Aurelia Butler

A lack of investment has limited oil and gas producers’ ability to boost output, leaving the world with few options to ease energy prices after the Russian incursion in Ukraine sent oil racing above $100 a barrel.International oil benchmark Brent rose to $102 early on Thursday, the highest level since 2014. Gas prices have also jumped on rising concern over the escalating tensions in eastern Europe. The rally could accelerate, analysts say, given big producers’ limited capacity to increase supplies in response to further potential disruptions. Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of crude oil and the most important supplier of natural gas to Europe. “Spare capacity is falling and the [oil] market is having to reprice that lack of safety margin,” said Christyan Malek, head of global energy strategy at JPMorgan, which predicts Brent could rise as high as $125 a barrel in the second quarter of this year.Global spare capacity, or the amount of additional production that can be turned online within a matter of weeks, has fallen to 2.8mn barrels per day, according to JPMorgan’s calculations, well below the 5mn b/d historically desired as a buffer against any operational or geopolitical issues. As a result, Malek expects oil prices to climb higher, even if the Ukraine crisis does not disrupt Russian exports.“The oil price is going up, and an oil supercycle is inevitable,” he said. “There is nothing you can do.”Bob McNally, head of Rapidan Energy Group, said the risk of disruption was probably limited to the oil and gas that transits through Ukraine, which he said was approximately 250,000 b/d of crude and roughly 20 per cent of the gas Russia sends to Europe. But given the lack of spare capacity, McNally said the size or likelihood of a possible physical disruption did not matter. “Until it’s clear that there will not be an interruption in oil supplies and in gas, I think you’re going to see upward pressure,” he told an oil market discussion on Tuesday organised by Bloomberg.Global oil demand is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels of approximately 100mn b/d in 2022. But supply was already struggling to keep up. Spending cuts during the pandemic have compounded lower investment in production by an oil industry under pressure to reduce future emissions. Some members of the Opec producer group in particular have struggled to restore output slashed at the start of the health crisis, leading the US and a number of other big consumers to release emergency oil stocks last year to try to calm prices.One of the reasons for the lack of spare global capacity has been the failure of Opec and its allies, including Russia, to meet their production targets since July. In response, the US and other big consumers have repeatedly urged the cartel, in particular Saudi Arabia, to pump more to ease prices and calm inflation.Even if Saudi Arabia agreed to such steps, it was not clear that the proposed actions would be effective, McNally said, since boosting production would only eat further into spare capacity.Natural gas, which jumped on Wednesday to trade at more than €88 per megawatt hour is of greater immediate concern to Europe, given its dependence on Russia for 40 per cent of its supply.Wholesale prices in Europe have already soared by more 450 per cent over the past year owing to resurgent demand as lockdown restrictions have eased and reduced flows from Russia.Laurent Ruseckas, analyst at IHS Markit, a consultancy, said it was unlikely that Moscow would respond to western sanctions by cutting off gas supplies, which arrive in Europe via through pipelines that run through Ukraine, Poland under the Baltic Sea respectively.“I have never seen that as a plausible possibility. So what it really boils down to is could conflict in Ukraine disrupt gas flows somehow,” he said.Ruseckas said there was a lot of “redundancy” in the Ukraine gas pipeline network so the odds of a “stray shell” knocking out supply were low. A big disruption would therefore require intentional action by either Russia or Ukraine. “It’s difficult to assess the likelihood of that but it is certainly not a base case scenario,” he said.Russia’s energy minister Nikolai Shulginov, speaking at an energy conference in Qatar on Tuesday, said Russia was aiming to keep its gas flows “uninterrupted.” If there were a disruption, Europe would find it impossible to replace Russian supply. “There is no single country that can replace that kind of volume,” Qatar’s energy minister Saad al-Kaabi said at the same conference, adding that — much like in oil — there was not sufficient spare capacity in the market to pick up that shortfall.Even before the Ukraine crisis, Russia’s state-owned Gazprom had refused to provide any additional gas to Europe beyond its contractual obligations, leading some European politicians to accuse Russia of weaponising energy exports. In response, Europe was forced to draw on stockpiles, which have fallen to low levels.As part of the European reaction to Putin’s deployment of troops into Ukraine on Tuesday, Germany announced it was halting certification of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was due to bypass Ukraine to deliver Russian gas direct to Germany through the Baltic Sea.“In theory, this should not have any impact on natural gas flows to Europe, given that the pipeline is not yet operational and there is spare pipeline capacity via other routes,” said Warren Patterson, analyst at ING. “However, Russia could possibly retaliate to the suspension process by further reducing overall Russian gas flows to Europe.” More

