FirstFT: Republican rivals turn on Haley

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Nikki Haley came under sustained attack in the Republican party’s fourth primary debate last night, as rivals Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie tried to halt her rise as a plausible alternative to Donald Trump for the party’s nomination.

The four candidates sparred for two hours over everything from bathroom bills and funding for Ukraine’s war effort to their prospects of actually defeating Trump. 

But it was Haley — who has risen in the polls in recent weeks while picking up the backing of deep-pocketed Wall Street donors — who sustained much of the heat in an often testy debate, as DeSantis and Ramaswamy tried to paint her as a stooge for wealthy backers and hidden interests. Here’s how the former South Carolina governor responded to the attacks.

Here’s what I’m keeping tabs on today:

• EU-China summit: European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European Council president Charles Michel meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and premier Li Qiang in Beijing. Here’s what to look out for.

• Russia-Iran: Vladimir Putin hosts his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, in Moscow a day after the Russian president visited the Gulf region for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• Economic data: Initial applications for US state unemployment aid — a proxy for lay-offs — are expected to have ticked up, two days after job openings data signalled a further cooling of the labour market.

• Results: Discount retailer Dollar General and Canadian athletic apparel maker Lululemon report results.

Five more top stories

1. Chip designer AMD has launched a new product it hopes will break Nvidia’s dominance of the artificial intelligence processor market. AMD’s MI300X chip is “the most advanced AI accelerator in the industry”, chief executive Lisa Su said yesterday at an event in San Jose, California, claiming it outperformed Nvidia’s current offering. AMD forecasts the AI-chip market will be worth $400bn by 2027, compared with $44.2bn last year.

2. Moody’s Investors Service advised staff in China to work from home ahead of its cut to the outlook for the country’s sovereign credit rating, according to two employees familiar with the situation. The move by the US rating agency highlights the unease of many foreign companies doing business in the world’s second-largest economy.

3. Hedge fund Muddy Waters has revealed a bet against a publicly listed real estate investment trust managed by private equity giant Blackstone. New York-listed Blackstone Mortgage Trust provides loans to commercial real estate groups in North America, Europe and Australia and manages $22bn in assets. Muddy Waters chief investment officer told a conference yesterday there was “a lot of rot in its book”. Here’s how Blackstone responded.

4. Corporate borrowers in the US and Europe are rushing to take advantage of a sharp drop in borrowing costs, issuing $246bn worth of investment-grade and junk bonds in November alone — 57 per cent more than October’s total and $16bn higher than the average figure for the first 10 months of the year, according to data from LSEG. Find out which companies have already issued bonds.

5. The global oil market has been caught by surprise by increased US crude oil production, which reached an all-time high of 13.2mn barrels a day in September, according to recent data. America’s record supply, which is more than any other country and accounts for about one in eight barrels of global output, is causing difficulties for the Opec+ oil cartel and complicates the government’s climate agenda.

Today’s Big Read

Venezuela has long disputed an international arbitration tribunal’s decision in 1899 to award Essequibo, an area the size of Greece, to what was then colonial British Guiana. But ExxonMobil’s discovery in 2015 and subsequent exploitation of one of the world’s biggest recent oil finds off the Essequibo coast reignited Caracas’s interest. This week Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro dramatically raised the stakes, sparking fears of military action. Here’s what experts in the region are saying about the prospect of war.

We’re also reading . . . 

Chart of the day

The collapse of Signa Holding, the owner of London’s Selfridges and New York’s Chrysler Building, is the most prominent symptom yet of a painful adjustment to higher interest rates across the multitrillion-dollar global commercial real estate sector. Property owners who prospered in the world of cheap debt are now facing a predictable reckoning.

Take a break from the news

Succession, The Bear and Fleishman is in Trouble — here is a look back at some of the best TV shows of 2023. We also want to hear from you. Tell us about your favourites in the comments below the story for a round-up we will be publishing before the end of the year.

Additional contributions from Grace Ramos and Benjamin Wilhelm