Air France-KLM is downgrading its 2026 capacity outlook as the war in Iran sends jet-fuel prices through the roof. The Franco-Dutch group now expects to pay $9.3bn for kerosene this year — $2.4bn more than in 2025 and 35% above its pre-conflict forecast of €6.9bn. Of that bill, $1.1bn falls in Q2 alone. The shares still rose more than 1% as the first-quarter print held up: revenue €7.5bn (+4.4%),
French GDP was flat in the first quarter, Insee reported on Thursday — well below the +0.2% the institute itself had pencilled in at end-March. The drag came from a fall in construction investment (a hangover from pre-municipal-election spending) and from foreign trade, which subtracted 0.7 percentage point: exports fell 3.8% (Airbus deliveries hit by the engine shortage), imports only 1.7%. Domestic demand contributed zero, with household consumption down 0.1% and total investment down 0.4%. Inflation crossed the 2% threshold in April, hitting +2.2% year-on-year (vs +1.7% in March), pushed up by an energy bill surging 14.2%. The economy destroyed 11,400 jobs in Q1 after losing 20,900 the previous quarter. The government's freshly revised 2026 forecast of +0.9% growth already looks optimistic: by end-June the carry-over will be just 0.5%, meaning GDP would have to grow 0.3% per quarter for the rest of the year. Brent is above $124 a barrel against Bercy's working assumption of $100 then $80; Allianz Trade's Maxime Darmet now sees full-year growth at "0.7% to 0.8%, even if the conflict ends quickly". Households are already braking: goods consumption fell 0.6% on the quarter despite a +0.7% bounce in March. Companies face a darkening outlook, and Société Générale CIB's France economist Fabien Bossy says the hopes for a 1%+ rebound this year have been "cold-showered" by the oil spike. The downside scenario, flagged by Allianz Trade, is a Q3-Q4 contraction if Strait of Hormuz traffic does not normalise by early June. Source: Les Echos, 30 April 2026, Nathalie Silbert.
Engie and the Belgian state signed a letter of intent on Thursday opening exclusive talks for the state to buy Engie's entire Belgian nuclear business, run through subsidiary Electrabel. Engie owns seven reactors in Belgium, of which only two are still in operation. Decommissioning operations are "suspended with immediate effect", Prime Minister Bart De Wever announced on X — a pause that, according to Belgian daily La Libre, will trigger compensation to Engie. The two parties have set a deadline of 1 October 2026 for a full memorandum of understanding, but stress the LOI is "not a firm commitment to close the transaction". Engie's stock rose more than 2% after the news. The deal flips a decade of policy. Belgium had planned to exit nuclear by 2025, but the Ukraine war and energy security worries changed the equation. The Flemish-conservative government led by De Wever, in office for a year, made extending the existing fleet (4 GW) and building 4 GW of new capacity central to its programme. Engie, which had only conceded extending two of seven reactors, refused to build new ones. Reactors Doel 3 and Tihange 1 were stopped late 2022/early 2023, with demolition pencilled in for 2027 — hence the urgency for Belgium, which now wants to study restarting Tihange 1. After repurchasing the fleet, the Belgian state could keep Doel 4 and Tihange 3 running beyond 2035 and look for an industrial partner: EDF and US Westinghouse have been mentioned. Per La Lettre last September, EDF executive Cédric Lewandowski had explored a takeover of Electrabel's nuclear arm, but France's APE — which manages the state's 100% stake in EDF — was not in favour. For Engie, this is a chance to draw a line under a Belgian nuclear file that has poisoned its outlook for years. Source: Les Echos, 30 April 2026, Sarah Dumeau and Hortense Goulard.
Société Générale posted a clean first quarter on Thursday, with net banking income (NBI) of €7.1bn (+4.4% on a constant basis) and net profit of €1.7bn (+5.5%) — beating the Bloomberg consensus on the bottom line (€1.5bn) and slightly missing on NBI (€7.2bn). All the headline ratios CEO Slawomir Krupa promised the market are green: ROTE at 11.7% (target 10%), cost-to-income down to 60.9% (vs 65% a year ago), costs -2.6% (€55mn lower). The new piece of disclosure — and the structural story — is BoursoBank. For the first time, SocGen has published the online bank's standalone profit: €92mn net in Q1, on track for the €300mn full-year target (already a third done). Customer growth slowed to 8.9 million at end-March from 8.8 million at end-December (against ~500k per quarter previously), because the bank cut back its expensive welcome offers; long-term ambition is 20 to 25 million clients. Inside SocGen retail (€625mn net, +49%), BoursoBank already represents one-sixth of profit, deposits up 12% (vs network -2%) and life-insurance reserves at €15bn — already 10% of group's €159bn book. The wholesale story is more mixed. Corporate & investment banking NBI was €2.7bn (-0.5%), with markets activities -3.9%, fixed-income/currencies/credit -18.2%, financing/advisory -3.8%, global banking advisory -10.7%. Equities were the bright spot, +10.9% to a record €1.2bn, alongside securities services +7.7%. The pattern — strong retail, weak rates, record equities — looks similar to BNP Paribas's Q1 print and is the right shape for the European war-shock environment. Source: Les Echos, 30 April 2026, Gabriel Nédélec.
Stellantis is back in the black: Q1 net profit of €377mn against a loss of nearly €400mn a year earlier. But the swing back masks a more mixed reality. Volumes drove the top line — group revenue up 6% to €38bn, North American sales +6% (US +4%), European sales +5% excluding Leapmotor. New CEO Antonio Filosa called the reception of 2025's launches encouraging and pointed to ten new vehicles for 2026. The margin story is less clean. Operating profit reached €960mn (vs €327mn) for an operating margin of 2.5% — far below the Tavares-era peaks but better than the year-ago 0.9% and in line with the 2026 guidance. Europe is barely above water at 0.1% margin, the consequence of price cuts and marketing spend deployed to revive volumes. North America, traditionally the most profitable region, shows operating income of €263mn at 1.6% margin — much better than last year's €500mn loss but flattered by a one-off €400mn "tariff cost adjustment" linked to Trump-era tariffs. Strip that out and the picture is leaner. The market wasn't impressed. Stellantis shares fell more than 7% in mid-morning trading in Paris, on disappointment with both the one-off and the overall financial performance. That sets up a tense backdrop for Filosa, who unveils his strategic plan on 21 May. Source: Les Echos, 30 April 2026, Yann Duvert.
In an Unhedged column, the FT's Robert Armstrong argues that AI firms will follow the same one rule as any other corporation — maximise shareholder return up to the limit of the law — and that hopes of self-regulation in AI safety are misplaced. He contrasts the optimist analogy (workers freed from horse-drawn carts) with the doomer retort that this time we're the horses, and notes the equine population's fate in the early 20th century. The argument: when corporate principles conflict with profit, profit wins. The numbers underline the pressure. Big Tech "hyperscalers" plan to invest more than $600bn in AI in 2025; AI start-ups raised $73bn in Q1 2025; OpenAI raised $122bn in a single funding round last month. That capital, Armstrong writes, comes from investors who demand high returns and know more capital will be needed for compute — making the industry "extremely sensitive" to revenue growth. He cites the Wall Street Journal report this week that OpenAI missed internal sales and user targets, which moved the entire Nasdaq before OpenAI dismissed the report as "clickbait". Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is quoted on the tension between not "autonomously threatening humanity" and staying ahead of authoritarian rivals; Armstrong's position is that this tension is "noise" relative to the profit incentive. His regulatory prescription is plain: don't try to protect specific job categories; match tools to specific harms (physical, digital, psychological, financial); rethink agency law for non-human agents; and emphasise liability over duty-to-warn so investors have skin in the safety game. AI is new, capitalism is not. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Robert Armstrong.
Russia's military project in the Sahel has suffered its most damaging defeat. Tuareg separatists from the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and al-Qaeda affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) overran Kidal — a strategically and symbolically vital town in northern Mali — at dawn over the weekend, forcing the Russian paramilitaries to retreat. JNIM has since announced a siege of Bamako, the capital, and FLA has promised to march on Timbuktu and Gao. Mali's defence minister Sadio Camara, the architect of Moscow's presence, was killed Saturday during the assault on the Kati military command centre near Bamako. Intelligence chief Modibo Koné was critically wounded. The defeat exposes what analysts call a structural mismatch. Russia's Africa Corps — the successor to Wagner since June 2024 — operates with around 2,000 men in a country twice the size of Ukraine. They lack the surveillance and intelligence networks the French and Americans had, ride tracked vehicles ill-suited to desert terrain, and have leaned on air power more than the gung-ho Wagner approach. Inpact, an Africa Corps-focused monitoring group, estimates Mali's regime has paid Russia between $500mn and $900mn since 2022 to underwrite the presence. Wassim Nasr at the Soufan Center says recapturing Kidal three years ago had been Russia's "sole battlefield success". The defeat goes beyond Mali. Russia's broader pitch in West Africa — that it is a more flexible, more efficient partner than the French — depended on Africa Corps's image as desert warriors. Eledinov, a former Russian officer in Dakar, says it is "a serious blow to their reputation". Konrad Adenauer Foundation's Ulf Laessing expects Russia to "give up the idea that they could control the whole country" and consolidate its mission, in line with how the small Russian contingents already operate in Niger and Burkina Faso. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Jacob Judah and Polina Ivanova.
Eurozone inflation rose more than expected to 3% in April from 2.6% in March, the second consecutive month above the European Central Bank's 2% target, according to Thursday's preliminary print. Reuters-polled economists had forecast 2.9%. Separate data showed eurozone GDP slowed to 0.1% in Q1 under the weight of surging energy prices. Markets did not like it. The 10-year German Bund yield hit 3.13% in morning trading — its highest since 2011 — before easing back to 3.11%. The 10-year UK gilt yield, near its highest since 2008, slipped marginally to 5.1%. The Stoxx Europe 600 was down 0.1%. Brent crude jumped as much as 7% to $126 a barrel, its highest since the US-Iran war began in February, on fears that the Strait of Hormuz disruption will be prolonged. Both the Bank of England and the ECB are expected to hold rates today, but with Brent above $120 the swaps market is now pricing three quarter-point hikes by each central bank by the end of the year. S&P Global Market Intelligence's economist warns that "the picture has abruptly changed, and higher inflation, combined with substantially elevated uncertainty, means that recessionary risks have increased significantly". The ECB's next press conference is the moment to watch — markets want clarity on whether the Frankfurt-side call will follow the BoE's hawkish signal. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, edited by Philip Georgiadis and Fergus Ryan.
Lazard has agreed to buy private capital advisory group Campbell Lutyens in a $575mn deal, with a potential additional $85mn performance-based payment. The 178-year-old US investment bank's existing private capital advisory team and London-based Campbell Lutyens — founded in 1988 — will combine into a new division called Lazard CL. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, lands as private markets boom and as private equity, credit, infrastructure and real estate funds increasingly need advice on the more complicated transactions that have emerged from a prolonged downturn in dealmaking. The combined unit is expected to generate roughly $500mn in 2027 revenue with more than 280 advisers across 18 offices globally. Over the past two years, the two firms together have advised on more than $100bn in secondary transaction volume and have raised more than $190bn. Campbell Lutyens specialises in fundraising and secondaries — including the increasingly common deals where limited partners sell stakes to other buyers, or where firms sell portfolio companies to new funds they themselves manage to generate liquidity. Both transaction types boomed because traditional exits via M&A and IPO have stalled. Industry participants told the FT the secondary-market explosion is a natural consequence of the broader expansion of private markets, which grew from $14tn in 2020 to $24tn in AUM last year. As more companies stay private for longer, alternative routes to liquidity become structurally important. "I am excited to partner with Gordon and our exceptional senior leadership group and teams to build a global platform that sets the standard for excellence in private capital advisory," said Holcombe Green, head of private capital advisory at Lazard. Lazard CEO Peter Orszag is positioning the firm where the fee pool is growing fastest within Wall Street advisory. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Alexandra Heal.
KKR is exploring a sale of Flora Food Group, the spreads business it carved out of Unilever in a €6.8bn deal in 2017, after the resurgence of dairy demand led the business to abandon its plan to make the entire portfolio plant-based by 2025. The US private capital group is working with bankers on a potential sale at a valuation of up to $10bn, with rival private equity groups expected to take a look. Flora's brand portfolio includes Bertolli, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, Elmlea and Becel. The strategic story has flipped. In 2021, under KKR, Flora announced a plan to make its entire portfolio plant-based by 2025, marketing itself as "the world's largest producer of plant-based foods". But growth in dairy alternatives has reversed: consumers now avoid so-called ultra-processed foods and seek higher-protein options. Sales of plant-based butter fell 4% in 2025 and plant-based spreads 10%, according to The Good Food Institute. Flora has now added dairy ingredients back into some products. The company generated €3bn in 2025 net sales with a 1% CAGR between 2019 and 2025. It remains highly leveraged: Fitch Ratings flags a debt-to-EBITDA ratio of about 7.5x, while expecting annual free cash flow to rise toward €150mn from this year through 2028. Flora's history reaches back to 1871, when Antoon Jurgens bought the patent for margarine. KKR took control in 2017 in a fiercely contested auction, beating Apollo and CVC, after Unilever divested in the wake of Kraft Heinz's failed $143bn takeover bid. Since then Unilever has also sold its tea business to CVC and spun off its ice-cream division (Magnum). The FT reported on Wednesday that CVC is now injecting €210mn to shore up the tea business as the €4.5bn Lipton deal comes off the boil. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Ivan Levingston and Madeleine Speed.
