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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Europe’s drive to simplify and streamline financial regulation is making top supervisors nervous about the risk of key safeguards being watered down. Two of the EU’s most senior financial supervisors told the Financial Times they were determined to avoid crisis prevention measures being swept away in the push to revive the region’s sluggish economic growth.“If it is about deregulating and lowering the bar on financial protections, we will not be ready to tackle volatility.’’ said Dominique Laboureix, head of the Single Resolution Board — which handles failing Eurozone banks. ‘‘That means crises, which means less growth.” The pointed intervention, which is uncommon for the watchdogs, comes after the European Commission recently announced plans to drastically cut the scope of business sustainability disclosure rules it introduced two years ago. It is also reviewing capital rules for banks and insurers as part of plans to boost financial market activity and growth.Some officials want Brussels to go further. The heads of the German, French, Spanish and Italian central banks wrote to the commission recently calling on it to remove “unduly complex” areas of financial rules that distort international competition without improving financial stability.Laboureix said he was “absolutely ready” to engage with calls for the burden of regulation to be eased. But he warned policymakers not to forget the lessons of the last big banking sector meltdown. “Don’t forget the 2008 crisis. What did that mean? Bailouts everywhere.”“I am ready to discuss simplification, but I am not ready to lower the bar in terms of protecting financial stability,” Laboureix said in an interview.Frank Elderson, vice-chair of the ECB supervisory board, pointed out that after the 2008 financial crisis Eurozone governments spent €1.5tn in capital support and €3.7tn in liquidity support for the financial system. Europe’s economy shrank 4.3 per cent in 2009 as the crisis took its toll.“It’s good to remember why we did that in the first place,” Elderson said in an interview, adding: “We need not be complacent and say the next decade will be rosy — so we have to be wary about doing away with supervisory functions that could lead to this situation repeating itself.”Elderson told a banking conference in London last week: “The debate on competitiveness should not be used as a pretext for watering down regulation.” Instead of lowering regulatory requirements he said the EU should focus on harmonising them across its 27 members. “Don’t cut rules, harmonise them,” he said.The ECB executive told the FT he supported “simplification in a nuanced way” of sustainability disclosure rules, but he warned if this went too far it could deprive banks of the information they need from companies to assess their own exposure to climate change risks.“Was all this perfect? Probably not,” he said. “Can we do better without paying too much of a price? Possibly.” But he added: “If it were to lead to banks not having the data they need to assess these risks, that would be a problem for banks and would make our work as a supervisor more difficult.”The ECB has been pushing Eurozone banks to address risks from floods, droughts, wildfires and the transition away from fossil fuels, threatening to fine those that drag their feet.The central bank has the power to impose “periodic penalty payments” on lenders worth up to 5 per cent of their average daily turnover every day for up to six months.Elderson said there were “a few banks” for which such penalties were still “a concrete possibility” after they missed the first of a series of deadlines to take steps to tackle climate risks in their balance sheets. “There are a small number” of other banks that have been told they could also face penalties for missing the ECB’s second deadline on climate action set for the end of 2023, he said. A final deadline expired so recently it is “too early to say” if any banks could be fined over this. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Japan has not yet beaten deflation despite years of persistently rising consumer prices and the largest round of annual wage increases in three decades, the country’s finance minister has warned.Katsunobu Kato’s blunt assessment in an interview with the Financial Times comes 15 months into the Bank of Japan’s efforts to “normalise” the economy and gradually reintroduce positive interest rates, after a quarter-century-long battle to steer the country away from falling prices.Kato acknowledged that Japan was experiencing rising prices and that other trends appeared positive, but said the government could only declare victory over deflation when it saw no prospect of sliding back.“I believe we need to judge carefully whether Japan has broken away from deflation by not only looking at the consumer prices, but looking at underlying prices and background in a comprehensive fashion . . . it is our judgment at present that Japan has not overcome deflation,” Kato said.The minister’s comments echo some economists’ fears that, while prices are rising, they largely represent the “wrong” type of inflation: driven by a weak yen and high commodity costs rather than a virtuous cycle of rising wages and consumer demand.Headline inflation has remained above the BoJ’s target of 2 per cent for 35 straight months, and consumer prices excluding fresh food rose 3 per cent in February from a year earlier. Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.Last Friday, the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, which claims a membership of 7mn workers, said negotiations had resulted in average wage gains of 5.46 per cent, which it said was the highest pay bump in 33 years.But wage growth is stagnant in real terms, consumer confidence has remained soft and, according to the research group Teikoku Databank, companies in February were passing a smaller proportion of their increased costs on to consumers than they were last July.During the deflationary period, said Kato, there was no movement in prices, wages or interest rates — a combination that suppressed economic growth and prevented the country from realising its potential.“It was a very sluggish situation,” Kato said. “However, things are now changing. We are now seeing prices rising, wages rising and in terms of monetary policies, the BoJ is now looking into what the optimal monetary policy stance will be for Japan. So we are now seeing signs of change and normalisation.”Kato spoke to the FT shortly after the BoJ opted to leave the short term policy rate on hold last week because of the huge uncertainties created by US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats and the rising risks to the global economic picture.The BoJ’s normalisation process involved ending negative rates in early 2024, followed by a small rise in July that year. In January 2025, the BoJ lifted rates to 0.5 per cent — the highest level in 17 years. Many economists predict at least one more rise this year.The process of transition into a normal economy, said Kato, depended on ensuring that wage increases outpaced price increases over the long term.He said it was encouraging that larger companies were raising wages, but the real challenge was to ensure that Japan’s small and medium-sized companies were able to pass rising labour and input costs on to customers.Stefan Angrick, Japan economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that while the level of consumer price inflation seemed to rule out a return to deflation, Kato’s comments reflected the fact that Japan did not yet have the kind of inflation it wanted.“And it’s hard to feel very confident that it will,” said Angrick.The supply shock would eventually fade, he added, and then only stronger domestic demand could keep inflation on target. “But domestic demand is quite weak. Consumer spending has been flat for the past three years. Capex spending is treading water. Labour markets aren’t quite as tight as they seem,” said Angrick, who expects inflation to drop below 2 per cent by 2026. More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is group chief economist at Société GénéraleLong bond yields in the Eurozone have risen sharply on the back of the “whatever it takes” fiscal measures presented by Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, on March 4. The benchmark 10-year Bund yield has jumped by about 0.25 percentage points since then.The sell-off is warranted by fundamentals, given expectations for significantly stronger economic growth and government bond issuance. This is not true elsewhere in the region, where similar scaled debt-financed spending measures are not in the pipeline.The welcome German measures won final approval last Friday, with relatively low import content from other euro area member states. As such, positive spillover from stronger German growth to the rest of the region is likely to be modest and is potentially even in danger of being more than offset by the sharp rise in bond yields. Soaring bond yields also add to governments’ debt servicing costs, adding to the challenges for member states in need of fiscal consolidation.It is further worth noting that euro area bond yields are now around the levels that prevailed last June, just before the European Central Bank embarked upon its current monetary policy-easing cycle, which has now led to 1.50 percentage points of cuts to its key deposit rate. There is thus an argument to be made that euro area member states, outside Germany, are experiencing an “unwarranted” increase in bond yields. Zooming in on the major 10-year benchmark bond yields in the France, Italy and Spain, these have increased by about 0.25 percentage points since the announcement of the German measures. The ECB’s toolkit has since the euro area debt crisis been expanded to deal primarily with unwarranted widening of euro sovereign bond yields relative to the German benchmarks, with notably the Outright Monetary Transactions and the Transmission Protection Instruments schemes. Neither tool has been used, but there is little doubt about their effectiveness.OMT is the 2012 scheme to buy government bonds in potentially unlimited amounts if needed. It was the delivery on Mario Draghi’s July 2012 promise to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro as the then-ECB president. TPI, introduced in July 2022 in what Christine Lagarde, his successor, called a “historic moment”, marked a further addition to counter disorderly market dynamics. It allows the ECB to buy the bonds of a Eurozone country if is suffering from an increase in its borrowing costs beyond the level justified by economic fundamentals.Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.In theory, the TPI could be activated to counter the recent rise in bond yields in member states outside Germany, but this seems both unlikely and suboptimal. The TPI is widely understood to be a tool to counter disorderly spread movements in jurisdictions under market pressure and comes with the conditionality of respecting European fiscal rules. Using the tool outside this context may lead to market confusion.And further rate cuts could prove a blunt instrument, if such moves were to merely to steepen the German bond yield curve, widening the gap between shorter and longer interest rates. Likewise if rate cuts steepened the yield curve farther by raising growth and inflation expectations in Germany.There is thus a case to be made for a tool to deal with an unwarranted rise in long euro area bond yields that is driven by the de facto anchor for this market, Bunds.Pausing so-called quantitative tightening — the unwinding of the long-running programme of bond buying to lower the costs of borrowing in order to stimulate the economy — could mark a first step. That could ease upside pressures on the premiums placed on longer-term bonds across the euro area over short-term debt.A speech by ECB executive board member Piero Cipollone last month discussed the right balance for the ECB’s balance sheet and its implications for monetary policy. He cited survey data suggesting the potential for a greater impact from QT on Spain and Italy, compared with France and Germany, in lifting bond yields. If accurate, this asymmetry offers a case to pause QT. A further avenue for the ECB involves its Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme, a temporary asset purchase programme of private and public sector securities buying to offset the shock of the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. The ECB is letting those purchases “run off”, not reinvesting proceeds from maturing bonds. The central bank has said this process will be managed “to avoid interference with the appropriate monetary stance”. It may be time to consider that, at least pausing PEPP run-off outside Germany.  More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The risk of a global trade war is “a very big concern” that would damage the world’s ability to tackle rising temperatures by limiting access to crucial technology, the chief executive of this year’s UN COP30 climate summit has warned.Brazil is due to host the world’s most important environmental talks in November, but the country’s climate secretary Ana Toni admitted they would take place in “very difficult circumstances”.Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has launched a sweeping attack on climate policies in the US, including pulling the country out of the landmark Paris agreement for the second time, while his threatened tariffs have sparked fears of a global trade war.“The trade war is a really big concern because some countries have technology for decarbonisation that other countries need,” Toni said in an interview with the Financial Times. “We cannot slow down the process because of trade wars in terms of exchanging technologies, products and so on.”A London School of Economics paper last year found that Trump’s promised tariffs would “significantly impact the affordability of electric vehicles” in the US alone. “Having fluid and free trade for specifically low carbon products is really important,” Toni said. “So trade wars don’t help us. They really make our lives harder for the process that we need to face, which is global decarbonisation.”Academic research suggests duplicate supply chains caused by tariffs can increase emissions, but bolstering domestic manufacturing can also cut demand for heavily-polluting long-haul shipping.Toni argued there was still widespread support from countries outside the US for addressing climate change, adding that the UK, Europe and China all supported a “multilateral approach”.“We have to have a successful COP” despite the geopolitical turmoil, Toni said. “Climate change is not going to wait for the geopolitical scenery to change.”She said this year’s COP needed to shift away from a focus on negotiations — arguing the “rule book” for the Paris accord was now largely agreed — and instead focus on how to “accelerate action”.She noted that the summit, which will take place in the Amazonian port city of Belém, will be the first held “since we’ve gone over 1.5C” above pre-industrial levels over a calendar year.This is not a breach of the Paris agreement’s goal to limit the temperature rise to 1.5C above the pre-industrial period, which is measured over decades rather than one year, but scientists warn last year’s record-breaking temperatures signalled that climate change was accelerating faster than expected.Brazil’s leadership of the COP conference has come under scrutiny in recent months, with criticism of its decision to explore for more oil, join the OPEC+ oil group and allow the construction of a road through forest in Belém.Despite being a big oil producer, Brazil is “going to do this transition” away from fossil fuels, Toni said, arguing their membership of OPEC+ could help drive dialogue about reducing nations’ dependence on oil and gas.She also played down concerns about deforestation caused by the construction of the road in Belém. The road was not being built specifically for the summit, she said, insisting it was instead infrastructure required for the city.