Inflation affects us all, but the rate at which we experience it will depend on our unique spending habits. Use the calculator below to estimate your personal inflation rate. Why estimate your personal inflation rate? For the past 30 years, inflation has been relatively stable across advanced economies, including the UK and US. In others
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There is no shortage of white men in economics. That is clear enough from a glance down the very male, very white list of winners of the discipline’s Nobel memorial prize. There are a few exceptions: the black Caribbean-born scholar Sir Arthur Lewis won in 1979; the first woman to win, Elinor Ostrom, did not
The billionaire Issa brothers and their private equity partners TDR Capital stumped up just £200mn for their 2020 deal to buy Asda, the UK supermarket chain valued at £6.8bn, corporate filings reveal. Mohsin and Zuber Issa and TDR used a complex chain of asset sales and debt deals that left them on the hook for just
It was nearly a decade ago when Intel, then the undisputed leader in global semiconductor manufacturing, made a fateful decision. A new technology, extreme lithography, was offering a way to pack more computing power on to the silicon wafers from which tiny chips, essential for widely used products like smartphones and PCs, are cut. Using
Five weeks after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there is no consensus on whether the ensuing financial stress in North America and Europe has run its course or is a foretaste of worse to come. Equally pressing is the question of whether, against the backdrop of still high inflation, central banks in advanced economies
For about as long as countries have been having recessions, one pattern has consistently appeared in the jobs data: when the economy contracts, employment falls faster and further among men than women and the male employment rate takes longer to recover. In fact, in some instances female employment doesn’t even fall, merely experiencing a slowdown
Boeing said on Thursday that a production issue will affect its ability to deliver a “significant” number of 737 Max jets, potentially exacerbating aircraft shortages for airlines around the world. The aerospace manufacturer said a supplier had used a “non-standard” process when installing two fittings in the fuselage of certain models of the narrow-body jet,
The cost of buying insurance against a US government default has shot to its highest level in more than a decade, in an early sign of market concerns about the political impasse in Washington over the debt ceiling. Amid a stalemate between the White House and congressional Republicans on raising the federal borrowing limit, the
The FBI arrested a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard as part of an investigation into the leak of highly classified US intelligence documents. Attorney-general Merrick Garland identified the suspect as Jack Teixeira in a brief statement to reporters on Thursday. “FBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident,” Garland
Britain’s chancellor said on Thursday that his government needed to look at raising the level of protection for bank customers given the speed at which deposits fled Silicon Valley Bank last month. Speaking on the sidelines of the IMF spring meetings in Washington, Jeremy Hunt echoed comments by Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of
Almost exactly a year ago, just before the IMF’s spring meeting, Janet Yellen, US Treasury secretary, launched a new buzzword: “friend-shoring”. The idea was that in a world of rising US-China tensions (and western hostility to Russia), American companies should move their “supply chains to a large number of trusted countries” — or friends. It
A growing proportion of UK lenders are seeing a rise in defaults on their loans to households and companies, as rising interest rates continue to squeeze borrowers, official data showed on Thursday. Responding to the Bank of England’s credit conditions survey, a net 14 per cent of banks and building societies said more households had
Germany is pushing Intel to expand its plans for a landmark €17bn chip plant in exchange for higher subsidies, in what is already set to be the country’s largest foreign direct investment since the second world war. The US semiconductor group is due to receive €6.8bn in subsidies from Berlin to build its mega fab,
Fox News goes on trial on Monday over some of its anchors’ and correspondents’ suggestions that voting-machine-maker Dominion helped fix the last US presidential election for Joe Biden. The Delaware judge has already made one major ruling: “None of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Now Dominion needs only prove
European stocks made moderate gains at the open on Thursday after the Federal Reserve predicted the US economy would go through a “mild recession”. The region-wide Stoxx 600 rose 0.3 per cent, Germany’s Dax was up 0.2 per cent, France’s Cac 40 added 1 per cent and London’s FTSE 100 was flat. Traders took heart
SoftBank’s decision to sell its South Korea-based venture capital arm to a company recently founded by the brother of its chief executive Masayoshi Son has drawn criticism from analysts over governance standards at the tech conglomerate. The Japanese group said it had taken appropriate governance measures over the deal, but sellside analysts and governance experts
By now the US Treasury market’s unnerving fragility back in 2020 has been pretty comprehensively dissected. But the Office of Financial Research last week published an interesting new take on one of the freakiest financial mishaps of the past decade. For people blissfully unaware of what happened, in March 2020 Treasuries went from being an
The writer of this essay is an investor and co-author of the annual “State of AI” report On a cold evening in February I attended a dinner party at the home of an artificial intelligence researcher in London, along with a small group of experts in the field. He lives in a penthouse apartment at
Getting our heads around large numbers can be hard. Few of us can comprehend the true scale of difference between a million, a billion and a trillion. But the events of recent months in the US may give us an incentive us to try. President Joe Biden has succeeded in passing three important acts that
In October 2020, Zambia, struggling from an economic and financial crisis compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, first missed an interest payment on its international bonds. Two and a half years later it remains in limbo, unable to resolve the default on most of its $31.6bn debts. That an impoverished and vulnerable country has for so
The writer is an FT contributing editor There is a clickbait argument that because the Federal Reserve has raised US interest rates so far and so fast, small banks — which provide almost 70 per cent of commercial real estate lending — are likely to see significant defaults, and when those loans go bad they