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
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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
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
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).
EY chief executive Carmine Di Sibio has sought to reassure staff that a planned split of its audit and advisory arms will happen after the head of the business in the US told partners the deal was on pause and needed to be reworked. In a message to staff on Thursday morning, seen by the
Three years ago this week, it sank in that this coronavirus thing was serious. I’d just attended a conference in London that, with hindsight, may have been a superspreader event. Hospitals were filling up. Several million deaths from the virus were — correctly — being predicted. Every plan you’d made was being cancelled. On March
European stocks continued their decline by early afternoon on Thursday as investors looked ahead to the release of crucial economic data that will help determine if the Federal Reserve will combat lingering inflation with faster and higher interest rate rises. The region-wide Stoxx 600 fell 0.5 per cent, the German Dax 0.4 per cent, and
Today’s Free Lunch brings the last part of our mini-series on financial sanctions against Russia. (If you missed them, here are the preview and parts one, two and three.) Thanks again to my colleagues Daria Mosolova and Claire Jones for their help in the past few months of looking into these issues, and all the
Recruitment consultancy PageGroup posted record profits and increased its dividend as the job market remains hot thanks to candidate shortages. The UK-listed group on Thursday reported £196mn in operating profit in the past year, against £168.5mn the previous year. Its board proposed to increase its final dividend by 4.5 per cent to 10.76p a share.
The argument over whether journalist Isabel Oakeshott was right to leak more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages given to her for the purposes of ghostwriting a memoir by the former health secretary and Tory MP Matt Hancock is, ostensibly, about the ethics of journalism. Those who defend Oakeshott argue that she has behaved as any decent
On a brisk night in November, a few dozen people huddled into a basement bookstore in Washington DC to hear Cal Newport opine on the state of technology, work and society at large. Newport, a 40-year-old MIT-trained computer scientist, spends much of his time researching distributed algorithm theory and teaching undergrads maths and theory as
Joe Biden will release a multitrillion-dollar budget plan on Thursday, sharpening the contrast with Republicans on taxes, social programmes and defence ahead of looming fiscal battles and the likely launch of his re-election campaign. The annual proposal comes as the US president and White House officials increasingly see a clash of economic ideologies as a
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week recommitted his forces to defending the eastern city of Bakhmut just as western officials and even some Ukrainian soldiers suggested it might be wiser to pull back. The battle for Bakhmut, raging for nine months, has become an attritional trap, with Russians and Ukrainians trying to deplete each other’s ranks
JPMorgan Chase is suing Jes Staley, a former top executive, in an attempt to make him liable for any penalties the US bank might have to pay if it is found to have facilitated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes in two high-profile lawsuits. Staley, who is alleged in the lawsuits to have “personally observed” Epstein
EY has “paused” its plan to split in two amid a fierce dispute over how much of its tax business should stay with the audit side of the firm. Julie Boland, the head of EY’s US business, who has been picked to run EY after it spins off its consulting arm, told partners on Wednesday
Britain is planning to tackle chronic shortages in the labour market by opening its doors to more foreign workers, starting with looser rules for the construction sector. While the priority for ministers is to tackle inactivity among the UK workforce, government officials acknowledge that will not be enough to fill the 1.2mn job vacancies and