The devil is in the retail as shop closures surge yet again
Shops are putting up their shutters for good and nowhere is the fallout bloodier than in Scotland. A total of 290 Scottish stores gave up the retail ghost in 2017, a rate of about five closures a week, a score a month.
That was offset somewhat by 142 store openings, but the bottom line (in every sense) shows 3,303 outlets were trading in January 2017 and only 3,155 a year later.
The Caledonian high street has nearly another 150 former shops now just providing backdrops for the often jobless graffiti artists and bill-stickers, and the net fall year-on-year at 4.5 per cent is the highest in the UK, according to the latest research from PWC and the Local Data company.
It is worrying that the spiral looks both entrenched and exponential, a one-third rise on the number of Scottish shop closures during 2016. It carries on a pattern or retail haemorrhaging both in Scotland and the wider UK in recent years.
What to do about it? Perhaps some municipal initiatives and a philosophical acceptance that digital shopping and consumer preference for big brand retail names has changed the game painfully.
Stocks Russian-ed off their feet
Thirty years ago a City wag described the Australian stock market as half a dozen commodity billionaires playing stud poker out back. Russian stocks, also dominated by energy, mining and metals, have carried on the volatile torch.
President Vladimir Putin’s maverick actions mean there is deep investor nervousness in the City about those stocks. Mining giant Evraz, aluminium major Rusal, Russian energy group EN+ and Polymetal have all taken sizeable stock market hits since the announcement of American sanctions against Moscow last Friday.
Shares in UK oil and gas group BP, with an extensive North Sea footprint, have also been buffeted given its exposure to Russia through its periodically troublesome stake in Rosneft.
As the West reacts with unusual uniformity in terms of sanctions and diplomat/spy expulsions, we can expect more of this volatility. In financial markets, Putin has become a geopolitical factor all to himself. It could also sharply dilute investor appetite for future UK flotations of Russian businesses.