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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

November 5, by all accounts, is set to be America’s first “crypto election”. Hundreds of millions of real dollars have poured into pro-crypto political action committees. Kamala Harris has talked about encouraging “innovative technologies”. Donald Trump, her rival for the presidency, has decided that bitcoin isn’t “a scam” after all, embarked on a series of crypto ventures and promises to make America “the crypto capital of the planet”.

“The crypto voter is real, bipartisan and ready to engage this cycle,” the executive director of lobby group Stand With Crypto, founded and funded by America’s biggest crypto exchange Coinbase, enthused last week. (The group gives politicians grades for their crypto stance, and Trump — unusually — gets an A.)

But reader, I must level with you right off the BAT (a digital token): the crypto voter is not, in any substantive sense, real. Aside from the small group of men (OK, mainly men) whose livelihoods now depend on this digitally indigenous fluff, most Americans have rather bigger things to worry about — food prices, healthcare, the jobs market, or the general state of their nation, maybe.

The idea, therefore, that there is a “constituency” of crypto voters needing to be pandered to, whose top issue is making sure that exchanges and other companies aren’t too heavily regulated, is fanciful. And yet that is the narrative being pushed by the industry, along with some creatively interpreted statistics.

“Crypto is a national priority . . . 52mn Americans own crypto and want their voices to be heard in the upcoming elections,” claims Stand With Crypto (the 52mn is certainly contested). “Nearly nine in ten Americans believe the financial system is overdue for an update. Yet, US policymakers seem content on maintaining the status quo, rather than fulfilling their responsibilities.”

This, presumably, means making sure people like multibillionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong can continue to get richer. Because if it’s really the crypto owners being considered here, they are doing just fine, thanks (or the ones lucky enough to choose an exchange that didn’t steal it all, anyway).

Despite the Biden-Harris administration being “very hostile” to crypto, according to Trump — “extremely hostile, like nobody can believe” — bitcoin has more than quadrupled in price since the 2020 election, reaching a record high earlier this year. The estimated value of the entire crypto market has almost sextupled. If it’s US jobs we’re talking about, industry figures show almost a third of the world’s crypto workforce is based in the US.

Crypto is also responsible for almost half of all corporate spending on the election so far, with the pro-crypto Fairshake super Pac having raised more than $200mn alone.

But while the fact that there is a huge amount of both crypto money and crypto rhetoric in this campaign is in no doubt, does either candidate really care? Let’s look at Harris’s own words. Until recently, there were none. But last Sunday at a Wall Street fundraiser, she finally said: “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets, while protecting our consumers and investors.”

For all those getting excited about her sudden conversion — Stand With Crypto even graded her a B, for being “somewhat pro-crypto”, before downgrading after a backlash — let me make clear my own thoughts: Harris couldn’t give a flying Satoshi. She has promised nothing at all. Her comments were designed not to alienate the tech world by coming across as heavy-handed while keeping those who favour stronger regulation on side.

Trump has sold four collections of NFTs, and generously offers Americans the “chance to contribute to the campaign with cryptocurrency”. But if you think his interest goes beyond his own prospects, you too should brace for disappointment. He might be lauded by Coinbase’s chief policy officer for his “concrete and visionary positions” but he doesn’t seem to take the whole thing very seriously. “Have a good time with your bitcoin and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” he told July’s bitcoin 2024 conference.

Neither does Trump display much understanding — which, to be fair, he at least owns up to. At the launch of his and his sons’ latest foray into crypto, World Liberty Financial, he compared it to learning Chinese. What the company will do remains unclear.

Still, at least the venture’s “DeFi visionary” seems to get it. “Barron knows so much about this,” the former president said of his 18-year-old son. “He talks about his wallet. He’s got four wallets or something, but he knows this stuff.” Remember remember the fifth of November. Cluelessness, claptrap and grift.

jemima.kelly@ft.com

GOOGLE Flights have revealed a new tool that will refund your flight price difference if it gets cheaper before you travel.

The new feature offers travellers the lowest price guarantee when booking certain flights.

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Google announced: “No one likes to feel buyer’s remorse, and that’s especially true for a big purchase like plane tickets where the prices change from day to day.”

The new tool enables travellers to determine whether the price of their trip is low, high, or average for their planned trip.

Jetsetters can also set flexible dates to find the cheapest time to book.

Google is currently testing a new program that guarantees the cheapest option for your next flight.

However, if the price drops between the time of purchase and take-off, Google will pay the difference via Google Pay.

A Google blog post about the feature claimed: “These price guarantees are part of a pilot program available for select Book on Google itineraries departing from the US.”

Flights eligible for refunds through the app will be marked with price guarantee badges, indicating that Google is confident the price won’t drop further before take-off.

