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The winner of the Conservative party leadership contest will face huge additional costs of servicing the nation’s debt and paying social security benefits as a result of rising inflation and interest rates, according to Financial Times calculations. The estimates, which are an update to the Bank of England’s previous official inflation forecast in March, show

Donald Trump is under investigation for potentially mishandling information related to US national defence in violation of the Espionage Act, along with other possible violations related to the handling of government documents, according to the FBI’s warrant to search the former president’s home. The search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, which triggered a fierce

For a guy on holiday with his family, Martin Lewis looked and sounded anything but relaxed. The Money Saving Expert founder (and closest thing Britain has to a patron saint of personal finance) usually adheres to a self-imposed media embargo for two weeks every summer, but broke it following shock predictions that average energy bills

Believe it or not, investors do sometimes think about things that are not directly related to US interest rate policy. Of course, the debate over what the Federal Reserve does next matters. It is unquestionably the biggest issue of the moment. This week it dominated otherwise sleepy summertime market conditions yet again, thanks to data

Merrick Garland had been quiet for three days about the search warrant executed on Monday by two dozen FBI agents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. But on Thursday, when the 69-year-old attorney-general stepped in front of the cameras to break his silence on the unprecedented move against a former president, he defended the FBI’s actions,

The writer is co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero and is set to become chair of Brookfield Asset Management Recent events have put into sharp relief the many failings of the global energy system. Energy is a weapon in a horrific, unjust war. Households in developed economies are facing crippling energy bills.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Friday admitted that the government’s existing £37bn cost of living package may not be enough to support struggling households, as Liz Truss, the frontrunner to replace him, rejected calls for windfall taxes to limit the pain of rising energy bills. Johnson, who will leave office next month, said in

Spain has said an additional link in a gas pipeline from the Iberian peninsula to France could be ready within nine months after Germany backed the idea of linking the region to central Europe to improve the continent’s energy security. Spanish energy and environment minister Teresa Ribera said on Friday that a new section of

Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder is suing the Bundestag to restore the parliamentary privileges it stripped him of in May after he refused to distance himself from Russian president Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war. Schröder’s lawyer Michael Nagel told the DPA news agency on Friday that the lawsuit had been filed with a Berlin administrative

Before our Lunch has even begun, Toto Wolff has bent the FT’s rules. It is hard enough to pin down the globetrotting leader of Mercedes’ Formula 1 team to a specific continent, let alone a city, so when his handlers suggest a late dinner in Wolff’s native Vienna rather than a rushed midday meeting, I

Count me among those who believe the wheels of US justice should turn as surely for Donald Trump as for any ordinary criminal suspect. No man is higher than the law etc. Yet I cannot help worrying that the Republican party’s response to this week’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has pushed America’s democratic predicament into

Anna Williamson has been hunting for a flat in London since January. In that time, average rates for new mortgages have jumped multiple times, each limiting the pool of what she can buy. Grace and Howard are anxiously waiting to see how much further the cost of borrowing will have risen by September, when they

European shares rose on Friday as investors balanced signs of steadying inflation in the US with questions over the global economic outlook. The Stoxx Europe 600 added 0.4 per cent, while Germany’s Dax rose 0.6 per cent. London’s FTSE 100 moved 0.5 per cent higher. Those moves came as fresh data showed that the UK

The UK economy contracted in the second quarter, with households cutting spending as the cost of living crisis began to bite and health sector output falling as Covid cases and testing declined. Gross domestic product, the measure of the quantity of goods and services produced, fell 0.1 per cent in the second quarter of the

With the fall of Kabul on August 15 2021 and the Taliban’s reinstatement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, women across the country had to find ways to cope with their lives being turned upside down swiftly and unexpectedly.  A group of women writers aged 22 to 60, from different provinces and ethnic groups, found

Big-name money managers are stampeding into digital assets, finding new ways to monetise investor interest even as trading volumes and prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have slumped. FTSE 100-listed Abrdn this week became the latest investment house to take the plunge, by buying a stake in a regulated UK digital assets exchange Archax. The

Boris Johnson briefly chaired a crisis meeting with energy companies on Thursday as a riposte to claims that he is leading a “zombie government”, but all big decisions have been put on hold until a new UK prime minister is in place. Civil servants may be working behind the scenes on policy options for the

The government long insisted it was not going to introduce a windfall tax on soaring energy company profits. It has now done one and repeatedly threatened another. All while various ministers mutter that they do not believe in the entire endeavour. Electricity generators came under government pressure this week to show plans to boost investment

Johnson & Johnson said it will discontinue production of its talc-based baby powder in 2023 as it battles almost 40,000 legal claims that the product caused users to fall ill with cancer. The US drugmaker said on Thursday that it decided to transition to an all cornstarch-based baby powder, which it has already launched in

US attorney-general Merrick Garland said the justice department had moved to unseal the search warrant and the list of items retrieved by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, breaking days of silence on the extraordinary operation. In a statement from the headquarters of the Department of Justice in Washington on Thursday, Garland