The "Big Four" hyperscalers — Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet — together expect to spend $725bn on AI infrastructure capex in 2025, 77% above the record $410bn they spent in 2024. Google emerged as Q1's clear winner: net income jumped 81% to $62.6bn, revenue +22% to $110bn, and Google Cloud sales rose 63% to $20bn. Alphabet shares rose 6% pre-market, on course to open near a record $4.5tn market value. Search revenue alone added $60.4bn (+19%), and the company booked a $36.9bn unrealised gain on equity securities (it owns stakes in SpaceX, valued at $1.25tn, and Anthropic, $380bn). Microsoft posted record total revenue of $82.9bn and net income of $32bn, lifted by a 40% rise in cloud sales; cloud unit Azure added $7.9bn yoy to $34.7bn. But CFO Amy Hood guided 2026 capex at $190bn — well above the $152bn analyst forecast — including $25bn from rising memory-chip prices, and warned of capacity constraints "at least through 2026". Microsoft shares fell 1.8% after gaining 18% over the past month. Amazon Cloud added $8.3bn yoy to $37.6bn, with a contract pipeline at $364bn end-March, including a recent $100bn Anthropic deal; the stock rose 1.8%. Meta was the loser of the round. Capex guidance jumped to $145bn (+$10bn), revenue did rise 33% to $56.3bn, but a drop in users and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vague AI-model timeline sent the stock down 8% pre-market — wiping out roughly $113bn of market value. SLC Management's Dec Mullarkey captured the criticism: "Investors continue to be concerned about how Zuckerberg's once capital-light money machine may be morphing into a capital-intensive incinerator." Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said the end of its OpenAI exclusivity gives the company "a frontier model, royalty-free, with all the IP rights, all the way till 2032". Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Stephen Morris, Ryan McMorrow, Hannah Murphy, Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Michael Acton.
More than half of "long-shot" bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) — a finding that suggests prediction markets pose a bigger insider-trading threat to sensitive information than previously recognised. ACDC analysed more than 400,000 markets settled on Polymarket between January 2021 and March 2026 and found that long-shot bets — defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35% or less — on military and defence markets had an average win rate of around 52%. That compares with 25% across politics-focused markets and just 14% for all markets on the platform. The report follows the first US prosecution of insider trading on prediction markets. Last week, prosecutors charged Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an active-duty soldier involved in planning the January raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, with placing roughly 13 bets worth $33,034 on positions including "US Forces in Venezuela" and "Maduro out". The bets netted more than $400,000. Van Dyke pleaded not guilty Tuesday. Earlier this year Israel filed similar charges against a reservist and a civilian. ACDC says markets where outcomes are determined by small decision-making groups — particularly military and defence markets — are "structurally vulnerable to insider trading". Activity on the platform remains heavy. Markets on whether the US and Iran will reach a permanent peace deal have seen $63mn in trading volume, while one on China invading Taiwan in 2026 has attracted $23mn. But sports still dominate: trading volume on this year's Super Bowl winner exceeded $700mn. Polymarket said Van Dyke's arrest was "proof the system works", noting it referred the matter to the US DoJ. A wave of start-ups now sells tools to copy suspected insider wallets — Unusual Whales charges $20/month, Polywhaler $4.99/month. A separate LSE study finds just 3% of accounts generate the bulk of price discovery on the platform. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Stephanie Stacey, Chris Cook and Jill R Shah.
Annual inflation in Iran rose to 50% as of 4 April, up from above 40% before the US-Israeli war, according to the central bank — and Iranians are bracing for further price rises and lay-offs as a fragile ceasefire holds while the US blockades the Strait of Hormuz to disrupt Iranian trade. A 56-year-old Tehran housewife told the FT that the price of a block of cheese rose this week to IR6.7mn ($5.09) from IR5.2mn a week earlier. A new Peugeot 207 has jumped from approximately IR18bn to IR25bn since the start of the war. Authorities are expected to approve a 40% increase in government-mandated cement prices. The rial, largely stable during the war, hit a record low Wednesday at IR1.8mn to the dollar, fuelling public panic. Steel production has fallen up to 30%, according to local newspaper Etemaad. A small petrochemical-dependent factory outside Tehran has laid off eight people, almost a third of staff. A Tehran clothing-business owner reports sales of IR2bn against costs of IR5bn. Unemployment was 7.6% before the war; the deputy minister of labour announced Wednesday that 191,000 workers had applied for unemployment benefits since hostilities began. Food coupons of IR10mn (~$7) per person per month, introduced during the December-January protests, remain in place. Politicians and analysts argue Iran has a higher pain threshold than Washington after decades of sanctions, hoping the US will eventually ease its demands — which include halting uranium enrichment for up to 20 years and reopening the strait. Tehran insists it will retain control of the strait and continue enriching uranium as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Some larger industries (gas, petrochemicals, steel) are avoiding mass lay-offs but are under significant pressure. If storage facilities fill up and the blockade succeeds, oil production may have to be cut significantly. President Masoud Pezeshkian's government insists strategic food reserves are sufficient. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, Najmeh Bozorgmehr.
SoftBank is planning to create and list an AI and robotics company called Roze in the US, with executives eyeing a valuation that could reach $100bn. Founder Masayoshi Son wants to list as soon as this year to offset spending commitments across the conglomerate's portfolio that run into the tens of billions of dollars, including its huge pledges to OpenAI. SoftBank plans to hold an analyst day at a Texas data centre in July to promote the IPO. The group has not finalised how big a stake of Roze it will sell, but it has previously kept a majority share — it still owns nearly 90% of UK chip designer Arm, which listed in 2023. Roze will be involved in building data centres. ABB Robotics, which SoftBank agreed to buy last year, could play a critical role once the deal closes, alongside existing group assets including land and infrastructure. SoftBank is also building its own data centres, with a large-scale project in Ohio powered by a $33bn gas power plant operated by SoftBank and funded by the Japanese government via a US trade deal. Son hopes to replicate that model in other US states. The group's $30bn additional investment in OpenAI is being deployed in parallel, but the exposure is making some lieutenants nervous and stretching the balance sheet. Some inside SoftBank are sceptical about the valuation and the proposed timeline given the geopolitical and economic uncertainty after Trump's strikes on Iran. US public markets may also have to absorb three of the largest IPOs ever this year — Elon Musk's SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI — pulling demand thin. SoftBank's share price was already volatile: it hit a record high last October before falling close to 45% by March, recovered most of that ground, then fell sharply again in recent days on renewed worries about OpenAI's growth. OpenAI's IPO is central to Son's plan to reduce leverage, but the start-up is facing growing competition from Google and Anthropic. Source: Financial Times, 30 April 2026, David Keohane and Leo Lewis.
No stories in this section on April 30, 2026.
UBS reported first-quarter net profit of $3bn, up 80% on a year ago, as record trading revenues — driven by Middle East war volatility — lifted the Swiss bank to its strongest result in years. Markets-division revenues hit a record $3.2bn, almost a third higher than the same period last year. Equities trading rose 29% to $2.3bn, fixed-income trading jumped 38% to $900mn, and investment-banking revenues climbed 30%, taking IB pre-tax profit to $1.2bn from $696mn a year earlier. The core wealth-management arm grew revenues 11% to $7.1bn and pulled in $37.4bn of net new client money. Return on common equity tier one capital — a closely watched profitability ratio — reached 16.8%, and UBS confirmed it will keep buying back shares alongside dividends, despite Bern's plan to force a $20bn capital top-up that the bank has called “extreme”. Peers lagged. Deutsche Bank posted revenues of €8.7bn (+2%) and a record net profit of €2.2bn (+8%), but flat fixed-income trading and credit-loss provisions up 10% to €519mn. Santander delivered €5.5bn of net income (+60%), boosted by a €1.9bn capital gain on the sale of its Polish unit. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Simon Foy, Mercedes Ruehl and Florian Müller.
Pernod Ricard and US-based Brown-Forman, the owner of Jack Daniel’s, ended their “merger of equals” talks overnight on 28-29 April after failing to agree on terms acceptable to both sides. The talks had been announced in late March. Pernod Ricard’s market value tops €15bn ($17bn); Brown-Forman’s is around $12bn. On the news, Brown-Forman shares fell as much as 9.8% in after-hours trading (still up 6.4% year-to-date), while Pernod Ricard dropped 12% in Paris. A Pernod spokesperson cited “a combination of factors” linked to the debt structure and the broader economic backdrop. In parallel, US rival Sazerac — owner of more than 500 spirits brands — has tabled a competing roughly $15bn offer for Brown-Forman, equivalent to $32 per share. Analysts are split: combined, Brown-Forman and Sazerac would control over 30% of the US whiskey market, almost certainly triggering a “deep review” by competition authorities and requiring significant divestitures, according to Barclays. Pernod Ricard, which also owns Absolut vodka and Jameson Irish whiskey, lowered its annual guidance in mid-April, calling 2025-26 a “transition year.” Source: Les Echos, 29 April 2026.
TotalEnergies reported first-quarter 2026 net profit of $5.8bn, up 51% year on year, and cash flow of $8.6bn (+23%). The numbers approach the records set in the early months of the Ukraine war, this time driven by surging oil and refined-product prices following the outbreak of the Middle East war. Oil and gas output held at 2.6 million barrels per day: oil production fell 2%, gas rose 2%. New projects in Lapa SW (Brazil) and Mabrul (Libya) offset losses of around 100,000 barrels per day in the Middle East tied to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The LNG (liquefied natural gas) division delivered $1.3bn in net operating income, with output up 12%. Downstream refining and marketing brought in $1.9bn, with refineries running at more than 90% of capacity to capture March’s exceptional margins. The group has closed its €5bn deal with EPH — paid entirely in shares — making Daniel Kretinsky one of TotalEnergies’ largest shareholders. Power generation remains a small contributor ($500mn net operating income), but TotalEnergies expects to add another 8 GW of renewables over the next twelve months. Source: Les Echos, 29 April 2026, Hortense Goulard.
Finland’s Kone has agreed to buy German rival TK Elevator (TKE) in a €29bn deal — the largest takeover in Finnish corporate history and one of Europe’s biggest M&A trades in recent years. The combined group would generate roughly €21bn in annual revenues. The price tag breaks down into €5bn of cash, about €15bn of Kone shares, and the assumption of €9.2bn of TKE debt. The seller is a private-equity consortium led by Advent and Cinven, which bought TKE from Thyssenkrupp for €17bn in 2020 alongside Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and RAG Foundation; Saudi group Alat acquired a 15% stake last year. TKE generated around €9.2bn of revenues in the year to end-September. The deal — pursued by Kone for a decade — closes no earlier than the second quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, and represents one of Europe’s biggest-ever private-equity exits. Strategically, the combination merges Kone’s Asian strength with TKE’s US presence and tilts both groups further toward the higher-margin services business: TKE CEO Uday Yadav notes that of 22 million lifts worldwide, 30% are more than 20 years old and ripe for refit, while ageing populations in Europe and China structurally lift demand for new installations. Kone shares are down about 6% year-to-date, valuing the buyer at around €25bn. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Ivan Levingston and Richard Milne.
The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday it will leave Opec, stripping the 66-year-old oil cartel of its third-largest producer and one of its most influential members. Brent crude rose for a seventh consecutive day, but the move was driven by fears around the closure of the Strait of Hormuz rather than the UAE’s exit, a signal of how far Opec’s market influence has eroded. Excluding the UAE, Opec produced around a quarter of the world’s oil last year, down from roughly half at its peak. The wider Opec+ group still accounts for around 40% of global output. Tensions with Saudi Arabia date back almost a decade: Abu Dhabi has been pushing to expand its production capacity from 3 to 5 million barrels per day (originally targeted for 2030, then accelerated to 2027), repeatedly clashed over its quota, and was accused by Saudi-aligned voices of “naughty boy” over-production. Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait still account for more than half of Opec output, but Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz — through which one-fifth of global oil normally passes — has further diluted the cartel’s leverage. Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador and Angola have all left Opec in recent years; the UAE’s departure is unlikely to be “fatal”, say analysts, but a follow-on by Venezuela, Iraq or Iran would significantly weaken the bloc. UBS analysts expect the move to weigh on long-term oil prices as the UAE produces more freely. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Verity Ratcliffe and Malcolm Moore.
Germany’s defence budget is on track to match the combined total of the UK and France by the end of this decade, marking the biggest shift in European military balance since the post-war settlement. After loosening its constitutional debt brake, Berlin will allocate €779bn to defence between 2026 and 2030 — more than double the previous five years. By 2030, Germany would surpass Nato’s 3.5%-of-GDP spending target — five years ahead of the 2035 deadline — with an annual defence budget approaching €190bn. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has framed the build-up as a response to Russia, US disengagement and the threat from Putin’s war in Ukraine, and has vowed to make the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces) “Europe’s largest conventional army” again. France, by comparison, spends €55bn on defence — covering its nuclear deterrent, submarines and fighter jets. Yet 80% of Germany’s planned spending is earmarked for legacy capabilities, with new defence tech capped at 5% of investment, according to the Kiel Institute. Tensions are emerging. Paris worries Germany will lock in US procurement (F-35s, Patriot air defence) and grow Rheinmetall at the expense of European peers; the Franco-German FCAS fighter-jet programme is on life support amid disputes with Dassault Aviation. Berlin also plans €35bn for its own military satellites in competition with an EU initiative. Public opinion is split: ~75% of Germans back doubling defence spending, but 61% oppose Berlin taking a leading European military role. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Leila Abboud.
BNP Paribas and Holmarcom Finance Company (HFC) signed a deal Wednesday for BNP to sell its entire 67% stake in Morocco's BMCI (Banque marocaine pour le commerce et l'industrie). The transaction, opened with exclusive talks in December, is set to close in Q4 2026 subject to Moroccan regulatory approvals. BNP will keep a Moroccan footprint through investment banking and Arval Maroc (long-term leasing). The Casablanca-listed BMCI delivered a 2025 net profit of 420 million dirhams (+29%), about €39mn, on net banking income of 3.94 billion dirhams (€363mn). Based on the December share price, BNP's stake was worth roughly €530mn; the deal will lift BNP's CET1 solvency ratio by about 15 basis points on closing. The exit fits a broader French-bank retreat from Africa. After Société Générale sold its Moroccan unit to Saham in 2024, and after Crédit Agricole sold its 78.7% Crédit du Maroc stake to Holmarcom, BNP becomes the third major French bank to exit a North African retail franchise. The conglomerate Holmarcom, present in agribusiness, real estate and insurance, plans to merge BMCI with Crédit du Maroc; CEO Mohamed Hassan Bensalah said the new ensemble would hold a 9% combined market share, ranking it Morocco's fifth-largest bank. Holmarcom executive Lamiae Kendili promised "no forced layoffs" in the merger. BNP is also reshuffling other holdings. The group finalised the sale of its 25% AG Insurance stake on Tuesday and used the proceeds to lift its position in parent group Ageas: Cardif moved from 14.9% to 22.5% of Ageas, Belgium's top insurer, originally spun out of Fortis. BNP also opened talks in December to acquire Mercedes-Benz's Athlon leasing arm, with closure expected in 2026. Source: Les Echos, 29 April 2026, Krystèle Tachdjian.
