Author: Arabian Media staff

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.This week’s fireworks in the gilts market, as investors fretted that the chancellor’s tears in the House of Commons portended her departure, marked the latest in what have become regular bouts of volatility in UK government bond prices.After selling off with the pound on Wednesday afternoon when Sir Keir Starmer stopped short of giving Rachel Reeves his full backing, gilt prices recovered after the prime minister made fuller public expressions of support, saying Reeves would be chancellor for a “very long time…

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The live music, free drinks and dancing at a big Boston biotech conference in June belied a stark reality: the city’s biotech sector is in trouble.While some industries are still languishing since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022, few have been hit as hard as the biotech sector by Trump administration policies. Concerns about routine medicine approvals from the US Food and Drug Administration have frightened investors. The White House’s calls for lower drug prices have chilled deal activity so far this year. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University have included freezing federal research grants, posing…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.As they trade the campus for the job market, fresh-faced graduates are quickly turning glum. From North America to Europe, university leavers are struggling to find suitable work. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates in the US has for the first time been consistently above the national level since the Covid-19 pandemic. In the EU, the employment rate of 15- to 25-year-olds has fallen over the past two years. Even the crème de la crème are struggling. The percentage of MBA…

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The Brics bloc of developing nations likes to boast that it represents nearly half the world’s population, but its annual summit this weekend in Brazil will highlight a major drawback of its fast expansion: the difficulty of reaching agreement.The bloc — comprised until 2023 of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — has more than doubled in size, as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and others took its membership from five countries to 11. Some new members have injected fresh divisions into the Brics, which was already struggling for coherence and split between democracies and autocracies.Around half the group’s leaders…

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Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Mining myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Western governments should provide price guarantees for critical minerals miners if they are to compete with Chinese rivals who receive huge state support, the boss of leading platinum producer Sibanye-Stillwater has said.The comments by Neal Froneman come as industrialised nations have become alarmed by China’s dominance in the production and processing of critical minerals — but have stopped short of setting prices for raw materials or creating a joint buying programme.“They have to level the playing field for us as mining companies,” Froneman,…

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Japan is mounting its most ambitious push in decades to revitalise its shipbuilding industry through consolidation and a proposed $7bn national fund, as one of the US’s closest allies tries to compete against China’s dominance of the sector.Imabari Shipbuilding, the nation’s biggest shipbuilder by revenue, agreed last week to take a controlling 60 per cent stake in Japan Marine United to create a global number four that can go toe-to-toe with east Asian rivals such as the China State Shipbuilding Corporation and…

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Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Industrials myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.US industrial companies are pivoting into the data centre market to boost growth, seeking a share of the hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into the sector as part of the artificial intelligence boom. Gates Industrial and Generac are part of a coterie of publicly listed companies that are increasing efforts to build and sell specialist equipment, which includes backup power generators and cooling pumps, designed for so-called hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. Honeywell, a $153bn North Carolina-based industrial giant…

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Big Food’s bet on America’s appetite for snacks is turning sour. Cookies, chocolate bars and potato chips are among the snacks being left on the shelves as US consumers rein in spending, according to grocery scanner tracker Circana. Sweet snacks are bearing the brunt of the pain: unit sales of sweet treats have declined by 6.1 per cent and salty snacks by 1.2 per cent in the US over the past year, according to checkout data collected by NielsenIQ. The declines are the latest problem facing packaged food groups — such as PepsiCo, General Mills, JM Smucker and Campbell’s — which are…

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South Africa is on the brink of being removed from the global financial crimes watchdog’s “grey list” after a major prosecutions push, said the governor of its central bank, despite concerns about the backlog of white-collar crime cases.The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which tracks whether countries are preventing money laundering and terrorist financing, in 2023 placed South Africa on its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, known as the “grey list”, citing 22 deficiencies.It said South Africa should take actions ranging from fighting unlicensed money transfers to introducing a framework for financial sanctions.Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South…

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