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Interest payments on UK government debt hit one of the highest levels on record last month as rising inflation limited an expected fall in public sector borrowing. Interest costs rose to £7.6bn in May, well above the figure for last year and higher than a £5.1bn forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, following a

The UK’s inflation rate hit another 40-year high in May, reaching 9.1 per cent, its highest level since 1982. Fuelled by higher food prices last month, the rise was in line with economists’ expectations that suggest inflation will march higher in the coming months to reach double digits by the autumn. The Bank of England

Large parts of Britain have ground to a halt after the biggest strike to hit the country’s railways in 30 years began in the early hours of Tuesday with disruption to passengers expected to last all week. Members of the RMT union officially launched the industrial action by not turning up for night shifts that

Britain risks becoming a “rule taker” from Brussels after the government chose not to give the competition regulator powers to set codes of conduct for big internet groups such as Google and Facebook, the watchdog’s outgoing chief executive has warned. Laws to empower a technology regulator within the Competition and Markets Authority were left out

Bitcoin’s price has broken below the key threshold of $20,000 for the first time since November 2020, risking triggering a fresh wave of selling and deepening the crisis gripping the digital asset sector. The largest cryptocurrency, which acts as a benchmark for the broader crypto market, plunged to under $19,000 on Saturday morning, a fall

Investors yanked billions of dollars out of corporate bond funds over the past week as unexpectedly high inflation data prompted an aggressive interest rate increase by the Federal Reserve, intensifying fears over a global economic downturn.  For the week to June 15, $6.6bn was withdrawn from funds that buy lower-quality, US high-yield bonds, making it

Shares in Asia followed Wall Street lower after the UK and Switzerland raised interest rates, adding to concerns that tighter monetary policies from central banks could undercut a global economic recovery. Japan’s benchmark Topix index and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 both shed 2 per cent, while South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.7 per cent. China’s CSI 300

The Federal Reserve is set to embrace an increasingly aggressive approach to monetary policy tightening as it confronts the highest inflation in four decades. During its two-day policy meeting, officials on the Federal Open Market Committee have been actively debating the merits of implementing the first 0.75 percentage point increase since 1994. An adjustment of

UK government plans to go ahead with its first flight deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda on Tuesday night were grounded by a series of last-minute interventions by the European Court of Human Rights and court of appeal in London. Government sources confirmed on Tuesday evening that there would now be no one on the flight,

Asia-Pacific equities slid in the wake of a sell-off that plunged stocks on Wall Street into a bear market, as the prospect of aggressive tightening by central banks rattled global investors. Japan’s Nikkei 225 and China’s CSI 300 index each dropped 2 per cent on Tuesday while Australia’s benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index shed 4.6 per

Boris Johnson has been accused by Tory MPs of “damaging the UK and everything the Conservatives stand for” as he prepares to publish a bill to rip up his 2020 Brexit deal with the EU covering trade with Northern Ireland. The legislation, to be published on Monday, will bring Johnson into conflict with many of

China’s defence minister has strongly pushed back against US accusations of aggression as he sought to present Beijing as a responsible power and western countries as outsiders undermining stability in Asia. China aimed to be “a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, a protector of the international order and a provider of

Ministers are planning to reject the main recommendations from a major review of England’s food strategy as Boris Johnson seeks to regain the support of rightwing MPs and avoid hitting households with new expenses in the cost of living crisis. The review, led by Henry Dimbleby, founder of the Leon restaurant chain, was commissioned in

Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt. Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises

US data analytics group Palantir is gearing up to become the underlying operating system for the UK’s National Health Service, poaching senior NHS officials as part of a bid to win a £360mn contract to manage the data of millions of patients across England. The company, best known for its ties to the security, defence

Bridgewater is betting on a sell-off in corporate bonds this year as the world’s biggest hedge fund takes a gloomy view on the trajectory of the global economy. The wager against US and European corporate debt underscores Bridgewater’s view that recent weakness across major financial markets will not be shortlived. “We’re in a radically different

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

The European Central Bank is this week set to strengthen its commitment to prop up vulnerable eurozone countries’ debt markets if they are hit by a sell-off, as policymakers prepare to raise rates for the first time in more than a decade. The bulk of the 25 governing council members are expected to support a

High levels of inflation and supply chain bottlenecks have created the best conditions for hedge funds trading bonds and currency markets since the 2008 financial crisis, according to one of the pioneers of macro investing. Kenneth Tropin, who founded $17bn-in-assets Graham Capital in 1994 and was previously chief executive of billionaire John Henry’s investment firm,

Lawyers filed a multimillion pound claim on Friday against administrators of the collapsed fund of Neil Woodford, the fallen star of British stock picking, in an attempt to recoup heavy losses of hundreds of thousands of savers. It marks the third anniversary of the suspension of the Woodford Equity Income Fund, which managed £3.7bn when