News

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has awarded almost $200m to a former Deutsche Bank employee who raised concerns about the manipulation of the Libor interest rate benchmark, marking the largest-ever payment under US whistleblower programmes. The US derivatives regulator said the payment had been made for “timely original information” that significantly contributed to an already

Chinese real estate developer Evergrande said a potential sale of its property services unit had collapsed, deepening the pressure on the group that has just days to avoid an official default on its debt. A deal to sell 50.1 per cent of Evergrande Property Services Group to fellow developer Hopson Development Holdings for HK$20bn ($2.6bn)

WeWork will finally make its debut on the stock market after a $9bn merger was approved by shareholders of a blank-cheque company, bringing to an end the property group’s tumultuous two-year journey to go public. The shareholders of BowX Acquisition, a listed special purpose acquisition company, or Spac, on Tuesday voted in favour of its

Countering the security threat from the rise of China will be an important part of Nato’s future rationale, the alliance’s chief has said, marking a significant rethink of the western alliance’s objectives that reflects the US’s geostrategic pivot to Asia. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said China was already

Low prices made Uber into a global sensation. Now they threaten its future. Cheap fares kept the ride-hailing app on the road through its worst years, despite accusations of aggressive rule-breaking, a belligerent founder and friction with drivers. But as the financial credibility of its disruptive business model is wearing thin, the era of Silicon

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise. Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.

Goldman Sachs reported a 60 per cent rise in quarterly profits, capping a week of bank earnings in which Wall Street firms reaped billions of dollars from a record burst of dealmaking. On Friday, Goldman reported third quarter group earnings per share of $14.93 on total net income of $5.4bn, up from $3.4bn a year

Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have both benefited from a surge in dealmaking that bolstered revenues in the third quarter and helped offset continued pressure from lower interest rates and weak loan demand. In third-quarter earnings on Thursday, Morgan Stanley posted investment bank revenues of $2.85bn, up 67 per cent from $1.7bn a year earlier and

The pace of US consumer price growth ticked higher in September, hovering at a 13-year high as inflationary pressures persisted amid intensifying supply-chain bottlenecks even while several pandemic-affected sectors saw some relief. The consumer price index (CPI) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday rose 5.4 per cent in September from a year

The EU will be making a “historic misjudgement” if it fails to agree to rewrite the Brexit deal that covers trading arrangements for Northern Ireland, the UK warned on Tuesday. In an uncompromising speech, UK Brexit minister Lord David Frost warned that “fractious” relations between the two sides would not find a new equilibrium unless

The price of US crude oil hit a fresh seven-year high on Monday on fears that fuel demand was recovering faster from last year’s economic slowdown than producers could bring supply to the market. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude benchmark, was trading at more than $81 a barrel, the highest since 2014 for the

The Kremlin’s ambassador to the EU has called on Europe to mend ties with Moscow in order to avoid future gas shortages, but insisted that Russia had nothing to do with the recent jump in prices. Vladimir Chizov, Russia’s permanent representative to the EU, said he expected Gazprom, the state-controlled exporter that supplies 35 per

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has resigned, just days after he was named as a suspect in an investigation by state prosecutors into grand corruption at the heart of the Austrian government. In a brief statement on Saturday evening at the Ballhausplatz — the seat of the chancellery in Vienna — Kurz said it had been

More than 130 countries have signed up to a ground-breaking global deal on corporate tax reform that the OECD hopes will eliminate tax havens while bringing in $150bn more a year from multinationals. The 136 nations also agreed to a two-year ban on imposing new taxes on tech groups such as Google and Amazon while

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have reached an agreement to extend the US debt ceiling through to “early December”, in a stop-gap deal that will provide short-term relief to investors and executives who had fretted about the possibility of a US government default as soon as this month. “We have reached an agreement to

US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has raised the prospect of releasing crude oil from the government’s strategic petroleum reserve, declaring that “all tools are on the table” as the Biden administration confronts a politically perilous surge in the price of gasoline. With the average price of petrol at the pump hovering at $3.19 a gallon

Facebook has misled investors about the size of its audience and concealed a years-long decline in younger users in the US, said Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, in a complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The drop in younger users continued even during the coronavirus pandemic, when overall social media use surged. “During Covid,

Oil prices jumped to the highest level in at least three years after Opec and its allies agreed to stick with existing oil production plans, resisting calls to help damp soaring global energy prices to protect the economic recovery. Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, rose 3 per cent on Monday to trade as high

Nancy Pelosi has given her warring party one more month to pass a $1.2tn infrastructure bill after the party failed to come to an agreement on Joe Biden’s spending plans despite a week of frantic negotiations on Capitol Hill. The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives wrote to Democratic Congressional colleagues on Saturday morning

Joe Biden insisted Democrats would pass his ambitious domestic spending agenda despite interparty feuding that has stymied its passage, saying “we’re going to get this done” after a rare Capitol Hill visit to lobby lawmakers. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, was due to bring the US president’s $1.2tn infrastructure legislation