About 600,000 homeowners have a mortgage that “tracks” the Bank of England’s rate, so a base rate change would have an immediate impact on monthly repayments.
But more than eight in 10 mortgage customers have fixed-rate deals. While their monthly payments aren’t immediately affected, future deals are.
Mortgage rates are still much higher than they have been for much of the past decade.
The average two-year fixed mortgage rate is 5.46%, according to financial information company Moneyfacts, and a five-year deal is 5.23%.
It means many homebuyers and those remortgaging are having to pay a lot more than if they had borrowed the same amount a few years ago.
About 800,000 fixed-rate mortgages with an interest rate of 3% or below are expected to expire every year, on average, until the end of 2027.
A hold in interest rates may have relatively little impact on pricing of fixed-rate mortgages in the short-term. The outlook is complicated at the moment as the markets, and lenders, consider the impact of the Budget and other global events.
You can see how your mortgage may be affected by future interest rate changes by using our calculator:
NHS website information on drinking while breastfeeding saw the highest increase in visits at Christmas last year, new figures show.
Among the most visited pages on Christmas and Boxing Day in 2023 were advice coughs, colds and chest infections.
But some people also wanted to know about drinking and breastfeeding, alcohol poisoning and rabies, NHS England said.
Page views on burns and scalds and how to treat them also increased.
In terms of health conditions, the most commonly viewed page after Covid-19 was for the winter vomiting norovirus with 19,170 visits over the 48-hour festive period in 2023.
Some 17,398 other visits – around one every 10 seconds – were for chest infections, while pages on diarrhoea and vomiting had 11,789 views.
Overall views on pages of the NHS website relating to breastfeeding and drinking alcohol were lower, but increased by 146% – from 1,028 to 2,526 – compared to the week before Christmas.
Alcohol can pass into your breastmilk and then into your baby when you feed them, the NHS advises.
An occasional drink is unlikely to harm your baby, especially if you wait at least two hours after having a drink before feeding, it adds, but warns: “Regularly drinking above the recommended limits can be harmful for you and your baby.”
There was also a 60% rise in people seeking information on alcohol poisoning during the festive period compared to a normal 48 hours, with hits up from 1,268 to 2,008.
And visits to pages about animal and human bites increased by a third to 1,494 from 1,128.
Hits on NHS pages about rabies increased by 123% to 1,564 over Christmas compared to 700 a week earlier.
Page views on burns and scalds and how to treat them increased by 50% compared to the week before Christmas to 2,748 from 1,782.
Prof Sir Stephen Powis, NHS England’s medical director, said accidents and injuries can happen and that the NHS website and the NHS App are available around the clock to provide help and information.
“So if you do burn yourself putting the roast potatoes in the oven, or you pick up a winter virus and want some support to manage the symptoms, the NHS website is the best place to find useful advice on what to do.”
He said NHS staff would be working hard throughout the festive season to provide care for those most in need.
Anyone in need of emergency help should contact 999, or 111 for less urgent health needs.
The factory was scheduled to be operational by March 2025, and was set to be BYD’s first EV plant outside of Asia.
The workers, hired by Jinjiang Construction Brazil, lived in four facilities in Camaçari city.
At one such facility, workers were made to sleep on beds without mattresses, according to prosecutors.
Each bathroom was also shared among 31 workers, forcing them to get up extremely early in order to be ready for work.
“The conditions found in the lodgings revealed an alarming picture of precariousness and degradation,” the MPT said.
“Slavery-like conditions”, as defined by Brazilian law, include debt bondage and work that violates human dignity.
The MPT added that the situation also constitutes “forced labour”, as many workers had their wages withheld and faced excessive costs for terminating their contracts.
BYD said affected workers had been moved to hotels.
It added that it had conducted a “detailed review” of the working and living conditions for subcontracted employees, and asked on “several occasions” for the construction firm to make improvements.
BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, is one of the world’s largest EV makers.
The company has also been expanding its foothold in Brazil, which is its largest overseas market by a wide margin.
It first opened a factory in São Paulo in 2015, producing chassis for electric buses.
Last year, it announced that it would invest 3 billion reais ($484.2m) in Brazil to build an EV manufacturing plant.
EV sales in China have been boosted by government subsidies. which encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids.