Therefore, travellers will be compensated for the difference through the Google Pay app if the price drops.

The refund policy will only apply to flights that are booked with Google and departing from the US.

Travellers should ensure there is a price guarantee badge before purchasing a ticket otherwise, they won’t be eligible for a refund if the price drops before takeoff.

It comes after a holiday booking expert has revealed the best way for passengers to save money when buying their flights.

Gilbert Ott is a frequent flyer and founder of the website God Save the Points, where he advises people on how to get the best deals on their plane tickets, as well as offering other tips and tricks.

As far as he’s concerned there are only really two days every year when passengers are guaranteed to find cheaper flight prices.

For the rest of the year, they have to use other methods to make sure they don’t overpay.

He told Mail Online that “Black Friday and Cyber Monday” were the closest thing holidaymakers would likely get to “a magical day to book travel”.

Instead, he recommends flying at certain times of the year to keep costs down, as well as getting to grips with online price trackers.

He continued: “To score the best flight deals, it’s often more about when you want to go than when you want to book, and setting price alerts to see when prices do change.

“Think about changing your travel plans to shoulder season months when airfare can be 43 per cent lower or better.

“Also, don’t be afraid to learn everything you can about Google Flights, so you can let the best deals you’ve searched for come to your inbox.”

He recommends setting price alerts as early as possible and relaxing while the price changes are emailed directly to you.

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The first cyber chief to fight an effort by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to hold him personally responsible for a massive Russian hack has called on global regulators to pass tougher cyber security laws.

Tim Brown, chief information security officer at SolarWinds, faced a landmark lawsuit that accused him and the company of misleading investors by not disclosing “known risks” and inaccurately representing the company’s security measures.

Speaking to the Financial Times in his first interview since the complaint was largely thrown out by a federal court in July, Brown warned that global cyber regulations are still “in flux”, which “absolutely adds stress across the globe” on cyber chiefs.

“When you don’t have rules to follow, it’s very hard to follow them,” said Brown. “Very few security people would ever do something that wasn’t right, but you just have to tell us what’s right in order to do it,” he added.

SolarWinds was a little known Austin-based IT supply chain company until it was breached by Russian hackers as part of a sprawling espionage campaign in 2020.

The SEC’s lawsuit came amid a push by the body to more aggressively target cyber risks under the tenure of chair Gary Gensler, as well as strong signals by itself and other authorities that individuals could be held liable for hacks.

Last year, Uber’s former chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, was sentenced by US authorities to three years of probation and fined $50,000 for covering up a data breach from 2016. It was the first criminal prosecution of a company executive over the handling of a data breach.

The SEC introduced new cyber rules last year around the disclosure of data breaches, as well as forcing public companies to outline elements of their cyber risk management processes, strategies, and governance in their annual reports.

Brown said he was hopeful that global cyber regulations were heading in the right direction. He said security professionals would benefit from a cyber equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 after the Enron scandal.

“You have to remember, the cyber issues are 20 to 30 years old. Other regulatory issues are hundreds of years old . . . So we’re just kind of catching up on the maturity of that model,” he added.

The lawsuit, which cited internal communications between Brown and other employees at SolarWinds, has been seen as a watershed for the industry. Lawyers representing security professionals have warned it risked “chilling” cyber professionals’ internal efforts to improve company security out of fear that their comments could later be taken out of context and used against them.

District judge Paul Engelmayer ruled in July that the SEC’s attempt to apply accounting rules to cyber security processes was “not tenable”. He threw out most of the claims against SolarWinds and Brown, but upheld one claim of securities fraud based on a statement published by SolarWinds on its corporate website. 

A SolarWinds spokesperson said in a statement the company planned to fight the remaining charge, which they said was “factually inaccurate”. The SEC declined to comment.

Brown said the lawsuit, although personally uncomfortable, had helped to give corporate security professionals a voice at the executive level.

“It puts pressure on, but it’s also an inflection point,” he said. “It has elevated the [chief information security officer] position and made sure that boards are having these conversations.”

Brown this month joined the advisory board of Israeli crisis management firm Cytactic but said he was still committed to staying in his role at SolarWinds.

“As far as the incident at SolarWinds: It happened on my watch. Was I ultimately responsible? Well, no, but it happened on my watch and I want to get it right,” he said.

The company reported $193mn in revenue in the three months to June, down from $246mn in the same period in 2020, before the hack was disclosed. Shares have begun to recover from their lows in 2022, but are still down more than 40 per cent since the so-called Sunburst incident.

Off the Angus coast, a small group of gannets skim the surface near one of the 114 turbines that make up the 1-gigawatt Seagreen offshore wind farm in Scotland’s North Sea as the birds head back towards shore.

