It has been a frantic two weeks. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 sparked a domino effect that toppled another regional US lender, Signature Bank, spooked global markets, and led to the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS. Bank shares fell again on Friday, led by Deutsche Bank — prompting chancellor
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Oil prices slid on Friday after US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said it would take “years” to replenish the country’s strategic stockpiles, undermining hopes that the federal government would soon return to the market as a major buyer. Brent crude, the international benchmark, slipped as much as 4 per cent to $72.68 a barrel. West
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
First Republic was engulfed in a distracting internal succession crisis in the months before the US Federal Reserve imperilled its business model by embarking on an aggressive cycle of interest rate rises, according to people briefed on the matter. After decades of rapid growth, when it won plaudits for providing personalised service to wealthy customers,
The writer is an FT contributing editor and co-founder of Now Teach Last Monday a primary school headteacher took to Twitter and declared that Ofsted inspectors, who were due the next day, would not be let in. She invited teachers everywhere to join a protest in solidarity with Ruth Perry, the primary head who recently took
Outside Zurich’s central station a statue of Alfred Escher looks proudly down Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world’s most expensive shopping streets, to Paradeplatz, the heart of the city’s financial district. Trains still trundle along the Swiss rail network that the 19th-century industrialist pioneered — but the bank he founded 167 years ago to finance its
In the latest security crackdown, UK ministers and officials have been ordered to remove TikTok from their mobiles lest it be used to hand sensitive private data to the Chinese government. And quite right too. We really don’t want the People’s Republic knowing whether government figures are up to speed on the steps to the
France and the UK have postponed the highly symbolic state visit of King Charles III that had been due to begin on Sunday because of the escalating protest movement against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age. The delay is an embarrassing setback for Macron, who has staked his reformist credentials in his second
Equity markets were mixed on Friday as concerns over the health of the global banking system dragged down shares in US lenders down more than 14 per cent this week. The FTSE All-World stock index was down 0.1 per cent on Friday during Asian trading but up 1.6 per cent for the week. Technology stocks
The Fed’s decision to guarantee non-insured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank is “the most wonderful example of moral hazard we’ve come across for quite a while”, says Standard Chartered chief Bill Winters. Winters’ remarks, made on Friday at a Hong Kong financial conference, come after US regulators pledged to protect deposits at failed Silicon Valley
Swiss politicians are stealthy by design. But last weekend, as Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, and a national institution, tottered on the brink of failure, Bern’s political leadership was uncomfortably thrust into the limelight. Karin Keller-Sutter has been in charge of the Swiss finance ministry for just two months. She now finds herself dealing with
Chinese authorities have raided US due diligence firm Mintz Group’s Beijing offices, detaining five local staff and closing its China operations, the company said in a statement. The raid, which one person familiar with the matter said occurred on Monday, comes as the Chinese government is preparing to welcome scores of international chief executives including
The demonstrators at Place de la République in Paris were chanting, weirdly, in Italian: “Siamo tutti antifascisti,” — “We are all antifascists.” In French, they targeted their chief enemy, the president: “We are here, even if Macron doesn’t want it.” Watching them were ranks of massed riot police, who, in the French policing tradition, made
Executive pay at Silicon Valley Bank soared after the bank embarked on a strategy to boost profitability by buying riskier assets exposed to rising interest rates, according to a Financial Times analysis of securities filings and people familiar with the matter. The jump in pay for chief executive Greg Becker and chief financial officer Daniel
Where were the regulators? It’s a fair question after the failure of several ostensibly supervised banks and policymakers are already asking it as they set out, once again, to make the financial system less crisis-prone. Even so, there is an equally pressing question to answer: where were the directors? The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,
Central bankers have been at pains to stress that they can maintain a neat dividing line between actions taken to quell inflation, and those to fix turmoil in the banking system. So much so that the US Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised interest rates by a quarter point, despite the recent collapse of three midsized
When Amar Bhidé joined the board of Baillie Gifford’s flagship Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust three years ago, an insider complimented the academic as a “world-class brain and a world-class bastard” who would take to task the £13.4bn company’s investment managers. Bhidé, a professor of business at Tufts University in Massachusetts, departed in acrimony this week,
The 2010s were a fruitful decade for culture warriors on the right. There was a particularly rich seam in 2016, with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Three years later, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson exploited the culture wars on their way to win victories in Australia and the UK. Much has
China has released a top chip investor after an eight-month detention as the country battles to bolster its semiconductor industry in the face of Washington’s containment efforts. Chen Datong, head of Yuanhe Puhua (Suzhou) Investment Management, also known as Hua Capital, was released this month as Beijing seeks help from chip experts to navigate tough
Do Kwon, the South Korean crypto entrepreneur behind the $40bn implosion of terraUSD and luna digital tokens last year, has been charged in the US with fraud, hours after he was arrested in Montenegro. In a 12-page indictment revealed on Thursday, US prosecutors accused Kwon of defrauding crypto customers by “deceiving those individuals about aspects
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.