“No one is proud to deforest even one tree but sometimes it is needed.”Climate CapitalWhere climate change meets business, markets and politics. Explore the FT’s coverage here.Are you curious about the FT’s environmental sustainability commitments? Find out more about our science-based targets here More

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Malaysia is planning to tighten regulations on semiconductors as it comes under US pressure to stem the illicit flow to China of chips crucial to the development of artificial intelligence.The country’s trade minister said Washington was demanding Malaysia closely track the movement of high-end Nvidia chips that enter the country over suspicions that many are ending up in China, in violation of US export rules.He added that he had formed a task force with digital minister Gobind Singh Deo to tighten regulations around Malaysia’s burgeoning data centres industry, which relies on chips from industry leader Nvidia.“[The US is] asking us to make sure that we monitor every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips,” Zafrul Aziz told the Financial Times.“They want us to make sure that servers end up in the data centres that they’re supposed to and not suddenly move to another ship.”The US has imposed export controls on advanced semiconductors and related equipment in an effort to obstruct China’s development of next-generation technologies, including AI, which may have military applications. Anxiety in the region over the illicit chip trade has escalated in recent weeks, after Singapore charged three men in a $390mn fraud case related to the suspected sale of Nvidia chips via Malaysia to China.In the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, the US introduced export controls that created a three-tier licensing system for AI chips used in data centres, such as Nvidia’s powerful graphics processing units. The system was aimed at hindering Chinese companies’ efforts to circumvent US restrictions by accessing the chips via third countries.Nvidia’s Singapore office accounts for nearly a quarter of its global sales, raising suspicions in Washington that some of the chips are leaking into China. The company has said almost all of these sales constitute invoicing of international companies through Singapore and very few chips pass through the city-state.Three weeks ago, Singaporean police arrested nine people — three of whom were charged — following raids on 22 locations over suspicion of fraudulent sales of servers containing Nvidia chips.Prosecutors said the fraudulent sales included Dell and Supermicro servers. Singapore has requested assistance from the US and Malaysia in investigating the movements of the servers.Zafrul said US authorities believed the Nvidia chips ended up in China after passing through Malaysia. But he said the investigation had turned up no evidence that the chips arrived at the Malaysian data centre to which they were purportedly sold.Malaysia has become one of the fastest-growing markets for data centre development, much of it concentrated in the southern state of Johor.The state has drawn in more than $25bn of investment from the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance in the past 18 months to build data centres, and recently agreed to form a special economic zone with Singapore.Zafrul emphasised the difficulty of tracking semiconductors through global supply chains, which involve chipmakers, suppliers and buyers as well as companies involved in manufacturing and distributing servers. “The US is also putting a lot of pressure on their own companies to be responsible for making sure they arrive at their rightful destination,” he said. “Everybody’s been asked to play a role throughout the supply chain.”He added: “Enforcement might sound easy, but it’s not.”Additional reporting by Mure Dickie in LondonVideo: Nvidia’s rise in the age of AI | FT Film More

