Xi Jinping has pledged to strengthen China’s security and build the military into a “great wall of steel” to defend the country’s interests as relations with the west reach the lowest point in decades. The Chinese president’s speech on Monday to the nearly 3,000 delegates of the National People’s Congress came at the close of
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US regulators are facing questions over whether they missed signs of mounting problems at Silicon Valley Bank, the tech lender whose implosion last week fomented fears of contagion across the banking sector. As the government fought to contain the fallout from the failure of SVB — which on Friday was taken over by the Federal
The writer is vice-chair at Oliver Wyman and former global head of banks research at Morgan Stanley What are the implications of the rapid demise of Silicon Valley Bank? That is arguably now the most important question in global finance. What can financial history tell us about what may happen next? First, Silicon Valley Bank
Good morning. It will be an interesting day in markets today. Did the US authorities do enough to quell worries about bank runs? It looks like it to us, but the situation remains tense. Emotion, not reason, may rule the day. Send us your worries, conspiracy theories and trading strategies: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com. Silicon Valley
US regulators unveiled emergency measures on Sunday to shore up the banking system and took control of another bank, as they moved to stem contagion from the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank. The Federal Reserve announced a new lending facility aimed at providing additional funding to eligible depository institutions to ensure that “banks have the
There’s no word yet on bidders for Silicon Valley Bank (or other parts of SVB Financial), but regulators have decided that depositors will be fine. From the Federal Reserve, FDIC and Treasury on Sunday: Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system. This step
Business confidence in the UK rose to its highest level in 12 months, according to a quarterly index monitored by Accenture and S&P Global. A reading of plus 43 per cent, the net balance of manufacturing and service sector companies expecting activity, marked a boost in sentiment from the plus 18 per cent registered in
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has vowed to use his Budget on Wednesday to set Britain on the “hard road” to becoming one of Europe’s richest countries but warned that big tax cuts will have to wait. Hunt is expected to use his limited room for fiscal manoeuvre to offer tax breaks to encourage companies to invest,
BBC executives are increasingly confident they will find a way to hold on to Gary Lineker, the corporation’s star sports presenter who was taken off air after breaching impartiality rules, as pressure grew on chair Richard Sharp to resign. Lineker, a former striker in the England men’s team and presenter of Match of the Day,
The pursuit of impartiality can make people do mad things. A number of journalists I know abstain from voting in order to maintain it. This has always struck me as a revealingly tribal way of viewing the world: is the only critical judgment they make about politics whether to tick a red or blue box
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has left start-ups scrambling to find emergency loans and pay staff as founders fear being held personally liable for unpaid wages. The bank’s closure on Friday has locked in client deposits, the vast majority of which are uninsured, and starved start-ups of funds to cover basic operations. “We’ve had
It is fitting that Silicon Valley should be home to the first significant digital run on a bank. Thanks to tech innovation, withdrawing money means going online these days, not queueing round the block. Hence the speed with which Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by regulators last week following $42bn of withdrawals. Opportunists have
The writer is a partner at Sequoia Capital Not much suggests a connection between Siena, the most majestic of Tuscany’s hill towns, and the flatlands of Santa Clara, the city in northern California which houses the Great America theme park and Levi’s stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers. But there is a link and
Janet Yellen said on Sunday that the US government was working closely with banking regulators to help depositors at Silicon Valley Bank, but dismissed the idea of a bailout. Speaking to CBS on Sunday, the Treasury secretary sought to assure US customers of the failed tech lender that policies were being discussed to stem the
The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and Gramercy The fate of what was a little-known bank outside the tech world until last week is now of major policy concern this weekend, and not just in the US. In a narrow sense, it demonstrates that even seemingly small banks
The UK government is trying to push through a takeover of the British arm of Silicon Valley Bank to prevent damage spreading across the technology sector, with a deep-pocketed Middle Eastern buyer having already expressed interest. The collapse of SVB has sparked crisis talks in Downing Street over the weekend, as British tech company executives
The UK chancellor will lay out his ambition to get hundreds of thousands more people into work in next week’s Budget, introducing reforms intended to move parents, the sick, disabled, and older workers back into jobs. Jeremy Hunt said his priority was to create the conditions for growth and to bear down on inflation, billing
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank has left many Chinese funds and tech start-ups in the lurch, as the collapsed institution served as a key funding bridge for groups operating between China and the US. SVB’s abrupt takeover by US regulators on Friday has also cast doubt over the fate of its joint venture in
Saudi Aramco reported record profits of $161bn in 2022 and increased its payout to shareholders as the largely state-owned oil company cashed in on a tumultuous year in energy markets. The Saudi Arabian producer on Sunday said it sold more oil than in 2021, improved refining margins and benefited from strong crude prices, which helped
The UK chancellor is preparing a dramatic intervention to provide a cash lifeline to scores of tech businesses next week as he seeks to contain the damage caused by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Jeremy Hunt said there was “a serious risk” to tech and life sciences companies that used SVB’s UK bank, many
Xi Jinping has kept the country’s central bank governor Yi Gang in his post and retained his finance and commerce ministers, as the Chinese president defied expectations of a large-scale overhaul of his cabinet at this year’s annual parliamentary meeting. The reappointments, which analysts said would reassure markets nervous about plans by Beijing to reform