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The EU and the UK are set to open in-depth competition investigations into Nvidia’s $40bn acquisition of the UK chip designer Arm, after rivals called for the deal to be blocked. Officials and advisers in both Brussels and the UK said that serious scrutiny of the deal was warranted, given the growing importance of Arm’s

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos will step aside later this year to become executive chairman, making way for Andy Jassy, who currently heads up its cloud computing division, AWS, to replace him in the role. The ecommerce group’s founder, 57, on Tuesday said it was an “optimal time” to make the move, which will happen

Robinhood has raised $2.4bn in its second capital infusion within a week as the online broker rushes to shore up finances that have been strained by a sharp rise in trading on its platform. The Menlo Park-based company said on Monday it had raised $3.4bn in total, including $1bn it secured on Thursday last week.

Retail traders have targeted the silver market following their successful attack against short-sellers of games retailer GameStop. The world’s largest silver-backed exchange-traded fund, the iShares Silver Trust, recorded almost $1bn in inflows on Friday, according to data from BlackRock, the fund’s sponsor. The jolt of investments came after a user in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum urged

Aung San Suu Kyi and other senior members of Myanmar’s ruling party have been detained by the military after several days of rising tensions over the results of a recent election, raising fears of a coup in the south-east Asian country. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s 75-year-old state counsellor, President Win Myint and other members

Brussels faces an international backlash over its new controls on vaccine exports as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen struggles to quell a firestorm over the EU’s handling of vaccine shortages. Canada and Japan raised concerns over export rules requiring manufacturers to obtain permission before shipping Covid-19 jabs outside the EU. South Korea also warned

Ursula von der Leyen has promised Boris Johnson that future EU controls on vaccines will not disrupt contracted supplies of the Belgian-made BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to Britain. The European Commission president, made the commitment to the prime minister in a tense Friday night call, which followed the Commission’s controversial plan — hastily abandoned — to impose

Michael Frawley had already been dabbling in financial derivatives for a few months when he joined a raucous, profane trade-tipping internet forum last year. Reddit’s WallStreetBets would prove the gateway into the 25-year-old Ohio engineer’s wildest ever bet. GameStop is a struggling bricks-and-mortar video game retailer in a world that is rapidly moving online. The

US regulators on Friday said they would review trading curbs imposed by Robinhood and other online brokerages and act on evidence of market manipulation, as GameStop and other targeted stocks resumed their Reddit-fuelled rally. The statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission followed a move by Robinhood, the online broker used by a new army

Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine has shown 66 per cent efficacy at preventing moderate and severe Covid-19, according to interim data published from a phase-3 trial of the first single-dose vaccine. The efficacy rate reported on Friday by the world’s largest healthcare company is lower than that of jabs that are already authorised from BioNTech/Pfizer,

Robinhood, the online brokerage at the centre of wild trading in GameStop and other hot shares, scrambled to shore up its financial position and public reputation on Thursday after a day of chaos and anger among its clients. The company has drawn down at least several hundred million dollars via a credit facility with banks

The independent commission advising the German government on vaccination policy has recommended that the AstraZeneca vaccine not be used for people aged over 65, in a move likely to complicate the acrimonious rollout of the jab in the EU. A statement by the Standing Vaccine Commission at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s main public health

A “short squeeze” that started on Wall Street swept across the globe on Wednesday, triggering another day of frenetic moves in the share prices of companies with large bets levied against them. The White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration was “monitoring the situation” as shares of companies including GameStop, the hard-hit

The IMF has warned that emerging markets’ limited access to Covid-19 vaccines poses a risk to global financial stability, saying shortages could exert a drag on economic recoveries in low-income countries.  “Inequitable distribution of vaccines risks exacerbating financial vulnerabilities, especially for frontier market economies,” the IMF wrote in its latest global financial stability update. Emerging market assets have