Citi’s 2024 hiring of Vis Raghavan as head of banking — sold to shareholders as a coup with a $52mn pay package needed to “incentivise” him to leave JPMorgan — was in fact a weekend rescue: just three days earlier, JPMorgan had told the investment banker he had no long-term future at the bank, after years of complaints about his conduct. Raghavan, now seen as a contender to succeed CEO Jane Fraser, spent 23 years at JPMorgan and helped take it to the top of European league tables. But he was the subject of two internal reviews over his leadership style, had a close family member hired in breach of usual policy, and at one point had his pay cut over behavioural problems. Three people left over working with him; concerns escalated to CEO Jamie Dimon as far back as 2021. After a 2024 reshuffle that put Jennifer Piepszak and Troy Rohrbaugh in charge of investment banking and trading, JPMorgan concluded his position was untenable. At Citi, Raghavan has delivered: the banking division reported record revenues in 2025, shares trade at 17-year highs, and he has lured a string of bankers from JPMorgan and Goldman. But Q1 2026 investment-banking gains were more muted than peers’, and former colleagues remain divided on whether he has truly mellowed. Citi called the FT’s account “frivolous, tabloid coverage built on anonymous smears”. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Joshua Franklin, Julie Steinberg, Ortenca Aliaj and Akila Quinio.
Ken Griffin — founder of $67bn hedge fund Citadel and trading firm Citadel Securities — has questioned whether wealthy individuals understand the risks of private credit, warning they could struggle to pull their money out in a downturn. His comments, made in an FT interview, add to growing concern about the sector’s rapid expansion into retail. The private-credit industry — investment funds that lend directly to private-equity-owned companies, largely replacing banks pushed back by stricter regulation — has grown to more than $3.5tn in assets, according to the Alternative Investment Management Association. Funds aimed at wealthy individuals are among the fastest-growing pockets, with Blackstone, Apollo, KKR and Ares all targeting the channel. “Semi-liquid” structures allow investors to redeem only periodically. Griffin sums up the risk: “the liquidity mismatch between the retail investor and the duration of the investments.” Cracks are showing — Blue Owl Capital has limited withdrawals from its two flagship funds amid billions of redemption requests and concerns over exposure to AI-vulnerable software firms. Wealthy investors tried to pull more than $20bn in Q1 2025 alone; just over half got through. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon told Norges Bank Investment Management in Oslo on the same day that with more than 1,000 private-credit firms operating, weak underwriting standards mean the next credit cycle “will be worse than people think”. Goldman Sachs president John Waldron has separately warned some firms have “not marketed their product as clearly” as he would like. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Harriet Agnew and Robin Wigglesworth.
Brussels is negotiating with Péter Magyar, Hungary’s incoming prime minister, over a workaround that would keep part of €10bn in frozen Covid-19 recovery funds available beyond an August 31 deadline. Magyar — a pro-EU conservative whose election victory ended Viktor Orbán’s rule — meets European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday. The funds were frozen under Orbán over rule-of-law concerns. Hungary is also seeking access to a total of more than €30bn, including €7.6bn in regular EU budget money and €17bn in cheap EU defence loans. One option Magyar proposed — a special purpose vehicle to disburse funds beyond the deadline — has been pushed back by Commission officials as too complex for the three-month window. Instead, Brussels wants a disbursement calendar tied to anti-corruption reforms, signed off in Magyar’s first weeks in office. Some of the original 27 “super-milestones” Hungary never met (including pension and procurement reform) may be replaced by faster-deliverable alternatives. EU money matters: Hungary’s economy grew just 0.4% in 2025, government bond yields are among the highest in the EU, and debt-financing costs run at 4-5% of GDP. Hungary plans to issue almost €10bn of foreign-currency government bonds in 2026, even as the Orbán-era deficit overshoot — two-thirds of the full-year 2026 plan was already used by end-March — forces deep fiscal adjustments. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Paola Tamma, Henry Foy and Marton Dunai.
Goldman Sachs has stopped its Hong Kong bankers from using Anthropic’s Claude AI models — the latest sign of how the technology is colliding with US-China tensions. Employees in the territory have been unable to access Claude either directly or through Goldman’s in-house AI platform for the past few weeks, according to four sources familiar with the decision. Western models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are banned in mainland China by the so-called Great Firewall, but Hong Kong has historically operated outside that perimeter, with usage limits set by the AI companies themselves. One person familiar with the move said Goldman had taken a strict reading of its contract with Anthropic following a consultation with the start-up, concluding that no Goldman employee in Hong Kong should access any Anthropic product. The restriction does not extend to other vendors such as OpenAI. Anthropic told the FT its Claude models had never been officially “supported” in Hong Kong but declined to elaborate. Goldman declined to comment. The crackdown reflects rising fear of “distillation” — Chinese actors training new models on intensive use of foreign ones. OpenAI accused DeepSeek of doing so last year, and the White House this month accused China of “industrial-scale” theft of US AI labs’ IP — claims Beijing called “pure slander”. The move comes as Anthropic’s new Mythos model raises concern over its potential to crack current cyber defences and threaten financial-system security. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Arjun Neil Alim, Zijing Wu and Tim Bradshaw.
Uber is expanding into hotel bookings via a partnership with Expedia, in a renewed push to achieve "super app" status and grow its premium subscription base. Customers will be able to book and pay for hotels via Expedia inside the Uber app, with the ride-hailing group offering discounts and ride-credit cashback as incentives. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — who ran Expedia before joining Uber in 2017 — told the FT that the "vast majority" of the income from the deal will be channelled into hotel discounts and incentives for Uber One members. The paid-membership scheme has roughly 50 million members; Uber declined to disclose the cut it will take on bookings. Uber has spent years adding services to its app, mirroring Asian super apps Grab (Singapore) and WeChat (China), which combine banking, chat and commerce. Food delivery was added in 2019 alongside the standalone Uber Eats app, and Uber has since expanded into groceries and shopping (Best Buy, Walmart). Khosrowshahi used these services to push Uber to its first profit in 2023. Mobility — car hire, ride-hailing, e-bikes, scooters — accounts for about half of gross bookings. The bet is that hotels will deepen Uber One value and rinse more usage out of existing users — a different model from US/European markets, which have so far been reluctant to embrace cluttered super-app interfaces. Uber will add a "hotel" tab and redesign its search function to enable cross-service browsing. Khosrowshahi remains on Expedia's board but said he was not involved in selecting the partner. Uber will not invest in Expedia as part of the deal. The FT previously reported Uber explored a takeover of the $30bn booking group in 2024 but did not make a formal approach. Khosrowshahi said Uber's "towering strength" is organic and partnership-led growth. The deal also tests how online travel agents survive AI agents that can book hotels independently — Uber and Expedia argue their "unique inventory" of drivers and hotels is hard to replicate. Source: Financial Times, 29 April 2026, Rafe Rosner-Uddin.
The United States struck 13,000 Iranian targets over the 39 days of war before the ceasefire, mostly with its most expensive precision-guided munitions. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the inventory of seven "critical" munitions is dangerously depleted, weakening both the rearming of Ukraine and the defence of Taiwan and the South China Sea islands. More than 1,100 Tomahawk missiles were fired (one third of the stock, five times planned 2026 production), delaying delivery of 400 Tomahawks ordered by Japan. A quarter of air-launched JASSM missiles were used, twice annual production. Air-defence munitions are the most exposed: a third of SM-6 interceptors and more than half of SM-3, over 75% of ground-based THAAD, and more than half of the Patriot PAC-3 ($4mn each, sold to 18 countries and shipped in more than 600 units to Ukraine). Lockheed Martin has announced production ramp-ups from 96 to 400 THAAD per year, and from 600 to 2,000 Patriots within ten years. Democratic senator Jack Reed, chair of the Armed Services Committee, said that "at the current rate of production, replenishing what we spent could take years". The Pentagon has secured a 2026-27 budget of $1.5tn and a 150% jump in non-nuclear munitions orders to $79bn. But CSIS warns it will take more than four years for orders placed this year to be delivered. The Pentagon is falling back on cheaper alternatives, such as the "Lucas" drone ($10,000 to $55,000) — a copy of the Iranian Shahed. Source: Les Echos, 28 April 2026, Solveig Godeluck.
The Bank of Japan held its benchmark interest rate at about 0.75 per cent on Tuesday, but flagged a sharp rise in inflation as the Iran war drives up energy prices in a country that imports more than 90 per cent of its crude from the Middle East. The decision came on a six-to-three vote — the biggest split under governor Kazuo Ueda since the BoJ scrapped negative rates in 2016 — with the three dissenters calling for an immediate hike to 1 per cent. The committee lifted its forecast for "core" inflation (consumer prices excluding fresh food) to 2.8 per cent for the fiscal year ending March 2027, up from 1.9 per cent in January, citing higher crude prices feeding through to corporate margins and household real income. It also said growth would slow this fiscal year and that "risks to economic activity are skewed to the downside and risks to prices are skewed to the upside". Capital Economics expects another rate rise in June, barring a fresh escalation in the Middle East. The yen strengthened against the dollar after the decision, but the Nikkei 225 — at an all-time high of 60,537 on Monday — fell about 1 per cent; the bank-heavy Topix rose 0.9 per cent. Finance minister Satsuki Katayama said the government was ready to act against sharp currency moves, with the yen near ¥159.50 to the dollar. The BoJ is the first of four major central banks deciding rates this week, with the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England all expected to hold. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Leo Lewis.
CATL — the world's largest electric-vehicle battery maker — will raise $5bn in Hong Kong by selling 62.4mn additional shares at HK$626.92 (US$80) each, a roughly 10 per cent discount to the average closing price over the prior five trading days. The Chinese group's stock has surged 40 per cent since the US and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February, as investors bet that an oil shock will accelerate demand for EVs and renewable energy. The follow-on placement will increase CATL's Hong Kong float by 40 per cent. Hong Kong-listed shares fell 8 per cent on Tuesday and the mainland shares lost 1.4 per cent. CATL has been listed in Shenzhen since 2018 and added a Hong Kong line last year, raising more than $5bn in 2025's second-biggest share sale, but the H-share pool still represented only 3.7 per cent of total listed shares before this deal. Because foreign investors strongly prefer the H shares — and supply is scarce — they trade at a premium to the mainland A shares, an unusual setup for a Chinese company. Bernstein analyst Brian Ho called the timing "very opportunistic". CATL says proceeds will fund R&D and "the construction of global new energy projects". The group already runs battery plants in Hungary and Germany and is building one in Spain with Stellantis; cash raised in Hong Kong can be deployed globally without China's strict capital controls. CLSA's Horace Tse questioned the rationale "given that they have cash on hand". Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, William Sandlund.
Indonesia is poised to repeat its nickel playbook with aluminium: massive Chinese-funded investment is turning the country into a major producer just as the Iran war strains global supply. Goldman Sachs estimates Indonesia will account for 5 per cent of global primary aluminium production by 2030, up from 1 per cent today, and contribute to 40 per cent of global growth in production. The Middle East represents almost 10 per cent of global supply, and disrupted production has pushed prices to highs last seen in 2022 at the start of the war in Ukraine. The mechanism is regulatory. Indonesia banned bauxite exports in 2023 (bauxite is the ore that, after refining into alumina, becomes aluminium), forcing companies to set up local processing — exactly what happened with nickel, where Indonesia leapt from 6 per cent of global refined nickel in 2015 to 65 per cent last year. At the same time, China imposed a domestic aluminium production cap in 2017, pushing Chinese producers like Shandong Nanshan Aluminium and Tsingshan offshore. Indonesian alumina output rose to 5.9mn tonnes in 2025 from 3.3mn in 2022, according to CRU. JPMorgan now forecasts the largest primary aluminium deficit since 2000, with global stocks "thin". South32 closed its Mozal smelter in Mozambique last month, and Rio Tinto is considering shutting Tomago in Australia, both citing high power costs. New Indonesian smelters will start to come online from 2027, partly offsetting Gulf losses but reviving fears of medium-term oversupply once the war premium fades. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, William Sandlund, Camilla Hodgson, Edward White and A. Anantha Lakshmi.
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) plans to invest "tens of billions of dollars" in the US to build a vertically integrated natural gas business, in a wartime push to diversify away from Iranian-affected Gulf supply. XRG — Adnoc's overseas investment arm, launched a year ago — is assessing 29 potential deals across the gas value chain, from upstream production to pipelines, processing, liquefaction and re-gasification, according to its new chief investment officer Nameer Siddiqui. XRG already owns a stake in the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas. Banks are pulling back from new US LNG bets on fears of global oversupply, leaving cash-rich Middle Eastern investors with an opening — although XRG has missed the wave of construction triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump's return. The track record is mixed: XRG withdrew a $19bn bid for Australia's Santos in September, but inherited from parent Adnoc the €14.7bn takeover of Germany's Covestro and the merger with Austria's OMV that created Borouge International. Reports suggest XRG is now eyeing Australia's North West Shelf project, although Siddiqui declined to comment. Strategically, XRG is narrowing its focus. Michele Fiorentino, head of its energy solutions arm, told the FT that hydrogen and carbon capture (CCUS) bets are off the table because demand is insufficient and they "did not make money"; the group's stake in ExxonMobil's low-carbon hydrogen project in Texas is on indefinite hold. The new mandate: only assets that produce, transport or use natural gas, including LNG bound for global buyers and gas to power US data centres. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Jamie Smyth, Verity Ratcliffe and Olaf Storbeck.
European airlines are using the Iran war's doubling of jet fuel prices to push the EU and the UK to drop or delay regulations they have opposed for years, including a planned rule that would allow each passenger two free cabin bags. Lobby groups are also targeting environmental payments, passenger compensation rules, "use it or lose it" airport slots, and the so-called "anti-tankering" rule that prevents airlines refuelling outside the EU with cheaper fuel. The financial backdrop is tough. EasyJet has warned of a bigger-than-expected spring loss; Lufthansa has cancelled 20,000 flights; Virgin Atlantic told the FT it will struggle to turn a profit in 2026. Wizz Air boss József Váradi said: "I didn't start a war in Iran. So why do I have to bear the consequences of that?" — and called for fuel-shortage compensation rules to be waived. Industry group Airlines 4 Europe wants a temporary suspension of the anti-tankering rule, arguing it will take weeks for kerosene supply to normalise more than 50 days into the conflict. The European airline industry supports more than 5mn jobs across the region. Brussels has so far conceded only minor temporary relief on slots, anti-tankering, public-service obligations and passenger rights, while transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas refused to push citizens to fly less ("There is no need at this point to intervene in how people live, work or travel"). The UK has already allowed exemptions to the slot rule when fuel shortages keep planes grounded. The wider question is whether a temporary energy crisis will be used to roll back consumer protections that survive long after kerosene normalises. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Peter Campbell and Ian Johnston.
