In September, Scotland is holding a referendum to decide if it should become independent. Mr Cameron is expected to claim there are just “seven months to save the most extraordinary country in history”.
According to a release published ahead of the speech on the Treasury website, Mr Cameron will say that while the vote is for the people of Scotland alone, all parts of the UK will be affected and must tell Scots with one voice: “We want you to stay”.
The speech at London’s Olympic stadium is a change of tack for Mr Cameron, who the FT said admitted last month that “interventions by a southern English Conservative prime minister might antagonise Scots and be counterproductive”.
However, members of the Conservative party have been urging Mr Cameron “to get more involved” and the FT said he is now planning several visits to Scotland, including holding a cabinet meeting there this month.
Barclays’ bonus pool bigger than 2012
According to the Guardian, Barclays will begin to hand out bonuses today to its 140,000 staff around the world from a bonus pool expected to be bigger than last year’s.
The Guardian said it is planning to hand out larger bonuses to some employees than a year ago to stop them going to work for higher-paying rivals. Last year, Barclays handed out a total of almost £2.2bn in bonuses - £1.8bn for the 2012 financial year and another £300m in deferred payments.
However, some staff may be affected by the EU’s bonus cap, which is 100 per cent of salary or, if shareholders approve, 200 per cent, which will take affect this time next year.
Barclays is expected to announce its annual results next week.
US finds portfolio manager guilty of insider trading
A New York jury has found Mathew Martoma, a former SAC Capital portfolio manager, guilty on all counts in the largest insider trading case on record, the Financial Times reports.
The three-week trial revealed what prosecutor Arlo Devlin Brown called the “underbelly of an industry”, referring to the casual ways in which some doctors shared insights into confidential clinical drug trials with hedge fund traders in exchange for thousands of dollars in fees.
Following a three-week trial, the jury at a federal court in New York returned the verdict on Thursday after two days of deliberation. It found Mr Martoma guilty of one count of conspiracy and two counts of security fraud.
Mr Martoma will remain on bail until he is sentenced. The charges carry a possible penalty of 20 years in prison for each fraud count, the FT states.
UK salaries to take a decade to recover
A think-tank has warned UK salaries will take a decade to recover to levels seen before the financial crisis even as the recovery gathers pace, according to The Telegraph.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said it expected economic growth to pick-up to 2.5 per cent, following November’s 2 per cent forecast. It said growth could even hit 3 per cent this year if the house price boom continued and output would finally surpass its pre-recession peak by the end of September.
However, Simon Kirby, principal research fellow at the NIESR, said despite this real consumer wages were still at 2004 levels and would not rise above their 2009 peak until “around 2019 or 2020”.
Twitter share price tumbles
Twitter’s share price dropped more than 20 per cent yesterday morning as investors reacted to news of slowing growth, the Guardian said.
On Wednesday (5 February), Twitter published its first quarterly earnings report since flotation, which revealed the firm made more money in the last quarter of 2013 than analysts expected. However, the social network also announced it had 241m users at the end of 2013, just 9m higher than the previous quarter.
Chief executive Dick Costolo also revealed that, in the last three months of 2013, the number of “timeline views” – Twitter’s equivalent of page views, and a key measure for advertisers – dropped for the first time in the company’s history.
The shares crashed during after-hours trading and continued to fall as the stock markets opened yesterday morning, according to the Guardian.
