News

The chief executive of London’s Heathrow airport, the UK’s largest, has warned it will take up to 18 months for the aviation industry to rehire staff and return operations to pre-pandemic levels, following a gruelling period of disruption and cancellations. John Holland-Kaye said airlines and airports needed to “plan much better” to avoid further cancellations

Boris Johnson on Monday night survived a bruising no-confidence vote, but his victory by 211 to 148 in a ballot of Tory MPs left him badly damaged and exposed the scale of the division and animosity in his party. The result means that more than 40 per cent of Johnson’s MPs wanted to oust the

Boris Johnson’s key allies are preparing to defend him in a challenge to his leadership, as they conceded it was increasingly likely that rebel Conservative MPs had reached the key threshold needed to trigger a vote of no confidence in the UK prime minister this week. For such a vote to take place, Sir Graham

US corporate bonds sold by low-rated companies have slumped in price, signalling lenders’ intensifying worries that scorching inflation and higher interest rates are beginning to hit borrowers most vulnerable to an economic downturn. Bonds assigned a triple C rating or below, the lowest rung on the ratings ladder, have posted a negative return of 2.8

The US economy registered another month of solid jobs growth in May, despite employers grappling with a historically tight labour market. Employers in the world’s largest economy added 390,000 jobs during the month, less than the upwardly revised 436,000 positions created during the previous period but more than economists had expected. The jobless rate steadied

Opec and its allies on Thursday agreed to accelerate oil production in July and August, as the cartel’s linchpin Saudi Arabia bowed to US pressure to cool a crude price rally that has threatened to stall the global economy. The cartel said it would increase output by almost 650,000 barrels a day in both months,

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon on Wednesday warned investors to brace themselves for an economic “hurricane” as the war in Ukraine and policy tightening by the Federal Reserve roil markets. Dimon struck a gloomier tone on the economic outlook than in remarks he made just last week during JPMorgan’s first investor day in two

The UK and EU have agreed a co-ordinated ban on insuring ships carrying Russian oil, shutting Moscow out of the vital Lloyd’s of London insurance market and sharply curbing its ability to export crude, according to British and European officials. Lloyd’s has been the heart of the marine insurance industry for centuries and blocking its

Joe Biden on Monday said the US would not send Ukraine long-range rocket systems that could be used to attack Russian territory, dealing a blow to Kyiv, which has repeatedly asked for such weapons. “We are not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia,” the US president said in response

Central banks are raising rates rapidly in the most widespread tightening of monetary policy for more than two decades, according to a Financial Times analysis that lays bare the reversal of their previous historically loose stance. Policymakers around the world have announced more than 60 increases in current key interest rates in the past three

Emerging market bonds are suffering their worst losses in almost three decades, hit by rising global interest rates, slowing growth and the war in Ukraine. The benchmark index of dollar-denominated EM sovereign bonds, the JPMorgan EMBI Global Diversified, has delivered total returns of around minus 15 per cent so far in 2022, its worst start

EY is exploring a public listing or partial sale of its global advisory business as part of the most radical transformation of a Big Four accountancy firm in two decades, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. A stake sale or listing would raise the prospect of a massive windfall for EY’s existing

EY is working on a split of its audit and advisory operations worldwide in the biggest shake-up of a Big Four accounting firm in two decades, according to three people with knowledge of the plans. The proposal, which is still being thrashed out among EY’s upper echelons, is a bold attempt to escape the conflicts

China’s premier has said the world’s second-largest economy could struggle to record positive growth in the current quarter, urging officials to help companies resume production after Covid-19 lockdowns. The comments by Li Keqiang, to tens of thousands of officials on an internal videocast on Wednesday, underscore the difficulties President Xi Jinping’s administration will have in reaching its

Chinese and Russian strategic bombers flew over the Sea of Japan as Joe Biden attended a Quad summit in Tokyo, in a joint exercise the Japanese government denounced as “unacceptable”. The nuclear-capable bombers conducted a joint flight on Tuesday that began over the Sea of Japan as the US president was meeting his counterparts from

The biggest producer of oil and gas in UK waters has pushed back strongly against government threats of a windfall tax on the industry’s surging profits, warning it would make some North Sea projects uneconomic and could be “detrimental” to the country’s energy security. Linda Cook, chief executive of the FTSE 100 company Harbour Energy,

Saudi Arabia has signalled it will stand by Russia as a member of the Opec+ group of oil producers despite tightening western sanctions on Moscow and a potential EU ban on Russian oil imports. Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the energy minister, told the Financial Times that Riyadh was hoping “to work out an agreement with

Anthony Albanese is on track to become Australia’s first Labor prime minister in nine years, after Scott Morrison’s conservative Liberal-National coalition government failed to win enough seats to form either a majority or minority government. But unexpected wins from the environmentalist Greens and a number of climate-focused independent candidates meant it was not immediately clear

Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, said on Friday that it was “crucial” to ensure that the UK avoids stoking an “inflationary psychology” and indicated he supported further interest rate rises. With inflation having reached a 40-year high in April, Pill said that prices rising at more than four times the central bank’s

UK consumer confidence has dropped to its lowest level for nearly 50 years amid the cost of living crisis, according to a survey, fuelling concerns that the economy will slide into recession in 2022. The UK consumer confidence index fell 2 percentage points to minus 40 in May, its lowest since records began in 1974,