Category: 3. Business

A mining company from Cornwall said it has become the first in the UK to produce lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LHM).

LHM is a key element of lithium-ion batteries and found in electric vehicles, grid scale battery storage and batteries in consumer electronics.

Cornish Lithium has repurposed a former china clay quarry and used patented low-carbon processing technology to produce LHM extracted from Cornish granite.

Founder and executive chairman Jeremy Wrathall said it was an important day for his company and the UK.

“We can test every single stage of it on an industrial scale, that’s why it is such an important day for us,” he said.

“Our faith in investing £10m in this project has been vindicated.”

Experts said it was a major step forward for Cornwall, but would also help secure a domestic supply of a key material for UK industry.

James McFarlane, a technical mining consultant, said: “The company was only founded in 2016 and I believe only started really looking at the hard rock potential in St Austell, in 2019.

“So to get from there to producing LHM domestically from their own deposit, is a massive milestone and one that really needs to be applauded for the amount of hard work that has gone into it.”

Cornish Lithium said it planned to build a full-size lithium processing and refining plant with an annual capacity of up to 10,000 tonnes.

It could be in full-scale production in 2029, potentially creating 300 jobs and injecting £800m into the UK economy, it said.

A group of creditors to bankrupt auto-dealership lender PrimaLend cited “grave concerns” over its Chapter 11 filing, especially the exclusion from the process of what they called its “most distressed” entity.

The ad hoc group of holders of $75 million of bonds issued by PrimaLend’s main holding company, which stopped paying interest on the debt several months ago, said the move to leave out the entity was designed to reduce the influence of unsecured creditors like them. It also objected to PrimaLend’s request for court approval to access bankruptcy financing, which sought to force a guaranty and legal releases by the entity, PCAP Holdings.

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The US Federal Reserve has announced plans for a major overhaul of its annual banking stress tests in response to a legal challenge by Wall Street groups against the regulator’s main tool for setting their capital levels.

The changes the Fed announced on Friday, including proposals to disclose and seek feedback on the scenarios and models it uses to test the resilience of banks, will make the exercise much less onerous for the biggest US lenders.

The changes to its stress test models and scenarios “are not expected to materially change capital requirements for firms” the central bank said, estimating they would fall by a “negligible” amount.

It added its revamp “seeks to improve the transparency and public accountability of the supervisory stress test, while ensuring that the stress test remains an effective tool for understanding and assessing risk and retaining appropriate risk sensitivity and risk capture in capital requirements”.

But there was dissent on the Fed board about the changes. Michael Barr, a member of the Fed board of governors, said he could not support the proposals because they would “make the stress test weaker and less credible” by leading to “overly optimistic projections” and opening the process up to “gaming by banks”.

His successor as Fed vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman, called the proposals “excellent”, adding she was disappointed “long-standing issues with the stress testing framework were not addressed proactively, but instead only after a lawsuit became inevitable”.

The move comes as US regulators are planning to rework many of their important rules for banks under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to strip back regulation to support growth and investment.

Since the Fed started subjecting the biggest American banks to stress tests in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the comprehensive capital analysis and review (CCAR) process has become a crucial mechanism for controlling capital requirements in the sector.

However, Wall Street executives have long complained about the Fed’s lack of transparency over the models used in the process and the high volatility in the results each year, which have occasionally required lenders to pare back their dividend payments.

The Fed on Friday said it would reduce the amount of supporting documents and data that banks have to disclose as part of the process by 10,000 pages on average per lender.

In the 2026 test, banks will have to gauge how they perform in a scenario where US unemployment rises to 10 per cent, a fall of nearly a third in nominal home prices and a 40 per cent decline in commercial property prices.

“The stress tests have been the strongest driver of capital requirements for the biggest US banks,” said Douglas Elliott, a partner at consultants Oliver Wyman. “The changes are likely, in practice, to loosen this constraint to some extent.”

The Fed estimated its model and scenario changes would reduce aggregate capital requirements for the biggest US banks by a “negligible” 0.25 percentage points on average compared to the past two years.

It is set to disclose the details of the tests earlier in the process, under Friday’s proposals, and will also publish more comprehensive details of the methodology.

Regulators require banks to have a minimum amount of capital to absorb losses in a crisis, but lenders prefer lower requirements to boost their profitability when measured against total equity capital.

Late last year, a number of banking and business groups filed an unusual lawsuit against the Fed in a federal court in Ohio, arguing its stress tests were illegal because they lacked transparency. That prompted the central bank to commit to reform the process.

The plaintiffs included the Bank Policy Institute, the American Bankers Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Bankers League and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.

The bond market hasn’t rung false recession alarms for this long in at least half a century.

By Monday, it will be three full years since the market’s movements started suggesting a US downturn was on the horizon. That’s when 3-month Treasury yields first pushed above 10-year ones — inverting the yield curve — as traders anticipated the Federal Reserve’s steep interest-rate hikes would stall the economy.

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Beer’s qualities as a “social lubricant” must play an important role in the debate about the harms of alcohol, the boss of Heineken has said.

Dolf van den Brink said that “in this time of loneliness and a mental health epidemic”, beer’s role in bringing people together was “important to make part of the public debate”.

Public health bodies are hardening their stance against alcohol, prompting the industry to talk up the non-health benefits of drinking such as socialising and to question new research into the dangers of moderate consumption. 

“Beer is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, consumer goods category,” van den Brink told the Financial Times, pointing to early evidence of collective beer drinking in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. 

Earlier this year the outgoing US surgeon general said alcoholic beverages should carry cancer warning labels, while the World Health Organization has been stepping up a campaign against moderate drinking.

The Heineken chief said that while the discussion about the effect of moderate alcohol consumption on health was legitimate, it lacked nuance. 

“We do believe that it’s not always reported in a balanced way, telling the full picture, because the relationship between alcohol and health is complex,” van den Brink said, while stressing that the debate needed to start by emphasising the harmful use of alcohol.

“There is a legitimate debate in society now about the effect of moderate consumption of alcohol, including beer, on health. And again, we believe that needs to be a balanced and nuanced discussion.”

Socialising had been at the core of Heineken’s marketing for decades and was “part of the essence of the product”, he said.

Other brewers have also extolled the health benefits of their brews, with the “Guinness is good for you” slogan used for decades to promote the Irish stout.

Heineken, Carlsberg and ABInbev have launched non-alcoholic versions of their beers in a bid to keep drinkers who want to moderate their consumption loyal to their brands. 

On Thursday the Dutch brewer announced a five-year plan to get consumers to buy more beer and boost efficiency at the company, which, like other alcoholic drinks producers, has been hit by weaker consumer demand. 

Van den Brink also warned there would be more brewery closures, but “not at a large scale”. 

Investors have soured on Heineken after two years of weak performance and a string of earnings misses, with shares falling by a fifth from highs in 2023. 

At an investor presentation in Seville on Thursday, the brewer said 80 per cent of its investment would go towards Amstel, Desperados, Moretti, Tiger and Heineken, with a quarter of its 350 brands getting none at all.

Porsche AG suffered its first quarterly loss as a listed company, with the luxury-car manufacturer taking a €3.1 billion ($3.6 billion) hit this year from scaling back its electric ambitions and US tariffs.

The 911 maker reported a €966 million operating loss in the three months through September, after delaying some of its electric-vehicle plans and scrapping a program to build its own batteries. Slumping demand in China has also taken a toll.