China is ready to throw Russia an economic lifeline as Vladimir Putin’s ties with the west deteriorate and Moscow is hit by snowballing sanctions over the crisis in Ukraine.Putin ordered the start of a military invasion of Ukraine on Thursday and demanded Kyiv’s army lay down its weapons, just a day after the west imposed new sanctions on Russia.US president Joe Biden said he would meet G7 counterparts on Thursday morning and would reveal further measures to punish Russia for the invasion.Financial analysts and geopolitical experts believed China would probably help Russia weather those sanctions, mostly through resource deals and lending by several state-owned banks, while seeking to avoid damage to its own economic and financial interests. “The level of Chinese support for Russian actions could be an influential factor in shaping an evolving crisis,” said Tom Rafferty, a Beijing-based analyst with the Economist Intelligence Unit. Since Russia concentrated 190,000 troops near the Ukraine border, Beijing has tried to strike a balance between Chinese president Xi Jinping’s backing of Putin and Beijing’s self-interest in the region’s stability.In the hours after the invasion started, Zhang Jun, China’s envoy to the UN, said the “door to a peaceful solution” was not yet fully shut and urged all parties to exercise restraint.However, a day earlier, Beijing reaffirmed its opposition to “all illegal unilateral sanctions”.“Since 2011, the US has imposed more than 100 sanctions on Russia,” Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokesperson, told reporters in Beijing.“However, have the US sanctions solved any problem? Is the world a better place because of those sanctions? Will the Ukraine issue resolve itself thanks to the US sanctions on Russia? Will European security be better guaranteed thanks to the US sanctions on Russia?” Hua also labelled the US the “culprit” in the Ukraine crisis, “heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare”.Russia’s Gazprom and China’s CNPC signed a 25-year deal this month on a new gas supply route © Andrey Rudakov/BloombergBeijing has a record of providing economic support to Moscow during Putin’s stand-offs with the west, including in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in early 2014. “Unless the west puts a really tangible cost on China, China will still help Russia behind the scenes,” said Jakub Jakobowski, a senior fellow with the China programme at the Eastern Studies Centre in Warsaw. China’s big policy banks, which are distinct from its state-backed commercial lenders, are expected to be critical conduits for economic support.Russia is by far Beijing’s biggest recipient of loans from official sector institutions, totalling as much as $151bn between 2000 and 2017, according to AidData, an international research lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Those included $86bn of non-concessional and semi-concessional debt from China’s state-owned policy banks and commercial banks — mostly loans collateralised against future receipts from oil exports.China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, in particular, are believed to be insulated from western penalties by a lack of US business interests. “They have less exposure to the dollar system and more options to finance things in different or innovative ways which are less vulnerable to sanctions measures,” said Rafferty. “For the commercial banks . . . they would still be very mindful of the impact it could have on their operations in other markets and their access to the US dollar system.”Chinese policy banks’ main lending activities are in the “global south”, Jakobowski said. “They have less worry about getting hit for violating US sanctions,” he added. “China will likely again lend money to Russia following the state-to-state sanctions-proof model.”Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Beijing’s ability to soften the blow from sanctions has been strengthened as the two countries have steadily reduced the use of the dollar in their bilateral trade. Sino-Russian economic ties have also firmed, with bilateral trade expected to have hit a record $140bn in 2021, reflecting consistent double-digit annual growth. The success of Russian efforts to take the sting out of sanctions by boosting settlements in other currencies was reflected in a series of recent energy deals with China. These arrangements skirted the dollar-based financial system with loans and credit in renminbi. When Putin met Xi in Beijing this month, Russia’s Gazprom and China’s CNPC signed a 25-year deal on a new gas supply route, the Power of Siberia pipeline, which launched in 2019 and is expected to reach full capacity in 2025. Rosneft, Russia’s top crude producer and its top oil exporter to China, accounting for 7 per cent of the country’s total annual demand, this month agreed with CNPC to supply 100mn tonnes of oil to China through Kazakhstan over 10 years. Russia and China are also working on a third gas pipeline project via Mongolia. Some analysts said a deal could be signed by the end of the year.Last week, Gazprom Neft announced it was switching all settlement for fuelling Russian planes in China to renminbi, the first Russian company to do so.

