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Wall Street followed European bourses sharply lower on fears that rising coronavirus infections will dampen business activity and as hopes for pre-election fiscal relief in the US dimmed. The US S&P 500 index fell as much as 2.9 per cent in afternoon trading on Monday, before trimming its losses to trade 2.1 per cent lower,

Ant Group is set to raise more than $34bn after setting the price of shares in its initial public offering, putting the Chinese payments group on track to top Saudi Aramco as the biggest ever market listing. The financial technology company, controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire founder Jack Ma, will sell shares in a dual listing

Laura Noonan New York City The rushing water of the 9/11 memorial in downtown Manhattan is quiet now. The throngs of people who once surrounded it at all hours of the day and night are absent, driven away by a barrier that went up around the site in March, and by the fear that has

The Italian government is expected to introduce the harshest public health restrictions since the end of its first national lockdown in May as new coronavirus cases hit a fresh daily record on Saturday. A draft government decree leaked to multiple Italian media outlets on Saturday suggested that Giuseppe Conte, prime minister, was preparing as early

US states were grappling with surges in coronavirus cases that threatened to overwhelm hospitals as Donald Trump and Joe Biden staged competing campaign rallies on Saturday with just 10 days to go until the presidential election. Mr Trump was due to visit three battleground states — North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin — on Saturday alone

The US has tallied the most new coronavirus cases in a week since a major summer outbreak, threatening to overwhelm hospitals in parts of the country just as voters head to the polls for one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in modern history. The worst-hit region in the latest spike continued to be

European governments have warned of an alarming rise in the number of coronavirus infections across the continent from west to east, an autumnal second wave that threatens to overwhelm hospitals and will sharply increase the death toll in the weeks ahead.  “The situation is grave,” Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, said on Friday, a day

Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden clashed over the best way to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in a final presidential debate on Thursday night that was less chaotic than their first encounter. Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump over his handling of the crisis, accusing the president of hiding the severity of the threat

Hong Kong’s securities regulator has fined Goldman Sachs’s Asia business a record $350m for serious deficiencies in risk compliance and money laundering controls in relation to Malaysia’s 1MDB. The Hong Kong fine is the first of more than $2bn of new penalties set to be announced on Thursday as regulators from the US to the

Asset managers are seeking to raise almost $300bn to plough into private lending deals with groups such as Goldman Sachs and Oaktree hoping to lure investors away from frothy public markets. Publicly traded debt and equity securities have surged in price this year after central banks and governments across the world unleashed trillions of dollars

One of the biggest US public pension funds has frozen new investments with Apollo Global Management, as growing concerns about founder Leon Black’s relationship with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein take a toll on the $414bn private equity group. The Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System said it had a discussion with Apollo last week

China is promising preferential access to its Covid-19 vaccines to countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, as Beijing uses inoculations as a new tool to bolster its ties with nations neglected by the US. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, has spearheaded the effort, pledging that Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos will be among the

Donald Trump’s handling of the US economy is no longer benefiting his candidacy just weeks before election day, with a Financial Times poll finding more Americans believe the president’s policies are hurting rather than helping the recovery. The final monthly survey of likely voters before November 3 for the FT and the Peter G Peterson

Donald Trump and Joe Biden will face hurdles to interrupting each other in final debate this week, after the organiser said it would mute their microphones at times to prevent the chaos of their first encounter. The decision followed heavy criticism of last month’s event, which critics said was unwatchable because the president kept interrupting

Striding between crates of conference pears stacked in a cavernous warehouse, Marc Evrard says business with Britain has actually been very stable since the 2016 Brexit referendum. There were some abrupt movements in the exchange rate between the pound and euro after the vote but, other than that, Belgium’s biggest fruit-growing co-operative has seen few

China’s economy expanded 4.9 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter as the country continues its rapid recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. The expansion in gross domestic product missed expectations but is still well ahead of a 3.2 per cent increase in the second quarter and represents a sharp turnround from a historic decline at

Europe’s economy is sliding towards a double-dip recession, with economists warning that rising coronavirus infections and fresh government restrictions on people’s movement are likely to cut short the region’s recent recovery. Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have all announced measures in the past week to contain the second wave of Covid-19

This is the first part of a major Financial Times series, Coronavirus: could the world have been spared?, investigating the global response to the crisis and whether the disaster could have been averted. The FT has spoken to dozens of medical professionals, government officials and ordinary citizens in Wuhan to find out what really happened

Senior Federal Reserve officials are calling for tougher financial regulation to prevent the US central bank’s low interest-rate policies from giving rise to excessive risk-taking and asset bubbles in the markets. The push reflects concerns that the Fed’s ultra-loose monetary policy for struggling families and businesses risks becoming a double-edge sword, encouraging behaviour detrimental to

The US’s third big coronavirus outbreak showed no sign of abating on Friday, with hard-hit states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Indiana reporting record one-day increases in infections. Although the new spate of cases has been concentrated in the Midwest and other northern states that are beginning to move into cold and flu season, other states

Donald Trump refused to denounce a conspiracy theory peddled by far-right group QAnon as the president and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden participated in separate televised town halls on Thursday night with less than three weeks until the election. Mr Trump and Mr Biden took questions from voters on two different television networks, NBC and

Several of the most fiercely contested battleground states in the US presidential election showed sharp increases in coronavirus cases on Thursday, reinforcing the pandemic as the central issue of the campaign in its final weeks. Both Wisconsin and North Carolina — which Donald Trump won four years ago but where he now trails Democratic challenger

European stocks and Wall Street futures dropped on signs that coronavirus is gathering pace, while a rally in German debt pushed yields on the regional haven to the lowest level since the market tumult in March. The gloomy trading day came after several countries including France and the UK announced new restrictions in an attempt

French president Emmanuel Macron has announced a 9pm-6am curfew for Paris and eight other big cities from Saturday in an attempt to curb the rise of coronavirus infections that threaten to overwhelm the country’s hospitals.  “Our intensive care wards are under unsustainable pressure,” Mr Macron said in an interview with French television stations on Wednesday

The total value of China’s stock market has climbed to a record high of more than $10tn, as the country’s accelerating economic recovery propelled it past the previous peak hit during an equities bubble five years ago. The market capitalisation of all shares listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen hit $10.08tn according to Bloomberg data compiled

The EU has been handed the right to hit almost $4bn-worth of US goods with punitive tariffs in retaliation for illegal state aid to Boeing, leading Brussels to ramp up calls for a final settlement to the two sides’ 16-year aircraft dispute.  The World Trade Organization announced the decision on Tuesday. The EU will now

KPMG, which this year revealed its rival accounting firm EY had missed a chance to stop Wirecard’s fraud, was itself the auditor to a suspicious vehicle that investigators believe may have been used to siphon off the payments group’s funds. In a special audit into Wirecard, which precipitated the collapse of the German group, KPMG

US stocks built on last week’s rally with investors bracing themselves for the start of earnings season and assessing election polls that show a strong lead for former vice-president Joe Biden. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 2.6 per cent, with tech heavyweights Twitter and Apple up 5 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. The S&P

EU regulators are drawing up a “hit list” of up to 20 large internet companies, likely to include Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Apple, that will be subject to new and far more stringent rules aimed at curbing their market power. Under the plans, large platforms that find themselves on the list will

The global economy has achieved only a fragile recovery from the depths of the coronavirus pandemic and many emerging economies are still suffering severe hardship, according to the latest Brookings-FT tracking index. Growth in the world’s largest economies has been uneven according to the index, which highlights the precarious outlook that will form the backdrop