Wall Street primary dealers — the big banks that underwrite US government debt — are holding the most US Treasuries since the global financial crisis, as the Trump administration's deregulation pulls them back into the $31tn market. Net Treasury inventories at primary dealers averaged roughly $550bn this year, up from less than $400bn in 2025 and equivalent to nearly 2 per cent of the whole Treasury market — the highest share since 2007. The trigger is the easing of the "enhanced supplementary leverage ratio" (eSLR), the rule that forces the largest US banks to hold a slice of capital against every asset on their balance sheet, regardless of risk. Watchdogs finalised the easing late last year, led by Federal Reserve governor Michelle Bowman, who argued post-2008 rules had pushed banks out of low-risk Treasury market-making and made the market more fragile. Morgan Stanley said this month it had deployed more capital into Treasury trading thanks to the change. Caveats remain. Banks are not obliged to make markets, and JPMorgan's Jay Barry warned dealers will not return to their pre-2008 dominance: hedge funds and high-frequency traders are now structural players. The shift is part of a broader US deregulatory push — the same wave that drove record Q1 buybacks and a proposal last month to cut capital requirements for the biggest US banks, partly offsetting the small increase from Basel III Endgame. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Kate Duguid.
Iran's political elite is fracturing again, three weeks into a fragile ceasefire with the US and Israel. Hardline politicians close to the influential Paydari faction are openly attacking parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf for leading talks with US vice-president JD Vance in Pakistan earlier in April. Their core demand: that Iran's nuclear programme not be on the table, and that the new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — who has not been seen in public since the war started on 28 February, reportedly injured in the strike that killed his father Ali Khamenei — be obeyed strictly. A Monday vote saw 261 of 290 MPs sign a statement supporting Ghalibaf and the negotiators, but key Paydari members were absent. A second round of talks scheduled for Pakistan over the weekend collapsed when Iran insisted the US first lift its blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, after which President Donald Trump cancelled the US delegation's trip and tweeted there was "tremendous infighting" inside Iran's leadership. Tehran's official line is unity: Ghalibaf, reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian and the judiciary chief jointly stated on X that "in our Iran, there are no hardliners or moderates". Iran's red lines have not moved: the US must lift its blockade, Iran retains the right to charge Strait of Hormuz transit fees, the right to enrich uranium, and refuses to transfer its highly enriched uranium stockpile to the US. The first round of talks drew a 70-strong Iranian delegation, suggesting genuine cross-faction coordination. But foreign diplomats note that Khamenei's hiding makes operational decision-making slow, and reformists fear hardliners will reignite open war if talks stall. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Andrew England.
Hungary's business elite is rapidly distancing itself from outgoing premier Viktor Orbán's network, weeks after Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won an election landslide. Magyar, a former regime insider who broke with Orbán in 2024, has pledged to prosecute officials and corporate leaders accused of corruption under the so-called "system of national co-operation" set up to reward loyalists. He says oligarch families have already begun moving abroad, ringfencing assets, withdrawing children from school and hiring private security ahead of departure. Magyar singled out Orbán's childhood friend Lőrinc Mészáros, Hungary's wealthiest man, who is reportedly preparing to relocate to Dubai with his family; Mészáros's company says it has written to Magyar to "resolve the tense situation" and the FT could not verify the relocation. Earlier in April, Magyar named Ádám Matolcsy — son of former central bank governor György Matolcsy — whose companies are accused of siphoning off more than €1bn from the central bank over a decade; both deny wrongdoing. Magyar said his government would ask the UAE to extradite Ádám "by coercive measures if needed", though the two countries have no extradition treaty. Orbán's son-in-law István Tiborcz moved to New York last year but has pledged to keep his business in Hungary via investment vehicle BDPST. The clean-up is also a precondition for unlocking tens of billions of euros of EU funds frozen by Brussels over corruption. Investor Dániel Jellinek of Indotek, who exited the Orbán-linked trucking group Waberer's Group in 2024, said his phone "lit up" on election night with foreign private equity firms wanting back into Hungarian assets, "because Hungary is cheap". OTP chairman Sándor Csányi, a long-time Orbán friend, said he had nothing to fear "unlike those who got work without correct tenders". Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Marton Dunai.
Airbus delivered 114 commercial aircraft in the first quarter of 2026, 22 fewer than a year ago and 29 fewer than rival Boeing, which is staging a comeback. Consolidated revenue fell 7% to €12.7bn and net profit dropped to €300mn, against €624mn a year earlier. The results came in below analyst expectations (~€512mn adjusted operating profit on ~€12.87bn of revenue). The European planemaker blamed the Pratt & Whitney engine shortage and fuselage defects flagged last December (traced to a Spanish subcontractor). Adjusted operating profit at the commercial-aircraft division collapsed 84% to €81mn, also weighed down by an unfavourable hedging rate against the weaker US dollar. By contrast, the Defence and Space division grew profits 69% with revenue at €2.8bn (+7%), lifted by the global rise in military spending. A delayed delivery of 20 aircraft to Chinese customers, held up by administrative issues, has now been cleared. With a record commercial backlog of 9,037 aircraft at end-March, Airbus has reaffirmed its 2026 targets: 870 commercial deliveries, which would top the pre-pandemic record of 863 aircraft delivered in 2019. “We are making progress” with Pratt & Whitney but “we’re not yet at an agreement,” said CEO Guillaume Faury. Source: Les Echos, 28 April 2026, Charles Plantade.
Bill Ackman is closing in on a long-desired public listing for Pershing Square that has raised $5bn — half the top end of the $10bn target — and follows an unsuccessful 2024 IPO attempt. The combined listing covers a new closed-end fund, Pershing Square USA, and the hedge fund’s management company; shares are expected to begin trading on Wednesday. The fundraising is the culmination of a years-long effort by Ackman to secure perpetual capital and build what he calls a “modern-day Berkshire Hathaway”. Investors will receive bonus shares in the management company for participating, allowing them to capture management-fee revenue. The scaled-back size — versus the originally targeted $25bn in 2024 — reflects lingering scepticism about closed-end funds, which trade at structural discounts to net asset value. As of end-March, Ackman’s $16bn-AUM London-listed Pershing Square Holdings had a market value of just ~$9bn. At least 80% of the new $5bn raise is reported to come from institutional investors, even though Ackman targeted retail through a Robinhood-CEO interview. Ackman has been on a dealmaking spree — including taking effective control of real-estate group Howard Hughes Holdings — but the results are mixed: the flagship hedge fund had lost more than 2% year-to-date as of April 21. The new vehicle pays Pershing Square a steady stream of fees regardless of performance, addressing the perpetual-capital problem that long held the platform back. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Amelia Pollard and Costas Mourselas.
British driving-services group RAC has pushed back its planned London IPO to the final months of 2026, prolonging the capital’s listing drought as volatile markets disrupt deal timelines. The flotation, targeting a roughly £5bn valuation, had been pencilled in for the first half of the year. RAC — owned by CVC Capital Partners, Singapore’s GIC and Silver Lake Partners — counted more than 15.5 million members at end-2025 and posted £840mn of revenue and £329mn of adjusted earnings (+12% year on year). An army of nine banks and Lazard as adviser have been appointed; the group is now solely focused on a listing rather than a sale. Closest rival the AA is, by contrast, gearing up for a possible £5bn sale of its own and has drawn private-equity interest. Other London listings have also slipped: Nordic software group Visma is delaying its €19bn float after a sector sell-off, and Loveholidays — tipped as 2026’s first major London listing — has pushed back its debut. Companies still pursuing London listings include Waterstones (owned by Elliott Management), which has just hired bankers, and possibly Airtel Africa’s mobile-money unit, after the Iran war disrupted its original Middle East plan. CK Hutchison’s AS Watson health-and-beauty business (including Superdrug) is also weighing London as a secondary venue alongside a Hong Kong primary. Source: Financial Times, 28 April 2026, Kieran Smith, Ashley Armstrong and Ivan Levingston.
The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada are widely expected to keep interest rates on hold this week as the Iran war and wild swings in oil prices make inflation forecasts unusually difficult. It is the second large energy shock in five years, and rate-setters fear repeating the 2021-22 mistake of acting too slowly. The Fed will vote Wednesday with its benchmark range parked at 3.5-3.75 per cent and core PCE inflation still running at 2.8 per cent in February. The ECB sits at 2 per cent — the only major western central bank to have already brought inflation back to target — and markets price two more hikes this year, but chief economist Philip Lane has signalled the bank cannot judge the shock before June at the earliest. The BoJ is expected to leave its key rate near 0.75 per cent rather than the hike previously priced in, and the BoE is in no rush to lift its 3.75 per cent rate. Officials are leaning on scenario analysis rather than point forecasts, partly because Donald Trump's social media posts on the war are themselves moving the oil market. Fed governor Chris Waller has warned that a prolonged price shock could embed higher inflation expectations across the US economy. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Sam Fleming, Olaf Storbeck, Claire Jones and Leo Lewis.
The United Arab Emirates has demanded immediate repayment of $3.5bn from Pakistan, a sum equal to roughly one-fifth of Islamabad's central bank reserves. The recall blindsided both Pakistan's finance ministry and the IMF, since Abu Dhabi had committed to the Fund not to ask for the money before the end of Pakistan's $7bn 2024 bailout programme in 2027. Saudi Arabia stepped in with $3bn in fresh central bank deposits and extended an existing $5bn for more than a year. Officials and analysts read the move as Abu Dhabi punishing Pakistan for trying to mediate the US-Israeli war on Iran rather than back the Gulf line, and as another sign of the deepening Saudi-UAE rift. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact in September; the UAE's growing closeness with India sits on the other side of that fault line. A planned $1bn debt-for-equity swap into Pakistan's Fauji Foundation has been scrapped and the cash returned. Pakistan now holds about $16bn in central bank reserves, of which Saudi deposits account for roughly half — a level of dependence that Pakistani advisers and outside analysts say is itself a risk, given Riyadh's tightening fiscal position. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Humza Jilani and Andrew England.
Goldman Sachs has raised its oil price forecasts as Middle East supply disruption stretches further than the bank assumed. Goldman now sees Brent crude — the international benchmark — averaging about $90 a barrel in the fourth quarter, up from $80, and US WTI at $83, up from $75. The bank pushed back its assumption for the normalisation of Middle East exports from mid-May to the end of June, and estimated the crisis cut oil inventories by up to 12 million barrels a day in April. Brent traded above $106 a barrel on Monday and is up more than 20 per cent since 17 April, when US-Iran peace talks stalled and Washington enforced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz alongside Iran's own. Brent peaked near $120 in early March. Crucially, the curve still slopes downward — December Brent futures sit around $84.80 — meaning the market expects the disruption to fade. Goldman warns of long-term "scarring" of about 500,000 barrels a day of Gulf production capacity, mostly in Iraq. Despite the spike, equity markets have rallied: the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite both closed at record highs on Friday on strong corporate earnings. Goldman cautions that the economic fallout will be larger than the headline price suggests, given product shortages and the unprecedented scale of the shock, and flags the risk of US oil export restrictions that could widen the gap between Brent and WTI. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, William Sandlund.
Eleven years after its founding, OpenAI carries a record $852bn valuation (€725bn) after a $122bn fundraise in early April, but its run-up to an IPO is turning into a puzzle. The ChatGPT-maker plans to invest $600bn over four years in data centres, while profitability is not expected before 2030 and Anthropic is on track to overtake it in enterprise revenue. Revenue is set to more than double in 2026 to $30bn (vs $13.5bn in 2025), powered by 900 million weekly ChatGPT users. Internally, however, CFO Sarah Friar — a former Goldman Sachs banker with deep IPO experience — is at odds with Sam Altman over how sustainable the spending plan is and how soon to list. France-born Fidji Simo, the new head of applications, has already pulled the plug on Sora, the AI video social network, and cancelled the planned UK data centres. Large enterprises now account for 40% of revenue and are expected to reach 50% by year-end. Codex, OpenAI's answer to Anthropic's Claude Code, has grown from 3 to 5 million users in a few weeks. Adding to the noise, Elon Musk's lawsuit opened on Monday 27 April in Oakland, California before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers: the xAI founder is seeking a rewrite of OpenAI's statutes that could delay the IPO by months. Former OpenAI engineer Ilya Sutskever and ex-CTO Mira Murati are due to testify, feeding a steady drumbeat of criticism against Sam Altman. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Florian Dèbes.
Big private equity investors — including a sovereign wealth fund and one of the largest US public pension plans — are warning that some of their peers may be rubber-stamping deals where buyout firms sell companies to themselves through "continuation vehicles". A continuation vehicle is a fund the private equity manager creates to buy an asset out of one of its own older funds, letting the manager hold on to the asset rather than sell to an outside buyer. The concern is that the small "limited partner advisory committee" that votes on these sales is increasingly populated by institutions that also run secondaries businesses backing continuation vehicles — meaning the same investor sits on both sides of the trade. One investor described recent committee members as "quasi-insiders". Investors flagged firms that run both lines, including Hamilton Lane, HarbourVest and Partners Group, none of which are accused of wrongdoing. The activity has exploded: continuation vehicles accounted for roughly a fifth of all private equity exits last year, with more than $100bn in sales globally, up from about $70bn in 2023 and just $7bn or less in 2015, according to Jefferies. The Institutional Limited Partners Association has issued new guidance asking buyout firms to disclose any side incentives — including future fund commitments — built into continuation-vehicle bids. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Alexandra Heal.