This article is an on-site version of our The Week Ahead newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every Sunday. Explore all of our newsletters hereHello and welcome to the working week. Or in the case of Britain at the moment, weak and not really working.The headline event over the next seven days for my colleagues on the UK news and economics desks — as well as much of the London newsroom — will be the Spring Statement to the Westminster parliament by chancellor Rachel Reeves. The first thing to watch for is the revision to forecasts for growth, or rather the lack of growth, by the Office for Budget Responsibility. They will be down because the GDP estimates have been worse than expected by the OBR when it published its forecasts for the Budget last year. The OBR has to downgrade this year’s growth figure from 2 per cent to 1.3 per cent even if it keeps its view of the rest of 2025 unchanged. My colleague Chris Giles believes it’s more likely that the OBR halves the figure to about 1 per cent. The main change in the forecast will be higher than expected interest rates, increasing the cost of government debt service by about £10bn a year, or 0.3 per cent of GDP. That is sufficient to wipe out the headroom Reeves had in October against her main fiscal rule to balance day-to-day public spending with taxation by 2029-30. The net result of all this, given the chancellor’s commitment to stability as well as growth, is that Reeves will balance the books with the cuts to welfare announced last week along with slightly lower departmental spending over the rest of the parliament than previously planned. Don’t expect any tax changes — those will have to wait for this autumn’s Budget speech. The Treasury’s ambition this week is to be boring. Reeves’ speech is due to kick off at 12:30pm local time on Wednesday.I need to highlight the less easy to diarise — but arguably most important — event of the next seven days, namely the talks between the US and Russia about the war in Ukraine, hosted by Saudi Arabia. Financial Times subscribers can hear analysis from FT experts on developments on the battlefield, in European capitals and US foreign policy under US President Donald Trump with an exclusive webinar this Thursday between 1pm and 2pm GMT. Register here. In other news, Wednesday is the 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin being elected president. Just saying.Germany’s new grand coalition will take its place in the 21st Bundestag on Tuesday as the country’s new parliament convenes after last month’s election. It will look a lot different: newly appointed Chancellor Friedrich Merz presides over a coalition of his Christian Democratic Union with the Social Democratic party, but the far-right Alternative for Germany and far-left Die Linke will together hold more than a third of the seats in the new Bundestag.In Asia, there will be anticipation about further details on China’s plan to stimulate its domestic economy. The Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) begins its four-day annual conference on Tuesday in China, often seen as the region’s answer to the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos.In a relatively thin week for earnings announcements, British retailer Next will be among the standout reports. It is expected to reveal a 10 per cent increase in annual profit, making in excess of £1bn for the first time, when it publishes numbers on Thursday. Attention will focus on the company’s perspective on UK consumer confidence (previously pessimistic) and the impact of the national insurance increase, about to come into force, on hiring decisions.The next seven days brings the regular run of end of month surveys: the comparison of G7 economies through the flash purchasing managers’ index reports, Germany’s Ifo and US Consumer Confidence surveys. However, there are also significant data reports: personal income and durable goods orders from the US, inflation, retail sales and trade data from the UK, French, Spanish and Japanese inflation numbers, German unemployment figures and Australia’s monthly GDP estimate. More details on these and other items below. One more thing . . . Europe’s clocks spring forward on Sunday. Do you have better things to do with your time? Email me at jonathan.moules@ft.com, or, if you are reading this from your inbox, hit reply.And finally a belated thank you to all those who suggested ideas for a coming of age birthday treat for my youngest child. Keeping it simple was the best advice, so we took him to see super stylish spy flick Black Bag, which (unbeknown to me) includes a cameo by the FT’s London headquarters as the entrance to the secret service organisation’s base. I throughly recommend going to see the film — in line with the FT’s review — but please refrain from shouting out: “That’s Bracken House!” This location insight will not endear you either to your fellow film-goers or your teenage son.Key economic and company reportsHere is a more complete list of what to expect in terms of company reports and economic data this week.MondayBank of England governor Andrew Bailey is guest speaker for the University of Leicester Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture, talking on growth in the UK economyHargreaves Lansdown’s acquisition by a consortium comprising CVC Advisers, Nordic Capital XI Delta, SCSP and Platinum Ivy is expected to become effectiveEurozone, France, Germany, India, Japan, UK, US: S&P Global/HCOB/HSBC flash services and manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) dataResults: Science Group FY, Social Housing Reit FYTuesdayHSBC Global Investment Summit, hosted by the bank’s chair Mark Tucker, in Hong Kong. Speakers