Aurelia Butler

Cancellation rates increased to 35% since November and holiday travel planning was down 10%, the company said, adding that most travelers were choosing domestic destinations.The company did not say what the cancellation rates were prior to November.The Omicron outbreak, first reported in southern Africa, has led to a flurry of new testing rules and border closings, raising concerns ahead of the important Christmas travel season.Multiple events ranging from sports and trade shows to corporate parties have been canceled, also leading to a slowdown in hotel bookings.Trivago said overall activity around holiday travel planning has slowed, growing by just 4% since the variant was discovered. By comparison, Christmas travel increased by 34.7% in the same one-to-two-week period in 2019.Last month, the company said it saw an increase of 35% in search traffic in the week leading up to Thanksgiving.U.S. travelers are sticking with Las Vegas and New York as top holiday destinations, the company said.”Much like 2020, domestic travel is the preferred option as consumers look to reunite with friends and family,” Trivago said.United Airlines said on Tuesday it expected around 8 million people to fly during the year-end holiday season, which the company added was higher than the number of people flying during the Thanksgiving period.The airline had previously warned that the Omicron variant was a threat to translantic travel.International flight searches from the United States were down between 35% and 39% in the first week of December, according to rival Booking Holdings (NASDAQ:BKNG) Inc’s travel website Kayak.They were down about 25% just before Thanksgiving, a day before the World Health Organization named the new COVID-19 variant and said it may spread more quickly than other forms, according to Kayak.Fears over the variant have grown after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned of a “tidal wave” of new cases, with the country reporting the first publicly confirmed death in the world due to Omicron on Monday. More

Click here to listen to the latest news in less than three minutes. Top Stories Today is an audio news digest that gets you up to speed on the day’s headlines.The Omicron coronavirus variant has been discovered for the first time on mainland China, according to health authorities, piling pressure on officials already contending with an outbreak in one of the country’s most important manufacturing hubs.Officials and state media said the Omicron case was “imported” by an arrival in the port city of Tianjin, south-east of Beijing, where travellers are quarantined before they are allowed to continue on to the Chinese capital.Later on Tuesday, state television reported that a second Omicron case had been discovered in the southern city of Guangzhou. It involved a local resident who had returned to China last month and spent two weeks in quarantine in Shanghai without the virus being detected.President Xi Jinping’s administration is pursuing a “zero Covid” policy across the world’s most populous nation, in part because of concerns about the relatively low efficacy of China’s homemade vaccines and the potential death toll if Covid-19 spreads freely among the country’s 1.4bn people.Meanwhile, two doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine provide 70 per cent protection against being admitted to hospital with the Omicron variant, according to the first real-world analysis of protection against severe disease with the new strain in South Africa. But the defence offered against Omicron is lower than the 93 per cent protection provided against the Delta variant, the report from Discovery Health, the largest private healthcare provider in South Africa found.Explainer: Why do Covid boosters offer greater protection against Omicron?What changes are you making in your life, if any, owing to the Omicron variant? Share your thoughts with me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading FirstFT Asia. Here’s the rest of today’s news — EmilyFive more stories in the news1. Goldman and JPMorgan plan bumper bonuses The US banks are preparing to pay out bumper bonuses to their investment bankers following a record year for deal activity. Goldman is considering increasing its bonus pool by about 40-50 per cent compared with last year, while at JPMorgan the pool could be as much as 40 per cent larger, according to people briefed on the matter.2. Top Trump aide faces contempt vote The US House of Representatives is poised to vote to hold Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows in criminal contempt, as newly revealed text messages provide fresh detail about what was happening inside the Trump White House during the January 6 Capitol riot.3. Blinken blasts ‘aggressive’ China US secretary of state Antony Blinken has criticised “Beijing’s aggressive actions” against its neighbours on his first visit to south-east Asia since taking office. In a speech in Jakarta, Blinken said President Joe Biden planned to host regional leaders in the coming months as he tries to rebuild credibility following Donald Trump’s administration.4. Toyota to spend $35bn on electric push The Japanese carmaker said it will pour $35bn into a shift towards electric vehicles as the world’s biggest carmaker sets itself up for direct rivalry with Tesla and joins other groups in a push for carbon neutrality.5. Men urged Japan’s first female trade union head to turn down job Male colleagues of Tomoko Yoshino, the first woman to head Japan’s largest trade union association, begged her to turn the job down because they believed her gender made her incapable of fighting corporate Japan for higher wages, she said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Tomoko Yoshino: ‘They said it was too difficult for a woman to handle the job in such a difficult time’ © Akio Kon/Bloomberg