Germany's SAP, the second-biggest European technology group by market capitalisation, is launching a so-called sovereign cloud offering in France on Monday with S3ns (pronounced "sens"), the Thales–Google Cloud joint venture. SAP customers will be able to migrate their systems straight onto the S3ns platform, which received SecNumCloud certification from France's cyber-security agency ANSSI in December — a state-recognised "trusted cloud" label recommended by the French government for sensitive data. Thales is the "customer zero" of the new offering, which will be commercially available by the end of the year. The French group sees it as a way to accelerate scaling in defence and cyber-security, where it still runs much of its IT in-house. For SAP, the goal is to push reluctant clients in regulated sectors onto the cloud. The group had already announced a partnership with Mistral in Berlin, and earlier this year teamed up with cloud Bleu (a joint venture between Orange, Capgemini and Microsoft). The macro context is helpful. Thomas Saueressig, an SAP executive board member, explicitly cites the US Cloud Act — the extraterritorial law that lets US authorities demand customer data from any US-domiciled company — as the trigger for boardroom debates across Europe. He argues for a European "digital union", calling it economically absurd to maintain 27 separate national clouds. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Joséphine Boone.
French solar developers GreenYellow and Reden Solar have raised close to €2bn of debt between them, even as the broader photovoltaic market is reeling from last year's moratorium threats and a new French multi-year energy plan (Programmation pluriannuelle de l'énergie, or PPE) seen as less ambitious than expected. Both want to fund new solar plants and battery storage, mainly in France, plus selective acquisitions, with Reden also refinancing existing projects. GreenYellow, the rooftop and shading-canopy specialist, announced an €824M revolving credit facility from nine commercial banks, a private debt fund and France's state lender Bpifrance. The group now has more than €800M of five-year revolver capacity, up from €600M, at better terms. It has also signed a €400M senior loan over 20 years for its legacy portfolio. Reden Solar closed €1.055bn the previous week, led by Natixis and Crédit Agricole CIB, including €700M over 15 years to refinance assets and a first-time €250M revolving line. Both groups benefit from strong sponsors — Ardian backs GreenYellow, Macquarie backs Reden — which reassures banks. But the climate is tightening: Reden has frozen 20 developer hires and plans to expand in Italy, Spain and Germany, since about 90 per cent of its French contracts come from public tenders that are now shrinking. GreenYellow is pivoting towards long-term self-consumption contracts with industrial customers. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Amélie Laurin.
Iran has submitted a new peace proposal to Washington, according to US news site Axios: reopen the Strait of Hormuz to end the war that started on 28 February, and treat nuclear talks as a separate, later track. The plan is to be examined in Washington on Monday at a meeting between Donald Trump and his closest national-security advisers. The Strait of Hormuz remains paralysed by a dual Iranian-American blockade — under normal conditions, roughly 20 per cent of world oil moves through it. The tactical picture is hardening. US Naval Forces Central Command says it turned back 38 ships from Iranian ports overnight. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Saint Petersburg on Monday morning to meet Vladimir Putin, framing Iran's Gulf neighbours as Tehran's "priority". Trump, for his part, cancelled on Saturday the planned trip to Pakistan by son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff, telling Fox News: "We have all the cards in our hand." Markets are reacting. In early Asian trading on Monday, Brent rose 2.28 per cent to $107.73, US WTI 2.21 per cent to $96.48. Gold fell 0.2 per cent to $4,700 an ounce. Germany's GfK consumer climate indicator collapsed to -33.3 for May (down 5.2 points on the month), its lowest since February 2023, pulled down by the war. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Claude Fouquet.
China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has ordered Meta to undo its $2bn acquisition of artificial-intelligence app Manus, an extraordinary late-stage intervention that lands less than three weeks before a planned Trump–Xi summit. The deal was announced in December and closed earlier this year; Meta had already begun integrating Manus's software into its own products. Manus was founded in China in 2022 by Butterfly Effect before relocating its headquarters and core team to Singapore in 2025 following a funding round led by US venture firm Benchmark Capital. Beijing has demanded that the parties fully reverse the transaction — return capital, re-register ownership and stop Meta from using the Manus algorithm — and warned of penalties, business restrictions and possible criminal charges if they fail to comply. Regulators began their probe in January under foreign-investment, antitrust and export-control rules; in March, two Manus co-founders were barred from leaving China. People close to the case told the FT that fully unwinding a closed deal is "hard" and that the move may be primarily a deterrent against similar transactions. This is the second high-profile foreign deal Beijing has tried to reshape, after the CK Hutchison sale of 43 ports to a BlackRock-backed group, where authorities pushed for a Chinese co-investor. The Manus order signals that even AI assets with Chinese roots and a foreign holding company are now politically contested. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Arjun Neil Alim and Tim Bradshaw.
Shell has agreed to buy Calgary-based ARC Resources for $16.4bn, its biggest acquisition since BG Group a decade ago. The deal pays $13.6bn in a mix of three-quarters Shell shares plus cash, and assumes $2.8bn in debt. The price represents a 20% premium to ARC's recent share price, which had been flat in 2026 after tripling over five years. For Shell, the move is a U-turn on North American shale: the company sold its Permian Basin business to ConocoPhillips in 2021 for $9.5bn, and CEO Wael Sawan, in post since 2023, had so far steered clear of large M&A — including a long-discussed bid for BP. The acquisition adds 370,000 barrels of oil and gas per day, lifts Shell's annual production growth from 1% to 4%, and adds 2bn barrels to proved-and-probable reserves. ARC mainly produces gas and condensate (a light liquid used in refining and to make ethylene), feedstock that could supply LNG Canada, the $40bn liquefied-natural-gas plant on the country's west coast in which Shell holds 40%. Canada's oil sector is in a bumper year — Enverus expects a C$90bn (US$66bn) windfall if oil stays above $100/bbl — a backdrop helping Shell push its LNG-trading dominance (more than 30% of global capacity, world's largest trader). ARC shares jumped 22% to C$31.51 on the announcement; Shell shares were flat. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Malcolm Moore, Jamie Smyth and Ilya Gridneff.
Jain Global, the multi-strategy hedge fund founded in 2024 by former Millennium co-CIO Bobby Jain, plans to return outside capital to investors in the third quarter of 2026 and instead manage money exclusively for Millennium. The shift, communicated in an internal memo, marks a striking unwind of one of the most ambitious hedge-fund launches of the past decade. Jain currently manages about $6bn — far below the scale required to compete with Citadel and DE Shaw, which manage tens of billions — and has returned only 0.6% so far this year against a backdrop of volatile markets driven by the war in Iran. Bobby Jain framed the move on an internal call as an acceleration: "Scale is paramount in this industry. We always knew that, and we took the challenging route out of the gate to get there. Millennium just collapsed the timeline." The firm secured $5.3bn of investor commitments at launch under a drawdown structure (capital called from investors in stages rather than upfront), hired more than 200 investment professionals globally and started with seven divisions at once. That cost base, set against thin returns, made independent multi-strategy life difficult. Millennium, founded in 1989 and managing more than $84bn, has previously taken on similar arrangements with external managers — most notably the quantitative fund WorldQuant. The exclusive-management deal turns Jain Global into something close to a captive pod: external in name, but funded and effectively client-of-one with Millennium. For the broader industry, the message is that the multi-strategy model is now effectively closed to all but a handful of giants. Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Amelia Pollard and Costas Mourselas.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the United States is "being humiliated" by Iran and warned there is "no exit strategy" to end the Middle Eastern conflict — an unusually sharp swipe from a staunch Atlanticist, signalling growing European frustration with Washington. Speaking at a school visit in western Germany on Monday, Merz said the US "quite obviously went into this war without any strategy" and had "no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either", while the Iranians were "very skilfully not negotiating". The economic backdrop in Germany is bleak. Berlin's economy ministry halved its 2026 growth forecast to 0.5 per cent because of the Iran war, putting the country on track for a fourth consecutive year of stagnation despite a massive infrastructure and defence spending programme. Merz's coalition agreed a €1.6bn short-term package to cushion households from rising fuel prices. Polls show the far-right Alternative for Germany rising to 27 per cent, ahead of Merz's CDU. Defence minister Boris Pistorius even said the Iran conflict was "not our war" after Trump asked Nato to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, although Merz has since pledged minesweepers — but only after a ceasefire. The chancellor is also worried that the Iran war is squeezing US weapons shipments to Ukraine. He invoked the lessons of "Afghanistan, for 20 years" and Iraq: "the problem with conflicts like this is always: you don't just have to get in, you have to get out again". Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany.
Lithuanian second-hand marketplace Vinted has closed a €880mn secondary share sale at an €8bn valuation — a 60% step up from the €5bn TPG-led round of 2024. The new shareholders include Teachers' Venture Growth and Schroders Capital, joining existing backer EQT, with BlackRock, Lombard Odier and Pinegrove Opportunity Partners also participating. Existing shareholders and employees were given the chance to sell down. No primary capital was raised. Vinted's economics now look like a profitable platform business rather than a marketplace start-up. Gross merchandise value (GMV — the total value of goods sold across the platform) reached €10.8bn in 2025, up 47% year-on-year. Revenue was €1.1bn and net profit €62mn — still thin margins but a clear inflection from prior years. CFO Maurizio D'Arrigo told the FT the company "internally operates already as a public company" and is "ready to go" when conditions allow, without committing to a timeline. Founded in 2008, Vinted has expanded from clothing into books, toys and video games, and built its own shipping and payment infrastructure (it secured a UK e-money licence — a permission to provide payment services and hold customer balances — in March). Comparable consolidation is under way: eBay agreed to buy Depop from Etsy for $1.2bn earlier this year. The next leg is the United States, where Vinted is letting buyers and sellers in London and New York trade with each other but is treating the market "as a test, not a full-blown expansion". Source: Financial Times, 27 April 2026, Ivan Levingston.
Eight weeks into the Iran war, with talks deadlocked, the US Treasury on 24 April blacklisted Hengli — China's second-largest private petrochemicals group. The operation, dubbed "Economic Fury" in echo of the "Epic Fury" military campaign, also targets forty oil tankers — many held by Hong Kong-based shell companies — accused of moving Iranian crude to China or third countries. The sanctions freeze any US assets of Hengli and its subsidiaries owned more than 50%, and cut those entities off from the US financial system. Foreign banks and suppliers that continue to work with them face secondary sanctions. Hengli — a 230,000-employee conglomerate active in petrochemicals, textiles, ceramics, tourism and shipbuilding, and one of China's largest "teapot refineries" (the mid-sized private refiners that process 25% to 30% of Chinese oil, per Wood Mackenzie) — has allegedly received more than 5 million barrels of Iranian crude since 2023, worth "billions of dollars", and financed the Iranian armed forces through the Sepehr Energy Nama Pars Company for "several hundred million dollars". Hengli calls the allegations "baseless" and says it holds three months of inventory. The financial hit was immediate: Hengli Petrochemical Refinery fell 10% on Monday (the daily limit), the group will now settle orders in yuan, and two Asian customers have reportedly already cancelled. Donald Trump is expected in China on 14–15 May. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Raphaël Balenieri.
The 11th review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) opened on 27 April at UN headquarters in New York. Signed by 191 countries — including Iran — and in force since 1970, the NPT is one of the few universal arms-control texts still standing, with other major treaties (New Start on US-Russia warheads, INF on intermediate-range missiles) either expired or torn up. French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said that "France will not let this edifice waver", at a moment when "the risk of nuclear proliferation has never been higher". China's arsenal has grown from fewer than 300 warheads three years ago to between 600 and 1,000 today, with little transparency; Russia has repeatedly issued nuclear threats since invading Ukraine; the recognised nuclear-weapon states spent $100.2bn modernising their arsenals in 2024, according to ICAN. The previous conferences (2015 and 2022) failed to produce a joint declaration and no one expects a breakthrough in New York this year either. Diplomatically, France is pushing the "advanced nuclear deterrence" concept that Emmanuel Macron unveiled at Île Longue on 2 March: eight European countries (Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom) are in detailed talks with Paris to associate themselves with it. Saudi Arabia, on the other side of the Gulf rift, has signed a defence pact with Pakistan, a nuclear power that is not an NPT signatory. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Anne Bauer.
Transavia, the low-cost subsidiary of Air France-KLM, will cancel some of its May and June flights to contain costs as jet fuel prices spike on the back of the Middle East war, a spokesperson told AFP on Sunday. The cancellations cover "less than 2 per cent" of the flight programme over the period. Affected customers are being notified individually by SMS and email and offered a choice between a free rebooking, a credit voucher or a full refund. For most of the cancelled flights, a re-routing within 24 hours is being offered. Sector pressure is rising. Europe normally imports half of its jet fuel from the Gulf, but since the US-Iran war began in late February, the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 per cent of the world's crude oil normally transits — has been paralysed. EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen says the bloc is "approaching very quickly" a supply crisis that could mean a summer of "more expensive tickets and more cancellations". IATA, the global airline industry body, on 17 April called on regulators to coordinate transparently in case jet fuel rationing becomes necessary. Transavia, like other carriers, has already raised fares by an average of around €10 per round trip. France's government, through energy minister Maud Bregeon and government spokesperson Maud Bregeon, says it has not yet seen actual supply difficulties but is ready to release part of the country's strategic stocks if volume problems emerge. Source: Le Monde with AFP, 26 April 2026.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid, who himself briefly led the government in 2022, will run on a joint slate at the next legislative elections in October, the two announced on Sunday. The new party — named "Beyahad" ("together") — will be led by Bennett, who comes from the right, and supported by Lapid from the centre. According to polls, Bennett is the candidate best placed to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. Bennett pledged that if elected he would set up a national commission of inquiry into the failures leading to the 7 October 2023 massacre — a step the current government has refused. "Bennett is a man of the right, but an honest right, and there is trust between us," Lapid said, defending a coalition that runs from centre to right but is unified against Netanyahu. The two men previously formed a broad national-unity government together in June 2021, which was replaced at the end of 2022 by the current coalition. Biographically, Bennett, 54, is a former special-forces officer who became a high-tech entrepreneur, selling his start-up in 2005 for $145M (€110M). Lapid, 62, is the son of author Shoulamit Lapid and the late journalist and minister Tommy Lapid, a Holocaust survivor. A former star television journalist, he founded Yesh Atid ("There is a Future") in 2012, which quickly grew into the country's second-largest party. Source: Le Monde with AFP, 26 April 2026.
