Coronavirus weekly round-up: Google joins $2trn club, Elon Musk dumps Tesla shares and UK growth slows

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Google parent Alphabet became the third company to report a market cap in excess of $2trn this week, joining Apple and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk offloaded a large chunk of his Tesla shares.

In the UK, health secretary Sajid Javid said Covid-19 jabs will be compulsory for frontline NHS staff in England from April 2022.

In addition, UK quarterly GDP growth slowed to 1.3% in the third quarter.

Elsewhere, COP26 in Glasgow drew to a close with members still wrangling over the finer details of the agreements, especially around the end of coal and fossil fuel subsidies.

See below for a summary of the key events and click through the slides above to find out what investment managers think this means for portfolios.

Monday 8 November

-Google parent Alphabet becomes only the third company to reach a market capitalisation of more than $2trn, joining Apple and Microsoft

-Elon Musk asks his Twitter followers over the weekend to decide whether he should sell more than $20bn worth of his Tesla shares

-The S&P 500 completes its longest run of all-time highs since 1997

-US biotech firm Regeneron says a single dose of its monoclonal antibody treatment can provide strong protection from Covid-19 for up to eight months

Tuesday 9 November

-Health secretary Sajid Javid announces that Covid-19 jabs will be compulsory for frontline NHS staff in England from April 2022

-British Retail Consortium figures show retail sales increased 1.3% in October compared with the same month last year, up from 0.6% in September

-French president Emmanuel Macron says the country’s over-65s will need Covid booster jabs in order to eat out or make long-distance journeys from next month

-Biontech lifts its revenue forecast for its Covid vaccine to €17bn this year as revenues are expected to be €1bn higher than previously thought

-Residential property prices in some of London’s most esteemed boroughs dropped sharply in the year to March 2021, with ONS data showing the median price in Westminster, the City of London and Kensington and Chelsea fell by an annual rate of between 2.3% to 14%

-Pfizer asks the US Food and Drug Administration to green light authorisation of its Covid-19 booster to all adults

Wednesday 10 November

-Analysis by the FT finds the number of new daily Covid cases reported in England has been lower than a week earlier for 18 successive days, the longest sequence of week-on-week declines since February

-Prime minister Boris Johnson returns to COP26 in Glasgow – urging nations to “pull out all the stops” to limit global warming as the first draft of the agreement setting out how countries will cut emissions to limit temperature rises to 1.5C is published

-Unit labour costs in UK wholesale and retail trade in Q2 were 3% below the average for 2019 while output per hour was around 10% higher, according to ONS figures

-Pub group Wetherspoons says sales in the 15 weeks to 7 November were down 8.9% compared with the same period in 2019

-ITV reports total revenues of £2.79bn for the first nine months of 2021, up 28% year-on-year and 8% on the pre-pandemic period in 2019

-M&S says group annual profits, before tax and adjusted items, would be in the “region of £500m”, exceeding expectations in August of them being between £300m and £350m

-US and China make a declaration to co-operate on climate change, which the Chinese special envoy to the UN COP26 summit described as an “existential crisis”

-Tesla CEO Elon Musk sells nearly $5bn worth of his shares in the EV manufacturer over the first three days of the week

Thursday 11 November

-UK gross domestic product expanded by 0.6% in September, up from 0.2% in August, according to the Office for National Statistics. On a quarterly basis, growth slowed to 1.3% in Q3, compared to 5.5% in Q2

-A rule requiring care workers to be vaccinated against Covid or lose their jobs comes into effect with an estimated 50,000 having not been recorded as having had both doses of a jab

-Figures show retail sales in India during Diwali surged to a record Rs1.25tn (£12.6bn), according to Nomura, up 75% per cent jump from the year before

-Sales in the UK’s hospitality sector reached £31.6bn in Q3, up 73% on the summer of 2020 but still 10% lower than the same period in 2019, according to figures by industry tracker CGA

Friday 12 November

-Astrazeneca signs its first for-profit deals for its Covid vaccine, moving away from the completely non-profit “at cost” model used during the pandemic

-The world’s largest healthcare company Johnson & Johnson is to spin off its consumer products division in 18 to 24 months to focus on pharmaceuticals and medical devices

-Most COP26 participants think talks over the final agreements from the summit will extend beyond the 6pm deadline on the final day (Friday) as wrangling over the end of coal and fossil fuel subsidies dominates the conversation

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