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European stocks and Wall Street futures rose on Friday, while US regional banks clawed back some of their recent losses in pre-market trade, as investors looked ahead to the publication of US jobs data for evidence of the health of the American economy. The region-wide Stoxx Europe 600 added 0.3 per cent in morning trade

Good morning. The people have spoken, but what they’ve said isn’t yet entirely clear. Most votes in the local elections are still being counted and we still only have a partial picture. What we can say is that it has been a very bad night for the Conservative party. What’s less clear is what it

The UK’s opposition Labour and Liberal Democrat parties expressed optimism early on Friday that they were making significant gains as votes began to be counted after local elections in many parts of England. Both parties argued that their performances positioned them well for the forthcoming nationwide general election. Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, told

One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working

The soaring value of family homes means that many pensioners are living inside a potential tax liability. The number of people in the UK paying inheritance tax jumped by 24 per cent in the past year, with 41,000 estates caught in the IHT net — nearly double the number three years ago. Should this trouble

Remember the rise of the right? First Brexit, then Trump, then a wave of rightwing populism broke over Europe. There were dozens of news articles on the “rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment”. Except it turns out that in the west, 2016 was a high water mark for such views. This is true of almost all

A flood of gilt sales is driving up the UK government’s borrowing costs, investors say, as markets are asked to absorb record volumes of bonds without the Bank of England stepping in to hoover up supply. Bond yields in most large economies have shot up over the past 18 months as soaring inflation drove a

Apple’s iPhone shipments bounced back from supply chain disruptions in the holiday period, though revenue still declined year-on-year for the second quarter in a row due to what it described as a “tougher” economic environment and currency headwinds. Finance chief Luca Maestri said Apple had seen “significant acceleration in iPhone revenue from December to March”.

In the US tech sell off, Apple was regarded as the safest pair of hands. It has more than 2bn active devices and nearly 1bn people paying for services. Unlike many of its peers it pays dividends as well as buying back shares. A drop in revenue and net income in the last quarter does

Travel groups Expedia and Booking Holdings said there was strong demand for accommodations in the first three months of 2023, with both companies notching record sales figures. Expedia reported $2.7bn in revenues, its highest for a first quarter and an 18 per cent improvement on the comparable period in 2022. Booking said its gross bookings

The executives leading the AI race that has transfixed the tech industry, including the CEOs of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, met at the White House on Thursday for what a senior US official described as a “frank discussion” about their responsibilities to make sure their systems are safe. The meeting, which was attended by vice-president

UK ministers plan to widen the forms of photo identification that voters can present at polling stations in future, as concerns grow that the requirement to show an ID card may have reduced participation in Thursday’s local elections in England. Voters have for the first time been legally obliged to produce proof of identity in

The World Economic Forum’s latest Chief Economists Outlook highlighted the uncertain backdrop to the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank’s meetings this week. While 45 per cent of economists thought a global recession was likely this year, the same proportion considered it unlikely. A lack of clarity on the trajectory of the US and

This month, global investors face a peculiar paradox. A mantra of modern finance is that Treasuries are “risk-free” assets, implying that it is inconceivable that the US government might default. But in January, the Treasury breached the $31.4tn debt limit, capping bond issuance, and warned of a crisis unless Congress raises this — something Republicans

Western Alliance shares pulled back from their session lows after the Arizona-based bank denied it was exploring a potential sale. The Arizona bank described a report in the Financial Times that it was considering a potential sale of all or part of its business as “categorically false in all respects”, adding: “Western Alliance is not

The European Central Bank has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point — less than previous increases — in a sign that eurozone borrowing costs may soon reach their peak. The ECB’s decision on Thursday, which mirrors the US Federal Reserve’s quarter-point rate rise the previous day, takes the benchmark deposit rate

Activist investor Nelson Peltz has warned that First Republic may not be the last regional US bank to fail as he renewed calls for deposit insurance to be extended to safeguard regional lenders. Peltz, the co-founder and chief executive of Trian Fund Management, told the Financial Times that depositors with more than $250,000 in a

Canada’s TD Bank is scrapping its planned $13.4bn acquisition of US lender First Horizon, the companies said on Thursday. The deal, which was first announced in February 2022, had been in regulatory limbo for months, with the closing repeatedly delayed. US politicians had raised concerns about TD, which is Canada’s second-largest bank, becoming too big

Shares in several US regional banks tumbled in pre-market trading on Thursday as the industry’s worst crisis since 2008 rumbled on, overshadowing a suggestion from the Federal Reserve that it could soon pause its policy of interest rate increases. California’s PacWest was more than 45 per cent lower ahead of the Wall Street open after

The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-ups When IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, some reckoned it was checkmate for humanity, as well as for the ancient sport itself. Newsweek magazine had billed the contest between the calculating machine and the then strongest

The crowning of Charles III will be as close as the new King comes to receiving public acclamation in the absence of a ballot. Saturday’s coronation, and the scale of public participation outside Westminster Abbey, will be the first popular marker of King Charles’s reign. With people camping out days ahead to secure positions where