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Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the US economy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. If 18 months of rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve were supposed to put a chill on the world’s biggest economy, US consumers had another idea. New federal data on Thursday showed the US

What’s the buzz? James Baron was working as a waiter in his hometown of Petersfield, Hampshire, while studying for his A-levels. He had a place at university but shocked his parents by deciding that instead of going away to study architecture, what he really wanted was to stay at the restaurant and become a chef.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Eighteen months ago, two billionaires lined up against the board of Italy’s largest insurer, Generali — and lost. This weekend, the emissaries of the country’s influential Del Vecchio family and building tycoon Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Germany’s financial watchdog is poised to ease a crippling growth cap imposed on N26 two years ago, when BaFin took issue with shortcomings at the Berlin-based online bank. N26 founders Valentin Stalf and Max Tayenthal

Elsewhere on Wednesday . . .  — They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird (Wired) — Japan: The Land of Rising Profits (GMO) — Excel created and destroyed a lot of jobs (Sam Ro $) — Data poisoning tool “Nightshade” fights generative AI (MIT Technology Review) —

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Chinese economy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. Three recent columns asked whether China’s rapid rise in relative gross domestic product and GDP per head was coming to an end, as many believe (or hope). The first argued that China had the potential

Residents of Lebanon are stocking up on food, fuel and emergency supplies as fears intensify that the Israel-Hamas war, now in its third week, will broaden and engulf them. From the southern border with Israel to the capital Beirut, Lebanese are increasingly on edge and preparing for their worst-case scenario, which would see the Mediterranean

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. UK employers paying the voluntary “real living wage” will be asked to deliver a double digit pay increase for the second year running, helping to repair living standards as inflation starts to subside. The Living

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Northvolt is looking to list its shares in Stockholm over other venues for one of the largest flotations for a European company in recent years. The Swedish battery maker has invited investment banks to pitch

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. AstraZeneca has sought to reassure investors that its plans to replace traditional chemotherapy with a new generation of targeted drugs are on track, as it announced full trial results at a medical congress on Monday. 

When Blythe Masters, a former top JPMorgan Chase executive and one of the most prominent financiers on Wall Street, was appointed chief executive of blockchain company Digital Asset Holdings in 2015, many saw it as a sign that the technology — for building secure transaction networks — would upend financial services. At the time, Masters

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Technology myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. It would be reasonable upon reading Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto”, to feel somewhat perplexed, and then to wonder: is the billionaire bitcoin-backing venture capitalist OK?  After all, the 5,000-odd-word essay, published on his VC fund a16z’s

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The writer is a historian of the modern Middle East and author of ‘A Line In The Sand’ and ‘Lords of the Desert’ “We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army; and then

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Up on the highest slopes of pop stardom, albums are designed as mega-mansions. Songs after songs are added, like the multiplying rooms of a Beverly Hills behemoth. Drake’s latest offering, For All the Dogs, is a case

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Why do women still tend to earn less than men? There is nobody better placed to answer that question than economic historian Claudia Goldin, the winner of the 2023 Nobel memorial prize in economics. Her

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Beijing is weighing holding up US chipmaker Broadcom’s $69bn acquisition of cloud software company VMware — a move that would come soon after Washington toughened rules to block Chinese access to high-performance semiconductors. China’s State

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Infrastructure fund I Squared Capital has said it will invest more than €2bn in growing and electrifying the fleet of Arriva after taking control of one of the biggest operators of red London buses and

For a second year, the FT’s Accelerating Business series has looked at the growing contribution of legal services providers in meeting the fast-changing needs of business. Increasingly, the focus has turned to generative artificial intelligence and its potential to transform legal work. Previous articles in the series have covered the technology’s role in contract review,

The west has become an uncomfortable place for old-fashioned liberals. Much of the challenge has arrived from the populist right, which has cast itself as the champion of the majority against the self-interested “liberal elite”. But on liberalism’s other flank, new forces have also grown, impatient with what they see as the lack of radicalism

Testimony and evidence presented in the New York fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried over the past week have shed fresh light on the sudden, chaotic demise of FTX, his crypto exchange. Also revealed: new details of his fateful rivalry with Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of FTX competitor Binance. FTX and Binance stood as pillars of