Coronavirus digestHong Kong is preparing to resume quarantine-free travel. Meanwhile,Hong Kong’s central bank is sending care packages to bankers in quarantine. The UK will remove all 11 countries from England’s coronavirus travel “red list”, as ministers accept that the Omicron variant can no longer be contained.Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral pill cuts the risk of hospitalisation or death by up to 89 per cent in high-risk patients, according to final trial results.Developing countries in Asia will grow at a slower pace than anticipated this year and next, the Asian Development Bank said.Science editor Clive Cookson explains why the human immune system finds it so hard to detect the new variant.

The day aheadAustralia loosens travel restrictions The country will reopen to foreign visa holders and vaccinated tourists from South Korea and Japan. (Sky News) UK inflation figures Data released today are expected to show inflation having risen to about 4.5 per cent in the November. Even with these signals of economic strength, the Bank of England is unlikely to raise rates, as it weighs the potential impact of Omicron.Federal Reserve policy-setting meeting The end of the Fed’s two-day meeting will conclude with a press conference, a new set of economic projections and an updated “dot plot” of individual interest rate projections. US producer prices rose at the fastest pace on record in November, piling pressure on the Fed to dial down pandemic emergency policy settings.Has inflation pushed up prices where you live? Tell us in our latest poll. And follow along with our inflation tracker for the latest figures.

What else we’re readingThe US is not responsible for China’s rise The west struggles to understand that the rest of the world has agency of its own, writes Janan Ganesh. While the west might have postponed China’s arrival at the top table, at some cost, preventing it outright was never in its power.Crunch time for the ECB The European Central Bank has sounded more dovish than most central banks but, scarred by past criticism of having raised interest rates too soon, it is reluctant to wind back its support after struggling for years with low inflation and sluggish growth.Gaming needs to end its stereotyping of the Arab world Once the stock villains of war games were Nazis, but today, following 9/11 and the war on terror, they are jihadis, faceless terrorists with robes and beards that exist only to hate the west and soak up bullets. Solving the problem of Arab stereotypes in games requires two discrete approaches, writes Tom Faber.Related read: Need relief from screen time? There’s an app for that, writes Elaine Moore.Ghislaine Maxwell trial shines light on class divide Class is threaded through the story of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender. At its centre was Maxwell, an Oxford-educated socialite, who witnesses said lured them when they were young and poor into a world beyond their imaginations.

The home of Jeffrey Epstein in Palm Beach, Florida © Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty

Why the Indian farmers’ movement is a lesson in democracy Their victory suggests the cure to democratic backsliding is more political participation from citizens, writes Mukulika Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India.CinemaFilm critic Danny Leigh reviews the best films that take you to Hong Kong. “Paris has romance and New York has the skyline. Hong Kong has heartache, mystery — and . . . a wealth of stylised, site-specific, vastly influential action and crime movies,” he writes as part of the FT Globetrotter guide to the territory.

A portrait of a now-vanished Hong Kong: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wai’s gorgeous ‘In the Mood for Love’ © Album/Alamy More

The sale of 50 F-35 warplanes made by Lockheed Martin to the UAE had slowed https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-intends-move-forward-f-35-sale-uae-us-official-says-2021-11-16 amid concerns in Washington over Abu Dhabi’s relationship with China, including use of Huawei 5G technology in the country.”Technical requirements, sovereign operational restrictions, and cost/benefit analysis led to the re-assessment,” the UAE official said in a statement to Reuters that confirmed a report in the Wall Street Journal.”The U.S. remains the UAE’s preferred provider for advanced defense requirements and discussions for the F-35 may be re-opened in the future,” the official said, adding there were discussions to “address mutual defense security conditions for the acquisition”.A person briefed on the negotiations said for several months sticking points between the United States and the UAE revolved around how the stealthy jets can be deployed and how much of the sophisticated F-35 technology the Emiratis will be allowed to take advantage of. The person asked not to be identified by name or by association with either country.The UAE had signed an agreement to purchase 50 F-35 jets and up to 18 armed drones, people familiar with the situation told Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-emirates-f35-int/uae-signs-deal-with-u-s-to-buy-50-f-35-jets-and-up-to-18-drones-sources-idUSKBN29P2C0 in January.Earlier, at the Pentagon, spokesman John Kirby (NYSE:KEX) had said the U.S. partnership with the UAE was more strategic and complex than a weapons sale and Washington was committed to working with Abu Dhabi to address their questions. “We will always insist, as a matter of statutory requirements and policy, on a variety of end use requirements,” Kirby said.He added that a meeting between U.S. and UAE officials at the Pentagon later this week was set to be about broad topics but anticipated that the weapons sale would come up. Kirby referred questions about details of specific arms sales to the State Department.A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the Biden administration was committed to the proposed sales of the F-35 aircraft along with the MQ-9B and munitions.”We are hopeful that we can work through any outstanding issues,” the official said. Lockheed Martin Corp (NYSE:LMT) referred requests for comment to the U.S. and UAE governments.The UAE, one of Washington’s closest Middle East allies, had long expressed interest in acquiring the stealthy F-35 jets, and was promised a chance to buy them in a side deal when it agreed to normalize relations with Israel in August 2020. More

