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My maternal grandparents married in 1961, amid a man-made famine. On her wedding night, the bride walked home along streets shared by the bodies of the dead. Her colleagues had surprised her with an extravagant wedding gift — a handful of boiled sweets — which she held like gemstones in her pocket. My parents were

The writer is a technology analyst In 1946, my grandfather, writing as “Murray Leinster”, published a science fiction story called “A Logic Named Joe”. In it, everyone has a computer (a “logic”) connected to a global network that does everything from banking to newspapers and video calls. One day, one of these logics, Joe, starts

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so

Wrongfooted investors and analysts have been forced to tear up their optimistic predictions of sweeping interest rate cuts this year as rising oil and metals prices add to inflationary pressures, reigniting fears that borrowing costs will have to stay ‘higher for longer’.  In a dramatic shift in sentiment, markets are now betting that the Federal

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the War in Ukraine myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. The US and the UK have launched a crackdown on trades in Russian metals, in a move designed to limit Moscow’s export revenue and restrict its ability to fund the war in Ukraine. The

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Kristalina Georgieva has won a second five-year term as IMF managing director, ahead of the start of the fund’s spring meetings in Washington next week.  Georgieva, who has been in the role since the autumn

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. A fondness for European defence stocks has been a somewhat oddball hobby for most of the last decade or two, but like V-neck jumpers, the sector is firmly back in fashion. So much so, in

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The European private equity group CVC Capital Partners is poised to announce its plans for an initial public offering as soon as Monday, kicking off one of the continent’s most highly anticipated listings this year.

Ben Bernanke was brutally honest about the failings of the Bank of England’s economic modelling when he published a long-awaited review of its forecasting processes on Friday.  But the man who led the US Federal Reserve in its response to the 2008-09 global financial crisis ducked the big question for economists: whether the UK’s central

Iran has signalled to allies and western nations that it will retaliate against a suspected Israeli air strike on its Damascus consulate in a “calibrated” manner to keep an all-out regional conflict at bay, according to officials briefed on the talks. Tehran is unlikely to target Israeli diplomatic facilities in the region, said an official

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Few central banks have emerged from the past three years of inflation fighting with the same credibility they had before. The Bank of England has had a particularly hard time. Net public satisfaction with the

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Thames Water shareholders backed away from supporting the group after the UK regulator demanded they slash the company’s debt pile and make other structural changes they calculated would cost as much as £8bn. The backtracking

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Growth in the world’s oil use is slowing, the International Energy Agency said on Friday, even as traders’ fears of a supply shock have driven up prices by nearly a fifth this year.  The IEA

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A string of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence over the past year has raised expectations for the arrival of machines that can outperform expert humans across a range of intellectual tasks. With progress in AI seeming to accelerate, there is near consensus in Silicon Valley that abilities that seemed far-fetched only a few years ago are

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The dollar has notched up its strongest weekly performance since 2022 after outsize US inflation figures caused ripples through world markets. The US currency has strengthened by 1.5 per cent against a basket of six

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. When I spoke this week to Christopher Groves, a London-based tax lawyer who advises the well-off, he was sitting in the Milan office of his firm Withers. It was not a coincidence. While the UK

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The Bank of England must revamp its main economic model if it is to avoid repeating its recent failure to forecast surging inflation, former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke has said. The Nobel laureate, who

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner is being investigated by Greater Manchester police over allegations that she potentially broke electoral law by failing to properly disclose her main residence in official documents. Rayner was reported to

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Roaring equity markets and the popularity of a new spot bitcoin exchange traded fund powered BlackRock to record assets under management of $10.5tn and net income of $1.57bn that was up 36 per cent year

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Profits at JPMorgan Chase rose 6 per cent in the first three months of 2024 from a year earlier, despite the bank paying an extra $725mn charge from US regulators to cover the costs of