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European stocks drifted on Tuesday after US retailer Walmart issued an after-hours profit warning and investors girded themselves for another interest rate rise from the Federal Reserve. Europe’s regional Stoxx 600 index struggled for direction, while London’s FTSE 100 rose 0.5 per cent. Shares in Walmart dropped almost 9 per cent in pre-market trading in

Good morning. Ethan is away this week, resting up for August, which I will skip altogether (Unhedged will appear just three times a week all month, with a special guest author writing one of those.) So you know who to blame for the below: robert.armstrong@ft.com.  The market thinks the Fed has very good timing It’s

For entrepreneurs hoping to get Masayoshi Son’s backing, the global outbreak of Covid-19 has made it harder than ever to meet the billionaire SoftBank founder in person. Even after two years of the pandemic, Son has stopped travelling overseas, switching instead to online video chats. Visitors from both in and outside of Japan are required

This year Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, was en route to Mozambique when he stopped off in the tiny central African nation of Rwanda. Rwanda has no oil and gas reserves and a small domestic market of 13mn people. Yet Pouyanné and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame signed a co-operation agreement anyway, agreeing to explore

The writer is professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley The dollar has had a spectacular run, having risen more than 10 per cent against other major currencies since the start of the year. Actually, not a few governments and central banks would prefer the adjective “disastrous” to “spectacular”. For developing

Two weeks after seasoned regulator Liu Rong arrived in the central province of Henan, plain-clothes security officials clashed with hundreds of protesters outside a local branch of the People’s Bank of China. The protesters were desperate to recover about Rmb40bn ($5.9bn) in frozen deposits from four rural banks. Beijing’s deployment of Liu, a veteran of

Walmart has cut its outlook for the second quarter and the rest of the year, signalling a sharp worsening of the US retail environment as inflation bites the price-sensitive consumers on which the world’s largest retailer depends. “The increasing levels of food and fuel inflation are affecting how customers spend, and while we’ve made good

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have exchanged blows over the economy in a crucial televised Tory leadership debate that ended in a bloody stalemate but took the contest to new levels of acrimony. Sunak, former chancellor, had hoped to use the primetime BBC1 debate to secure a breakthrough against foreign secretary Truss, who is seen

Lord David Trimble, a key architect of the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland almost a quarter of a century ago, has died after a short illness. He was 77. The Ulster Unionist party, which Trimble led from 1995-2005, released a brief statement from his family saying the politician had died earlier

Liz Truss, foreign secretary, has proposed sweeping reforms to UK trade union laws that would guarantee minimum services during strikes and raise the threshold on the number of workers needing to take part in ballots on industrial action. Truss, the bookmakers’ favourite to be the UK’s next prime minister, pledged on Monday to introduce legislation

Walmart has issued its second profit warning in 10 weeks, signalling a further deterioration in the US retail environment as inflation weighs on the price-sensitive consumers on whom the world’s largest retailer depends. “The increasing levels of food and fuel inflation are affecting how customers spend,” said Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive. He said the

The chemicals sector faces a £2bn hit of post-Brexit red tape, twice the cost of initial industry estimates, as Britain sets up its own regulatory regime, ministers have warned. While Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have promised to “axe EU red tape” during the Tory leadership campaign, the cost of homegrown British red tape after

The travel chaos seen around the main Channel ports of England since the end of last week has demonstrated how quickly the arterial link for tourism and trade between the Britain and the EU can clog up. In the first big test for post-Brexit border checks, with thousands of families embarking on their summer holidays,

Russia will slash gas supplies through its largest pipeline to Germany to just a fifth of capacity from Wednesday in a move that threatens to leave the continent short of critical supplies ahead of the winter. Russia’s state-owned Gazprom said on Monday it would cut existing flows on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in half

Ukraine hopes to start implementing a deal to export millions of tonnes of grain from blockaded Black Sea ports as soon as this week, even after Russian missile strikes hit the key Ukrainian port city of Odesa and threatened to unravel the agreement. Preparations include demining essential areas for maritime traffic and setting up special

Wall Street stocks wavered on Monday as cautious investors looked ahead to a week of big tech earnings and a crucial interest rate decision from the Federal Reserve. The blue-chip S&P 500 equity gauge switched from small gains to small losses in early trading, while the Nasdaq Composite index dipped 0.3 per cent, following a

The writer is the author of ‘The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest’ A great experiment in monetary policy is drawing to a close. Last week, the European Central Bank announced its largest rate hike in two decades, taking its benchmark rate back to just zero per cent. Never before, over the course

German business confidence has fallen to its lowest level for more than two years in the latest sign that Europe’s largest economy is teetering on the brink of recession. Companies across Germany became more gloomy about both their current situation and the outlook for the next six months, according to the Ifo Institute’s closely watched

The Goldman Sachs bankers were in a hole. It was February 2022 and they were trying to sell over £5bn worth of bonds and loans backing the UK’s biggest leveraged buyout in years: US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice’s £10bn takeover of grocer Morrisons. They were well behind schedule, having put plans on

Satellite operator Eutelsat has confirmed it is in discussions to acquire smaller participant OneWeb over an all-share deal that seeks to help the France and UK-based groups better compete with US rivals. Eutelsat’s share price fell by more than 17 per cent to €8.60 in early trading after the statement on Monday as investors balked