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Nancy Pelosi stared down progressives in her own party on Friday, vowing to press ahead with a vote on a $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill while delaying consideration of a separate, larger social spending package popular with the leftwing of the Democratic party. The move breaks a longstanding promise to move the two bills through Congress

Opec and its allies declined to accelerate plans to increase oil production, rejecting calls from President Joe Biden to help ease rising crude prices and increasing the odds of a retaliatory move by the US. The Opec+ group, which has included Russia since 2016, said on Thursday it would stick with a plan formulated this

The Federal Reserve said it would begin scaling back its massive $120bn monthly bond-buying programme this month, a critical milestone for a US economy that is recovering from the pandemic and contending with surging inflation. The decision is the culmination of months of debate among Fed officials about the level of support the world’s largest

US regulators have sued to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, which would have created a mega-publisher in the US books market. Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, last November struck a $2.2bn deal to acquire Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS, significantly outbidding Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in a deal

Joe Biden’s hopes of gaining congressional approval for his sweeping domestic agenda, including climate proposals he is touting in Glasgow, were dealt another setback after a holdout Democratic senator said he had lingering “concerns” about the $1.75tn spending package. The intervention on Monday from West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin risked undermining confidence in Biden’s commitments

G20 leaders have sealed a deal to end international financing of coal power in a boost ahead of the opening of the COP26 climate summit. Leaders at a G20 summit in Rome agreed to end financing for coal-fired power plants overseas by the end of this year, according to the final text of their communiqué.

The US and the EU have agreed to ease tariffs on billions of dollars of steel and aluminium products in a bid to resolve a trade dispute that has hung over transatlantic relations since the Trump administration. “We have agreed with the US to pause our steel and aluminium [section 232] trade dispute and launch co-operation

President Emmanuel Macron has warned that an energy crisis threatens the world’s post-pandemic recovery, calling for leaders at a G20 summit in Rome this weekend to work together to stabilise supplies. In an interview, the French president also urged bigger financial commitments towards the fight against global warming on the eve of the COP26 climate

Severe staffing shortages and the mounting costs of keeping its logistics empire running at full speed will throttle Amazon’s earnings for the remainder of the year, the company warned on Thursday. The ecommerce giant said that “inconsistent staffing levels” within its fulfilment network had led to inventory being inefficiently routed to regions with a more

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Microsoft both posted strong revenue growth in the third quarter, while Twitter swung to a loss, as the three tech companies released results late on Tuesday. Alphabet Alphabet smashed Wall Street’s profit expectations in the third quarter, thanks to stronger-than-expected ad sales, though the Google parent fell short of expectations

Tesla has become the first carmaker to be valued at $1tn after rental group Hertz said it had ordered 100,000 Tesla Model 3 sedans to electrify its fleet. Tesla shares rose 9.84 per cent in mid-day trading on Monday to $998.74, bringing year-to-date gains above 40 per cent and lifting the company’s market cap to

Facebook’s senior executives interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted on its social network, overriding rules designed to curb misinformation and harmful content, leaked internal documents suggest. In particular, employees claim in the documents that while Facebook has long insisted that it is politically neutral, it allowed rightwing figures to

The EU has been warned not to delay the next phase of global banking rules, as draft plans show that Brussels is suggesting giving European banks a two-year extension to an internationally agreed deadline. Carolyn Rogers, secretary-general of the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, said the new rules were “a really important final chapter” in

Saudi Arabia has pledged to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2060, while also maintaining its role as a leading producer of oil and gas, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in a speech on Saturday. The announcement comes just days before the opening of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and the G20

Evergrande, the embattled Chinese property developer, has repaid a missed interest payment on a dollar bond, state media reported, just days ahead of a deadline that would have forced a formal default. The Securities Times reported on Friday that the real estate group had a day earlier transferred an $83.5m interest payment to Citibank, the

The European Central Bank is pushing banks to add hundreds of extra staff and billions of extra capital to their post-Brexit operations in continental Europe. One of the big surprises of Brexit was how few jobs moved from the City to the EU, with Financial Times research showing only a minimal reduction of London bank

Jens Weidmann has decided to step down after a decade as head of Germany’s central bank in a move that comes weeks after the country’s general election and shortly before a crucial decision on the future of eurozone monetary policy. Since he joined the Bundesbank, Weidmann has been one of the most vocal critics of

The European Commission will take steps to punish Poland for challenging the supremacy of EU law, its head has vowed as she condemned Warsaw for “calling into question the foundations of the European Union”. Ursula von der Leyen, commission president, said on Tuesday that Brussels would use one of three tools to hit back at

Countering the security threat from the rise of China will be an important part of Nato’s future rationale, the alliance’s chief has said, marking a significant rethink of the western alliance’s objectives that reflects the US’s geostrategic pivot to Asia. In an interview with the Financial Times, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said China was already

China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise. Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.

Goldman Sachs reported a 60 per cent rise in quarterly profits, capping a week of bank earnings in which Wall Street firms reaped billions of dollars from a record burst of dealmaking. On Friday, Goldman reported third quarter group earnings per share of $14.93 on total net income of $5.4bn, up from $3.4bn a year

Japan’s new prime minister has pledged to move the country away from neoliberal fundamentalism as he lambasted his own party’s failure to deliver broad-based growth under the Abenomics programme that defined the economy for almost a decade. In his first interview with international media since taking over Japan’s leadership this month, Fumio Kishida told the

International bond sales by Chinese developers have all but halted as the crisis at China Evergrande stokes fears of defaults across the country’s property sector, throttling a crucial driver of Asia’s high-yield debt market. Just one developer has managed to tap overseas bond investors since Evergrande, the world’s most indebted real estate group, missed an

The Biden administration has secured pledges from Walmart, UPS and FedEx to extend their working hours in a bid to ease supply chain bottlenecks that are weighing down the US and global economic recoveries. According to a senior White House official, the three companies will on Wednesday announce a move towards a round-the-clock, seven-day-week model

The EU will be making a “historic misjudgement” if it fails to agree to rewrite the Brexit deal that covers trading arrangements for Northern Ireland, the UK warned on Tuesday. In an uncompromising speech, UK Brexit minister Lord David Frost warned that “fractious” relations between the two sides would not find a new equilibrium unless

The price of US crude oil hit a fresh seven-year high on Monday on fears that fuel demand was recovering faster from last year’s economic slowdown than producers could bring supply to the market. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude benchmark, was trading at more than $81 a barrel, the highest since 2014 for the

The Kremlin’s ambassador to the EU has called on Europe to mend ties with Moscow in order to avoid future gas shortages, but insisted that Russia had nothing to do with the recent jump in prices. Vladimir Chizov, Russia’s permanent representative to the EU, said he expected Gazprom, the state-controlled exporter that supplies 35 per

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has resigned, just days after he was named as a suspect in an investigation by state prosecutors into grand corruption at the heart of the Austrian government. In a brief statement on Saturday evening at the Ballhausplatz — the seat of the chancellery in Vienna — Kurz said it had been

More than 130 countries have signed up to a ground-breaking global deal on corporate tax reform that the OECD hopes will eliminate tax havens while bringing in $150bn more a year from multinationals. The 136 nations also agreed to a two-year ban on imposing new taxes on tech groups such as Google and Amazon while

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have reached an agreement to extend the US debt ceiling through to “early December”, in a stop-gap deal that will provide short-term relief to investors and executives who had fretted about the possibility of a US government default as soon as this month. “We have reached an agreement to