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The global energy crisis deepened on Tuesday as a further surge in natural gas prices in Europe and the US threatened to push some of the world’s largest economies into recession. Gas markets in Europe jumped by as much as 10 per cent to as high as €251 a megawatt hour, equivalent in energy terms

A new lender has been granted a licence by UK financial regulators to offer mortgages with fixed rates of up to 50 years in a move aimed at helping borrowers manage soaring inflation. Perenna, a UK-based specialist lender, is initially planning to provide home loans that lock in rates for 30 years, before rolling out

US lawmakers demanded more information on the potential threat to national security posed by Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents, as the fallout from the unprecedented search at the home of the former president reverberated through Washington. The requests and comments by Democrats and Republicans on Sunday were among the first reactions from Congress to

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

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

Britain’s electricity generators will face pressure from ministers to invest their “extraordinary profits” in new green energy projects, rather than paying out the windfall to shareholders. Some have made huge profits from surging electricity prices that have risen in line with the soaring cost of gas, even if the power they produce comes from renewables

Liz Truss is facing an early fight with the Bank of England if she becomes the next UK prime minister after signalling she will give ministers powers to override City regulators seen to be holding back post-Brexit reforms. The foreign secretary has vowed to press ahead with a law allowing ministers to “call in” regulatory

Boris Johnson has rejected calls to draw up an emergency response to the cost of living crisis during his final weeks as prime minister, with Downing Street insisting big fiscal decisions must be taken by his successor. The CBI employers federation on Monday joined calls by Gordon Brown, former Labour prime minister, for Johnson to

The UK government’s Covid-19 venture capital fund has been mostly invested in what one director overseeing the portfolio called “zombie businesses”, leaving it with “a significant tail of dormant companies”, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. The Future Fund, a £1.1bn portfolio set up by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak and managed by the state-owned

Western capitals are increasingly alarmed about the deepening economic co-operation between Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin, warning of the mounting risk that the Nato member state could be hit by punitive retaliation if it helps Russia avoid sanctions. Six western officials told the Financial Times that they were concerned about the pledge

Liz Truss, the Tory leadership frontrunner, has rejected “handouts” as the best way to help households through the worst income squeeze in 60 years, promising instead tax cuts and radical economic reform. Truss, in an interview with the Financial Times, defied the “abacus economics” of the Treasury, insisting she would press ahead with tax cuts

Britain faces a protracted recession and the worst squeeze on living standards in more than 60 years, the Bank of England warned on Thursday, as it raised interest rates to their highest level since the onset of the global financial crisis. Eight of the Monetary Policy Committee’s nine members voted to raise interest rates by

Motoring organisations on Wednesday called on BP and the big four supermarkets to cut their petrol prices and provide greater help to Britons struggling with the cost of living crisis. The AA claimed BP — which unveiled its highest quarterly profits for 14 years on Tuesday — was charging “what they can get away with”

Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan on Tuesday night in the highest-level visit by a US official for decades, defying Chinese threats of a military response. The trip by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives has become a test of how far Beijing will go to deter foreign support for Taiwan and of China

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, plans to meet Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, in a controversial visit that has triggered concern about a possible military response from China. Three people familiar with the situation said Pelosi would meet Tsai in Taipei as part of a wider visit to Asia that

Companies in England are heading for an “iceberg” next spring with business rates set to rise by up to £3bn because of soaring inflation, industry groups have warned. They said those businesses that gain from an upcoming revaluation could see those benefits eroded as a result, while those that lose out will see their losses

Foreign investors have pulled funds out of emerging markets for five straight months in the longest streak of withdrawals on record, highlighting how recession fears and rising interest rates are shaking developing economies. Cross-border outflows by international investors in EM stocks and domestic bonds reached $10.5bn this month according to provisional data compiled by the

US stocks have rebounded from a tough first half of 2022 as easing interest rate rise expectations and upbeat earnings this month from big tech companies fuelled a broad rally. The blue-chip S&P 500 index was on course to post a 9 per cent gain in July, its best month since November 2020, bolstered by

The US economy shrank for a second consecutive quarter, meeting one of the common criteria for a technical recession and complicating the Federal Reserve’s push to stamp out soaring inflation with a string of aggressive rate rises. Data published by the commerce department on Thursday showed gross domestic product fell 0.9 per cent on an

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark policy rate by 0.75 percentage points for the second month in a row on Wednesday as it doubled down on its aggressive approach to taming soaring inflation despite early signs the US economy is starting to lose steam. At the end of its two-day policy meeting, the Federal Open

European gas prices have surged 30 per cent in two days after Russia deepened supply cuts to the continent in Moscow’s latest attempt to weaponise energy supplies. Futures contracts for delivery next month tied to TTF, the European benchmark wholesale gas price, jumped 20 per cent on Tuesday to breach €210 per megawatt hour, the

Russia will slash gas supplies through its largest pipeline to Germany to just a fifth of capacity later this week in a move that threatens to leave the continent short of critical supplies ahead of the winter. State-owned energy group Gazprom said it would cut existing flows on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in half

China is preparing a system to sort US-listed Chinese companies into groups based on the sensitivity of the data they hold, in a potential concession by Beijing to try to stop American regulators from delisting hundreds of groups. The system is designed to bring some Chinese companies into compliance with US rules that require public

Volkswagen’s chief executive Herbert Diess, the architect of the German carmaker’s multibillion-euro push into electric vehicles, will leave the company within weeks after being forced out by union leaders and shareholders. The 63-year-old, who took over in the years following the VW emissions scandal, will be replaced by Porsche chief executive and former VW manager

The owner of the UK’s largest steelworks, Tata Group, has threatened to shut down operations if the government does not agree in the next year to provide £1.5bn of subsidies to help it reduce carbon emissions. Tata Steel UK runs the Port Talbot plant and employs nearly 8,000 people across all its operations. As one

Liz Truss will go head-to-head with Rishi Sunak in the race to become Britain’s next prime minister as the bookmakers and opinion polls put the foreign secretary as the favourite to succeed Boris Johnson. After five bruising rounds of voting by Tory MPs, Truss and Sunak will battle it out over the summer for the

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has raised the possibility of increasing interest rates by half a percentage point in early August as he toughened the central bank’s language on battling rising prices. Bailey said the central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee had an “absolute priority” to bring inflation back down to its 2 per cent

SoftBank has put on hold plans for a London initial public offering of Arm because of the political turmoil in the UK government, throwing doubt on Britain’s place as the future home of the Cambridge-based tech giant. UK prime minister Boris Johnson has personally lobbied SoftBank’s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son to secure at least a

A government plan to deregulate the City of London and foster a post-Brexit ‘Big Bang’ will trigger a battle this week with the Bank of England, which is seeking to defend high standards and its regulatory autonomy. A radical Financial Services bill, drawn up by former chancellor and Tory leadership contender Rishi Sunak, will be