Deputy prime minister Dominic Raab has defended his record at the Foreign Office during the withdrawal from Afghanistan over the summer after a whistleblower has claimed the system for evacuating Afghans as the Taliban advanced was chaotic and badly managed. “I think anyone would expect us to conduct the basic checks” on identity and validity...Read More

This is the fifth straight month that average house prices have risen, with typical values up by almost £13,000 since June, and more than £20,000 since this time last year. On a rolling quarterly basis the uptick in house prices was 3.4%, the strongest gain since the end of 2006, bringing the new average property...Read More

China’s politburo has signalled measures to kickstart the faltering economy as the crisis gripping the country’s debt-laden property sector continued to play havoc with growth forecasts. Amid a warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that a slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy could hurt the global recovery from Covid-19, President Xi Jinping’s senior leadership...Read More

China’s debt-loaded property market is headed for a reckoning, as China Evergrande Group and another troubled housing developer face deadlines for millions of dollars’ worth of payments in a test of Beijing’s narrative that it can handle the threat to the Chinese economy. Evergrande, with bills totaling $300 billion or more, will need to come...Read More

Just four weeks ago, the Federal Reserve set in motion carefully telegraphed plans to gradually wind down a bond-buying stimulus program by June. Officials are making plans to accelerate the process at their policy meeting next week, ending it by March instead. The abrupt shift opens the door to the Fed raising interest rates next...Read More

Dec 6th 2021 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp A SELECTION of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: what the Omicron variant means for the world economy, what experiments with “free banking” in the 18th and 19th centuries reveal about the future of stablecoins (10:53) and how the legacy...Read More

A hacker on Friday posted a tweet from the official handle of the Pakistani embassy in Belgrade, claiming government officials had not been paid for three months amid galloping inflation, and mockingly asked Prime Minister Imran Khan if this was “Naya Pakistan” he had promised. The Foreign Office in Islamabad said the claim in the...Read More

“As a result, the market started to do much of the stabilizing for us, selling sterling when it approached DM3 and buying sterling whenever it dipped below it.” The above quote is from The View From No. 11, Nigel Lawson’s autobiographical account of his tenure under Margaret Thatcher as England’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lawson’s words...Read More

People waiting to receive a Covid-19 vaccine in Marseille. The new potentially more contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus was detected in mainland France on Thursday. Credit…Daniel Cole/Associated Press The French authorities confirmed the first cases of the Omicron version of the coronavirus in mainland France on Thursday, but their alarm remained focused on a surge...Read More

SHAH WALI KOT, Afghanistan — One by one, women poured into the mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the folds of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas. Many had walked for more than an hour across this drab stretch of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a washed-out sky,...Read More