Despite those deals, experts noted that there was still a sizeable chunk of Russian trade in the conventional dollar system. During the first nine months of 2021, Russia and China conducted 8.7 per cent of their trade in roubles and 7.1 per cent in other currencies, according to the Russian central bank data. Dollars and euros accounted for 36.6 per cent and 47.6 per cent of Russia-China trade, respectively.The US is also exploring the use of export controls to cut off computer chip supplies to Russia, in a similar way to how it targeted Huawei, the Chinese technology group, according to government officials in Taiwan and Japan and US diplomats in Asia. The move could cripple Russia’s supply of components vital for industries ranging from telecoms to oil exploration.“We have been in discussions with the US about export controls,” said a senior Taiwanese government official, “and we have put together an inventory of potential products that might be relevant in the context of export controls here, including military and dual-use products, basic infrastructure, technology and strategic supplies.” Additional reporting by Max Seddon and Nastassia Astrasheuskaya in Moscow and Maiqi Ding in Beijing More

Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally.The FT’s Max Seddon, reports from Moscow about Vladimir Putin’s order to launch a full-scale invasion into Ukraine, and the FT’s economics editor, Chris Giles, explains what a Russian invasion might do to the global economy. Mentioned in this podcasVladimir Putin orders start of ‘military operation’ in eastern UkraineUkraine crisis: Sanctions and high energy prices pose threat to global economyRussia-Ukraine webinar: What Next? The FT News Briefing is produced by Fiona Symon and Marc Filippino. The show’s editor is Jess Smith. Additional help by Peter Barber and Gavin Kallmann. The show’s theme song is by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s executive producer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.Transcripts are not currently available for all podcasts, view our accessibility guide. More

