News Headlines - 18 October 2018

▽Trump Hints Pentagon Chief Mattis May Be Planning to Quit - Bloomberg

President Donald Trump hinted that U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis may be planning to quit his administration, and described the former U.S. Marine Corps general as “sort of a Democrat.”
In an excerpt from a “60 Minutes” interview that will air in full Sunday on CBS, Trump talked about the level of turnover in his administration after almost two years, and suggested there could be more to come.

▽Fed points to more rate hikes amid criticism from Trump

A summary of the Sept. 25-26 Federal Open Market Committee session reflected both confidence in the rate of economic growth and some hesitancy over the impact that tariffs might have on the future path.
Ultimately, the committee unanimously voted to approve a quarter-point hike to its benchmark rate target, with members indicating that more increases are on the way. The increase took the Fed’s overnight target to a range of 2 percent to 2.25 percent.

▽Europe's top bankers shun Saudi investment conference | Reuters

The bosses of some of Europe’s biggest banks and finance firms have pulled out of a high-profile investment conference in Saudi Arabia, joining a growing list of business chiefs to abandon the event amid widespread concern about the fate of a journalist.

▽UK pay growth rises to 3.1%, the highest in almost a decade | The Guardian

Britain’s workers have started to repair the damage from a lost decade of wage growth after increased competition for workers pushed the government’s preferred measure of pay to its highest level since the UK was deep in recession a decade ago.
The latest health check on the labour market from the Office for National Statistics showed that regular pay – which excludes bonuses – was 3.1% higher in the three months ending in August than in the same quarter a year earlier.

▽Germany and France start to draw up no-deal Brexit contingency plans | Politics | The Guardian

Germany and France are starting to step up their preparations for a no-deal Brexit even though both publicly insist an agreement with the UK over the terms of its departure from the EU can still be achieved.
Angela Merkel revealed for the first time on Wednesday that Germany was drawing up contingency plans, saying the government had started making “suitable preparations” for the possibility of Britain leaving with no accord... France has published a draft bill that would allow the government to introduce new legal measures to avoid or mitigate the consequences of a hard Brexit by emergency decree, as opposed to parliamentary vote, within 12 months of the law being passed.