Arabelle Solutions, the EDF subsidiary specialised in turbines and circuits for nuclear reactors, will invest €100M in Chalon-sur-Saône to take in-house the production of heat exchangers for the six planned French EPR2 reactors. The project, unveiled on Monday by industry minister Sébastien Martin and energy minister Maud Bregeon, will create 160 jobs. Construction starts in early 2027 on the former Nordeon/Philips industrial site, and production of the giant heaters and steam superheaters — cylinders 25 metres long weighing between 220 and 270 tonnes — will begin in 2030. The timetable does not cover the first pair of EPR2 reactors planned at Penly (Seine-Maritime), whose commissioning has now been pushed back to 2038. EDF nonetheless says Arabelle "will supply the heat exchangers for the first six reactors", without confirming the production sites. Alongside Chalon, the manufacturer has already begun a €350M extension of its historic Belfort plant, which builds turbines for EDF's UK reactors and will serve Westinghouse in Poland and the French EPR2 fleet. Arabelle plans to hire 600 people a year through 2030, 70 per cent of them in France. Chalon also fits an industrial-cluster logic: Framatome (formerly Areva NP) already employs 1,300 people there, and several thousand more across Saône-et-Loire (Le Creusot forge, Saint-Marcel factory). The two groups have signed a "gentlemen's agreement" not to poach each other, even as the French nuclear sector expects 100,000 hires by 2035 (Gifen). Source: Les Echos, 26 April 2026, Amélie Laurin.
Mediterranean Shipping Company, the world's biggest container shipping line by some way, last week formally passed control from 85-year-old founder Gianluigi Aponte to his two children Diego (CEO) and Alexa (CFO). Few in the industry expect Aponte to step back entirely: he still holds Saturday morning calls with senior executives in Geneva, and daily calls with shipbrokers. Personal fortune estimated by Forbes at $44bn, MSC was built from a single second-hand ship in 1970 into a privately-held group with almost 800 vessels controlling about 20 per cent of the global container market — having overtaken Maersk in 2022. Diversification keeps accelerating. Just before the US-Israeli war on Iran, MSC bought a 50 per cent stake in South Korea's Sinokor, which then snapped up roughly $5.4bn of tankers in the first quarter — well-timed, as VLCC rates have since jumped to about $200,000 a day from $40,000 a year earlier. The group is also waiting on a $23bn deal to buy CK Hutchison's global ports portfolio, including a minority stake in Panama Canal terminals; the deal is held up by US-China political friction and the seizure of the Panama assets by local authorities. Two MSC ships were seized by Iran this week and at least seven of its vessels remain stuck in the Gulf, six others having escaped over the weekend. Privacy is part of the model. The company has never published its accounts, although a 2022 leak showed €36.2bn net profit on €86.4bn turnover with €63bn cash reserves — figures MSC has not disputed. Source: Financial Times, 25 April 2026, Alice Hancock, Mercedes Ruehl and Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli.
US prosecutors have arrested Puthugramam Chidambaran, founder and former CEO of iLearningEngines, and CFO Sayyed Farhan Ali Naqvi, on ten charges that could carry life sentences. Pitched as a "revolutionary" AI-driven solution for corporate and school training, the company is alleged by prosecutors to have exploited investor enthusiasm for AI by presenting "idyllic financial projections built on lies" — with 90 per cent of reported revenue allegedly fictional. Founded in 2010, iLearningEngines had reached the Nasdaq via a SPAC — a special-purpose acquisition company, the listed shell vehicle used to take a private company public without a traditional IPO. It reported revenues of $300m–$400m built around licences of its educational "AI packs", allegedly supported by a system of fake customers and sham contracts maintained between 2019 and 2024. Short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report in August 2024 that erased half the share price in 24 hours; the company filed for bankruptcy on Christmas Eve 2024, just eight months after listing. The ticker "AILE" did not save it. The damage spans several groups: financial institutions that lent to iLearningEngines, ruined shareholders and laid-off employees. The roughly $500M of shares held by the founder are now worthless. Source: Les Echos, 25 April 2026, Nessim Aït-Kacimi.
France is pressing Greece to hand about a dozen Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets to Ukraine, in exchange for a fresh Greek order of new Dassault Rafale jets, Les Echos reports on the eve of Emmanuel Macron's two-day visit to Athens. Kyiv has been asking for more aircraft; Paris, constrained by its own budget, cannot deliver directly and sees Athens as a workable intermediary. The deal is contentious. Greece currently flies 24 Mirage 2000-5 plus 10 older Mirage 2000 EGM/BGM in storage, alongside 24 Rafale and US F-16s. Athens is reluctant to part with half of its Mirage fleet immediately, fearing a strategic gap vis-à-vis Turkey before new Rafales arrive (Mirage replacement was planned for 2030, not now). The financing question is also open: a used Mirage and a new Rafale do not have comparable price tags. Greece has already committed around 12 billion euros of its 25 billion euros defence modernisation plan through 2036, including 20 F-35s. Only a European financing arrangement — for example Ukraine using the 90 billion euros EU loan to buy the Greek Mirages, with proceeds covering Greece's Rafale down payment — would make the triangle work. Dassault would also be expected to cut its price. Talks continue during Macron's visit. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Basile Dekonink and Anne Bauer.
Chinese start-up DeepSeek unveiled DeepSeek-V4 on Friday, claiming "significantly enhanced" capabilities versus its predecessor R1 — the January 2025 model that briefly shook Wall Street by proving that a cheap Chinese AI agent could credibly compete with ChatGPT. The announcement lands the same week OpenAI presented GPT-5.5, and while US authorities accuse DeepSeek of using restricted Nvidia Blackwell chips for training. According to The Information, V4 was actually optimised to run on Huawei chips rather than US silicon. The Hangzhou-based firm released two variants: V4-pro, the more capable and compute-hungry version, and V4-Flash, a cheaper and lighter model. Neither is multimodal yet (no video/image processing), but DeepSeek said it is working on adding those capabilities. This is the headline technical limitation versus frontier Western models. The launch matters because China's AI sector has been under intense scrutiny. US export controls have starved Chinese labs of the best Nvidia chips, and Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI and MiniMax were seen as getting ahead. DeepSeek also lost key talent — Guo Daya, a lead architect of the R1 model, was reportedly poached by ByteDance at over 100 million yuan (12.5 million euros). V4 is DeepSeek's answer that it is still in the game. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Claude Fouquet.
Microsoft will launch its first-ever voluntary departure programme in the company's 51-year history, targeting roughly 7% of its US workforce — about 8,700 people — according to CNBC, cited by Les Echos. The company employs around 125,000 staff in the United States and 228,000 worldwide. Unlike the waves of forced lay-offs Microsoft ran in previous years, this plan lets eligible employees opt in voluntarily. Eligibility is tied to a combined age-plus-tenure threshold of 70 (for example a 50-year-old with 20 years at the company qualifies), and reaches up to the senior director level. Employees were notified on Thursday; detailed terms will be announced on 7 May. Amy Coleman, EVP and Chief People Officer, framed the scheme as giving "eligible people the choice to take the next step on their own terms, with the generous support of the company". Separately, Microsoft is overhauling executive compensation: bonuses and stock grants will be decoupled, giving more flexibility to reward performance, and the rating grid will compress from nine tiers to five. The move comes the same week Meta confirmed about 8,000 lay-offs. In France, Microsoft plans to cut 180 positions — with the real net impact estimated at 75 to 100 jobs after vacancies and internal mobility. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Claude Fouquet.
Nike announced on Thursday evening that it will cut 1,400 jobs worldwide — just under 2% of its total headcount — mostly in technology roles within the global operations team. The cuts are the latest instalment of the "Win Now" turnaround plan under CEO Elliott Hill, who returned in late 2024 to the top of a group that has been losing ground across its main markets. Hundreds of posts were cut last summer and another 775 at distribution centres in January, on the back of automation. Context is heavy. Net profit for the quarter ended February fell 35% year-on-year to $520 million; revenue stood at $11.2 billion, flat. Nike warned current-quarter sales will drop 2% to 4%, citing geopolitics; in China — its third-largest market behind North America and EMEA — the decline should reach 20%. Persistent promotions to clear excess inventory in Europe and the Middle East continue to compress margins. The shares reflect the picture. Nike is down about 30% year-to-date and fell nearly 2% on Thursday alone. Longer-term guidance is due this autumn. "Win Now" aims to simplify the organisation, modernise industrial tools, and tighten integration of the supply chain. For now, the market is waiting to see whether the cuts finally land. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Hayat Gazzane.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk publicly questioned whether the United States would honour its NATO Article 5 obligation to defend Europe, warning that a Russian attack on an alliance member could come in "months" rather than years. In an interview with the FT conducted in Ayia Napa, Tusk said Europe's "biggest, most important question is if the United States is ready to be as loyal as it is described in our [NATO] treaties", framing the remark as "my dreams that guarantees on paper will change into something very practical". The intervention is remarkable. Poland is NATO's biggest spender by share of GDP, already at 5% — the alliance's target — and is one of Europe's most staunchly Atlanticist countries. Tusk cited last year's incident when about 20 Russian drones breached Polish airspace and some NATO allies were reluctant to treat it as an attack; the alliance eventually scrambled jets and shot down several drones, the first direct NATO-Russia confrontation since 2022. The context is an EU summit in Cyprus where leaders are debating reviving Article 42.7 — the EU treaty's own mutual-defence clause — in response to Trump's ambiguous stance on Article 5 and repeated threats to withdraw from NATO. The departure of Viktor Orbán, Putin's ally, opens space for that discussion; Tusk called the likely election of pro-EU conservative Péter Magyar a "much better collaborator" on defence. Tusk's framing: "my obsession now and my mission is to reintegrate Europe". Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Henry Foy and Barbara Moens.
In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, Chris McGuire — senior fellow for China at the Council on Foreign Relations and former US National Security Council deputy — argues that April 2026 is an AI inflection point: US labs have built models so powerful they are deliberately not releasing them publicly. Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview is described as the first model able to autonomously discover, chain and exploit or patch software vulnerabilities faster than nearly any human researcher, at scale. Cyber-security experts call it a "watershed event". OpenAI's upcoming model Spud will reportedly follow the same selective-release playbook. McGuire's core argument: the current US lead over China in AI is roughly seven months, and that window is exactly how long America has to harden its digital infrastructure before Chinese cyber-weapons match US defences. China's AI ecosystem is still structurally dependent on US technology — Nvidia chips (despite sanctions), distillation from US models, and ASML lithography machines (China bought more DUV systems in 2024 than every other country combined). Close the loopholes and the lead extends to 18 months or more. His policy prescription is maximalist: halt all AI-chip exports to China (including the less-advanced Nvidia H200), crack down on smuggling networks (he cites one case diverting 2.5 billion dollars of Nvidia servers via South-East Asia), block Chinese cloud access to export-controlled chips, prevent remote access to US AI models, and stop semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports including foreign-made kit that relies on US tech. The Cold War precedent he offers: the US blocked Soviet nuclear assistance but later shared permissive action link technology to prevent unauthorised launches. Maximise the lead, but keep talking on guardrails. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Chris McGuire.
Wall Street banks gave wealthy clients radically different fee structures to access Anthropic's February capital raise, a 30 billion dollar round that valued the Claude-maker at 350 billion dollars and included Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, Coatue and Nvidia. Morgan Stanley charged a flat 1% placement fee. Goldman Sachs used a multi-layered structure — a 1.25% management fee plus 17.5% carried interest on profits above an 8% return — unusual for a single-company vehicle where banks typically charge only a small placement fee and a nominal maintenance fee. The disparity creates the prospect that two investors in the exact same deal earn materially different returns depending on which bank they used. Goldman framed its structure as consistent with acting as a fiduciary co-investor alongside ultra-wealthy clients (average account size around 70 million dollars). Morgan Stanley said its scale enabled access "without management or carry fees, similar to what institutions receive", and did not act as a fiduciary (offering the deal without a recommendation). Typical Morgan Stanley wealth accounts are 20 million dollars or more. Context: retail and wealth investors are playing an increasingly central role in the run-up to mega-IPOs for Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX. OpenAI raised 3 billion dollars from retail as part of its record 122 billion dollar round last month. Wall Street is using proprietary vehicles to get these clients into deals early — but how they price access now varies considerably, and the lack of standardisation will be in regulators' sights. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Harriet Clarfelt, Joshua Franklin, Eric Platt and George Hammond.
In a long FT analysis, Anna Nicolaou and Eva Xiao chart how Donald Trump has reshaped the US media landscape over a decade — from declaring war on the press in 2016 to today, when billionaires sympathetic to him own major outlets, online creators regularly outdraw TV anchors, and his Federal Communications Commission functions as what critics call an "attack dog" on broadcasters. Fox News, his favourite network, averaged roughly 1.9 million viewers a day in March, versus 641,000 at CNN and 759,000 at MS Now (formerly MSNBC). The legal side is unprecedented. Trump has sued The New York Times for 15 billion dollars, the Wall Street Journal for 10 billion dollars and the BBC for 5 billion dollars. Paramount paid 16 million dollars to settle a CBS News lawsuit widely seen as weak, to clear the path for its regulatory approval to merge with David Ellison's Skydance. Fox News previously paid 787.5 million dollars to settle Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit over false 2020-election claims — one of the largest defamation settlements in US history. Ownership has consolidated around Trump-aligned figures. Paramount under David Ellison — son of Oracle's Larry Ellison, a Trump donor — won the battle for Warner Bros Discovery after Trump publicly weighed in. Ellison now controls CBS and CNN and has installed Bari Weiss to lead CBS News; Anderson Cooper and John Dickerson have left amid accusations of editorial interference. FCC chair Brendan Carr warned in March that broadcasters airing what he called "fake news" about the Iran war could face licence revocation, the same day Trump said he was "thrilled". Meanwhile online voices — Candace Owens (nearly 6 million YouTube subscribers, more than The New York Times), Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh — have gained reach formerly reserved to networks. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Anna Nicolaou and Eva Xiao.
KPMG and EY have quietly been removing UK partners from their equity partnerships and offering them "salaried partner" roles instead, in a break from the accounting industry's traditional job-for-life model, several sources told the Financial Times. Equity partners — the senior practitioners who own the firm and share its profits — typically kept that status until mandatory retirement age; being "retired" into a salaried role is a new form of "departnering". At KPMG, where average equity partner pay last year was 880,000 pounds, some partners were told they would be moved into a salaried rung introduced in recent years. Under CEO Jon Holt, appointed in 2021, KPMG has reallocated the "units" that determine each equity partner's share of profits, placing less weight on tenure and more on bringing in business. An internal shorthand — "Huncs", for high-units-no-clients — describes partners with large equity stakes and few active clients. Several of those, sources say, "have been let go recently". KPMG profit per partner now outperforms PwC and EY for the first time in more than a decade. The trend is wider. Big Four equity partner promotions hit a five-year low in 2025. EY has also demoted a small number of equity partners since introducing its salaried rung in 2022. KPMG says it will have created more than 200 new partnership roles over a two-year period (salaried plus equity). The shift mirrors practices in law firms and Goldman Sachs: concentrate profit among top performers, and push out those who underperform — even if a formal "salaried partner" title softens the message. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Ellesheva Kissin.
