7.44am: Diageo CEO and JTC accepts offer
Guinness and Smirnoff maker Diageo PLC (LSE:DGE) has appointed former Tesco boss Sir Dave Lewis as chief executive, starting in January.
Lewis, who led the UK’s largest supermarket chain from 2014 to 2020, also brings three decades of experience at Unilever.
He is currently chair of Haleon, a role he will step down from at the end of December, and a non-executive board director at PepsiCo.
Elsewhere, JTC PLC (LSE:JTC) has accepted a £2.3 billion all-cash takeover offer from private equity firm Permira, after rejecting two bids back in August.
Under the terms of the deal, shareholders in the FTSE 250-listed provider of fund administration and corporate services will receive 1,340p per share.
This is a 49% premium to the price before the first offer was made, and is 15% above the most recent rejected offer, which was 1,165p a share.
7.16am: FTSE to come out all guns blazing
The FTSE 100 is expected to come out all guns blazing at the start of the week, after two days of retreating, with analysts hailing reports that the US government shutdown could end soon.
On the futures market, a gain of 83 points was predicted for the London benchmark on Monday, after it fell 34 points over the whole of last week to end at 9,682.57.
US stock futures are also strongly higher on Monday, after a bad week that saw the Dow Jones lose 1%, the S&P 500 drop 1.7% and the Nasdaq fall 3.65%.
Asian markets are positive this morning, led by the Hang Seng’s 1.4% gain, while Japan’s Nikkei is up 1.3%.
“Last week was a tough one,” says market analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya at Swissquote, pointing to a “cocktail of rare but discouraging US data” from private company surveys in the absence of government data due to the shutdown.
“Falling yields failed to lift risk appetite, and better-than-expected tech earnings couldn’t lure investors back on board.
“But this morning, things look calmer. The news that the US government shutdown could finally come to an end lifts market sentiment, after the Senate put together the 60 votes needed to push the deal through its first stage.
“It’s only the opening act in what could still be a drawn-out political drama, but investors are seizing on any sign of progress to end the longest US government shutdown in history and feed on data — data they need to understand where the US economy stands, where inflation and jobs are headed, and what the Federal Reserve (Fed) should do next.”
