In the latest security crackdown, UK ministers and officials have been ordered to remove TikTok from their mobiles lest it be used to hand sensitive private data to the Chinese government. And quite right too. We really don’t want the People’s Republic knowing whether government figures are up to speed on the steps to the
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France and the UK have postponed the highly symbolic state visit of King Charles III that had been due to begin on Sunday because of the escalating protest movement against President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age. The delay is an embarrassing setback for Macron, who has staked his reformist credentials in his second
Equity markets were mixed on Friday as concerns over the health of the global banking system dragged down shares in US lenders down more than 14 per cent this week. The FTSE All-World stock index was down 0.1 per cent on Friday during Asian trading but up 1.6 per cent for the week. Technology stocks
The Fed’s decision to guarantee non-insured depositors of Silicon Valley Bank is “the most wonderful example of moral hazard we’ve come across for quite a while”, says Standard Chartered chief Bill Winters. Winters’ remarks, made on Friday at a Hong Kong financial conference, come after US regulators pledged to protect deposits at failed Silicon Valley
Swiss politicians are stealthy by design. But last weekend, as Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, and a national institution, tottered on the brink of failure, Bern’s political leadership was uncomfortably thrust into the limelight. Karin Keller-Sutter has been in charge of the Swiss finance ministry for just two months. She now finds herself dealing with
Chinese authorities have raided US due diligence firm Mintz Group’s Beijing offices, detaining five local staff and closing its China operations, the company said in a statement. The raid, which one person familiar with the matter said occurred on Monday, comes as the Chinese government is preparing to welcome scores of international chief executives including
The demonstrators at Place de la République in Paris were chanting, weirdly, in Italian: “Siamo tutti antifascisti,” — “We are all antifascists.” In French, they targeted their chief enemy, the president: “We are here, even if Macron doesn’t want it.” Watching them were ranks of massed riot police, who, in the French policing tradition, made
Executive pay at Silicon Valley Bank soared after the bank embarked on a strategy to boost profitability by buying riskier assets exposed to rising interest rates, according to a Financial Times analysis of securities filings and people familiar with the matter. The jump in pay for chief executive Greg Becker and chief financial officer Daniel
Where were the regulators? It’s a fair question after the failure of several ostensibly supervised banks and policymakers are already asking it as they set out, once again, to make the financial system less crisis-prone. Even so, there is an equally pressing question to answer: where were the directors? The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,
Central bankers have been at pains to stress that they can maintain a neat dividing line between actions taken to quell inflation, and those to fix turmoil in the banking system. So much so that the US Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised interest rates by a quarter point, despite the recent collapse of three midsized
When Amar Bhidé joined the board of Baillie Gifford’s flagship Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust three years ago, an insider complimented the academic as a “world-class brain and a world-class bastard” who would take to task the £13.4bn company’s investment managers. Bhidé, a professor of business at Tufts University in Massachusetts, departed in acrimony this week,
The 2010s were a fruitful decade for culture warriors on the right. There was a particularly rich seam in 2016, with the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Three years later, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson exploited the culture wars on their way to win victories in Australia and the UK. Much has
China has released a top chip investor after an eight-month detention as the country battles to bolster its semiconductor industry in the face of Washington’s containment efforts. Chen Datong, head of Yuanhe Puhua (Suzhou) Investment Management, also known as Hua Capital, was released this month as Beijing seeks help from chip experts to navigate tough
Do Kwon, the South Korean crypto entrepreneur behind the $40bn implosion of terraUSD and luna digital tokens last year, has been charged in the US with fraud, hours after he was arrested in Montenegro. In a 12-page indictment revealed on Thursday, US prosecutors accused Kwon of defrauding crypto customers by “deceiving those individuals about aspects
If any Bank of England policymakers were wavering ahead of Thursday’s decision to raise interest rates for the 11th time in succession, the shock of February’s inflation data will have stiffened their resolve. The acceleration in consumer price inflation to 10.4 per cent, just as price pressures were expected to ease, made it all the
TikTok’s chief executive told US lawmakers that the viral video app would be kept “free from any manipulation by any government”, as he tried to head off a potential ban in the US. Shou Zi Chew faced bruising questioning in Congress on Thursday over the social media app’s links to its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
It took just 72 hours for Swiss regulators to fast-track a $3.25bn rescue of Credit Suisse by its rival UBS. Now executives at the two banks face a painful few years as they integrate the businesses. Thousands of jobs will be lost, entire data systems transferred and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of assets
The UK’s parliament on Thursday became the latest public organisation to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok app from its devices and networks as concern mounted about the security implications of its use. The decision by the commissions that run both the House of Commons and the House of Lords comes just a week after the UK
The writer is a former chief executive of Credit Suisse Like everyone else, I watched the events unfolding in Zurich in recent days with something akin to stunned disbelief. When I stepped down as the chief executive of Credit Suisse, it had just posted its highest profits for 10 years after a deep restructuring. And
The Bank of England has increased interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.25 per cent, despite the turmoil that has engulfed banking in recent weeks. The rise, which was in line with economists’ forecasts, comes a day after data showed that the annual rate of inflation jumped from 10.1 per cent
China said it “firmly opposes” any forced sale of TikTok, denouncing Washington’s demand that the social media app cut ties with its home country ahead of a pivotal hearing in the US on Thursday. “Forcing the sale of TikTok will seriously damage the confidence of investors from all over the world, including from China, on