Stocks fell on Tuesday after a report indicated US wholesale prices rose at a record pace last month, increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to bring its bond purchase programme to an end. Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 closed 0.7 per cent lower, led by a 6.6 per cent drop in the shares of Adobe, the creative software maker. The technology-focused Nasdaq Composite fell 1.1 per cent. Microsoft shares, which fell 3.3 per cent on the day, contributed to the dip in both indices. US producer prices rose 9.6 per cent in November from the same month the previous year, the biggest rise on records going back to 2010 and a sharp uptick from 8.8 per cent the previous month. Economists polled by Reuters had expected prices to advance at a 9.2 per cent rate in November. “The rapid rise in producer prices serves as further confirmation that the US economy is experiencing a generalised rise in prices that is broader, more persistent, and less clearly tied to the pandemic than Fed officials had assumed,” said Andrew Hollenhorst, an economist at Citigroup. Markets across the Atlantic also fell after the start of trade in the US, with the Europe-wide Stoxx 600 index closing down 0.8 per cent and Frankfurt’s Dax off 1.1 per cent. London’s FTSE 100 was down 0.2 per cent. Investors are awaiting decisions this week from three central banks on how they will balance rapid inflation with the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. Some economists expect the Fed will announce on Wednesday plans to slow its bond-purchasing programme more rapidly than it had indicated at its meeting last month. That would set the stage for rate rises from historic lows around the middle of next year. “Possible outcomes at the . . . Federal Open Market Committee meeting range from a modest acceleration of the taper to a sharp acceleration that reflects acute inflation worries, signalling a fast pace of rate hikes,” said Steven Englander at Standard Chartered in New York. “Our client discussions suggest that market participants see a significant risk of a sharp taper acceleration.”Ahead of the Fed, yields across Treasury maturities were higher, leading to a slight flattening of the yield curve, a trend that has persisted since October. The benchmark 10-year yield rose 0.02 percentage points to 1.44 per cent. The two-year yield, which moves with interest rate expectations, also moved up 0.02 percentage points to 0.66 per cent.In the UK, investors are betting that the rapid spread of Omicron has reduced the chances that the Bank of England will tighten monetary policy at Thursday’s meeting.Investors will also be closely scrutinising the European Central Bank meeting, scheduled for Thursday, for clues on how it will respond to the rise in inflation across the eurozone. Its €1.85tn pandemic-era bond-buying programme is set to cease net purchases in March. Inflation in the eurozone rose to 4.9 per cent in November, outstripping the 4.5 per cent expected on average by economists polled by Reuters.Although prices for everything from energy and housing to food are rising in each region, the three central banks face subtly different pressures, according to Georgina Taylor, fund manager at Invesco Emea.“Going back to the financial crisis, it was all about [the banks] being pretty co-ordinated,” she said. “Now everyone is fighting their own domestic dilemmas and they’re all doing their own thing.” More

In a fiscal update, the finance ministry said the deficit would be C$144.5 billion ($112.4 billion), down 6.6% from the C$154.7 billion forecast in April. “Canada has largely recovered from the economic damage inflicted by COVID-19 and is poised for robust growth in the months to come,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a prepared speech, adding the fight against COVID-19 remained “our most important national project.”Ottawa though cut its forecast for 2021 real gross domestic product to 4.6% from 5.8% in April’s budget, citing disruptions in global supply chains.The fiscal update document forecast Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio would be 48.0% in 2021/22, versus 51.2% forecast in April, falling to 44.0% in 2026/27. More