News

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Sunday was trying to contain a revolt from rightwing lawmakers opposed to his debt agreement with President Joe Biden, as both sides moved to sell their parties on a deal to prevent a looming US default. McCarthy defended the pact ahead of a high-stakes vote expected on Wednesday in

Stronger than expected US inflation and a bump in consumer spending have fuelled worldwide expectations that interest rates will go higher, as predictions about future monetary policy rapidly shift. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation overshot expectations in April, data published on Friday showed, while US consumer spending rose last month and new orders

Jeremy Hunt has backed further interest rate rises to bring prices under control as figures showed only Argentina and South Sudan experienced bigger increases in underlying inflation last month. The UK chancellor signalled his support for Bank of England rate increases after a week when core inflation, which excludes energy and food, hit its highest

Net immigration to the UK rose to a record high of 606,000 in 2022, driven by rising numbers of people from outside the EU, including from Ukraine and Hong Kong. The figures fell short of estimates of about 700,000 but remain far above the Conservative government’s 2010 pledge to reduce net immigration to the “tens

UK inflation dropped to 8.7 per cent in April, a smaller fall than the Bank of England expected, raising pressure on the central bank to keep increasing interest rates.  The figure will come as a blow to ministers and the central bank because the fall in consumer price inflation from 10.1 per cent in March

The governor of the Bank of England has conceded there are “very big lessons to learn” in setting monetary policy after the central bank failed to forecast the recent rise and persistence of inflation. Along with other members of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, Andrew Bailey told the House of Commons Treasury select committee on

Meta has been hit with a €1.2bn fine by the EU and ordered to suspend transfers of user data to the US, in the largest penalty to be imposed against a Big Tech company in the bloc over privacy violations. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees the General Data Protection Regulation, on Monday handed down

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to win over Brazil and India at the G7 summit in Japan, where he called on leaders to unite behind his proposal to end Russia’s war. Zelenskyy said there was a need for “the clear global leadership of democracy” to counter Moscow’s aggression, in a speech addressed to G7 leaders,

The G7 has issued its strongest condemnation of China, as the world’s most advanced economies step up their response to what they say are rising military and economic security threats posed by Beijing. In broad criticism of China over everything from its militarisation of the South China Sea to its use of “economic coercion”, the

James Gorman plans to step down as chief executive of Morgan Stanley within the next year after more than a decade at the top of the Wall Street bank he turned into a wealth management juggernaut. Gorman, 64, told the bank’s annual shareholder meeting on Friday that the “specific timing of the CEO transition has

Calpers, the biggest US public pension plan, is considering bigger bets on private equity despite despite growing fears that higher interest rates will curb the industry’s returns. Chief executive Marcie Frost said that the $442bn-in-assets retirement fund, one of the world’s biggest investors in private equity, will start an extensive review of its holdings in

Andrew Bailey has acknowledged for the first time the Bank of England is dealing with a UK wage price spiral as he pledged to raise interest rates as far “as necessary” to get inflation back to the bank’s 2 per cent target. Speaking to the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference in London, the BoE

Oxford university ended its relationship with the Sacklers on Monday after a Financial Times investigation into its continued ties with the wealthy family led academics and students to call for sweeping reforms. The decision to cut social ties and remove the Sackler name from buildings, spaces and staff positions comes at the end of a

Turkey’s veteran leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday led a hotly contested election to extend his rule into a third decade, defying polls to enter an expected run-off for the presidency with momentum on his side. After a hard-fought campaign that had raised hopes of an opposition breakthrough, Erdoğan won 49.3 per cent of votes

Howard Marks, the co-founder of $172bn investment group Oaktree Capital Management, has warned that the boom in private credit will soon be tested as higher interest rates and slower economic growth heap pressure on corporate America. The 77-year-old billionaire told the Financial Times that big asset managers had competed aggressively to lend to the largest

Russia’s defence ministry claimed a long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive had begun, pointing to intensifying attacks in eastern Ukraine over the past 48 hours. The ministry said on Friday that Ukraine had launched 26 assaults along a 60-mile stretch of the frontline near Bakhmut and the nearby town of Soledar, involving more than a thousand troops and

PwC is racing to contain the global fallout of an Australian leak scandal on its business after it emerged that the firm used confidential government tax plans to advise tech clients. Emails released by an Australian senate committee last week showed that PwC had used information received during its work with the government to win

The Bank of England has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.5 per cent, as it warned it would not hit its inflation target until 2025. A seven to two majority on the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee said the rise was needed to bring inflation back under control as

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has said a crackdown on crypto has made it “very difficult” to do business in the US, adding it now hopes to be regulated in the UK. The firm’s chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann said at the FT’s crypto and digital assets summit that the US “has been very

The compensation bill for those affected by the NHS contaminated blood scandal could reach £10bn, according to officials, in a further blow to the UK’s stretched public finances. Ministers have accepted the “moral case” for compensating families of the victims of the scandal, in which tens of thousands of people were infected with HIV and