Canadian AI start-up Cohere has agreed to take over Germany's Aleph Alpha in a deal valuing the combined group at about 20 billion dollars, creating what the two governments frame as a transatlantic alternative to US Big Tech providers. The transaction is backed by the German and Canadian governments and focused on "sovereign" AI — systems where customers keep control of their data and infrastructure. Aleph Alpha shareholders will receive one Cohere share for every nine shares held, according to two sources familiar with the terms; Cohere will retain its name and operate from dual headquarters in Canada and Germany. The deal reflects a broader pushback against reliance on Silicon Valley: it follows SpaceX's acquisition of coding start-up Cursor and is an early sign of consolidation in the AI sector. Cohere was founded in 2019 in Toronto by former Google researchers, focuses on enterprise large language models deployed within clients' own infrastructure, and was valued at 6.8 billion dollars last year. Heidelberg-based Aleph Alpha was valued at roughly 500 million euros in a 2023 round and has struggled to keep up with larger rivals; its former CEO Jonas Andrulis stepped down earlier this year to found a new AI start-up with consultancy Roland Berger. The merger comes with a fresh funding round led by Schwarz Digits, the tech arm of German retailer Schwarz Group (owner of Lidl supermarkets), which has committed 600 million dollars in equity and research funding. Schwarz is already the biggest backer of Aleph Alpha (above 20% stake) and is building an 11 billion-euro data centre near Berlin to support AI workloads; those data centres will host Cohere's AI systems. The German government will act as anchor customer for sovereign, secure AI in public procurement. Canada's AI minister Evan Solomon told the FT that "middle powers" need "an option between the hyperscalers and the hegemon". Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Florian Müller, George Hammond and Ilya Gridneff.
US banks led by Goldman Sachs have borrowed record amounts of Chinese currency this year, tapping the offshore renminbi debt market to raise low-cost funding as Beijing makes it easier for mainland investors to buy Hong Kong-listed fixed-income products. Total issuance of "dim sum" bonds — renminbi-denominated debt sold outside mainland China, mostly in Hong Kong — has hit 300 billion yuan (44 billion dollars) so far this year, more than double the same point in 2025, itself a record year. Self-led issuance by US banks has reached 47.5 billion yuan, with Goldman making up the majority. Goldman has become the largest foreign issuer of dim sum bonds and the second-largest issuer overall after the state-owned Bank of China, with 32.1 billion yuan issued this year — about 10% of total issuance. Isaac Wong, Goldman's head of fixed income distribution for Asia ex-Japan, said the market provides "an attractive alternative source of funding". The bank swaps the renminbi proceeds into dollars and hedges currency risk; the money is not used for mainland China operations (capital controls apart, offshore-raised renminbi is not subject to China's strict cross-border rules). Other April issuers include Portugal, Finland's MuniFin, the Korea Development Bank, the Nordic Investment Bank, and the Swedish Export Credit Corporation. The driver is a yield gap. China's 10-year government bond trades at around 1.75%, pushing Chinese institutional investors — insurers, pensions — toward higher-yielding offshore products after Beijing broadened Bond Connect last year. Goldman's 10-year dim sum bond carries a 3% coupon. At the same time, yields on Japan's 10-year government bond have risen to more than 2.4% from 0.61% at the start of 2024, removing the yen's historic role as the world's cheapest funding currency. "The offshore renminbi has become a major funding currency for lack of a better option", said Alicia García-Herrero of Natixis. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, William Sandlund.
Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) CEO Luigi Lovaglio is considering selling the 7.4 billion euro, 13% stake in insurance group Generali that MPS acquired last year through its takeover of Mediobanca, to help fund a fresh push for Banco BPM, according to five sources cited by the FT. The move would revive the Italian government's earlier ambition to combine MPS and BPM into a national banking champion, a plan disrupted last year when UniCredit launched a takeover bid for BPM that was eventually blocked by Rome. After publication, MPS denied it was examining the Generali stake sale, saying it was "entirely focused" on integrating Mediobanca. Lovaglio was reinstated as CEO less than a month after MPS's outgoing board ousted him over strategy disagreements — including the future of the Generali stake. The Italian government, which retains a small stake in MPS, abstained from the vote, signalling it did not oppose his return. Giorgia Meloni's government treats Generali as a "national strategic asset" — the insurer is one of Italy's biggest buyers of sovereign debt — and last year opposed Generali's asset-management JV with France's Natixis out of concern that French governance would undermine Generali's role in Italian bonds. Intesa Sanpaolo and UniCredit are seen as preferred buyers for the Generali stake, but both are problematic: UniCredit is absorbed in a battle for Commerzbank in Germany, and Intesa is already Italy's biggest bank and largest life insurer (antitrust risk). Intesa CEO has also ruled out taking "minority" stakes. An alternative is distributing the stake to MPS shareholders as a special dividend. Meanwhile UniCredit's Andrea Orcel has built a near-9% stake in Generali on his own. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli.
US prosecutors have charged Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an active-duty soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with using classified information about the January raid that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro to place bets on Polymarket that netted more than 400,000 dollars. According to a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday, Van Dyke, who was involved in planning the raid, placed roughly 13 bets worth 33,034 dollars between December and end-January on positions including "US Forces in Venezuela" and "Maduro out". After profiting 409,881 dollars, he moved most of the winnings to a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then to a new online brokerage, and sought to hide his identity following reports of atypical trading on the Maduro contracts. Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche said soldiers are "prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain", adding that "widespread access to prediction markets is a relatively new phenomenon, but federal laws protecting national security information fully apply". Van Dyke was charged with three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act, one count of wire fraud and one count of unlawful monetary transaction — each carrying a maximum sentence of 10 to 20 years. The case was assigned to the Manhattan federal court. Polymarket said it had flagged the trades internally — "when we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ" — and framed the arrest as "proof the system works". The case is the highest-profile insider-trading prosecution linked to prediction markets, and lands as the broader industry faces fresh regulatory scrutiny: Vanguard's chief warned this week of "financial exploitation" by prediction markets, and French authorities are investigating potential tampering with weather-service data after suspicious Polymarket bets. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Stefania Palma.
Meta will cut 10% of its staff next month — roughly 8,000 jobs — as the 1.7 trillion dollar social-media group "runs the company more efficiently" to offset CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending spree, according to an internal memo cited by the FT. Meta is also no longer filling 6,000 positions it had previously planned to hire for. Lay-offs are scheduled for 20 May and will include an 18-month healthcare package for affected US employees, according to Chief People Officer Janelle Gale. The cuts offset the extraordinary AI investment Zuckerberg has committed. Meta said in January that capital expenditure could nearly double to 135 billion dollars this year; the group has also been spending heavily on elite talent to catch up with Google and OpenAI on cutting-edge models. Zuckerberg has centred the AI strategy on what he calls "personal superintelligence"; this month Meta launched Muse Spark, a new AI model that the company acknowledges still lags the best Western rivals. A new data-centre project, "Meta Compute", aims at "tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more" — each gigawatt of data-centre capacity costs tens of billions of dollars to build. The move lands the same day Microsoft told staff it was offering voluntary redundancy to about 7% of its US workforce (see our Microsoft brief). Staff nerves are also fraying over Meta's plan to install tracking software that would record employees' mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screen content to train AI agents that could autonomously carry out work tasks — raising fears that workers are training the models that will replace them. Reuters first reported the lay-offs and the tracking plan. Source: Financial Times, 23 April 2026, Hannah Murphy.
Ingenico, the historic leader in payment terminals owned by US fund Apollo since 2022, has opened discussions with its creditors over a €1.1bn debt due by 2030, according to Bloomberg. The French company has hired Rothschild as financial adviser; on the other side, asset manager Pimco leads the creditor group, advised by investment bank Houlihan Lokey and law firm Gibson Dunn. Ingenico's debt structure also includes a revolving credit facility of up to €278M maturing in March 2028, only partly drawn. Apollo and Ingenico declined to comment. The terminals market has hardened. Ingenico, which once dominated alongside the US Verifone and its ubiquitous black point-of-sale terminals, has been losing share to China's PAX with materially cheaper devices. A pivot toward software and cloud has not been enough to rebuild margin. Moody's downgraded the company from B3 to Caa2 in February, citing "very high" leverage, persistently negative free cash flow and weak liquidity. The agency puts annual interest expense at around €100M and the company's annual cash burn at €60M–€70M, calling the structure "unsustainable". Apollo bought the terminals business from Worldline in 2022 for €2.3bn. The debt, picked up by Pimco at a discount, was refinanced in early 2024. Moody's warned as early as February that the company's "headroom under restrictive covenants" was shrinking and that a distressed exchange rating could follow during the year. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Marion Heilmann.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), in its first quarterly report covering the Iran war, estimates that global liquefied natural gas (LNG) production — gas cooled to about -160°C so it can be shipped by tanker — fell 8 per cent in March. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz removed roughly 20 per cent of LNG volumes from world markets. Loadings from Qatar and the UAE collapsed by 9.5 billion cubic metres year-on-year in March, almost their entire production. North America partly absorbed the shock. The Plaquemines liquefaction plant in Louisiana ramped up between October 2025 and February 2026, alone contributing half of global supply growth; total capacity rose 12 per cent and actual trade by 9.5 per cent (28 billion cubic metres). Asia took the brunt of the disruption — 85 per cent of Qatari and Emirati gas went to Asia in 2025: Pakistan's imports fell 70 per cent, China's 30 per cent. Asian spot prices jumped 55 per cent in March, against 35 per cent in Europe. The IEA projects that the "new wave" of global LNG supply expected before 2030 will be delayed by at least two years. Qatar, heavily damaged, would need four years to return to the levels previously planned. Every additional month of Hormuz closure would cut global LNG supply by another 10 billion cubic metres. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Nicolas Rauline.
Federal prosecutor for Washington Jeanine Pirro has dropped the investigation into Jerome Powell, chair of the US Federal Reserve, over construction-cost overruns at the Fed's headquarters renovation, which rose from $1.9bn to $2.5bn. Going forward, the Fed's inspector general will examine the overruns, described as costing "several billion dollars" to taxpayers. The probe, opened in November by a prosecutor appointed by Donald Trump, accused Powell of "incompetence" and of having "pocketed money" on the construction work. The decision is a win for Powell — whose term ends 15 May — in his standoff with the White House. Trump has repeatedly attacked him, calling him an "imbecile" and "truly one of my worst appointments", because the central banker has refused to cut interest rates for fear of reigniting inflation. In a rare video in January, Powell called the accusations "pretexts" and defended the Fed's independence against "political pressure". Dropping the case removes a key obstacle to the Senate's confirmation of Kevin Warsh, Trump's pick to succeed Powell after mid-May. Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who had blocked the nomination while the investigation was running, confirmed on Sunday that he would now support it. A separate investigation into Fed governor Lisa Cook remains open. Source: Les Echos, 24 April 2026, Sarah Dumeau (with agencies).
Swedish white-goods group Electrolux will cut 3,000 jobs over two years — nearly 8% of its global workforce — and launch a 9 billion Swedish kronor rights issue (830 million euros), ahead of its Q1 results. This follows a similar-sized restructuring announced in late 2022 (4,000 jobs at the time) and a series of smaller cuts since. Half of the first 1,500 cuts this year will land in North America, where Electrolux is forming a joint venture with Chinese manufacturer Midea to take over part of its regional production. The JV, effective Q3 2026, spans three sites with different ownership splits: the Anderson, North Carolina plant (which stops refrigeration and pivots to washers, with Midea set to hire up to 1,200 staff in 2027-2028 — not necessarily the same people or on the same terms), a US refrigeration commercial entity, and a Mexican refrigeration plant. Electrolux expects synergies of around 600 million Swedish kronor (55.5 million euros) by year three of the partnership. In parallel, the group is closing a Hungarian refrigerator plant that made both standalone and built-in units. Electrolux frames the move as a push for efficiency "through targeted optimisation of the global industrial footprint", but the Midea tie-up is the bigger signal: a European incumbent handing over part of its US manufacturing base to a Chinese competitor. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Clotilde Briard.
Nestlé held its 2026 targets despite the contaminated infant-milk scandal and Middle East-driven commodity cost pressure, delivering a better-than-expected Q1 thanks to stronger volumes in coffee, culinary products and snacks. Revenue fell 5.7% year-on-year to 21.3 billion Swiss francs (23.1 billion euros) — slightly above the 21.2 billion Swiss francs consensus — with the Swiss franc's strength explaining most of the decline. Sales volume rose 1.2%, well above the average 0.2% forecast from analysts polled by AWP. The share price jumped 6.20% to 80.22 Swiss francs (87.4 euros) at 9:50 Paris time, lifting the SMI by 1.04%. New CEO Philipp Navratil said the strategy to restore sales is "bearing fruit". The infant-milk recall dragged on organic growth, but the recovery in volumes more than compensated: Nestlé is still targeting full-year organic growth of around 3% to 4%, with volume growth accelerating versus 2025. Middle East geopolitics adds uncertainty. The region represents about 3% of group revenue, and Nestlé says its factories there are still running — but it flags "broader effects on the group, including impacts on commodity costs, distribution costs and consumer confidence" as unclear. Separately, Nestlé France announced 180 potential job cuts from 2027, with real impact seen at 75 to 100 after vacancies and internal moves. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026.
Wendel, one of Europe's largest listed investment companies, reported a first-quarter net asset value (NAV) of 158.4 euros per share — down 3.6% from end-2025. The group attributed the move to lower market multiples applied to its private-asset management arm, notably IK Partners and Monroe Capital. Alongside equity stakes in industrial groups like Bureau Veritas and Scalian, Wendel has built a third-party asset-management platform now close to 50 billion euros under management. CEO Laurent Mignon called the investment and management businesses "two solid and complementary engines of value creation", but the Q1 release also signalled genuine pressure. In private debt, Monroe Capital saw withdrawal requests from one of its vehicles — "limited" in size and fully honoured thanks to new subscriptions, says Wendel. Still, this line alone trimmed NAV by 8.5 euros per share over the quarter. The signal travels beyond Wendel. In the United States, Apollo, Ares, Blackstone, BlackRock and Blue Owl have all had to manage or cap redemptions in private-credit funds. Blue Owl capped withdrawals at 5% of shares in one vehicle, returning a little over 1 billion dollars out of 5.4 billion requested. Despite the valuation hit, Wendel's commercial momentum is intact: 349 million euros of fees in 2025, 3.8 billion dollars raised by Monroe, and Q1 fees up 129% year-on-year to 106.2 million euros. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Samir Touzani.