All but five of the 50 Republicans in the US Senate backed Donald Trump in a key vote on Tuesday, suggesting the former president is unlikely to be convicted for inciting the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill. Forty-five Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, voted in favour of the “point of order” put forward

The IMF expects the US and China to be by far the most successful at steering their economies through the pandemic, leaving Europe and other emerging markets trailing in their wake. In its updated forecasts for the global economy, the fund predicts that by 2022 recoveries in the US and China will leave their economies

Leon Black is to retire as chief executive of Apollo Global Management, the private equity group he founded in 1990 and built into a $433bn financial powerhouse that has become a big lender to corporate America. The announcement came as Apollo revealed the conclusion of a review by law firm Dechert into Mr Black’s relationship

US president Joe Biden is set to tighten “buy American” provisions as part of a push to boost domestic manufacturing, in a move that risks straining relations with key US allies. Mr Biden is on Monday expected to order an increase in domestic content requirements for federal procurement contracts, following a campaign pledge to boost

Joe Biden, the US president, faces a narrow window to clinch bipartisan support for his $1.9tn stimulus plan, after congressional Democrats said they wanted a deal before the impeachment trial against Donald Trump begins the week of February 8. On Sunday, Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council in the White House, was

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda has urged the EU to step up its sanctions on Russia in the wake of the summary arrest and jailing of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption activist who has become Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic. Protests flared across Russia on Saturday after Mr Navalny was detained on his return from Germany last

Russian police detained more than 2,100 people attending peaceful rallies in support of jailed opposition activist Alexei Navalny on Saturday, in a violent response to nationwide protests set to be the country’s largest in years. Mr Navalny, president Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, was jailed this week upon returning from Germany where he had been

Flurries of snow may have greeted Joe Biden as he stepped out for his inauguration as US president on a windy Wednesday in Washington, but financial markets were not concerned about the weather. The past week has seen China post figures showing its economy avoided a contraction in 2020 and a new US administration promising

Joe Biden’s administration has taken its first steps to revive the flagging US economy but warned the moves were “not a substitute” for another large stimulus package, as it increased the pressure on Congress to pass a $1.9tn Covid relief bill. The US president on Friday signed two executive orders to broaden access to food

The Brexit denouement had finally arrived. As the year drew to a close, Boris Johnson stood triumphant in the House of Commons and proclaimed the rebirth of Britain as “an independent nation” on the brink of a free-trading future. “We are going to open a new chapter in our national story,” he declared on December

Coronavirus will have killed half a million people in the US by the end of next month, Joe Biden predicted on Thursday as he warned that his administration would not be able to dramatically speed up the pace of vaccinations. The president, who ran for election on a pledge to overhaul the US response to

Joe Biden, the US president, has taken executive action to bring the US back into the Paris climate accord, signalling a big break with the administration of Donald Trump on handling the climate crisis and a return to multilateralism. The move fulfils one of Mr Biden’s core campaign pledges as he fended off liberal challengers

Joe Biden will sign a barrage of executive orders on Wednesday as he aims to use his first afternoon as US president to reverse some of Donald Trump’s most controversial policies in areas ranging from climate change to immigration. Mr Biden will use his inaugural address from the US Capitol, which is under heavy military

Donald Trump has granted clemency to Steve Bannon, his former White House strategist, as part of a sweeping set of pardons in one of his final acts ahead of Wednesday’s inauguration of Joe Biden as president. Mr Bannon was charged last year with defrauding hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters who donated to a crowdfunding

Mitch McConnell has blamed Donald Trump for last week’s siege on Capitol Hill, saying the mob was “fed lies” and “provoked by the president” ahead of the violent attack that left five people dead. The broadside was delivered on Mr Trump’s final day in the White House and on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration

The cost of shipping goods from China to Europe has more than tripled in the past eight weeks, hitting record highs as a shortage of empty containers stemming from the pandemic disrupts global trade. The cost of shipping a 40ft container from Asia to northern Europe has increased from about $2,000 in November to more