Each week I host financial wellbeing webinars for employees of UK organisations, where I answer money-related questions. Recently, more people are asking how to cope with rises in the cost of living.Rising prices will put severe financial strain on many lower-income households. But in the first 18 months of the pandemic, some households saw their finances improve, with non-mortgage debt falling, savings increasing and fewer opportunities to spend.During this period, many people I spoke to were surprised to find how much money they could save (or not borrow) when they could only spend on life’s essentials. As pandemic restrictions end and living costs rise, it is worth considering more ways to control spending — by choice rather than necessity. In my online sessions, I run polls to give me insights into how people manage their finances and to help attendees see how they compare with others. One of the most revealing questions is “How do you manage your day-to-day spending?”. It turns out the majority of attendees have no real plan for spending their money on a daily basis. The human brain is wired to favour short-term rewards, which invariably leads to short-term thinking and spending. And the fact that few schools or parents teach personal budgeting skills to children and young people means it’s no surprise that many people end up living from payday to payday, have little or no savings and accumulate expensive consumer debt. Learning to manage daily spending is seen as an optional extra, despite having such a profound impact on personal wellbeing.Controlling spending is not just a skill for low or average earners. Many years ago, when I worked as a personal financial planner, I had to stress to one client with a £10mn portfolio that he would eventually go broke if he didn’t rein in his extravagant lifestyle. If you can’t manage your expenditure you’ll never build financial resilience, no matter how much you earn. High earners also need to learn budgeting skills to support their estate planning. If you spend less than your income, you can gift that income away with confidence. Such gifts fall out of your estate immediately for inheritance tax purposes, providing you can produce evidence that they don’t adversely affect your standard of living.Yet some personality types will actively resist controlling their spending because it can seem like a reduction in their sense of control and freedom. Others might feel it will expose an addiction or other wasteful spending. Others think budgeting would cause conflicts with their partner. But a significant reason why many resist learning to control spending is that they would rather bumble along, react to events and indulge consumerist impulses than grab the budgeting bull by the horns.In practice, I advise people to avoid the word “budget” because, for many, it can seem too much like hard work. Instead, I teach people to develop a Smart Spending Plan, which involves deciding where you want your money to go before receiving it, based on three types of spending: essential, future and fun.As income comes in, it needs to be partitioned into different accounts to create some structure and make it easy to see how much is available for the various spending priorities. Here are my top tips for being a smart spender:1 Get to the truth of where your money goesLook at your bank statements over the past six months to gain clarity on your spending, including irregular items like holidays, car servicing and house maintenance. Most people find a big difference between their perception and reality.2 Decide where you want your money to goYou must work only with the money you have now, not future bonuses, pay rises or other anticipated income. Every pound needs to be allocated to a purpose. Money coming in must equal money going out.3 Adopt the CEO approach to spendingCEO stands for “cut, earn and optimise”. It means cutting out unnecessary spending, such as unwanted subscriptions, insurance policies or cars funded on finance. It means earning more through overtime, or selling unwanted possessions online. And make sure you are getting any state benefits to which you are entitled. Finally, you need to optimise the essential spending you can’t cut. Make sure your mortgage is competitive, haggle with your insurance company and change your mobile phone to a cheaper SIM-only deal.4 Aim for progress, not perfectionYour spending plan is not a straitjacket, and things won’t go according to plan. But keep your focus on the progress you make, not the gap between your reality and your ideal.The impending squeeze on incomes will be hard for some households to navigate. But difficult times often cause us to face up to things we have been putting off. And as my experience shows, many people have been putting off getting to grips with their daily spending. Now is the time to put that right. Jason Butler is an expert on financial wellbeing and presenter of the “Real Money Stories” podcast. Twitter: @jbthewealthman More

