The past two years have reinforced to Matt Ballantine, head of technology and transformation for RHP, a housing association, that his favourite part of a conference is addressing delegates from the stage on the topic of technology and the future of work. “I don’t like big groups of people. I enjoy it when I talk

The Sex Pistols credit card was launched by Virgin Money in 2015. One design featured the artwork for their debut single “Anarchy in the UK”, another the cover of their album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. For the punk true believer, things only got worse the following year, the subculture’s 40th anniversary

The writer is co-head of foreign exchange strategy for Goldman Sachs The yen has been the worst performing major currency this year, sliding around 12 per cent against the dollar and underperforming even the Turkish lira and Argentine peso. Relative to a basket of trading partner currencies and adjusted for inflation, the yen has fallen

If you see blurbs such as “devastating” and “pitilessly honest” on a film poster, you might understandably feel nervous — even if they are followed by “masterpiece” or “unmissable”. So you have to applaud the directors of two new films for daring to make what they surely knew would be very tough sells. Both films

Apollo Global Management beat profit expectations in its first results since its merger with life insurance company Athene in January, a deal that dramatically transformed the private equity giant into a $32bn financial conglomerate. In results released on Thursday, Apollo reported a $1.2bn adjusted pre-tax profit, with $670mn earned from its newly acquired Athene operations.

Hikvision’s share price fell 10 per cent on Thursday after Washington moved to impose tough sanctions on the Chinese surveillance camera maker accused of facilitating human rights abuses. The company’s Shenzhen-listed shares finished trading on Thursday down by the maximum daily limit at Rmb38.24 ($5.74) as Chinese markets returned from a three-day holiday. The Financial

To understand how Russia is being affected by the west’s sanctions, I have been listening to a lot of experts on the country’s economy and on how sanctions work. They include the Bank of Finland’s institute for emerging economies, or Bofit, which I mentioned last week and which should be one of your go-to places

Shell reported its highest ever quarterly profits as it capitalised on the volatility in global energy markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Adjusted earnings at Europe’s largest oil company rose to $9.1bn in the first three months of the year, almost three times the $3.2bn it recorded a year earlier. That beat average analyst estimates

The prospect of the Supreme Court reversing the reproductive rights it granted to all Americans in 1973 has put the country’s largest employers in a position that almost all of them had hoped to avoid. Chief executives have become increasingly vocal in the country’s biggest debates, from voting rights to gun control, infuriating rightwing politicians

The US economy’s long era of cheap shale gas is showing signs of fading, with prices hitting the highest in more than a decade and Europe and Asia ready to pay more to import American supplies. The Henry Hub natural gas benchmark settled at $8.415 a million British thermal units on Wednesday, more than double

Good morning. Yesterday, the Federal Reserve said exactly what everyone thought it was going to say, but, as usual, the market found something in the press conference to get worked up about. More on that below, and on the long-term outlook for bonds. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com The Fed doesn’t have a plan, and

Austria’s Leopold Museum has rediscovered an early work by Egon Schiele, and plans to include it in a sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on works by the Viennese artist. “Leopold Czihaczek at the Piano” (1907) is an impressionistic painting of the artist’s uncle and legal guardian made when Schiele was only 17. Missing for

The idea put forward by Bank of England deputy governor Sam Woods in your editorial “Sieving the alphabet soup of banks’ capital requirements” deserves consideration (May 2). The current framework is not easily reformed as it rests on too many assumptions, and too many models providing opportunities for cherry-picking and tweaking. Change is needed. The

UK ministers are shelving plans to ensure that workers keep their tips, despite having first promised to do six years ago, in a move that has angered trade unions. Paul Scully, the business minister, announced in September that the government would take action to make it illegal for employers to withhold tips from workers. The

The writer is chief economist at Enodo Economics For a long time, foreign investors’ favourite adjective for the Chinese Communist party was “pragmatic”. The CCP would not do anything that would harm China’s economic interests, the argument went, and so short-term glitches in policy would always be ironed out before they made a durable dent

I accept Mary Shipley’s invitation to ponder her question “Why is it there are so few FT letters by women?” (Letters, May 4) If published, this will be my fourth letter in the FT. I identify as a male. I think there is a surplus of men of a certain age that are underemployed and

US stocks and government bonds rallied after Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell appeared to rule out raising rates by 0.75 percentage points at one of its forthcoming meetings. The US central bank on Wednesday announced its first 0.5 percentage point interest rate rise in more than 20 years, but the move was widely expected and

Intercontinental Exchange has deepened its push into the US housing market data business, striking the largest deal in its history by agreeing to purchase mortgage software company Black Knight for $13.1bn. Atlanta-based ICE on Wednesday said it would pay $85 per share for the company, a roughly 35 per cent premium on Black Knight’s trading

A clever trade executed by several vulture funds in March 2020 was a bet on normalcy. The junk bonds of large, stable companies — think cable-TV and internet providers — had fallen to around 85 cents on the dollar. Knowing that such businesses would have plenty of cash to make interest payments, opportunistic Wall Street

One of the most-read FT articles of 2022 is a column headlined “How to handle a narcissist in the workplace”. A lot of us, it turns out, want to discover the secret to dealing with a terrible boss. Spoiler alert for those who haven’t read Michael Skapinker’s excellent piece: in many cases, the best thing