The windy, shallower waters of the outer Firth of Forth and Tay Bay are prime locations for fixed-bottom wind turbines, the workhorse of the UK’s transition to decarbonised electricity. They are also the feeding grounds of some of Europe’s largest seabird breeding colonies.

Concerns over wind turbines striking or displacing marine birdlife has emerged as one of the most onerous barriers — alongside tardy grid connections and supply chain disruptions — for offshore wind projects.

Government regulators must balance the urgency of meeting national renewable energy targets with the impact that offshore wind can have on already imperilled bird species.

SSE’s Seagreen, in operation since last October, was constructed in two years — almost as long as the energy giant has been waiting for Scottish government consent for its large 4.1GW Berwick Bank offshore wind project.

“Twenty one months is too long and is materially impacting the project,” said Robert Bryce, of SSE Renewables. “We need to be able to get on and deliver.” While recognising the need for a thorough process, he said this level of uncertainty was having a significant bearing on investor confidence in Scotland’s ability to deliver.

UK efforts to decarbonise the electricity network by 2030 include plans to quadruple offshore wind capacity from today’s 15GW to 60GW. Over the past year, wind power accounted for almost a third of UK electricity production, compared with 26 per cent from natural gas and 15 per cent from nuclear power.

This will require at least 10GW to be delivered at the next wind auction round that provides developers with a guaranteed electricity price for renewable projects. The lack of consent kept Berwick Bank out of this year’s round.

“This target is simply not achievable without Berwick Bank,” said Paul Cooley, SSE Renewables’ director of offshore. “The current planning system in Scotland is too complex and is simply taking too long,” he added.

However, some politicians recognise there is a difficult trade off between accelerating renewables while adopting nature positive policies.

While tackling global warming is priority “number one”, said Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, she noted that recent seabird colony collapses can also be attributed partly to the impact of climate change on shifting migratory patterns for fish.

“It’s important we take time to think about this,” she said. “We need to assess the impact on biodiversity and to mitigate that as much as possible — no one can pretend that this is easy to do or evidence correctly.”

To accelerate consent in the future, the UK and Scottish governments are working together to speed up the process to keep both administrations’ climate targets on track.

Scottish ministers are responsible for providing consent for domestic infrastructure, but cannot change UK legislation covering energy and the offshore marine area 12 nautical miles from the coast.

Gillian Martin, Scotland’s acting net zero and energy secretary and a Scottish National party MSP, said the UK’s new Labour government was willing to devolve powers to Edinburgh allowing reforms to speed delivery, unlike its predecessors.

The changes would allow compensatory measures for any wildlife damage caused by offshore wind farms to be deployed across the country via a marine recovery fund. Currently, developers fund nature restoration schemes linked to individual projects.

Developers hope this would de-risk business plans through greater clarity on consenting timeframes and streamline work on individual recovery schemes.

“We will get a double benefit of a reduction in climate change, the biggest threat to nature, and targeted interventions as a result of compensation,” said Martin. “It’s a win-win.”

The Scottish government has also hired new officials to deal with the backlog of applications, she added, as it seeks to speed up the process of consent to nine to 12 months in most cases.

Berwick Bank, 38km from the world’s largest colony of northern gannets at Bass Rock, has been tied up in a bureaucratic maze that has been extended by requests for additional information regarding compensatory measures.

Within foraging range of special protection areas for the 100,000 seabirds that assemble during breeding season, the project requires a government exception to bypass stringent habitat protection regulations.

SSE, in its consenting submissions for Berwick Bank, has offered compensatory measures to offset the impact on seabirds, including ending sand eel fishing to replenish stocks and eradicating rats to protect nests.

The authorities concluded that compensatory measures are needed to mitigate the adverse impact of 2,305 bird deaths a year, including 873 kittiwakes — an assessment SEE called “over-precautionary”, estimating 716 birds was a “more appropriate” figure.

SSE added that, in any case, its proposed compensatory measures would cover the most precautionary conclusions many times over. Scottish ministers are yet to complete their assessment.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has objected to Berwick Bank’s ecological damage, especially given other stresses facing marine birdlife, and views the compensatory measures as insufficient.

The conservation charity has said the project, in combination with other North Sea wind farms, would reduce the number of kittiwakes at the nearby St Abbs reserve by up to two-thirds over its 35-year lifespan.

Officials are worried that if consent is given, stakeholders such as the RSPB could challenge the decision with a judicial review — the loss of which could derail the entire project. Regulatory bodies therefore have to be certain that procedures are carried out correctly.

