Sean Farrell 13 March 2014 theguardian.com Morrisons has issued its second profit warning in three months as it announced a programme of aggressive price cuts to take on Aldi and Lidl. The group is also selling £1bn worth of property to pay off debt and fund its dividend. Alongside the disposals, Morrisons announced that it is revamping its stores and cutting prices over the next three years in a £1bn programme, starting with £300m of investment this year. However, the announcement of the fightback strategy was overshadowed by a profit warning, the second since Morrisons revealed poor festive trading in January. Morrisons shares tumbled more than 10% in early trading, dragging Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer down sharply as well. Morrisons posted an underlying pretax profit for 2013 of £785m – down 13% but in line with analysts’ depressed expectations. Revenue fell 2% to £17.7bn and sales at stores…

14 March 2014 The Guardian Editorial: Before George Osborne crows about the recovery in the budget, he should look to the UK’s high streets and supermarkets Unemployment is tumbling, inflation is easing off and, by the summer, the British economy might well be bigger than ever before. It all sounds terrific – just so long as you forget all about the dreadful starting point bequeathed by the biggest slump in living memory. If George Osborne is feeling the itch to crow about the recovery in next week’s budget, he should look to the high streets and supermarkets across the length and breadth of the country, where the statistical recouping in the financial data is much less in evidence than the continuing toll of six lost years. Yesterday it was Morrison’s turn to come clean about becoming a basket case. After reporting £176m in losses for last year, it revised down…

Kate Jones March 17, 2014 It’s making millions by recycling fag ends and it’s just arrived in Australia. Making millions from a business that recycles cigarette butts seems stranger than fiction. But Tom Szaky is an entrepreneur bent on making the impossible possible. Szaky’s company TerraCycle has been described as “the coolest little start-up in America” and “the Google of garbage”. But don’t describe this super eco-friendly outfit as just another recycling company. About 24 billion cigarettes are sold in Australia each year with an estimated seven billion of those eventually becoming litter. Szaky, a prominent eco-entrepreneur in the US, says the firm has a much higher purpose. “Waste is a completely human idea and TerraCycle was born as a way to outsmart waste or to eliminate the idea of waste under the premise of trying to make things that are non-recyclable naturally recyclable,” he says. Founded in 2001 by…

Michael West March 17, 2014 Oil production in Australia peaked in 2000. It would have peaked worldwide too by now, had it not been for the shale oil boom in the US. Some interesting work by this country’s most unrelenting peak oil proponent, retired engineer Matt Mushalik, shows that without shale oil – which accounts for 1.5 million barrels a day – world oil production last year was back at 2005 levels. It seems a monumental economic crisis may have been averted. Still, the price of crude oil has stubbornly hovered around its present mark of $US108 a barrel for the past three years even as shale oil production has ramped up. For motorists in Australia, should consensus predictions of a falling Australian dollar come to pass, prices will head higher at the petrol pump in coming years. This currency effect, however, is a sideshow compared with the big question…

MARCH 17, 2014 News.com.au Prepare to pay more for your morning coffee as prices surge around the world. THE morning caffeine hit is about to get more pricey as drought in top producer Brazil has sparked fears of a global shortfall of coffee this year, sending the price of beans soaring. Coffee prices hit their highest point in two years in New York, with Arabica beans due for delivery in May fetching 203.75 cents per pound, more than double that of the 100.95 cents per pound in November. The worst drought to hit Brazil in decades has sparked fears that the crop in the world’s top coffee producer could shrink for the second consecutive year for the first time since 1970. Leandro Gomes Ribeiro Costa, head of coffee at farmer group Coopamig, said some regions of Brazil have had only a tenth of their average rainfall so far this year…