But there is a growing backlash abroad against what some see as the Chinese government’s unfair support for domestic car makers.
Major markets like the US and EU have placed tariffs on EVs from China, with more tariffs expected during the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump.
A powerful government panel on Monday failed to reach consensus on the possible national security risks of a nearly $15 billion proposed deal for Nippon Steel of Japan to purchase U.S. Steel, leaving a decision to President Joe Biden, a longtime opponent of the deal.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, sent its long-awaited report on the merger to Mr. Biden, who formally came out against the deal in March of this year and now has 15 days to reach a final decision, the White House said. A U.S. official familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the private report, said some federal agencies represented on the panel were skeptical that allowing a Japanese company to buy an American-owned steelmaker would create national security risks.
Both Mr. Biden and President-elect Donald Trump courted unionized workers at U.S. Steel and vowed to block the acquisition amid concerns about foreign ownership of a flagship American company. The economic risk, however, is that Nippon Steel also has the financial resources to invest in the mills and upgrade them, possibly helping to preserve steel production within the United States.
The interagency committee reviews such deals with an eye toward potential national security risks. Monday was the deadline to approve the deal, recommend that Mr. Biden block it or extend the review process.
The Washington Post earlier reported CFIUS’ submission of its report.
The United States Steel Corp. Clairton Coke Works facility in Clairton, Pennsylvania, on Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. United States Steel Corp.
Justin Merriman/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Under the terms of the approximately $14.9 billion all-cash deal, U.S. Steel would keep its name and its headquarters in Pittsburgh, where it was founded in 1901 by J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. It would become a subsidiary of Nippon Steel, and the combined company would be among the top three steel-producing companies in the world, according to 2023 figures from the World Steel Association.
Mr. Biden, backed by the United Steelworkers, said earlier this year that it was “vital for (U.S. Steel) to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated.”
Trump has also opposed the acquisition and vowed earlier this month on his Truth Social platform to “block this deal from happening.” Trump proposed to revive U.S. Steel’s flagging fortunes “through a series of Tax Incentives and Tariffs.”
The steelworkers union has said it doesn’t believe Nippon Steel would keep jobs at unionized plants, make good on collectively bargained benefits or protect American steel production from cheap foreign imports.
“Our union has been calling for strict government scrutiny of the sale since it was announced. Now it’s up to President Biden to determine the best path forward,” David McCall, the steelworkers’ president, said in a statement Monday. “We continue to believe that means keeping U.S. Steel domestically owned and operated.”
In the face of political opposition, Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel had waged a public relations campaign to win over skeptics.
U.S. Steel said in a statement Monday that the deal “is the best way, by far, to ensure that U.S. Steel, including its employees, communities, and customers, will thrive well into the future.”
A growing number of conservatives had publicly backed the deal, as Nippon Steel began to win over some steelworkers union members and local officials around its blast furnaces in Pennsylvania and Indiana. Many backers said Nippon Steel has a stronger financial balance sheet than rival Cleveland-Cliffs to invest the necessary cash to upgrade aging U.S. Steel blast furnaces.
Nippon Steel pledged to invest $2.7 billion in United Steelworkers-represented facilities, including U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces, and promised not to import steel slabs that would compete with the blast furnaces.
It also pledged to protect U.S. Steel in trade matters and to not lay off employees or close plants during the term of the basic labor agreement. Earlier this month, it offered $5,000 in closing bonuses to U.S. Steel employees, a nearly $100 million expense.
Nippon Steel also said it was best positioned to help American steel compete in an industry dominated by the Chinese.
The proposed sale came during a tide of renewed political support for rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector, a presidential campaign in which Pennsylvania was a prime battleground, and a long stretch of protectionist U.S. tariffs that analysts say has helped reinvigorate domestic steel.
Chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, CFIUS screens business deals between U.S. firms and foreign investors and can block sales or force parties to change the terms of an agreement for the purpose of protecting national security.
The committee’s powers were significantly expanded in 2018 through an act of Congress called the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, known as FIRRMA.
In September, Mr. Biden issued an executive order that expands the factors that the committee should consider when reviewing deals — such as how the deal impacts the U.S. supply chain or puts Americans’ sensitive personal data at risk.
Nippon Steel already has manufacturing operations in the U.S., Mexico, China and Southeast Asia. It supplies the world’s top automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp., and makes steel for railways, pipes, appliances and skyscrapers.
