Aurelia Butler

Activist investor Carl Icahn has urged the Federal Reserve to stay the course in the fight against the “disease of inflation” despite the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and two other banks last week.“I think you have to stamp out the disease of inflation,” Icahn told the Financial Times. “[Jay] Powell is completely right,” he added, referring to the Fed chair. “And I hope he doesn’t decide that they need to change course because of what is going on.”Icahn’s comments come ahead of the Fed’s rate-setting meeting next week, with economists actively debating whether it will raise interest rates by 0.25 percentage points or take a pause following the SVB implosion. According to futures markets, traders slightly favour a rate rise.The activist investor warned of stress beyond the financial sector, saying many companies had wasted billions of dollars on flawed acquisitions and become over-indebted in the process. That would result in “major problems” for the broader economy, he predicted. “I think in the first quarter GDP might be all right but after that, even on a nominal basis, I think you will see GDP go down quite a bit, at least for the next year and a half. I see what is going on in these companies. It is so horrible,” he said.“A lot of companies have squandered the money because of low interest rates — they had the ability to make acquisitions and do things,” Icahn added.Icahn is in the midst of a proxy fight with Illumina over what he describes as the gene sequencing company’s “reckless” $8bn acquisition of cancer-screening company Grail, with which it pressed ahead despite opposition from EU regulators. He said the deal was emblematic of companies run by “a bunch of overpaid guys”.“It is a fiasco of the worst kind and typifies the arrogance of some of these boards. They spent $8bn on a company that doesn’t make any revenue,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of boards do rotten deals and overpaying in my time. But how do you go in and complete the deal even when the EU is telling them not to do it and there will be great recriminations?”Icahn said the fight with the EU could take many years and that the only path forward is for Illumina to divest the asset. “Illumina is stuck in quicksand — the EU has them,” he added. Icahn, who owns a 1.4 per cent stake in Illumina, is nominating three directors for election to the company’s board, arguing the “ill-advised” decision to acquire Grail had already cost shareholders $50bn.Illumina is opposing the election of the Icahn nominees, arguing in a statement that they lack relevant skills and experience to sit as director on its board. It said it would sell Grail but only if it loses a legal appeal against a divestment order by European regulators. More

TikTok will be banned on all devices with access to New Zealand’s parliamentary network by the end of March, said Parliamentary Service Chief Executive Rafael Gonzalez-Montero. TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny due to fears that user data from the app owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests.    Britain on Thursday banned the app on government phones with immediate effect. Government agencies in the U.S. have until the end of March to delete the app from official devices.    Gonzalez-Montero, in an email to Reuters, said the decision was taken after advice from cybersecurity experts and discussions within government and with other countries.    “Based on this information the Service has determined that the risks are not acceptable in the current New Zealand Parliamentary environment,” he said.     Special arrangements can be made for those who require the app to do their jobs, he added. More

“Mr. Sullivan and all of the party leaders discussed the importance of investing in Northern Ireland’s vast economic potential and ensuring prosperity for all communities,” the White House said in a readout. British lawmakers will vote next week on whether to back the central element of the government’s recent deal with the European Union to reform post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. More

Visitor numbers at the UK’s most popular attractions, including the British Museum and Tate Modern, have failed to rebound since the onset of the pandemic, as the cost of living crisis and a lack of Chinese travellers hobbled demand. There were 123.4mn visits recorded across Britain’s 349 best-known tourist sites last year, an improvement on 2021 but still well below the 161.2mn visits across the sites in 2019, according to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, an industry body, on Friday.Bernard Donoghue, ALVA chief executive, said London’s landmarks had recovered particularly slowly because they were “highly dependent on foreign visitors” and as a result were “suffering from the tourism equivalent of long Covid”.In 2022, 46.6mn visits were recorded to the capital’s biggest attractions, down 33 per cent on levels recorded before the pandemic struck. Visits to the British Museum, which previously ranked as the UK’s most popular attraction, were 35 per cent lower, while trips to the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum were more than 40 per cent down compared with 2019.Windsor Great Park ranked as the most popular visitor attraction with 5.6mn visits in 2022, boosted by crowds gathering to watch the state hearse carrying Queen Elizabeth II to her final resting place at the King George VI Memorial Chapel in September.Donoghue said that with the end of Beijing’s Zero-Covid policy last December, marking the loosening of Chinese travel restrictions, the outlook for international visitors was improving “week-by-week”. “Chinese visitors are not just important in terms of sheer numbers, but they tend to spend more as well,” said Donoghue. According to the tourist board VisitBritain, annual spending from international visitors to the UK is set to reach nearly £29.5bn this year, surpassing the previous record of £28.4bn set in 2019, but visitor numbers will not rebound in full until 2025. Donoghue added that the cost of living crisis meant Britons were making “tactical decisions” about leisure spending, which was cutting into footfall at many sites. Visits to free attractions recovered to 14 per cent below 2019 levels, and bounced back faster than paid-for sites, whose numbers were 28 per cent down. Dan Wolfe, commercial director of Historic Royal Palaces, a charity that runs six UK palaces, including the Tower of London, said recovery in tourist numbers had been “led by the Americans returning en masse”. Alongside sluggish demand from visitors from China and south-east Asia, Wolfe said the Tower of London had seen a drop-off in visitors from European countries. “The question mark is whether Covid to an extent has hidden the effects of Brexit,” said Wolfe, pointing to how more bureaucratic hurdles for school tours visiting Britain had hurt demand. Tim Reeve, V&A deputy director, said that, while the museum had benefited from record-high domestic visitor numbers, a drop-off in international visitors had held back demand. “We recognise that it may be some time before international tourism reaches pre-pandemic levels,” said Reeve. More