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Emmanuel Macron, France president, defended his unpopular plan to raise the retirement age on Wednesday as being key to repairing the public finances but acknowledged public anger over his government’s decision to pass the law without a parliamentary vote. “Do you think I enjoy doing this reform? No,” said Macron in a televised interview. “But

Amy Orben and Tom Metherell write that there is little evidence to suggest smartphones are hurting children’s mental health (“Technology is a scapegoat for society’s teen traumas”, Letters, March 20). To claim otherwise is, apparently, an example of using “simplistic narratives” to explain much more complicated “socio-economic, international . . . and lifestyle factors”. It is of course worthwhile

Premium Swiss athletic brand On Running has warned that UBS’s acquisition of rival Credit Suisse risks limiting choice for start-ups in the country when they eventually seek to list. Both UBS and Credit Suisse underwrote On Running’s equity when it launched its initial public offering in 2021. The company has gone on to become a

Your correspondent Leo Lewis has long argued, with admirable consistency but little discernible success, that Japan’s economy and corporate sector would be more successful if they became more American. Rather oddly the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank had him returning to his theme (Opinion, March 16). He always argues his case well and it is

The UK regulatory pendulum has been halted in mid-swing. The direction of travel for bank regulation in recent years has clearly been in the financial services sector’s favour. Aided by a government eager to find benefits of post-Brexit regulatory freedom, there has been a sense of opportunity to tweak or modify, to strip off gold-plating

There is little evidence to back up your recent headline that “Smartphones are hurting children’s mental health” (Opinion, March 10). Most academic experts — us included — have long accepted that teens’ relationship with technology is far more complicated. Smartphones are used for many different activities. While some will cause harm to certain teenagers, some

Europe’s push to make arms for Ukraine has been hobbled by a shortage of explosives, which industry insiders fear will delay efforts to boost shell production by as much as three years. Scarce supplies of gunpowder, plastic explosives and TNT have left industry unable to rapidly meet expected EU orders for Ukraine, regardless of how

By claiming protesters against a low traffic neighbourhood in Oxford are somehow part of a QAnon conspiracy, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan seems to be borrowing one of London mayor Sadiq Khan’s habits of casting all opposition to his plans for extending ultra-low emissions zones as belonging to an anti-science rightwing confederacy (“How the 15-minute city became part

The parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, the lender taken over by US regulators last week, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a federal court in New York. The move by SVB Financial Group is an attempt to salvage value from two units — a broker-dealer and a technology investing business — that are

Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally. This week, we host a writer and an editor in conversation. Booker-winning novelist and poet Ben Okri and outgoing FT Weekend editor Alec Russell meet in the studio on Alec’s last day in the role. They

Li Lin is sitting in her Renzo Piano-designed offices in Hangzhou, China, when we talk over Zoom. Dressed in a plain dark hooded top, she hardly looks like a successful fashion entrepreneur: her short hair is bobbed into a neat cap and she is relaxed and full of fun and laughter. Yet the company she

Critics of private equity hoot that buyout groups inevitably miss out on bargains when company prices fall because debt is then harder to obtain. For the biggest private equity firms, today’s tightening credit market is giving them a chance to challenge that limitation. Earlier this week, tech-focused Silver Lake announced that it would acquire the

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has shown technology makes bank runs easier. Panic may also spread more fluidly across the world thanks to electronic media. European banks sold off heavily in response to the SVB failure in the US. In Switzerland, Credit Suisse was forced to seek central bank support. How risky are European

Blackstone knew what it was doing. In recent months, the private assets giant limited redemptions from Breit, its real estate investment fund. Like many such vehicles for rich private investors, the $975bn fund has inbuilt “gates”. These forestall panic selling of assets at bargain prices when investors want their cash back. The banking sector, in

The Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its Chinese owners do not sell their stake in the social media company to address growing national security concerns, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (Cfius) — an inter-agency panel that evaluates foreign investment in

US prosecutors have charged Guo Wengui, the Chinese businessman and critic of the Communist government who fled to New York and allied himself with prominent China hawks, with being a serial fraudster who funded his lavish exile through a string of investment scams. Guo was arrested Wednesday on charges including fraud, conspiracy and money laundering,

China’s consumer spending returned to growth in the first two months of 2023, in an early sign of an economic recovery that the government warned remains fragile after years of pandemic restrictions. Retail sales rose 3.5 per cent year on year in the first two months of 2023, compared with declines in each of the

Charles Schwab is battling to allay fears about interest rates and unrealised losses after the brokerage’s shares fell 40 per cent following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Shares in Schwab, which is the largest brokerage in the US, with $7.4tn in client assets, have fallen further and faster than its rivals, such as Interactive

Lebanon’s commercial lenders have closed their doors to customers for an open-ended strike that presents the latest obstacle for beleaguered depositors struggling to withdraw their money from the country’s zombie banking system. The closure of the banks from Tuesday, for an indefinite period, is largely in response to what the industry said were “arbitrary” judicial

“The early 19th century saw Geneva become a really important city for horology. It was right in the middle of Europe. Watchmakers of that period were incredibly talented, and Geneva was famous for its enamels. Being clever, business-minded people, they decided that they could start making watches to suit different tastes. They were influenced by the fashions of that era and