As I slide out of the Uber that has dropped me off at the little art deco block of flats in Cape Town where Nuruddin Farah lives by himself, and where he is to cook me lunch, I catch a friendly face peering from above. “I’ll come down and let you in,” the great Somali
News
The UK economy rebounded by more than expected in January, driven by growth in the services sector, according to official statistics published ahead of the Budget next week. Gross domestic product rose 0.3 per cent between December and January, following a contraction the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday. This was
Good morning. Welcome to jobs day. Forecasters think there were 205,000 jobs added in February. They thought something similar last month, before the real January number, more than half a million jobs, blew everyone away. Since then, many have taken to waving away strong January data as a warm-winter fluke. Another bumper payrolls report today
Something is going very wrong for teenagers. Between 1994 and 2010, the share of British teens who do not consider themselves likeable fell slightly from 6 per cent to 4 per cent; since 2010 it has more than doubled. The share who think of themselves as a failure, who worry a lot and who are
Xi Jinping began an unprecedented third term as China’s president on Friday, cementing the Chinese leader’s unchallenged grip on power amid growing tensions with the US and deepening economic challenges at home. In a solemn ceremony at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong was sworn in as head
Asian equities followed the US sharply lower on Friday, after investors on Wall Street sold off stocks over concerns about the health of the US banking sector. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 2.2 per cent, China’s CSI 300 shed 1 per cent, South Korea’s Kospi declined 1.1 per cent and Japan’s Topix lost
The tired metaphor is that the chancellor will try to pull a rabbit out of the hat on Budget day. The sleight of hand is usually less delightful: he’ll stuff some frozen prawns behind the radiator and a turd underneath the sofa, and hope to make a getaway before anyone notices the stink. The game
When Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon in March 2017 demanded a second referendum on independence from the UK, her Scottish National party launched an online drive to raise funds for the coming campaign. Six years later, that fundraising effort — and a police investigation into what happened to the money it brought in — are
The writer is a former global head of asset allocation at a fund manager Time and time again, betting against Japanese government bonds has cost traders untold fortunes. The pay-off for going short on JGBs has always looked tempting and risks asymmetric. Potential losses appear limited given that yields, which move inversely to prices, cannot
Silicon Valley Bank shares plunged 60 per cent on Thursday, a day after launching a $2.25bn stock sale to shore up its balance sheet as it grapples with declining deposits from technology start-ups. Shares of SVB Financial Group, Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company, registered their biggest-ever decline, wiping $9.6bn from the banking group’s market capitalisation,
New applicants for unemployment aid in the US rose above 200,000 for the first time in eight weeks, running slightly counter to a recent string of strong labour market data. There were 211,000 initial jobless claims in the week ended March 4, up from 190,000 a week earlier, according to US labour department data released
The financial sector has been, uh, thoroughly spooked by a 60-per-cent single-day slide in the shares of SVB Financial, the holding company for Silicon Valley Bank. SVB hasn’t done much better in after-hours trading, sliding more than 20 per cent after reports that venture capital firms such as Founders Fund (co-founded by Peter Thiel) are
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan has been appointed chair of the $790bn Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the main sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates’ capital, in a signal of his expanding influence. Sheikh Tahnoon is the UAE’s national security adviser, but he also chairs the state holding company ADQ, the country’s largest lender
Investors wiped $52.4bn off the market value of the four largest US banks by assets on Thursday amid a widespread sell-off of financial stocks that analysts linked to investor fears over the value of lenders’ bond portfolios. The sell-off in JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo appeared to have been sparked by
Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven are primed to offload their stakes in Alfa-Bank in a $2.3bn sale of Russia’s largest private lender, as they seek to free themselves from western sanctions. The oligarchs’ longtime business partner Andrei Kosogov, who has not been targeted by sanctions, has agreed to buy the Russian bank for
The British government will delay building the Birmingham to Crewe leg of the HS2 rail line and its link into central London, along with a number of road projects, as ministers grapple with the impact of inflation on capital budgets. HS2, which has long been dogged by cost overruns and delays, is being built in
Just when you might have thought that financial markets could not turn any funkier — they have. On Tuesday, Jay Powell, US Federal Reserve chair, indicated that the Fed may raise rates further than expected in order to combat inflation. Two-year Treasury yields duly jumped above 5 per cent for the first time since 2007.
The US has privately urged some of the world’s largest commodity traders to shed concerns over shipping price-capped Russian oil, in a bid to keep supplies stable and regain some oversight of Moscow’s exports. US Department of Treasury officials met executives and traders at Trafigura and Gunvor among others, according to five people familiar with
Interest rates are ticking up, but even so, the thought of getting a 25 per cent boost on your savings is something most can only dream of. If you’re under 40, it’s possible with the Lifetime Isa (Lisa). Launched six years ago, the Lisa allows UK millennials to save for their first home, or invest
The writer is founder of Sifted, an FT-backed site about European start-ups Science fiction writers are often credited with predictive powers. On some subjects, their ability to foresee the future is deserved: on submarines, the internet, mobile phones and driverless cars, for example. On others, they have been mostly wrong (or maybe just too early).
Russia has carried out one of its largest strikes on Ukraine including with nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that hit cities and knocked off back-up power at Europe’s largest atomic plant. Of the more than 80 rockets fired, six were nuclear-capable hypersonic Kh-47 Kinzhal air-to-surface missiles, according to Ukrainian officials. The assault has left much of Kyiv