Aedán Smith, RSPB Scotland’s head of policy and advocacy, said it was hard to see how the project could progress in its current circumstances.

“The impact is just too big to stomach,” said Smith. “Is this the best way to achieve the societal objective of net zero? We would say no.”

A MAJOR coffee chain with over 2,000 branches has abruptly shut leaving customers “absolutely gutted”.

The Costa Coffee branch in Fleet Walk, Burnley, has pulled down the shutters for the final time.

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The branch has actually been closed since the start of the month with customers left confused as to why it was empty.

But the company has now confirmed the closure is permanent, and it is set to be replaced by another shop.

A Costa Coffee spokesperson said: “We can confirm that our Costa Coffee store on Fleet Walk, Burnley, which is owned and operated by one of our corporate partners, closed for trade at the beginning of September 2024.

“Customers are however still able to visit the Costa Coffee store located in Tesco on Centenary Way.”

Many shoppers were left disappointed after the branch shut down.

Commenting on news of the closure one said: “Absolutely gutted on Saturday when I couldn’t get my Costa!”

Another wrote: “Town centre is dying of a slow death.”

A third quipped that the situation was a “Costa living crisis”.

The store only reopened in July 2022 following a refurbishment inside.

The popular café has already closed dozens of its sites in recent months.

Costa closed its branch in Alexandra retail park, Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, on Sunday 1 September.  

The franchised site had been open for nine years, and customers have said it was a “great place”.

Coffee giant Costa regularly reviews its store estate across the UK.

This can include the closing or renovation of existing stores, or the opening of new stores.

Below we reveal the full list of Costa Coffee sites which have already shut and those which are due to close this year.

To find your nearest store or Costa Express machine, you can visit the chain’s website.

Which Costa Coffee shops have closed?

Each of the sites which have closed has further Costas nearby, which you can find using the locator tool on the chain’s website.

The following branches closed, or are set to close this year.

• Packhorse Road, Buckinghamshire – January 10
• King Street, Maidstone, Kent – January 20
• Chiswick High Road, London – February 6
• Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh – February 14
• Rottingdean, Brighton and Cove – February
• Erdington High Street, Birmingham – March 1
• Cheltenham (inside House of Fraser) – March 23
• Stockton Heath, Warrington – April 11
• High Street West, Uppingham – May
• Rhyl High Street, North Wales – May 14
• The Martlets, Burgess Hill, July 8
• Maryport Street, Devizes – August 15
• Alexandra retail park, Tunstall – September 1

Here are the Costa shops which closed in 2023:

• Coliseum retail park in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire – June 3
• Welch Way, Witney – June 5
• Wigan town centre – June 25
• Five Rise Shopping Centre, Bingley – July 9
• High Street, Worcester – July (relocated September 15)
• Lowestoft’s North Quay retail park – July 23 (refurbishment)
• Church Street, Oakham – September 15
• West Bridgford, near Nottingham – September 22
• Commercial Street, Newport, Wales – October
• Church Street in Malvern, near Worcestershire – November 17
• Gatwick Airport South Terminal – November

Which other food and drink chains have closed?

Food and drink chains in general have been suffering in recent months as the cost of living has led to fewer people spending on eating out.

Businesses had been struggling to bounce back after the pandemic, only to be hit with soaring energy bills and inflation.

Multiple chains have been affected, resulting in big-name brands like Wetherspoons and Frankie & Benny’s closing branches.

In early 2023, burger chain Byron Burger collapsed into administration resulting in the loss of over 200 jobs.

Prezzo, the Italian chain, also revealed plans to shut 46 restaurants last year as a result of soaring energy and food costs, putting 810 jobs at risk.

More recently, Papa Johns confirmed 43 closures for May 2024.

Although some chains have managed to persevere, like Greggs which announced huge expansion plans.

Bakery chains Wenzel’s the Bakers and Patisserie Valerie are also looking at opening new branches.

Fixed-priced deals offer certainty for a set period but, if prices drop, people could find themselves stuck at a higher price.

The forecaster Cornwall Insight, which tracks the energy market, has suggested prices could increase again slightly in January, due to rising wholesale costs paid by suppliers.

It says the typical home could pay £1,762 a year.

Given prices are rising, Ofgem says people should consider fixed deals as an option.

However, it says they should seek independent advice and consider what is most important for them – the lowest price or the security of a fixed deal.

Price comparison site Uswitch says the market for fixes is the best in recent years.

Some deals allow you to fix for a year, some for longer.

Uswitch warns customers should check whether fixed deals have exit fees before signing up and ensure they fully understand the terms of the contract.

Because the price cap changes every three months, it is difficult to know with any certainty whether a fixed tariff is a good deal. The longer the fixed term, the greater the uncertainty.