Today In The Markets

Private equity is accelerating its pursuit of consultancies, talent agencies and accounting firms, as it targets professional partnerships in one of the buyout industry’s last unconquered territories. Two of the top-10 largest US accounting firms — Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly — have agreed to sell majority stakes to private equity in the past six

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Management consulting myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. The UK consulting market will fail to grow this year for the first time since 2020 as fears over the resilience of the economy, an upcoming election and geopolitical tensions prompt businesses to spend less

Just days after picking a public feud with Joe Biden — a self-declared Zionist — Benjamin Netanyahu turned for support to the next most powerful force backing the Jewish state in Washington: the Israel lobby. In a short, but pointed, address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last week he rejected each rebuke the

Gabrielle Judge’s job at a tech company did not end with a whimper, or with a bang, but with a video. It captured a gruelling, and in Judge’s words “cringe”, performance review meeting during which she told her managers she was leaving. Judge, who had been doing the job alongside a part-time career as a

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Messages from the archive of Rutherford Hall, critical communications strategist WhatsApp to Stephen: Fantastic job getting Oliver Dowden for our platinum client business dinner. I know Tory MPs are all looking to their post-government relationships

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. If the UK’s real gross domestic product per head had continued on its 1955-2008 path, it would now be 39 per cent higher. I made this point in a column on Jeremy Hunt’s recent Budget.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The true cost of Rishi Sunak’s plan to remove asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda could reach up to £3.9bn over five years, according to analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research. The

Hello and welcome to the working week. What is the collective noun for interest rate announcements? A pack? A litter? Whatever it is, we have one on our hands. The headline acts will be the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England, but we will also have policy updates from

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The Bank of England is set to keep interest rates unchanged this week as it hunts for clearer signs that pay growth and services inflation are cooling sufficiently to permit a cut in the cost

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Banks have clashed with the UK government over a new scheme designed to use cash from accounts frozen over suspected links to criminality to fight fraud and money laundering. The “suspended accounts scheme” would be

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the US interest rates myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. The Federal Reserve will be forced to hold interest rates at a high level for longer than markets and central bankers anticipate, according to academic economists polled by the Financial Times. More than two-thirds

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Some 24 years after Vladimir Putin was elected to his first term as Russia’s president in an election that was still broadly free, this weekend’s electoral procession to anoint him to a fifth term is

Vladimir Putin is cruising to victory in Russia’s presidential election, cementing his rule for another six years amid his invasion of Ukraine and brutal suppression of dissent. The result of the three-day election ending on Sunday is a foregone conclusion after the Kremlin outlawed all criticism of Putin or the war and blocked any opposition

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Benjamin Netanyahu has lashed out at sharp criticism from western allies of Israel’s strategy in Gaza, accusing them of seeking to orchestrate elections that would “paralyse” the country and lead to its defeat in the

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called on activists to knock on 5mn doors “to bring the blue wall tumbling down” at the UK general election as his party targets older voters following the chancellor’s

When anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders secured the most votes in Dutch elections last year, his breakthrough was seen as a harbinger of how the far right could seize power in Europe. But four months on, he remains shut out, with mainstream parties in the Netherlands closing ranks to force his Freedom party to give up

The congressional Republicans who spearheaded investigations into antisemitism on US college campuses are turning their focus on the Qatari government, one of the largest donors to American universities over the past decade. The line of inquiry, led by Republicans on the US House’s education committee, focuses on suggestions among conservative activists that Qatari funding has

Mike Lynch, once one of the UK’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, is set to go on trial in San Francisco on Monday, 13 years after what US prosecutors have called “the largest fraud in the history” of Silicon Valley. Lynch, who sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11.7bn in 2011, faces charges that

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The chief executive of British American Tobacco has dismissed the idea of moving the company’s listing from London to New York as a “distraction”, after it emerged that the top-10 shareholder who pushed for the

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. If there was one phrase guaranteed to have an immediate chilling effect on my behaviour as a child, it was not the classic “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” line, but a much crueller and