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The US urged the UK and the EU on Friday to reach a compromise on Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements after Boris Johnson threatened to tear up the agreement between the two sides. The British prime minister said during a trade mission to India that his government was willing to take unilateral steps to reform

Elon Musk has unveiled how he would assemble a $46bn financing package to fund his takeover bid for Twitter, as the Tesla chief executive pushes ahead on a deal that would be one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history. Musk has lined up $25.5bn in debt — including a margin loan of $12.5bn against

US stock futures dropped and Treasuries extended their losses, following disappointing earnings from Netflix and further signs that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates aggressively to curb inflation. Contracts tracking Wall Street’s technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 index were down 1 per cent during the early European morning after Netflix said its decade-long run of subscriber

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s claims that the UK has the fastest growing economy in the G7 were undermined on Tuesday as the IMF forecast it would sink to the bottom of the league table next year. The fund predicted Britain’s economy would increase by just 1.2 per cent in 2023 as the cost of living

Asda’s private equity co-owner has valued its stake in the grocer at almost 20 times the amount it paid last year, an exceptional paper return enabled by the extensive financial engineering used in the takeover. Marylebone-based fund TDR Capital and billionaire Blackburn-based brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa used an unusually small amount of their own

The twin perils of slowing growth and high inflation, or stagflation, will hit the global economy this year as Russia’s war against Ukraine exacerbates a slowdown in the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, according to Financial Times research. Mounting price pressures, slipping output expansion and sagging confidence will all pose a drag for most countries,

This year’s hawkish change in tack from central banks is close to ending the era of negative-yielding debt, shrinking the global tally of bonds with sub-zero yields by $11tn. Bond prices have tumbled this year as central banks move to end large-scale asset purchases and raise interest rates in their battle with soaring inflation, pushing

Twitter has launched a poison pill takeover defence to fend off a $43bn hostile bid from billionaire Tesla chief executive Elon Musk. In the first sign that the social media company plans to fight Musk’s bid, Twitter said on Friday that its board of directors had unanimously adopted a year-long shareholder rights plan to “enable

Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter with a bid that values the company at $43.4bn, a move that could turn the Tesla chief executive into a social media mogul. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share comes days after he took a 9 per cent stake in the company, becoming its largest shareholder

A court in Jersey has imposed an order freezing more than $7bn in assets linked to Roman Abramovich in a significant blow to the Russian oligarch’s fortune. The order comes after the island’s police searched premises “suspected to be connected to the business activities of Roman Abramovich”. “The Royal Court also imposed a formal freezing

UK prime minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak have been issued with fines as part of an investigation by the Metropolitan Police into breaches of Covid-19 rules in Downing Street and Whitehall during the pandemic. The force said on Tuesday that more than 50 fines had been issued. Downing Street

Signs that Russia is nearing a significant new offensive in eastern Ukraine mounted on Monday as US defence officials reported that troops withdrawn from Kyiv and the surrounding areas were being resupplied and reinforced by the Kremlin for redeployment in the Donbas region. Although Ukrainian officials have reported escalating Russian bombing in the region already

Rishi Sunak has ordered an internal inquiry into how his wife Akshata Murty’s “non-dom” status was leaked to a newspaper as Britain’s beleaguered UK chancellor fights to restore his political career. Sunak’s aides said he had ordered the Cabinet Office and Treasury to carry out a full investigation into the leak, adding that divulging the

Italian prime minister Mario Draghi will visit Algeria on Monday to sign a new gas supply deal, as Rome strives to reduce its dependence on Russian fuel following the invasion of Ukraine. It is the latest in a series of moves made by European countries to secure alternative fuel sources as they seek to cut

Russian missiles on Friday hit a railway station in Kramatorsk, killing dozens in the town in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as Moscow intensified its offensive in the east of the country. “Thousands of people were at the station during the missile strike, as residents of Donetsk province are being evacuated to safer regions of Ukraine,”

The Labour party and independent experts have warned that Boris Johnson’s energy security strategy will fail to reduce the UK’s reliance on expensive imports this decade and do little to alleviate the pressure on households from soaring fuel bills. The prime minister has backed away from setting targets for some of the fastest and cheapest

The US has imposed its most severe level of sanctions on Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution, and Alfa-Bank, the country’s biggest private bank, escalating its economic punishment of Moscow in response to atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. The announcement on Wednesday of “full blocking sanctions”, which prevent the lenders from transacting with any

Ark Invest’s flagship exchange traded fund has extended its losses this year to 26 per cent, as investors ditch the high-growth but often unprofitable technology stocks that powered its extraordinary rise. Investor Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation opened down 4 per cent on Monday, after a 12.6 per cent fall last week, its worst week since

US job growth slowed in November while the unemployment rate fell to its lowest since the pandemic began, painting a complex picture of the labour market’s recovery as the Federal Reserve moves to consider whether to speed up its withdrawal of stimulus support. Employers in the world’s largest economy added just 210,000 jobs for the

Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Opec+ alliance agreed to continue increasing monthly crude production, delivering a victory to consumer governments including the US that had called on the group to help push prices lower. Oil prices initially fell on the announcement, which surprised a market that had expected the group of major producers