Seven days in the Square Mile

Stock markets celebrated their best weekly performance in six years at the last week as confidence returned from the global sell-off. The CBOE Volatility Index, better known as the Vix, which had surged to a two-year high retreated. In London, the FTSE 100 achieved its first weekly gain in more than a month. Global dividends were reported to have reached record levels last year, growing by 7.7% to $1.3trn because of strong growth and a revival in US payouts. Finance chiefs reacted strongly to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s threat to curb the City and make it a “servant” of industry, arguing that he had failed to grasp that the sector – Britain’s biggest exporting industry – was a national asset. Commentator David Buik said Corbyn’s policies would turn London “into the last Soviet-era capital west of Pyongyang”. Stuart Gulliver bowed out as HSBC’S chief executive with a mixed set of results. He hit most of his long-term targets, but last quarter profits were below expectations. The world’s biggest commodities trader, Glencore, tipped for extinction a few years back, filed a 44% leap in profits to a record $14.7bn and issued a bumper dividend. Merlin, the company behind Legoland and Madame Tussauds, became the latest UK company to be targeted by a US activist investor, Valueact. Walmart, the giant US supermarket, suffered its worst share fall in more than three decades after reporting disappointing online sales figures.