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CIA director Bill Burns travelled to China last month, a clandestine visit by one of President Joe Biden’s most trusted officials that signals how concerned the White House had become about deteriorating relations between Beijing and Washington. Five people familiar with the situation said Burns, a former top diplomat who is frequently entrusted with delicate

In just two days this week, Elon Musk had more top-level Chinese meetings than Biden administration officials have had in months. The Tesla and Twitter boss secured meetings with three government ministers as well as influential Shanghai Communist party chief Chen Jining. He reportedly even met vice-premier Ding Xuexiang, a confidant of President Xi Jinping.

The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter Economic policymaking in the US, the most important economy in the world, has a kaleidoscopic quality. At the start of the year, the world was fixated on the Federal Reserve, interest rates and banks. Shake the kaleidoscope and a few weeks later national

OK readers. We’ve been together for six months now and if any of you still have your money in an active fund — you know, where you actually let portfolio managers choose things all on their own — I haven’t done my job. There is no excuse for it. Actually, there’s one. If your manager

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson has said he will give the Covid-19 inquiry on Friday his unredacted WhatsApp messages shared with the Cabinet Office, in a swipe at Rishi Sunak. Johnson added in a letter to inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett that he would like to hand over other “relevant” material, including correspondence from

Emmanuel Macron deployed a novel tactic this week to try to repair France’s frayed relations with Europe’s eastern flank — call it “strategic humility”.  In a speech at a security conference in Bratislava, the French president all but apologised for not heeding warnings issued from Warsaw to Tallinn about the risks posed by Vladimir Putin’s

Good morning. What is the government’s legal battle with the official Covid-19 public inquiry really about? The story that some of Boris Johnson’s allies want to tell is that it is about the relationship between Johnson and Rishi Sunak, but that isn’t quite right. The line that Labour is running with is that it shows

European stocks rallied on Friday after investors took heart from US congressional passage of a deal to lift the country’s debt ceiling and suggestions from Federal Reserve officials that the central bank would halt interest rate rises. Europe’s region-wide Stoxx 600 rose 0.5 per cent, extending gains from the previous day, while France’s Cac 40

The US Senate has approved a fiscal deal between the White House and congressional Republicans, ending a weeks-long political stand-off over the debt ceiling that risked triggering an unprecedented default in the world’s largest economy. Lawmakers in the upper chamber passed the bill with overwhelming bipartisan support on Thursday evening, with 63 senators backing the

The late Erast Yakovenko, a barrel-chested veteran of the 1990s war in Chechnya, hailed from a long line of Russian military men. So it was no surprise to his family when he signed up to fight in Ukraine — even at 53. What was more unusual than his age — and his demise on the

As the Berlin-based music group BMG was bargaining over the terms of the sale of its record label to Sony 15 years ago, executives at the New York-headquartered entertainment giant could not understand why their German counterparts wanted to hang on to the likes of Rick Astley. Like a string of “legacy artists” that BMG

The west must take “into account” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s security concerns and stop the slide towards a Versailles-style victors’ peace in Ukraine, said Brazil’s top foreign policy adviser. Celso Amorim, a foreign minister during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first two terms and current adviser on international affairs to the leftwing leader, said

Katie Petrelius, a top White House official who oversaw fundraising for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and has been responsible for his presidential appointments while in office, is leaving the administration.  Petrelius helped the president select US ambassadors around the world, as well as other top positions within the government, including members of his export council

Rishi Sunak’s government on Thursday refused to hand over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages to the official Covid public inquiry, instead launching a legal challenge to try to keep them secret. The move puts Sunak at loggerheads with the inquiry, headed by former judge Baroness Heather Hallett, and fuelled claims by opposition parties that he

Compared with what could have happened, it was close to being the least bad outcome possible. The deal that President Joe Biden struck with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker, to avert a US sovereign default was hammered out under duress. No other large economy has a debt ceiling rule let alone a routine habit of

What if Apple came up with its most important new product in years and the world yawned? Next week’s expected unveiling of Apple’s mixed reality headset — a product that combines virtual reality with augmented reality, which overlays a digital world on to the real one — feels oddly out of step with the times.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured US funding to provide satellite internet to the Ukrainian military, as its founder abandoned his stated doubts over how his company’s terminals were being deployed in a major conflict. The Department of Defense has agreed to buy Starlink terminals from Musk but has not disclosed the quantities it will purchase,

The British state is, for a reporter, a deeply irritating entity. Officials, ministers and advisers all too often believe that the core power of government is its ability to control the flow of information. That is also part of why it is so difficult for businesses to engage with the UK government. This was shown

When Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan, flew to Shanghai this week, he might have expected to attract attention for his views on Sino-American relations. But that was before Bill Ackman, the veteran activist investor, jumped in. On Wednesday, Ackman issued a passionate appeal for Dimon to throw his hat into the 2024 presidential race, challenging

Goldman Sachs is preparing for “a tougher environment” by laying off more employees, which may help it surpass a $600mn savings target from job cuts, one of the bank’s top executives said on Thursday.  The warning from Goldman president John Waldron underscores the increasingly gloomy outlook on Wall Street as rising interest rates have damped

In the three decades since the end of the cold war, the leafy streets around Mimosa Plus Golf Course in Clark, an area about 92km north of the Philippines’ capital Manila, have been largely quiet, populated mainly by retirees. But one day in April, about 100 US troops were sitting on a pavement and more