. To understand…
The US Treasury has moved to sanction Banque Misr UAE, the United Arab Emirates branch of an Egyptian bank, after concluding it processed roughly $1.8 billion for companies allegedly linked to Iran’s shadow banking network, as part of a broader campaign to cut off Tehran’s access to the international financial system.The action is the latest move under what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has branded ‘Operation Economic Outcast’, a sanctions drive launched four days before this week’s announcement with the stated aim of severing all of Iran’s economic ties around the world.What Banque Misr UAE is accused ofAccording to analysis published…
Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh used his Kevin Warsh Jackson Hole speech to warn that policymakers will ‘have work to do’ if they are not confident that inflation is easing for American households. Speaking at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Wyoming, Warsh said the most recent inflation readings looked better than expected over the summer, but did not show that the current picture had ‘meaningfully improved’.The symposium brings together central bankers, government officials and academics from around the world each year to discuss interest rates, inflation and broader economic challenges. It was Warsh’s first appearance at the…
The government has unveiled plans to tackle the cowboy builder crackdown UK consumers have long demanded, announcing a new database of vetted traders and a protected payment system designed to stop families losing money to rogue tradespeople. The scheme is set to launch next month.Home renovations are one of the biggest sources of consumer complaints handled by Citizens Advice. The government says more than a quarter of people who carried out home improvements in the past 18 months encountered problems, with builders disappearing after receiving upfront payments among the most common complaints.A survey carried out for the Competition and Markets…
Iran has set out sweeping conditions for any return to talks with Washington over the Strait of Hormuz, with senior officials saying that Iran Hormuz diplomacy conditions include an end to military operations across Lebanon, Gaza and Syria before any new agreement can be reached.The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most consequential oil corridor. Before the US-Israel war on Iran began on 28 February, Al Jazeera reports that one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies passed through it. The volume of traffic using the strait has since collapsed, and the question of who controls it has…
Six months into the Iran war, financial markets have largely moved on, even as the conflict that began with US and Israeli strikes drags into an open-ended standoff. Front-month Brent crude oil futures have gained almost 20% since the Iran war six months of fighting began, but those contracts are now trading around a third below their April peak of $126.41 a barrel, and global equity markets have broadly rallied as corporate earnings optimism has outweighed fears about the war’s wider economic consequences.What the White House once expected to last four to six weeks has settled into something far more…
The question of who controls Strait of Hormuz safe passage is shaping oil markets and geopolitics in equal measure, with analysts and officials sharply divided over how much oil is actually getting through the narrow Gulf waterway. Competing claims from Iran and the United States, a pair of cautiously positive diplomatic headlines, and an escalating US economic campaign against Tehran are all pulling in different directions at once. The Toll Plan Gulf Nations Will Not Accept Iran and Oman have indicated they are close to establishing a joint shipping corridor through the Strait, with the two countries potentially working together…
The number of young people NEET figures UK-wide now stands at 981,000, with new data showing nearly one in eight people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training, as a long-awaited government-commissioned report prepares to set out recommendations for tackling the crisis.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published the figures for the period between April and June. While the total has edged down from over one million in the first three months of the year, it has risen by 3% compared with the same period last year, when 951,000 young people were classed as Neet. The…
Tarr’s Ice Cream closure will bring to an end more than a century of trading in Brislington, Bristol, with the family-run shop set to shut its doors after operating since the 1920s. The business has been a fixture in the area for 106 years, making it one of the longest-running independent ice cream shops in the city. A century of scoops in Brislington Tarr’s has served generations of Bristol families from its home in Brislington, a suburb in the south-east of the city. Family-run businesses of this kind are a rarity in modern retail, where rising costs, changing shopping habits…