(Reuters) -Facebook-owner Meta is working on artificial intelligence research to generate worlds through speech, improve how people chat to voice assistants and translate between languages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, as he sketched out key steps to building the metaverse. Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet. “The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI,” he said, speaking at the company’s live-streamed “Inside the Lab” event. Zuckerberg said Meta was working on a new class of generative AI models that will allow people to describe a world and generate aspects of it. In a prerecorded demo, Zuckerberg showcased an AI concept called Builder Bot, where he appeared as a legless 3D avatar on an island and gave speech commands to create a beach and then add clouds, trees and even a picnic blanket.”As we advance this technology further, you’ll be able to create nuanced worlds to explore and share experiences with others, with just your voice,” said Zuckerberg. He did not set a timeline for these advancements or give more details on how Builder Bot works.He said Meta was working on AI research to allow people to have more natural conversations with voice assistants, a step towards how people will communicate with AI in the metaverse. He said the company’s Project CAIRaoke was “a fully end-to-end neural model for building on-device assistants.” A demonstration of the Project CAIRaoke tech showed a family using it to help cook a stew, with the voice assistant chiming in to warn that salt had already been added to the pot. The assistant also noticed they were running low on salt and ordered more.Meta said it was using the model within its video-calling Portal device and aimed to integrate it into devices with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). In an interview with Reuters, Meta’s vice president for AI Jérôme Pesenti said it was tightly restricting the responses of its new CAIRaoke-based assistant until it could ensure that the system did not generate offensive language.”These language models are very powerful … so we are making a lot of effort to be able to control them,” said Pesenti.Zuckerberg also announced that Meta was working on a universal speech translator, aiming to provide instant speech-to-speech translation across all languages. The company previously set a goal for its AI system to translate all written languages.The social media company, which recently lost a third of its market value after a dismal earnings report, has invested heavily in its new focus on building the metaverse and changed its name to reflect this ambition. This month Meta reported a 2021 net loss of $10.2 billion from its Reality Labs, the company’s augmented and virtual reality business.DIFFERENT BEAST Meta is exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to moderate content and activity in the metaverse, its AI head Pesenti told Reuters.”We use a lot of AI for moderation on our main platforms … the metaverse is a bit of a different beast, it’s a lot more real-time,” said Pesenti, who said this was “evolving work” and that Meta was still figuring out the policies for metaverse activity.At the AI event, Zuckerberg said Meta was preparing for how AI could interpret and predict the types of interactions that would occur in the metaverse, by working on “self-supervised learning” – where AI is given raw data rather than being trained on lots of labeled data.Zuckerberg said Meta was also working on egocentric data, which involves seeing worlds from a first-person perspective. He said it had brought together a global consortium of 13 universities and labs to work on the largest ever egocentric dataset, called Ego4D. Meta also said it would expand free education initiatives aimed at bringing more racial minorities into tech, which researchers say is critical to create AI systems free of bias. About 80% of data analytics and AI executives identify as men and 65% as white, according to a recent survey across the United States and Europe by recruiter Heidrick & Struggles (NASDAQ:HSII). In a nod toward transparency, Meta plans to make open source the recommendations library TorchRec that is uses to personalize products like Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)’s news feed, said Pesenti in another event session. The company also will publish a feed ranking prototype to show how its algorithms prioritize which content it displays to users on Instagram, he said. Some of the projects Meta announced on Wednesday, such as Project CAIRaoke and the algorithm transparency effort, follow similar innovations announced in recent years by rivals such as Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc’s Google.Meta also recently announced its research team has built a new artificial intelligence supercomputer that it thinks will be the fastest in the world when completed in mid-2022. More

(Reuters) -San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly said on Wednesday she expects the U.S. central bank will need to raise rates at least four times this year, and likely more, to stop high inflation from getting worse.”There is broad agreement that inflation is too high and the policy rate is too low,” Daly said at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. It is important, she told reporters after the event, to have “a little more urgency” on raising interest rates; a rate hike every other meeting “doesn’t satisfy the moment,” she said, and neither does waiting until later in the year to start reducing the Fed’s $9 trillion balance sheet.Daly’s embrace Wednesday of a series of four or more rate hikes was a notably hawkish shift from her previous support for a less aggressive stance. She also said the Fed may need to consider a bigger-than-usual half-percentage-point rate hike down the road, although for now quarter-point rate hikes remain her expectation.”Raising rates at least four times — at least — would be my preference, but it most likely will need more than that” to bring demand back into line with supply — unless consumer demand falls more than she expects, or supply chains get fixed faster than she anticipates. Financial conditions are more accommodative now than they should be, given the strength of the economy and the pace of job gains, she said. And while the geopolitical situation with Ukraine and Russia adds to uncertainty, she said, it will not change the Fed’s plans to raise rates unless conditions get sharply worse. Once the Fed has begun raising rates, she said, it will then begin to reduce its $9 trillion balance sheet, a process that will further tighten policy, and work to slow inflation. Inflation by the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, rose 5.75% last year, the highest in about 40 years and more than twice the Fed’s 2% goal. “We need to demonstrate to the American people that we are committed to having that not be a perpetuating spiral,” Daly said. Still, she said, raising rates does not mean the Fed is slamming on the brakes, but rather allows economic growth to continue by easing inflation.”The last thing you want is an economy that’s going too fast, overruns what’s possible, and then you do have to bridle it back; but that’s not where we are at,” she said. “We’re doing the handoff from intense COVID-related support to gradually moving the policy rate up and getting this policy accommodation right-sized for the economy that we have.” Eventually, Daly said, she does expect pandemic-disrupted supply chains to heal and at least some workers to return to the labor force as public health improves, so for now there’s little need for the Fed to raise rates steeply.”If we run first and do everything at once… then we will have overcorrected,” she said. “We need to get policy in line, but we can’t be impatient about doing it all today.”Among data she’ll be watching, she said, is the transition from pandemic COVID-19 to an endemic state; how quickly disrupted supply chains recover; how rapidly workers sidelined by COVID-19 return to the workforce; and how quickly the fiscal support that bolstered the economy’s recovery from the pandemic shutdowns fades.TRANSPARENCYDaly also expressed hope that the Fed’s ability to communicate its inflation-fighting intentions and thus shape inflation expectations will keep an upward price spiral from taking hold as it did in the 1970s.Back then, she said, the more prices rose, the more people expected them to continue to rise, and the Fed — as was its custom – offered little guidance on what it would do in response. The Fed would have policy meetings, but did not even announce their decisions afterwards, for instance.That silence, she said, allowed the situation to snowball: inflation continued its rise until the Fed put in a series of steep interest rate hikes that knocked it back but also sent the economy into recession.Since then, she said, things have changed – not just in the economy itself, but more importantly with the Fed’s approach to communications. The central bank now has a 2% target for inflation and an explicit framework for adjusting policy to reach its goals; it publishes Fed policymaker forecasts, and policymakers like Daly routinely go out and give speeches about their views. That transparency, she said, has locked down inflation expectations despite the current rise in actual inflation, potentially reducing the need for the kind of aggressive action needed decades ago.”Greater transparency and a strong commitment to achieving our goals assures Americans that periods of high inflation or unemployment will not last forever; that there is an end in sight.” More