at the two-day event include Hong Kong financial secretary Paul Chan Mo-po and Hong Kong chief executive John LeeShell publishes its annual report, including details of chief executive Wael Sawan’s pay packageGermany: ifo Business Climate IndexJapan: minutes of the last monetary policy meetingSpain: February producer price index (PPI) inflation rate dataUS: Conference Board’s March consumer confidence indexResults: AG Barr FY, Ashtead Technology FY, Bellway HY, Fevertree Drinks FY, Heidelberg Materials FY, Henry Boot FY, IP Group FY, Kingfisher FY, McCormick & Company Q1, Regional Reit FY, Smiths Group HY, Tullow Oil FYWednesdayAustralia: February consumer price index (CPI) inflation rate dataFrance: INSEE consumer confidence surveyJapan: February services PPI inflation rate dataUK: February CPI and PPI inflation rate data. Also, UK House Price IndexResults: Cintas Q3, Commerzbank FY, Dollar Tree Q4, Evoke FY, Exor FY, PayChex Q3, Porsche FY, Vistry Group FYThursdayEU: European Central Bank General Council meetingUK: Bank of England February capital issuance figuresUS: revised Q4 GDP estimate and weekly export sales figuresResults: M&C Saatchi FY, H&M Q1, James Halstead HY, Lululemon Athletica Q4, Next FY FridayBoohoo shareholders vote on name change to Debenhams GroupCanada: January GDP estimateFrance: February PPI and March CPI inflation rate dataGermany: February labour market statistics. Plus, March GfK consumer climate surveyUK: revised Q4 GDP estimate, plus February retail sales figures for Great Britain US: February state employment figures. Also, February personal income dataWorld eventsFinally, here is a rundown of other events and milestones this week. MondayCanada: parliament resumes business, for the first time under new prime minister Mark CarneySouth-east Asia: the Asian Development Bank publishes its Asian Economic Integration reportJapan: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrives in Tokyo for a state visit, including meetings with the Emperor and Prime Minister Shigeru IshibaTuesdayAustralia: Budget Night, when treasurer Jim Chalmers presents the annual federal fiscal statement to the parliament in Canberra at 7:30pm local time. The Labor government, preparing for an election, faces pressure to boost cost of living spending while not adding anything that might fuel inflation, a tightrope walkChina: Boao Forum for Asia beginsGermany: 21st Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany, meets for its inaugural session after the February 23 electionsGreece: Independence DayUK: Financial Conduct Authority chair Ashley Alder and chief executive Nikhil Rathi appear before the Treasury select committee to answer questions on the regulator’s workWednesdayBangladesh: Independence DayGermany: the country’s constitutional court decides whether taxpayers must continue to shoulder a so-called solidarity tax surcharge introduced after the German reunification three decades ago to support poorer eastern states. If the court sides with plaintiffs, federal tax revenues annually worth about €12bn could be in jeopardy, potentially putting further strains on state coffersRussia: 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin being elected presidentUK: Chancellor Rachel Reeves presents her Spring Statement to parliament, while the Office for Budget Responsibility publishes its spring economic and fiscal forecastThursdayMyanmar: Armed Forces Day, this year commemorating 80 years since conflict with the Japanese army in the second world war. Myanmar has been in crisis since the army chief Min Aung Hlaing led a coup and arrested members of an elected government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021UK: Tom Hayes, a former Citigroup and UBS trader, and the first person in the world to be found guilty by a jury for conspiring to rig the London Interbank Offered Rate, is due to hear the verdict of his appeal against his conviction at the Supreme Court. His appeal will be heard alongside that of former Barclays trader Carlo PalomboFridayUK: Reform UK party stages a mass rally in the Utilita Arena, Birmingham — billed as its “biggest event yet” — to launch its campaign for local elections on May 1, as well as building momentum for the upcoming by-election in RuncornSaturdayJapan: Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba will join US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth and Gen Nakatani, the Japanese defence minister, on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima for a joint memorial service to commemorate the 1945 battle that involved some of the fiercest fighting of the second world war and the location for the famous US marine flag raising image. Hegseth is likely to use the occasion to lobby Japan to increase its defence spendingSundayEid al-Fitr (End of Ramadan)EU: European daylight savings time beginsUK: British Summer Time begins. Also, Mothering SundayRecommended newsletters for youWhite House Watch — What Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world. Sign up hereFT Opinion — Insights and judgments from top commentators. Sign up here More

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