Wednesday newspaper round-up: Lidl and Iceland, Help to Buy, shadow banking

(Sharecast News) - Lidl and Iceland have become the first companies to have ads banned after the introduction of rules cracking down on the marketing of junk food in the UK. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been policing the ban on ads featuring junk food on TV before 9pm, and in paid online advertising at any time of the day, since 5 January. - Guardian Higher-income households were the biggest beneficiaries of George Osborne's Help to Buy mortgage schemes, introduced in the 2010s, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) thinktank. Launched by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in 2013, Help to Buy involved two separate schemes aimed at making home ownership more achievable in a period of rapid house price growth. - Guardian

The boss of JP Morgan has said that he is "not worried" about his own bank's $50bn (£37bn) exposure to private credit, despite recent warnings over the risks of "shadow banking". Jamie Dimon said that JP Morgan was well insulated from any wider ructions in the private credit sector. The chief executive told analysts: "You're going to have very large losses in private credit before it looks like banks are going to get hit. "It doesn't mean you won't feel some stress and strain, and you might have to do something about it, but I'm not particularly worried about it." - Telegraph

Sir Sadiq Khan's goal of building 88,000 homes a year now appears "impossible" to meet, a leading property analyst firm has warned. Construction started on just 2,103 private new-build homes in the three months to March, new findings from Molior showed, far from the 22,000 needed each quarter. This was an improvement on the quarterly average of 1,397 in 2025, but the rate of construction has still been described as "awful" by analysts at Molior. - Telegraph

The government and Ofwat, the water regulator, are "sleepwalking into a dreadful outcome" if they allow Thames Water to be taken over by its creditors. That is the view of Andrew Hunter, executive director of the Hong Kong ­infrastructure investor CKI, whose own bid for Thames Water was spurned last year by the utility's board. - The Times