The direction of interest rates will have the greatest impact on the municipal bond market this year, according to a vote taken at The Bond Buyer’s 2024 National Outlook Conference in Manhattan on Thursday. Almost three quarters of respondents, 72%, said interest rates would have the most significant effect on the public finance industry in
The highway from the Belgian city of Namur to Brussels suffered a traffic jam like none other last week. Around 700 tractors and 1,500 farmers blocked the road, many staying for 36 hours. It was not an isolated event. Farmers who have been protesting across the EU for several months have dramatically escalated their actions
Sir Keir Starmer on Friday was accused of shredding his political credibility and his hopes of converting Britain to “clean power” by 2030, after the Labour leader junked the party’s flagship £28bn green investment plan. The slow-motion scrapping of Starmer’s most expensive policy was ridiculed by Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said Labour’s plan
The honeymoon phase for environmental, social and governance considerations in the municipal market is beginning to wane, giving way to a more thorough and dynamic vision for how issuers and market participants can deal with the hotly-politicized concpept. ESG was building steam before the pandemic, but has now become so overly-politicized that banks, underwriters and
Employee-owned international broker-dealer Baird has launched a California Public Finance group and hired veteran banker John Baracy as a managing director to run it and be the California K-12 market lead. “It’s been a market we wanted to expand in just given the size of the California economy,” said Brian Brewer, Baird’s director of public
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Candidates loyal to imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan have won a shock victory in Pakistan’s election, defying a military-backed campaign of arrests and harassment to mount an unexpected bid for power in the country
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Rishi Sunak made £1.8mn in capital gains last year, his largest in four years, according to figures that highlighted the UK prime minister’s wealth as he tries to win the support of a British public
Joe Biden’s fitness for the presidency was thrust to the centre of the 2024 White House race after Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, issued a report on Thursday citing troubling memory lapses Biden experienced while being interviewed during the probe last year. The assessment of Biden’s mental confusion —
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The writer, an FT contributing editor, is chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and former chief economist at the Bank of England British politicians spent the first few weeks of the year love-bombing business.
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Thursday ought to have been a good day for Joe Biden. America’s Supreme Court heard arguments that Donald Trump was unfit to hold office because he fuelled an insurrection; the former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson
The Internal Revenue Service has informed the Port of Port Arthur Navigation District of Jefferson County, Texas that the tax-exempt status of a 2017 $55 million bond issuance remains unresolved, months after the district initially disclosed that the IRS was casting doubt on the tax-exempt status of the bonds. The notice came via a notice on
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Global cocoa prices have soared to record highs as bad weather batters harvests in the world’s main producing countries in West Africa. New York cocoa prices surged to $5,874 per ton on Thursday, a rise
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The UK’s national security rules on screening foreign investment in British companies should be strengthened to counter threats from China and Russia and to protect media freedoms, according to an influential committee of MPs. The
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Sir Keir Starmer has insisted the British public would “appreciate” him being “straight” about Labour’s plans for the economy after he slashed the party’s long-standing £28bn annual green spending commitment. Starmer on Friday said Labour
SOURCES The FT’s main UK poll tracker uses data from every new national voting intention poll by a member of the British Polling Council. Voting intentions in demographic subsamples use data from Deltapoll, Ipsos, Omnisis, Opinium, PeoplePolling, Redfield and Wilton, Savanta, Survation, Techne and YouGov. METHODOLOGY We use general election polls covering the United Kingdom
Debt-shy Tennessee is eying private activity bonds under its newly authorized public private partnership program. Gov. Bill Lee signed the Transportation Modernization Act into law last April, supported by a $3 billion general fund infusion, making Tennessee the latest state to authorize P3s. The alternative delivery method will be used to build four toll lanes
A four-day atmospheric river-fueled storm that walloped California caused estimated damages of up to $11 billion and put the state’s aging infrastructure to the test. The preliminary damage estimate of up to $11 billion by AccuWeather accounts for damage to homes, businesses, infrastructure, facilities, roadways and vehicles, as well as over 900,000 reported power outages
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Junior doctors in England are to stage a fresh strike over five days this month, threatening further damage to the NHS during the tough winter period as they battle to secure a better pay deal.
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Sir Keir Starmer has decided that his own personal credibility is a less important asset than Labour’s economic credibility. In the same week in which he publicly defended the importance of the party’s plan to
“Today, I pinch myself,” says Sir George Iacobescu shortly after we take our seats in the leafy garden of the Arts Club, a stately townhouse in London’s Mayfair, tucked between the Ritz and Berkeley Square. It’s not difficult to imagine why the businessman and chair of Canary Wharf Group feels that his life is like
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. A century has now passed since the death of Lenin in January 1924. But “useful idiots” — the term usually attributed to Lenin — are still making the trek to the Kremlin to broadcast Russia’s