THE NEWS WRAP: Greens propose SME tax cut

An investigation will be held after the Australian sharemarket suffered a four-hour blackout yesterday following a technical glitch.

The Australian Securities Exchange suspended trade due to a ”network connectivity” problem, before trade resumed at 2pm.

The embarrassing failure left investors, keen to capitalise upon an expected surge in shares following the European debt deal, frustrated, with prominent options trader David Waterhouse calling it a “disgraceful day”.

Greens propose SME tax cut

The Greens have proposed that small businesses are given a significant tax cut, at the expense of the big banks.

The Gillard Government is planning an overall 1% cut in the corporate tax rate as part of its mining tax package, but the Greens want the big banks frozen out of the deal, handing a 5% tax cut to small companies instead.

RIM faces outage lawsuit

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is facing a class action lawsuit from customers in the US and Canada over a recent global outage of its service.

The legal action claims that RIM is guilty of a breach of contract over the system failure, which left millions of users without email, instant messaging and internet access.

Overnight

The Dow Jones industrial average soared 340.19 points, or 2.87%, on news of the European debt deal, ending at 12,209.23. The Australian dollar also rose, to 107.33 US cents.