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The IMF has warned governments against relying on short-term improvements to their public finances stemming from higher inflation, saying these rarely provide lasting relief from fiscal pressures. The fund’s Fiscal Monitor, published on Wednesday, showed the surge in inflation over the past year had lowered both borrowing and debt burdens in advanced and emerging economies.

To get trapped in a temporal glitch once is unfortunate. To get trapped in a temporal glitch twice is surely a sign that the cosmos knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s also a sign that Netflix knows how to get more out of a cult hit. A second series of the trippy psychological comedy Russian

The best thing about Frieze Art Fair, or any international art show for that matter, is the potential for superlative people-watching. Forget the crazy installation pieces by artists with single syllable names and Old Masters selling for the annual GDP of a small nation; when it comes to stealth-wealth dressing, no environment is better for

ESG “is the Devil Incarnate”, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter this month. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has obvious reasons for discomfort with the ESG agenda. While Tesla can boast uniquely impressive environmental credentials, having kick-started the global electric car industry, its social and governance record is more problematic. There have been serious allegations

Oxford BioMedica warned that uncertainty over the future of its contract to manufacture AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine would cause revenue to decline this year, sending its share price down 6 per cent. The London-listed company said there was a “pause” in vaccine manufacturing while it was in talks with AstraZeneca about whether to extend the supply

Dear reader, British householders basked in Easter holiday warmth at the weekend. A few have even returned to work sporting tans gained in their back gardens. The political climate is chillier. Autumn will bring colder weather, big price rises for domestic heating and voter discontent. In October, the UK’s latest rolling energy price cap, which

Several hundred GlaxoSmithKline workers have voted to go on strike after rejecting a below inflation pay rise, setting the stage for an industrial battle unusual in the pharmaceutical industry. Unite, the union representing the workers at manufacturing sites across the UK, said the strike would be the first in the drugmaker’s history. Unite members voted

Momentum is building in Sweden for the country to apply for Nato membership after its biggest selling newspaper endorsed the move and an opinion poll showed a record number of Swedes supported the idea. The debate over membership of the western military alliance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been slower to

Six months ago opposition leaders were so worried that Rishi Sunak would be their rival at the next election they began working to dent his reputation. The young chancellor’s star quality and popularity ratings reassured Conservatives that they had a powerful plan B in place should Boris Johnson’s premiership blow up. Since then Sunak has

It sounded like a fair question. With sanctions against Russia likely to disrupt Germany’s energy supply, why, asked MP Marc Bernhard, couldn’t Berlin just restart its mothballed nuclear power stations? “If we reactivate the three plants that were switched off last December they could, together with the three that are still operating, replace all the

Gary Chen, co-founder of Raise Robotics, strides on stage at the University of California, Berkeley wearing a bright yellow hi-vis vest. The attention-grabbing outfit is his ploy to stand out to an audience of investors and convince them to hand over $2mn. If successful, he and his robots will continue on a journey that might

Japan’s Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry was on a high. It was June 2018 and Meti, as it is more commonly known, had just forced through the $18bn sale of Toshiba’s prized memory chip business to a private equity consortium. The deal appeared to justify the ministry’s billing as the creator of the nation’s

One thing to start: Elon Musk’s $43bn bid to take Twitter private is struggling to draw interest from institutions with the financial firepower to pull off such a large deal including Blackstone Group, Vista Equity Partners and Brookfield Asset Management in part due to concerns over whether the social media group can become more profitable.

17Capital, a financier to buyout groups, has raised $2.9bn for its first credit fund, which will lend money to private equity funds that want to juice returns by using more leverage to strike deals. The London-based investment firm, backed by Oaktree Capital, is already a pioneer in lending money to private equity funds by allowing

In a few years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hoping to be able to predict outbreaks like a forecaster might do the weather, following the launch of its new pandemic forecasting unit on Tuesday. But thanks to legal setbacks for the Biden administration, including a ruling earlier this week by a

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: Who will back Elon Musk? Marc FilippinoGood morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, April 20th, and this is your FT News Briefing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Elon Musk still wants to buy Twitter, but it’s not clear who will back his $43bn bid.

A consortium led by US private equity group KKR has offered to buy Australia’s largest private hospital operator for A$20.1bn ($14.9bn), in what would be one of the biggest leverage buyouts in the country’s history. The offer for Ramsay Health Care valued the company at a 37 per cent premium on the Australian business’s closing

Opening this month, hotelier Navid Mirtorabi’s elegant property, The Twenty Two, occupies a sunny corner of Grosvenor Square. While it is very much in Mayfair, in attitude and spirit The Twenty Two is decidedly – strategically – not of Mayfair.  “It used to be that there was a very eclectic crowd there,” explains Mirtorabi, whose hotel career comprises 10 years

Janan Ganesh takes international relations theory to task (“No grand theory can explain the Ukraine crisis”, Opinion, April 13). But when debunking “realism” he makes two classic mistakes. The first one is to assume that state leaders must adhere to realism for that theory to make any sense. So Ganesh writes: “When Putin himself cites

Rana Foroohar (Opinion, April 18) echoes US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s call for a new Bretton Woods framework based on shared values. The call comes as the west has shown incredible unity trying to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty and, by extension, the democratic values the west holds dear. The call to base international, economic

Scientists are urging China to look for alternatives to its two homegrown Covid-19 vaccines to tackle its Omicron outbreak, amid mounting concerns about the jabs’ efficacy against the variant. The country is struggling with two problems as it faces its worst Covid-19 surge since the start of the pandemic: the sluggish take-up of booster doses