Closing summary: Wall Street hits new highs on US-China trade deal hopes
Time to wrap up.
Wall Street shares have scaled new all-time highs, as rising expectations of a US-China trade deal encouraged risk-taking by investors, in a week dominated by Big Tech results and a widely-expected Federal Reserve interest rate cut on Wednesday.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose by 1.6%, the Dow Jones gained 0.5% and the S&P 500 climbed by nearly 1%.
Argentina’s currency, stocks and government bonds surged after the party of Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, won Sunday’s midterm elections – after a campaign in which Donald Trump announced a $40bn bailout for the country and made continued aid conditional on the victory of his Argentinian counterpart.
The peso rose by 10% to the US dollar, while the Merval stock market in Buenos Aires jumped by more than 20%. International bonds rallied between 10 and 15 cents each, pushing their yield below 10%.
Our main stories today:
Petrofac, one of the biggest North Sea oil and gas contractors, has filed for administration, putting more than 2,000 jobs in Scotland at risk.
The energy services provider said it had applied to the high court of England and Wales to appoint administrators, after it lost a major offshore wind project over its failure to meet contractual obligations.
Petrofac, which employs about 7,300 people globally, said the administration plans – likely to be carried out by the business services firm Teneo – applied only to its ultimate holding company and that it would continue to trade during the process.
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Bye! – JK
Updated
Britain announces £1.1bn budget for offshore wind auction
Energy minister Ed Miliband has set aside £1.1bn a year for offshore wind power developers investing in new projects, in the latest budget for windfarms needed to meet the UK’s green electricity targets.
The government’s energy department said on Monday that it had budgeted £900m to pay developers of fixed wind turbines at sea, with another £180m for floating platforms.
Renewables provided about half of the UK’s electricity during 2024, with wind accounting for 30% of generation for the first time – overtaking gas power stations. Further huge investments in wind and solar power will be necessary to meet the target of completely removing carbon emissions from British electricity supplies by 2030.
Government sources have previously told the Guardian that ministers may consider abandoning that target – long seen as hugely ambitious by experts – if it were to prove too expensive. However, a government source said the initial budget for offshore wind showed “big backing by the Treasury for offshore wind”.
Wind power developers, expected to include energy companies SSE, RWE and Scottish Power, will be invited to bid to build new offshore wind projects, which would be eligible to receive the budget.
In a change from previous years, the final budget could rise higher if ministers consider that enough projects provide value for money – potentially surpassing the £1.1bn for offshore wind allocated last year. The contracts will also last 20 years, rather than 15, in order to try to attract lower prices.
Chris Stark, the civil servant who leads the UK’s clean power efforts under Miliband, said he expected the bids to exceed the budget for fixed offshore wind. The government is prepared to “contract more offshore wind generation if we see value for money for the consumer”, he said in a social media post.
