US companies are rushing to borrow money in the bond market, bringing forward deals in case the country’s debt ceiling stand-off causes turmoil over the summer. Highly rated companies have issued bonds worth $112bn so far this month, according to data from Dealogic, up from $46bn in May 2022 and more than triple the amount
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US president Joe Biden called on Republicans to moderate their “extreme positions” as he spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Sunday in a bid to ease tensions in the escalating US debt ceiling crisis. Biden called the Republican leader on the flight home from the G7 leaders summit in Hiroshima, Japan, after negotiations had
Joe Biden has said he expects to see a “thaw” in US relations with Beijing, even as he concluded a G7 summit in Japan that made a concerted effort to counter military and economic security threats from China. The US president said in a news conference at the end of the three-day summit that talks
With the skeleton of Hiroshima’s A-Bomb Dome as a backdrop, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida ended the G7 summit with a call for global peace and a world without nuclear weapons, after being upstaged by Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s appearance. Only a few weeks earlier, Kishida had thought “the hurdle was too high” for the Ukrainian president
“Magic circle” law firm Allen & Overy is merging with New York’s Shearman & Sterling to form a practice with combined revenues of about $3.4bn, in one of the biggest transatlantic legal tie-ups in history. The merger, which is subject to a vote of both firms’ partners, will create one of the largest law firms
China said that US chipmaker Micron Technology’s products posed “serious network security risks” as it banned operators of key infrastructure from buying them, in its first big measure against an American semiconductor group. The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday announced that the company, which is the biggest US maker of memory chips, “posed significant
“If you’ve read my novels, you already know absolutely everything about me,” wrote Martin Amis in Inside Story, his 15th and final novel, published in 2020. But in saying that, the British writer, who died at his Florida home on Friday, at the age of 73 of cancer of the oesophagus, was only continuing the
The writer is chair of Rockefeller International Something is rotten in the Chinese economy, but don’t expect Wall Street analysts to tell you about it. There has never been a bigger disconnect, in my experience, between some of the rosier investment bank views on China and the dim reality on the ground. Perhaps reluctant to
Everyone wants a slice of the electric vehicle market. Carmaking is not only a big employer, it has also long symbolised a nation’s manufacturing prowess, from British Minis to Italian Ferraris. As the sector goes electric to meet climate change targets, the US, EU and China have been thrust into a race to build up
Downing Street has defended the UK home secretary Suella Braverman following reports over the weekend that she asked civil servants to help her avoid speeding points on her driving licence. Braverman was caught speeding by the police last summer, as first reported by the Sunday Times newspaper. The minister, who was attorney-general at the time,
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,
Climate experts criticised the G7 group of advanced economies for failing to commit to tougher action on fossil fuels after Germany and Japan prevailed on the continued use of gas and coal respectively. In their final communique, the leaders of the G7, including the UK, US, France, Italy and Canada, said they were committed to
Vladimir Putin has hailed his first major victory since the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, claiming Russian forces had captured the eastern city of Bakhmut despite Kyiv insisting the battle “was not over”. Russia’s president said the paramilitary group Wagner had seized the Ukrainian city with help from Russia’s armed forces after a
This time last year, Jamie Dimon was preparing for the bank’s investor day at a rare moment of weakness, with shareholders raising concerns over the bank’s $15bn investment plans and rebelling against his pay. Fast forward 12 months and the longest-serving big bank chief executive on Wall Street is heading into the same event having
When Arthi Raghu was suddenly laid off from her sales development job the other week, she went straight on to LinkedIn to write a guide to surviving the first crushing 48 hours of losing your job. So far so normal, except for one thing: the company laying off Raghu — and more than 700 of
Facebook’s parent company is in talks to create a multiyear agreement with augmented reality start-up Magic Leap, as the social media giant continues to pour billions of dollars into its ambition to create an avatar-filled online world called the metaverse. According to people familiar with early discussions, Meta is exploring ways in which Magic Leap
The new chief executive of Rolls-Royce has said that one of the company’s key divisions had been “grossly mismanaged” in recent years, pointing to the scale of the challenge facing the FTSE 100 engineering group as it seeks to change course after years of underperformance. In an interview with the Financial Times, Tufan Erginbilgic, who
Nationalist party Sinn Féin swept to a better than expected victory in local council elections that were widely regarded as a vote on the region’s post-Brexit stalemate. “Historic change is happening and Sinn Féin is leading that change right across Ireland,” Michelle O’Neill, the party’s first minister-in-waiting, said in a statement after her party became
Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has “set back” China’s ambitions to invade Taiwan, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said. In a wide-ranging interview at the FT Weekend festival in Washington on Saturday, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate, who served as America’s top diplomat under Barack Obama, offered stark assessments on Russia’s invasion of
British author Martin Amis has died aged 73, according to his publishing house. Dubbed ‘the erstwhile Mick Jagger of British letters’, Amis had a privileged background as the son of novelist Kingsley Amis. Yet he was drawn to the seedy underbelly of society. His publisher Vintage Books said Amis had defined “what it meant to
Salman Rushdie is working on a book about the attack that robbed him of his right eye, he said in one of his first public appearances since he was repeatedly stabbed onstage at a literary festival in upstate New York last year. Speaking at the FT Weekend Festival in Washington on Saturday, the novelist, 75,