“Fountain effect” performed by a school of sardines attacked by a striped marlin. Credit: Felicie Dhellemmes, SCIoI
In the vast, open ocean with no place to hide, sardines group together for protection. When they cannot rely on speed to escape, the sardines’ best chance is to outmaneuver the predator altogether. However, predators also seek ways to find weak spots in the group’s defense.
In a study published in Communications Biology, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), and Cambridge University uncover the connection between how prey‘s collective escape patterns emerge and why predators adopt specific strategies to attack them.
Using a combination of computational modeling and observations from aerial video footage, an interdisciplinary research team investigated the predator-prey behavior of striped marlins (Kajikia audax) and sardine shoals (Sardinops sagax caerulea) in the open ocean. Their findings reveal that individual prey in groups follows simple decision-making rules, which lead to complex, collective self-organized maneuvers—and that this response is something predators can capitalize on.
The ‘fountain effect’ helps sardines escape the marlin…
In the striped marlin predator-prey system, there is a certain stage of the hunt in which the fish school under attack splits into two subgroups, creating an arched trajectory that goes around the attacking predator and rejoins the group at its tail. This is the so-called “fountain effect,” a collective anti-predator response that emerges when predators try to break up the prey groups and isolate individuals.
Getting isolated from the group, a single sardine becomes an easy target for a predator. Simply put: staying in the group gives you a better chance to survive. Not only does the “fountain effect” allow slower-moving prey to outmaneuver the fast but less maneuverable predator, but it also allows the separated subgroups to rejoin after the attack, retaining the benefits of belonging to a larger group, and be fully prepared for the next attack.
“Fountain effect” performed by a school of sardines attacked by a striped marlin from behind. Credit: Felicie Dhellemmes/SCIoI
However, the researchers have found that this fascinating phenomenon is subject to trade-offs. The individual escape rule provides a tradeoff between maximizing the distance of individual prey from the predator and minimizing the time they need to return to the bigger group after an attack.
“Using agent-based computer simulations, we discovered that there is an optimal ‘prey-fleeing angle’ of 30°, which not only produces a fountain-like pattern at the collective level but also maximizes individual survival chances independent of the attack direction,” explained researcher Dr. Palina Bartashevich, lead author of the study.
“But we also showed that this comes at a cost: the group takes longer to recover after an attack.” This suggests that predators can also potentially exploit the “fountain effect,” despite it being a defensive mechanism against them.
Predators often attempt to fragment prey schools, as this reduces group size, which can increase capture success. The empirical data collected under natural conditions showed that the marlins generally attack the sardine shoals from the side and from behind, with side attacks most frequently leading to the fountain effect.
“Non-fountain” evasive maneuvers, where the entire school evaded the attack cohesively in one direction rather than splitting up and re-joining, occurred predominantly when groups were attacked from the back.
“With our predator-prey computer model, we were able to predict that if the prey in the group uses the mentioned optimal fleeing angle of 30°, predators are more effective in attacking from the side of the school,” said Bartashevich.
“That’s because attacking from the sides represents the best compromise between getting close to the prey and increasing their splitting time, making it an efficient strategy for a predator balancing both objectives at the same time.”
A simulation snapshot modeling the “fountain effect”. Red dot is the simulated predator, black dots are simulated sardines.The orange dashed line connecting the predator-dot and the individual sardine-dot shows 0° direction of the flee. Blue velocity vector shows the flee direction of the prey agent which corresponds to the fleeing angle of 30°. Credit: Palina Bartashevich/SCIoI
It’s a constant battle between predator and prey
The researchers were also able to predict that prey are more effective in escaping when attacked from behind, verifying modeling predictions with empirical observations from aerial footage.
“Our simulations, as explained above, provide a plausible explanation as to why the prevalence of both side and back attack directions and the observed prey response can be the case, suggesting that there is an ongoing arm wrestle between predators and prey in the strategies they use to improve their own success at the expense of the other,” explained Bartashevich.
More information:
Palina Bartashevich et al, Collective anti-predator escape manoeuvres through optimal attack and avoidance strategies, Communications Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-07267-2
Citation:
Ocean showdown: How marlin and sardines outsmart each other (2024, December 23)
retrieved 24 December 2024
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