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The most disconcerting thing about Masayoshi Son at the announcement of SoftBank’s quarterly results was not the record-breaking $23bn loss, the promise of ferocious cost-cutting or even, two days later, the historic selldown of the company’s stake in Alibaba. It was how much he looks and sounds like the 65-year-old chief executive of a Japanese

The writer is director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank For more than a decade, the British state has been in retreat. This ragged withdrawal has been unplanned and inconsistent, felt most keenly in the poorest places and by people who lack loud voices. Until this Conservative leadership contest prompted echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s call

Soaring energy prices could mean an even colder and darker winter across Europe, with governments racing to find new ways to protect households facing huge utility bills. Wholesale gas prices are hovering around €200 per megawatt hour — eight times higher than the average level of recent years, wholesale electricity prices have risen sharply in

Energy suppliers including British Gas, Eon and Octopus have called on the UK government to move a swath of charges from customer bills into general taxation as they face growing pressure to lower soaring costs for households. With UK gas and electricity bills forecast to reach as high as £5,000 a year next spring, four

Salman Rushdie, the author who has lived under a death threat from Iran for several decades, was stabbed on stage during a literary event in the US on Friday morning. Police said Rushdie, 75, suffered a stab wound to the neck and was flown to hospital by helicopter. The Booker Prize-winning author was still in

The contestants? Fifty or so cars, some food stalls, an FT columnist, scooter taxis, alighting Skytrain riders and one of those street cats that, spared western feeding, manage to keep their figures. The prize? Space to move, or just to be. And this is one of the airier junctions of Sukhumvit Road. The rail line

The House of Representatives has approved the $700bn climate, health and tax bill championed by Joe Biden and congressional Democrats, completing a significant legislative victory for the US president and his party. The lower chamber of Congress voted on the legislation on Friday following its final passage in the US Senate this past Sunday. It

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

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

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

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

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