The Kremlin said two Moscow-backed separatist territories in eastern Ukraine had asked Vladimir Putin to “repel the aggression of the Ukrainian regime”, in the strongest signal yet that Russia is about to launch a full invasion of the country. Russian newswires published letters on Wednesday in which the leaders of the breakaway statelets in the Donbas border region asked Russia’s president to use military force to protect them from what they described as “ongoing military aggression” by Ukraine. Kyiv and its western allies say the claims of a Ukrainian attack — which have been spread widely on Russian state television, backed up by little or no evidence — are “phoney allegations” meant to create a pretext for war.Ukraine’s parliament late on Wednesday approved President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decree calling for declaring a “state of emergency” with 335 MPs voting in favour, more than a constitutional majority.Putin has repeatedly denied he is planning to invade Ukraine but demanded that Kyiv “demilitarise,” surrender the entire Donbas border region to the separatists, and declare neutrality.US stocks closed at their lowest levels since last June as tensions escalated between Russia and the west over Ukraine, exacerbating a sell-off that has taken the benchmark S&P 500 index deeper into correction territory.FT.com has the latest news on the Ukraine conflict. Explainer: Kyiv has few ways to respond beyond bolstering its defences.Sanctions: Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff and his defence minister have been blacklisted by the EU as part of the bloc’s first round of sanctions. Plus, fresh US sanctions imposed on Russian bonds add “more teeth” to existing curbs.Opinion: The UK’s weak initial response risks emboldening Putin’s coercive diplomacy, writes our editorial board. Russian banks are getting off lightly, says our Lex column.Thanks for reading FirstFT Asia. What questions do you have about the crisis in Ukraine? Share them with us at [email protected] — Emily Five more stories in the news1. Traders leave US penny stocks in sign speculative fever is cooling Trading in unlisted US shares has dropped almost three-quarters from its peak at the height of last year’s retail trading frenzy, as investors rein in speculative bets and regulators crack down on potential fraud in penny stocks.2. The world’s first quantum gravity sensor Birmingham university researchers and their industrial partners have demonstrated what they say is the world’s first quantum gravity sensor that works reliably in the real world, detecting subterranean structures outside tightly controlled lab conditions. Construction and infrastructure projects could be a key application of the technology. 3. Turkey set to ban German and US public broadcasters Two international public broadcasters are facing an imminent ban in Turkey after defying a demand from authorities that they described as “censorship”.4. Rio Tinto to pay $7.7bn final dividend as earnings soar Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the mining sector has emerged as the dividend-paying powerhouse of the London stock market, returning huge sums of cash from record raw material prices.5. India’s IT sector grapples with hiring ‘crisis’ The India chief executive of software giant Salesforce said the country’s IT sector was suffering a skills shortage “crisis” as companies struggled to meet surging demand and compete with well-funded tech start-ups for workers.Coronavirus digestHong Kong launched a new round of financial handouts as the city struggles to contain China’s biggest outbreak of coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, even as economists warned the city’s zero-Covid strategy was “unsustainable”.Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline will apply for regulatory approval of their long-awaited Covid-19 vaccine as a primary jab and booster, after reporting an overall efficacy rate of 57.9 per cent.The World Health Organization is establishing a South Korea facility to provide training for drug manufacturing in poorer countries to increase local production, combat chronic diseases and enhance preparation for future health crises.Employers warned they will be flying blind when all restrictions in England end as the government has not issued workplace safety guidance.Opinion: A mass return to the workplace brings a much-misunderstood area of risk to all careers: the work social event.

