Open Editor's Digest for freeRula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK's undervalued stock market is a tempting target for private equity buyers. Companies in the midst of cyclical downturns make the best bites ever. This thinking should apply to strategic buyers as well, except that they may suffer their own economic downturn rather than sit on dry powder. the solution? Get a private equity fund to finance your bid.This is the path that Nasdaq-listed Viavi has chosen to take. The $2.3 billion telecommunications equipment maker has made a recommended £1 billion…
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Unlock the Editor's Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.It feels like a long time since we last had a proper bond market liquidity freakout. For anyone hankering for their fix, the International Capital Market Association is out with a new report. Last year ICMA set up a Bond Market Liquidity Taskforce — which is probably as glamorous as it sounds. The BMLT has now published its first report, examining the health of the “core” European government bond markets, in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Anyone who has followed…
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra testifies during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing titled “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Semiannual Report to Congress,” in the Dirksen Building on Thursday, November 30, 2023.Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty ImagesThe Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unveiled a new rule Tuesday that it said would cap the typical late fees banks charge customers at $8 per incident.By lowering late fees to $8 from an average of about $32, more than 45 million card users will save an average of $220 annually, the CFPB said in a statement.The new rule, which…
Using large cloud computing providers is convenient, but not exactly cheap. Ubicloud, a new startup founded by the team behind Citus Data, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019, wants to change the dynamics by offering a layer of core cloud computing services as well as affordable bare metal servers from providers like Hetzner, OVH Cloud, Leaseweb and AWS. . This includes a managed service and an open source version that allows developers to build their own cloud on bare metal providers. Right now, Ubicloud's focus is on a small set of core components: compute and the PostgreSQL database service…
A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during morning trading on March 4, 2024 in New York City. Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty ImagesUS stock futures fell on Tuesday, putting Wall Street on track to build on the previous session's decline.Linked futures contracts Dow Jones Industrial Average It fell 50 points, or 0.1%. Standard & Poor's 500 futures It decreased by 0.2%, while Nasdaq-100 futures It decreased by about 0.5%.AMD Shares traded down 2% after Bloomberg News reported that the chipmaker faced a regulatory hurdle that will prevent it from selling an artificial…
For the past month, my mail-in ballot for the upcoming primary has been piling up on my kitchen table, collecting dust. Every day I walk beside him. I even put a pen on top of it, as a reminder to fill it out, to do my civic duty. But I couldn't even bring myself to open the seal. And I'm hardly the only one. Of California's nearly 22 million registered voters, only about 14% had returned their ballots as of Monday. Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., expects turnout to eventually reach 30%, ranking it among the lowest…
Forget election night. Election season has been upon us for weeks, and it won't end anytime soon.California's stunning adoption of mail-in voting has fundamentally changed how we engage in the democratic process. This shift has also necessitated a cultural reshaping around election night results, and a reframing of the timeline for learning outcomes in many races.Final answers are likely to be clear only in the most lopsided contests by late Tuesday night. In some of the more difficult races, conclusive results may take days or weeks to appear.But don't worry, these relatively slow vote counts are a feature of a…
Stay informed with free updatesSimply subscribe to myFT Digest for Real Estate – delivered straight to your inbox.More than two-thirds of New York home sales last quarter were cash purchases, a record high, as high interest rates on mortgages deter all but the wealthiest buyers.With mortgage rates hovering around 6 percent, nearly 70 percent of New York City homes purchased in the fourth quarter of 2023 were purchased without a mortgage, according to Pamela Lipman, CEO of Corcoran Real Estate Brokerage. Cash purchases jumped from just 55 percent of transactions in the same period in 2022.“High mortgage rates create a…
Open Editor's Digest for freeRula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has just released a report criticizing the government for failing to track whether it is doing a good job of its borrowing strategy. You can read the mainFT article here. It is unfortunate that the PAC report is weak. He mostly criticizes the government for its inability to measure what arguably cannot be measured, while making some wavering comments about the risks of rising foreign ownership of government bonds. This is unfortunate, because a comprehensive analytical…
Open Editor's Digest for freeRula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bill Anderson, CEO of struggling German company Bayer, said on Tuesday that the company was “deeply devastated” and currently unable to separate.Investors have long pushed Bayer to split itself into three separate groups, but Anderson said the expected loss of its exclusivity on key drugs, high debt, costly litigation over the weed killer and the group's internal red tape prevented it from doing so.”The four challenges the company faces greatly limit our ability to choose our destiny: whether it is a three-division…