A flow of key data over the past 10 days suggests the UK economy is less of an outlier among its peer countries than previously thought, as figures showed unexpected economic resilience and a sharp decline in inflation. A few weeks ago, Britain was the only large advanced economy not showing a steady downward trend
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Barbie and Oppenheimer delivered the strongest opening weekend at the box office this year as fans rushed to experience the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, boosting cinemas after what has been a lacklustre summer season. Barbie’s estimated $155mn opening in North America was the highest of the year, following a marketing blitz from toymaker Mattel and Warner Bros.
The US criticised elections in Cambodia on Sunday as “neither free nor fair” after strongman Hun Sen claimed a landslide victory, setting the stage to transfer power to his son. Hun Sen said his Cambodian People’s party won 120 of 125 National Assembly seats, according to unofficial results, with five for the royalist Funcinpec party.
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez was trailing his conservative rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the country’s general election on Sunday night, but the race was unexpectedly close with more than 90 per cent of the vote counted. The preliminary results defied the predictions of most pollsters that Feijóo’s People’s party would comfortably oust the incumbent Socialist
The government will on Monday announce plans to focus on building homes in city centres and liberalising planning restrictions, as it seeks to meet its manifesto promise to build 1mn new homes in England by the end of the current parliament. Prime minister Rishi Sunak will outline his strategy to boost the country’s supply of
Powerful Republican donors and billionaires Ken Griffin and Nelson Peltz are rethinking plans to support the US presidential bid of Ron DeSantis over concerns that the Florida governor has veered too far to the right. They have been discouraged by DeSantis’s interventionist policies, people familiar with their thinking told the Financial Times. Griffin objects to
The Treasury will this week summon the heads of Britain’s biggest banks to explain how they intend to ensure that customers are not “de-banked” for their political views after Coutts closed the account of former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage. NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays are among 19 banks and fintechs that will be
The writer is a historian, philosopher and author To understand events in Israel, there is just one question to ask: what limits the power of the government? Robust democracies rely on a whole system of checks and balances. But Israel lacks a constitution, an upper house in the parliament, a federal structure or any other
European central banks could accelerate the process of shrinking their vast bond portfolios, according to officials and economists, who say this would reinforce their fight against inflation and make room to buy assets again in the next crisis. Rate rises have been the main tool for central banks to tackle the recent surge in inflation
Italy will try to maintain its influence on European Central Bank affairs by proposing Piero Cipollone, a senior Bank of Italy official, as its candidate to join the eurozone’s top monetary decision-making body. Three sources close to the decision said Cipollone was the Italian government’s favoured candidate to replace Fabio Panetta, the ECB executive board
In his Mansion House speech early this month, Jeremy Hunt, chancellor of the exchequer, recognised some of the defects of the UK’s pensions mess. He acknowledged, for example, the low prospective returns on pension assets and the failure of institutional investors to back high-growth home companies. But he failed to deliver hope for radical reforms.
UK banks have handed more of the benefits of interest rate rises to savers than their counterparts in Europe or the US, as politicians, regulators and clients push for a greater share of the haul. Global banks are coming under pressure to pass on the benefits of higher interest rates to their customers — but
“We don’t want Disneyland to train our military.” Those were US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s words last week at a press conference in which he and other Republicans defended inserting “anti-woke” provisions in a military spending bill that were designed to curb abortion rights, diversity training and transgender healthcare. The fact that he
Elon Musk has said he plans to revamp Twitter’s branding and ditch its iconic bird logo, posting on the social media platform that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”. Musk has already made significant changes to Twitter since he bought the company last year, changing its name
Grant Shapps, energy minister, has insisted that the government will “max out” the UK’s remaining reserves of North Sea oil and gas, arguing this is compatible with Britain’s pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Labour leader Keir Starmer has said the UK will grant no new North Sea licences if his party
Spaniards go to the polls on Sunday with the choice of re-electing Pedro Sánchez and his fractious leftwing alliance or letting conservatives reverse the prime minister’s reforms in a possible pact with the hard right. Most polls suggest the opposition People’s party will win the snap general election but fall short of an outright majority.
Top US consultancies are struggling to attract business in China as Beijing’s national security raids scare away local clients and global investors pull back from dealmaking in the country. Management consultancy Bain is telling new China hires to wait until as late as 2025 to start their jobs, while roughly half of McKinsey staff do
Like many breakthroughs in scientific discovery, the one that spurred an artificial intelligence revolution came from a moment of serendipity. In early 2017, two Google research scientists, Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, were in a hallway of the search giant’s Mountain View campus, discussing a new idea for how to improve machine translation, the AI
An influential early warning system for identifying emerging infectious diseases is in danger of financial collapse, raising concerns over experts’ capacity to track future pandemics despite pledges by policymakers to learn lessons from Covid-19. The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) was among the first to detect viral outbreaks including Sars, Mers and Covid-19, which
The writer is a professor at Cornell, senior fellow at Brookings and author of ‘The Future of Money’ With cash on its way out, many central banks around the world are experimenting with — or in some cases rolling out — retail central bank digital currencies. Their time may have come and they have many
EY has hired a leading adviser to crisis-hit companies to conduct a review of the failed attempt to split its audit and consulting businesses. The Big Four firm has engaged Lord David Gold to examine the process behind Project Everest, which collapsed in April after leaders of its US business blocked the global break-up, according