Conduct or conversation that is beyond the pale in the office is equally unacceptable at the party © Getty Images

The day aheadJimmy Lai in court The national security case of the media tycoon and other former Apple Daily associates is expected to resume in courtSouth Korea interest rate decision Policymakers are expected to keep interest rates on hold after raising rates at the previous two meetings. Rate hikes are expected to resume in the second quarter. (Yahoo Finance) EU summit in Brussels EU leaders are planning to convene to discuss the escalating crisis in Ukraine. Charles Michel, European Council president, told EU leaders that he wanted to meet in Brussels to “jointly define our collective approach and actions”.Join Financial Times journalists and leading experts on February 25 at 13:00 GMT for an unmissable virtual briefing, Russia-Ukraine Conflict: What Next? Register free here.What else we’re reading Ukraine crisis saddles Washington with Indo-Pacific dilemma In capitals from Canberra to Tokyo, the spectre of a Russian attack on Ukraine has diverted attention from the Indo-Pacific strategy — which the Biden administration published this month — to the fact that the US is again focusing its efforts elsewhere.The monetarist dog is having its day Economists are being forced to relearn lessons about the importance of money supply. When people are holding more money than they desire, they want to get rid of it. This would lower the price of most assets, but the nominal price of money is fixed: a dollar is a dollar. The adjustment comes via higher prices for everything else — or inflation, writes Martin Wolf.

Martin Wolf: ‘A big lesson of history is that if economists think they understand how the macroeconomy works, they will be wrong’ © James Ferguson

Carl Icahn’s push for happier McDonald’s pigs is just the start Single issue charities and activist hedge funds have long sought to use US annual general meetings to demand change. Now, they are getting backing from a much wider range of investors who won’t sit by idly when companies fail to match stakeholder rhetoric and ESG promises with genuine action.Real-world profits in the metaverse Retailers such as Forever 21, Nike and Chipotle are creating virtual world stores in a bet it can boost profits. But is it a gimmick, or will the metaverse allow for the creation of low-overhead, high-margin ecommerce businesses that will transform global retail?The rise of ‘wellness’ apartments For some, “wellness” isn’t merely an ill-defined buzzword, it’s a way of life. And property developers have been rushing to cash in. By one estimate there are now more than 2,300 “wellness residential projects” around the world that are either built, partially built, or in development. But buyers face hefty premiums.TelevisionConflicts come to a head in Peaky Blinders’ final series, which makes its debut on BBC1 this weekend. This season, the last battle looms for Cillian Murphy’s gangster Tommy Shelby as he moves across the Atlantic. Critic Dan Einav gives it four stars in his review.

Cillian Murphy returns as a more composed Tommy © BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions More