News

Corporate America is facing its sharpest drop in profits since the early stages of the Covid pandemic, according to Wall Street forecasts, as high inflation squeezes margins and fears of an impending recession hold back demand. Companies on the S&P 500 index are expected to report a 6.8 per cent decline in first-quarter earnings compared

Investors are loading up on protection against a fresh round of financial turmoil in US regional bank stocks as lenders prepare to reveal how badly their earnings have been squeezed by the troubles that took down Silicon Valley Bank. Regional bank share prices have stabilised since SVB’s collapse sparked a massive mid-March slide, but traders

US fund managers are increasing investments in international stock markets after rising interest rates and fears of an economic slowdown brought an end to more than a decade of domestic dominance. US stocks have vastly outperformed most other developed and emerging markets since the financial crisis, but the trend began to reverse last year. The

A British business registered to a terraced house in a north London suburb appears to have arranged the sale of about $1.2bn of electronics into Russia since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022. Mykines Corporation LLP, a company based in the London borough of Enfield, is listed in Russian records

The IMF’s managing director has warned that the global economy is facing years of slow growth, with medium-term prospects their weakest in more than 30 years. Speaking in Washington ahead of the World Bank and IMF spring meetings next week, Kristalina Georgieva said the world economy would expand at an average annual rate of about

Police have arrested the husband of former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon as a suspect in an investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National party. Peter Murrell resigned as chief executive of the SNP last month after the party was forced to admit it had 30,000 fewer members than it had claimed.

Jamie Dimon has criticised regulators in the wake of the banking turmoil for incentivising banks to load up on government securities and imposing flawed stress tests. Dimon said the failure last month of Silicon Valley Bank and the Swiss government-engineered takeover of Credit Suisse risked undermining confidence in the banking industry and had prompted investors

Donald Trump was set to fly to New York on Monday to face criminal charges in a Manhattan court, marking an ominous new chapter in American political and legal history surrounding the former US president. Trump said he would depart at noon from his estate at Mar-a-Lago, on the Atlantic coast of Florida, and head

Saudi Arabia and other members of the Opec+ group announced surprise oil production cuts totalling more than 1mn barrels a day, putting Riyadh on a collision course with the US as the kingdom attempts to boost prices amid fears of weaker demand. Saudi Arabia will implement a “voluntary cut” of 500,000 b/d, or just under

Two years on from the January 6 Capitol riots, and following a familiar call to arms from former president Donald Trump, it was widely feared that crowds of his supporters might swarm the streets of New York to protest his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney. But by Friday afternoon, the anticipated hordes were conspicuously absent.

Donald Trump will turn himself in to New York prosecutors on Tuesday, his lawyer said, insisting the former president would “not be put in handcuffs”. Joe Tacopina added he expected the charges — the first criminal indictment in history of an ex-US president — to relate to payments to buy the silence of porn actress

Donald Trump has been indicted following a years-long investigation by Manhattan prosecutors that has led to the first criminal charges against a former US president in the country’s history, according to his lawyers. “President Trump has been indicted. He did not commit any crime. We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in court,” his lawyers

Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire who sold Marvel to Disney in 2009 and had clashed with the company’s chief executive Bob Iger, has been ousted as part of the company’s round of job cuts, according to people familiar with the matter. Perlmutter was chair of Disney’s Marvel Entertainment unit, which has become a blockbuster-making juggernaut for the

The governor of the Bank of England has dismissed the prospect of an imminent financial crisis, describing last week’s dumping of European bank shares as investors “testing out” lenders and insisting the world is not “at all in the place” it was before the 2008 crash. Appearing before the cross-party Treasury select committee on Tuesday,

Israel’s president Isaac Herzog has implored the government to halt a bitterly contested judicial overhaul, warning that the polarisation it had caused had put “our security, economy, society” under threat. Mass protests erupted across the country overnight with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sacked his defence

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sacked his defence minister Yoav Gallant after he called for a judicial overhaul to be halted, warning that it posed an “immediate danger” to national security. The fight over the bitterly contested proposals, which would significantly weaken the powers of the judiciary, has sparked the biggest wave of protests

Vladimir Putin has said Russia plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, marking Moscow’s latest attempt to use the threat of a nuclear war to ramp up tensions with the US and Nato over the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s president said work would be completed on building storage units for tactical nuclear weapons in

Olaf Scholz rejected comparisons between Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse as a slump in the German lender’s shares sparked a further day of turmoil for the banking sector. Speaking after Deutsche shares fell 14 per cent, the German chancellor sought to shore up confidence in the country’s biggest bank, with investors still nervous after the

TikTok’s chief executive told US lawmakers that the viral video app would be kept “free from any manipulation by any government”, as he tried to head off a potential ban in the US. Shou Zi Chew faced bruising questioning in Congress on Thursday over the social media app’s links to its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday pressed ahead with its monetary tightening campaign despite the recent turmoil in the banking sector, raising its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point and signalling another increase to come. Following its latest two-day meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to lift the federal funds rate