After a five-year sabbatical, Gordon Brown has found a job.
The former Prime Minister is to join a five-person global advisory board for private investment firm Pimco.
It’s his first role in the private sector since resigning from the premiership in 2010.
Brown will join former central bankers Ben Bernanke and Jean-Claude Trichet on the board, which will add “economic, geopolitical, and market expertise and insights”, the company said.
But sources close to the former tenant of Number 10 said he will not make a penny from the deal, instead choosing to donate his fees to charities.
In other news, genetics expert Genus has bred the world’s first pigs to be resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV).
The disease is the most harmful swine illness faced by farmers and currently has no cure.
Genus sells pig and cow semen and breeding animals with preferable genetic traits to farmers across 75 countries.
Using intricate gene editing, the University of Missouri, through its partnership with Genus, bred pigs without a specific protein necessary for the virus to spread in the animals.
On the economic front, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) confirmed that Black Friday turned out to be a relatively damp squib.
While the event, along with the well-received Cyber Monday, boosted sales figures in November, the rest of the month was poor and sales dropped 0.4% on a like-for-like basis compared to the year before.
Retailers are hoping the upcoming Christmas period can help them recover.
However, online sales are going from strength to strength, making up about 22.4% of total sales in November, the highest since the BRC started publishing internet sales data in 2012.
Staying online, demand for cyber security experts has quadrupled to a record high in the last twelve months following data breaches at telecom group Talk Talk, tech giant Sony and love-rat database Ashley Madison.
The surge will lead to a rise in employment in the New Year, with employers more optimistic than at any time during 2015, according to a survey by recruitment agency Manpower.
The survey asked more than 2,000 employers if they intended to cut or increase staff, with most favouring hiring rather than firing.
While employment figures look set to rise, housing figures keep falling, with the number of new homes coming up for sale at an all-time low in the UK.
Yet UK house prices slipped 0.2% from October to November, with the rate of growth falling to its lowest for a year, research from mortgage lender Halifax revealed today.
Despite the dip, with the number of new houses so low, the lender expects house prices to rise 9% next year.
On the corporate front, Anglo American is scrapping its dividend for the first time in six years as part of a range of cost-cutting measures to combat weak commodity prices.
Other measures include the closure of its Thabazimbi iron mine in South Africa and the Snap Lake diamond mine in Canada.
In small-caps, online domain name specialist CentralNic has unveiled a deal to buy Aussie rival Instra Group for £16mln.
Instra offers three main services including domain portfolio registration for large corporates, domain names and web site hosting for small businesses and white label sales.