Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s tour of European capitals may bring Ukraine closer to acquiring fighter jets. That would provide wings for freedom — and a helpful updraft for defence companies. They are already benefiting from Ukraine-related orders: Saab, maker of the Gripen fighter jet, rose 10 per cent on accelerating sales guidance on Friday. The Ukrainian president’s
News
The writer is an FT contributing editor Britain is in search of a new foreign policy. Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit fantasy of a second Elizabethan age departed with its author. Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has demanded a rewrite of the government’s security and defence policy. Rishi Sunak’s first task, though, is to rebuild international respect.
US regulators have been on the warpath about WhatsApp and private messages since they discovered that traders and dealmakers were using these “off-channel communications” but their employers weren’t saving them. When the enforcers complained that this would hamper future investigations and lawsuits, the big investment banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Barclays capitulated. Twelve
The US military shot down a “high-altitude object” off the coast of Alaska on Friday, White House spokesman John Kirby said, a week after it downed a Chinese spy balloon that was floating in American airspace. The object, which Kirby said was the “roughly the size of a small car”, passed over land in Alaska
It came in the dead of night, an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude that hit southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Its epicentre was close to Gaziantep — Unesco Creative City of Gastronomy, famous for its diverse cuisine and sweet pistachio pastries, home to the world’s largest mosaic museum with a mesmerising collection from the ancient settlement
Gillian Keegan, UK education secretary, has signalled she will fight any Home Office attempts to cut migration into Britain by driving away overseas students, saying universities were a “hugely valuable” export success. Keegan, in an interview with the Financial Times, said she wanted to build on the UK’s booming export market in university education, and
Debt market specialists have been banging the drum on this for months: bonds are back. Now it appears this message has cut through sufficiently clearly — particularly on corporate bonds — that the popularity of the bet is one of the few things they think could hold the asset class back, at least in the
In 2022, the six largest western oil companies made more money than in any year in the history of the industry: over $200bn, largely from pumping and selling the fossil fuels the world must replace to avert the climate crisis. The windfalls that BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and Total revealed in their end-of-year results
The City of London will ask its cluster of skyscrapers to dim their lights at night as part of a new strategy to reduce visual pollution and save energy. Property owners across the Square Mile will be asked to switch off unnecessary building lights as part of a proposal by the City of London Corporation
Ukraine has pleaded with its allies for ammunition and artillery “immediately”, warning it is running short of stocks to defend against a new Russian offensive that Kyiv fears is imminent. The demand, by deputy prime minister Olha Stefanishyna, came on a day when Moscow launched ballistic missiles against Ukraine’s infrastructure. It also followed a tour
The writer is the Freeman chair in China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Close followers of the US-China relationship have become accustomed to both whiplash and cognitive dissonance. First, the whiplash. A little more than a week ago, US secretary of state Antony Blinken was set to travel to Beijing for
By now, the chances of survivors being found under the rubble left by the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are extremely slim. The death toll has already climbed to 22,000, surpassing that claimed by Turkey’s huge quake in 1999. The human cost will inevitably climb higher still. But aid and attention must now focus
On Thursday, two resale tickets to catch Beyoncé on her world tour in May at a London stadium were on sale on Ticketmaster for £586. That is a lot of money to gaze from the upper tier, even at the queen of pop herself, but at least the price was clear enough: it included the
Britain’s armed forces would “last about five days” if there was a war, a senior Conservative MP has claimed, as pressure increases on the chancellor to boost defence spending in next month’s Budget. Tobias Ellwood, Tory chair of the Commons defence committee, told the Financial Times that high inflation and the cost of replacing equipment
The writer, a former FT editor, is head of industrial policy at Policy Exchange. When Harold Wilson, Labour’s newly elected prime minister, set up the ministry of technology in 1964, he was thinking along the same lines as Rishi Sunak, who this week announced the creation of a new department for science, innovation and technology.
The government and the Bank of England say a digital pound is “likely to be needed” in the future and have started work on its detailed design. Ministers and officials are worried that cash use is declining rapidly: physical money accounted for 60 per cent of transactions as recently as 2008, but now makes up
Russia launched another mass aerial attack against electricity network targets across Ukraine, with one of its missiles flying through Moldovan airspace highlighting the risk of the conflict spilling over. Russian forces fired 71 cruise missiles, 7 Iranian-supplied Shahed attack drones and 35 S-300 missiles, normally used for air defence, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the chief of Ukraine’s
The yen climbed on Friday as investors responded to news of the likely appointment of academic Kazuo Ueda as the next Bank of Japan governor. The Japanese currency climbed 0.45 per cent to 130.97 to the dollar, as markets judged Ueda would mark a departure from the ultra-dovish policies of Haruhiko Kuroda, who is due
Russia will cut oil production from next month in response to the price cap imposed by western nations, the country’s top energy official said, in the first sign Moscow is moving to weaponise oil supplies after slashing natural gas exports to Europe last year. The cut of 500,000 barrels a day, the equivalent of about
Good morning, Robert Shrimsley here. Today I’ll take a look at why Unionists think that Scotland might have passed “peak Sturgeon” and assess one of the unfortunate side-effects of Rishi’s reshuffle. Like a Sturgeon, trashed for the very first time There’s not a lot cheering Conservatives at the moment — aside from the news that
The UK economy stagnated in the final quarter of 2022, narrowly avoiding a recession despite output shrinking by more than expected in December. Gross domestic product was unchanged between the third and fourth quarters of 2022, following a contraction in the previous three months, according to data published on Friday by the Office for National