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Beijing has accused the EU of risking damage to world supply chains by throwing up regulatory and trade hurdles to foreign businesses, warning “discriminatory” practices could strain the global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. The Chinese ambassador to the EU said the European Commission’s drive to sharpen its trade toolkit was seen by some businesses

A last-minute intervention from India and China weakened the move to end coal power and fossil fuel subsidies in the Glasgow Climate Pact in the closing stages of the UN COP26 summit. Countries agreed to “phase down” rather than “phase out” coal, in wording that was watered down several times in the course of the

Jes Staley exchanged 1,200 emails with Jeffrey Epstein over a four-year period with content that included unexplained terms such as “snow white”, according to people familiar with the correspondence between the former Barclays chief executive and the convicted sex offender. Staley resigned from Barclays last week after seeing preliminary conclusions of an investigation by UK

Toshiba’s board is poised to rule out pursuing a deal to take the whole company private and is preparing to reveal an alternative plan to split the business in three that some investors say they may reject, according to people familiar with the matter. A $20bn offer for the conglomerate by UK private equity group

US consumer prices are expected to have surged in October at their fastest pace in three decades, as bottlenecks and other supply-chain disruptions intensify and inflationary pressures broaden. Consensus forecasts compiled by Bloomberg indicate that the consumer price index to be published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday rose 5.9 per cent in

US industrial group General Electric is to split itself into three public companies from 2023, a big step in chief executive Larry Culp’s plan to streamline the sprawling conglomerate. The companies will focus on healthcare, energy and aviation. GE Healthcare will be spun off in 2023, with GE retaining a 19.9 per cent stake in

The Federal Reserve warned on Monday that stresses in the Chinese real estate sector “posed some risk to the US financial system”, pointing to heavily indebted property companies like Evergrande as a potential source of global contagion. “Given the size of China’s economy and financial system as well as its extensive trade linkages with the

Elon Musk at the weekend asked Twitter users to decide whether he should sell more than $20bn worth of his Tesla shares and pay tax — and the online crowd responded with a resounding “yes”. Musk’s apparent willingness to cash in a tenth of his stock and incur a tax bill of more than $4bn

Investors propelled US stocks to a record high last week, buoyed by declining unemployment and advancements in the treatment of Covid-19 giving hope to a resurgent economy. The S&P 500 index of blue-chip US stocks, seen as a benchmark for the health of corporate America, rose 2 per cent for the week to Friday, its

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

Royal Dutch Shell is under pressure to break itself up after the activist hedge fund Third Point built a large stake and accused the oil supermajor of being bogged down by an incoherent strategy. Third Point, which is led by Daniel Loeb, urged Shell to split itself into “multiple standalone companies”, including a “legacy” arm

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