Avis Budget shares have jumped 342% since 20 March, to 444 dollars, while the S&P 500 is up just 10% over the same period. The trigger: Pentwater Capital Management disclosed an 8 million-share position on 20 March, giving it 22% of the 35 million shares outstanding — second-largest holder behind SRS Investment Management (~17 million shares, roughly 50% of the capital). Both funds hold additional cash-settled swaps that give them the right to acquire up to 13 million more shares; the free float outside those two holders is just 10 million. This is where it gets explosive. More than 9 million shares have been sold short. If SRS and Pentwater exercise even part of their swap rights, short sellers will have almost nowhere to buy back the stock. The dealers who sold the swaps typically hold the underlying as a hedge and will not release them. SRS, which has more than 10% of the capital, cannot sell during the quiet period before end-April results. Pentwater is constrained by US insider-trading rules until September (the short-swing rule claws back profits on trades within six months). Paper losses for the short sellers already reach 2.5 billion dollars, according to S3 Partners, and the cost of borrowing shares has exploded to more than 13 times its usual level. The historical comparison is Volkswagen 2008, when Porsche's hidden stake triggered a squeeze that briefly made VW the world's largest listed company. The only plausible relief valve would be Avis issuing new shares (up to 5 million authorised), but that would require board approval (where SRS holds two of six seats) and probably has to wait until after the earnings release. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Corentin Chappron.
Christophe Bruneau, executive chairman of ArianeGroup since 1 April, fires a warning at Europe in a joint interview with Les Echos and Handelsblatt: "Tomorrow, if Elon Musk decides not to launch this or that customer, he will shut off the tap." His group — owned 50/50 by Airbus and Safran — is the only continental player with a full ballistic-technology stack, and Bruneau wants to make it the backbone of Europe's space and nuclear rearmament. ArianeGroup is targeting 7 to 8 Ariane 6 launches this year, rising to around ten per year, each able to place more than 30 satellites in low Earth orbit — Amazon's Leo constellation has already booked 18 launches, the first of which flew on 12 February from Kourou. Bruneau is also pushing into conventional ballistic missiles and studying a missile production line in Germany, riding Berlin's Zeitenwende: 300 German SMEs are part of the Ariane supply chain and the German army plans 47 satellites by 2029. On costs, he promises a "significant" cut by shifting from a "craftsmanship" model to a true industrial one — simplifying geographic-return rules, ending engineering derogations, and scaling reusability through Maiaspace. The political message is direct: SpaceX's ultra-low prices rely on US institutional contracts, and Europe must impose a "European preference" for its own institutional launches or see prices "surge" once the competition is gone. Ariane 6, Bruneau argues, is the "independent route" for research, telecoms and military payloads. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Anne Drif.
EU heads of state and government — 26 in practice, with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban absent after his 12 April election defeat — gather in Nicosia on Thursday evening for an informal summit focused on the geopolitical, economic and energy fallout of the Middle East crisis. Cyprus is the EU member state closest to Iran, and the European Commission unveiled on Wednesday 22 April a package in response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — fuel-price surge and a looming jet-fuel shortage for aviation. Another key item: "operationalising" Article 42.7 of the EU treaty, the mutual-assistance clause invoked only once — by France in 2015 after the Paris attacks — and back in the spotlight since an Iranian drone hit a British base in Cyprus. EU intelligence services flag that Russia could test a member state, possibly a Baltic country, in coming years; Ukraine sees the clause as a security guarantee. Leaders want to define a concrete activation procedure with or without EU-institution coordination, without weakening NATO's Article 5 — political-level exercises are already scheduled for this spring. On Friday, leaders tackle for the first time the toxic 2028–2034 EU budget file: funding new priorities (defence, competitiveness, research) and repaying the post-Covid recovery bond without bloating national contributions. The incoming Irish presidency aims to land a deal by end-2026 for first disbursements in January 2028 — a timetable most diplomats call unrealistic. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Karl De Meyer.
John Phelan was fired as secretary of the US Navy on Wednesday, an abrupt departure announced by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on X without any stated reason. The move lands in the middle of one of the most consequential US naval missions in decades: the blockade of vessels transiting in and out of Iranian ports through the Strait of Hormuz, with 21 US warships in the region, seven more on the way, and more than a dozen actively involved in the blockade. Phelan, a Palm Beach financier and political donor, had reported directly to defence secretary Pete Hegseth and led an effort to rebuild US military shipbuilding, including a proposed "Golden Fleet". A person familiar with the matter says tensions with Pentagon civilian leadership had grown over the shipbuilding programme, officer nominations and promotions. He is replaced on an acting basis by Hung Cao, the under-secretary of the Navy. The ouster fits a pattern of Hegseth-driven Pentagon shake-ups under Donald Trump's second term: earlier this month army chief of staff Randy George was forced out as thousands of soldiers deployed for the Iran war, and tensions with army secretary Dan Driscoll have spilled into the open. The turmoil coincides with increasingly aggressive US operations — the Iran war since late February, January's Venezuela raid and ongoing strikes on alleged drug boats. Source: Financial Times, 23 April 2026, James Politi and Steff Chávez.
Japan has moved to block South Korean private equity group MBK Partners' ¥274bn ($1.7bn) takeover of machine tools maker Makino Milling on national security grounds — the first such intervention since Tokyo revamped its foreign-investment screening rules in 2020, and the first outright block since the UK-hedge-fund / J-Power episode in 2008. Makino shares fell as much as 10% on Thursday; the Nikkei 225 was down 1%. The Japanese government told MBK its ownership was "incompatible" with Makino's sensitive-information obligations because the company's machine tools — so-called "mother machines" that produce high-precision aircraft engine blades and vanes — are "widely used by manufacturers of defence equipment in Japan". MBK has until 1 May to withdraw voluntarily, after which Tokyo can impose stricter measures. Prime minister Sanae Takaichi, elected in a February landslide, is overhauling Japan's FDI regime on the model of the US Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) and tightening defence and critical-minerals policy in parallel. The decision could chill foreign private equity in Japan, where MBK — founded in 2005 by ex-Carlyle executive Michael Byung Ju Kim, now with $33bn of assets under management — has been one of the most active buyers. MBK had been negotiating with Tokyo for ten months after winning the bid; it stepped in after Nidec dropped out following Makino's poison-pill defence. US-based Carlyle and several Japanese bidders are reportedly circling. Source: Financial Times, 23 April 2026, Harry Dempsey, David Keohane and Daniel Tudor.
Renault reported a 7.3% rise in Q1 2026 revenue to €12.5bn, but Dacia acted as the brake: the Romanian brand's registrations fell 16.3% over the period, hit by logistics and production disruption in the Strait of Gibraltar caused by severe weather that hampered the group's Moroccan plant in January and February. March started a recovery (+1.9% in Europe) and the order book remains solid, supported by double-digit order intake growth since the start of the year. The core Renault brand held up well: registrations up 2.2% overall, nearly 400,000 vehicles sold, +3.8% in Europe, and the new-generation Clio 6 already at 27,000 European units. Full-electric sales jumped 40% and now make up 23.9% of the European mix, led by the R5 and soon the Twingo. Sporty niche Alpine posted +54.7% on 3,246 vehicles (led by the A290). International ex-Europe sales were stable at 140,000 units, supported by recent launches of the Duster in India and the Filante in South Korea. Group registrations fell 3.3% overall, but automotive revenue rose 6.5% (+8% at constant FX) thanks to partner deliveries (Micra built for Nissan in Douai, Geely distribution in Brazil). Mobilize Financial Services — Renault's captive auto-finance arm — kept its pace, with revenue up 13% to €1.72bn. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Lionel Steinmann.
Employee and former-employee shareholders of Société Générale sold heavily in 2025 to capture the 153% share-price rally, with the stock rising from €26 to €70. Their stake in the capital fell to 9.11% at 31 December 2025 from 10.23% at end-2024 — despite the July launch of a worldwide employee shareholding plan (PMAS) subscribed by more than 50,000 staff, which issued 7.5 million new shares (0.97% of equity). In total, employees offloaded more than 19 million shares, about 2.5% of the capital. At the 2025 average price of roughly €48, that represents a little over €900mn in gross proceeds — though the exact gain depends on individual entry prices. Société Générale still ranks third in the SBF 120 for employee ownership (behind Bouygues and Eiffage) and first in its sector, well ahead of BNP Paribas (4.4% held by staff) and the banking-insurance sector average of 4.2%. Employee ownership has been central at Société Générale since its 1987 privatisation, and chief executive Slawomir Krupa accelerated it on arrival, launching one plan a year instead of every three: the employee share stood at 7.93% end-2022, 9.84% end-2023, 10.23% end-2024, before this year's profit-taking. The CFDT union disputes calling it remuneration, and internal engagement is reportedly at an all-time low. Source: Les Echos, 23 April 2026, Gabriel Nédélec.
Leonardo-Maria Del Vecchio, one of the heirs of EssilorLuxottica's late founder, has struck a deal to buy out his brother Luca's and sister Paola's 12.5% stakes in Delfin, the family holding, for a combined €10bn. He will lift his own share to 37.5% and emerge as the controlling shareholder of the vehicle, locking in the governance of the Italo-French optics giant. Delfin holds 32% of EssilorLuxottica, 10% of insurer Generali and 17% of Italian bank BMPS — strategic stakes Leonardo-Maria will de facto control. Part of the €10bn price will come from personal cash, the rest from a bank loan that UniCredit, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole are reportedly ready to underwrite. The deal must be validated at a 27 April extraordinary general meeting and closed by June, just before Delfin's July annual meeting. The stakes go beyond the succession: EssilorLuxottica is Giorgio Armani's designated candidate to take over his luxury group, and the optics giant's board will be renewed in spring 2027. Separately, EssilorLuxottica reported Q1 revenue of €7.13bn, up 10.8% at constant currencies. Source: Les Echos, 22 April 2026, Olivier Tosseri.
In a Financial Times opinion column, Nadia Schadlow — deputy national security adviser for strategy in the first Trump administration, now senior fellow at the Hudson Institute — argues that the transatlantic rift opened by the Iran war is deeper than Trump's style. Washington and European capitals, she writes, operate from different assumptions about risk, responsibility and the value of multilateral institutions. The US under Trump judged that acting against Iran was worth the short-term disruption to weaken Tehran long-term; Europe preferred to preserve stability, uninterrupted energy flows and diplomatic channels. Schadlow traces the divergence to the July 2015 JCPOA, from which Trump withdrew in 2018 after concluding that Iran had used the deal to build the region's largest ballistic missile arsenal and enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels, per the IAEA. Ursula von der Leyen's line that "the negotiating table is the only place to end this crisis" captures Europe's faith in dialogue; Trump views a theocratic regime as beyond persuasion. Schadlow also flags Europe's own strategic complacency: Nord Stream 2 and deep dependence on external energy suppliers, warnings Washington had issued for years. Bridging the gap, she concludes, requires less outrage and more clarity about the underlying differences. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Nadia Schadlow.
Switzerland's Federal Council confirmed on Wednesday it will require UBS to hold roughly $20bn of additional high-quality capital against its foreign subsidiaries, the core of the post-Credit Suisse "too big to fail" reform package. The figure is lower than the $26bn Bern initially flagged in June, but UBS puts the real impact closer to $22bn and calls the proposal "extreme". The overhaul comes in two parts. A government ordinance — which does not need parliamentary approval — will phase software assets out of capital over three years and, for now, spares deferred tax assets (tax credits a bank can deduct from future taxable profit), wiping about $4bn of CET1 (common equity tier one, the highest-quality core capital) from next January. The second and larger leg, forcing UBS to fully back its overseas units with parent-level CET1 for around $20bn extra, goes to parliament in June and could still be diluted. UBS shares closed 0.15% higher in Zurich. Since absorbing Credit Suisse in 2023, UBS's balance sheet dwarfs Switzerland's economy, which is why Bern is moving tougher than Washington. The Swiss Bankers Association and 16 cantons oppose the package, warning it undermines international competitiveness; finance minister Karin Keller-Sutter argues the state cannot shoulder another Credit Suisse-style failure. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Mercedes Ruehl and Simon Foy.
Boeing delivered 143 commercial aircraft in the first quarter of 2026, up 10% on a year earlier and 29 more than Airbus — its widest quarterly lead over the European rival since 2018, when the 737 Max crisis began. Revenue climbed 14% to $22.2bn and the net loss narrowed to $7mn from $31mn a year earlier, beating analyst estimates. Shares closed up 5.5%. Chief executive Kelly Ortberg, in post since August 2024, reiterated full-year delivery targets for the 737 Max despite a wiring issue and confirmed plans to step production up to 47 jets a month this summer (from 42 now). Certification of the new 737-7 and 737-10 variants is expected by year-end. Chief financial officer Jay Malave guided 2026 free cash flow to $1bn–$3bn, with a longer-term target of $10bn. Boeing's defence, space and security revenue rose 21%, lifted by a seven-year Pentagon framework on Patriot seeker sensors and the broader defence spending surge. Airbus is struggling with engine-supply bottlenecks, widening Boeing's opening. Ortberg said Boeing had seen no impact from the Iran war, though Melius Research's Scott Mikus notes that sustained high jet-fuel prices could benefit both manufacturers as airlines retire older, less efficient jets. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Christian Davies and Sylvia Pfeifer.
Argentina's economy shrank 2.6% in February compared to January, the steepest monthly contraction since Javier Milei took office in late 2023, according to the national statistics agency's proxy for GDP. On a year-on-year basis, activity fell 2.1%, the largest drop since 2024, breaking a spell of optimism that followed 4.4% full-year growth in 2025. The downturn exposes the cost of Milei's tight monetary policy and austerity programme: unemployment hit 7.5% in Q4 2025, up 1.1 percentage points on a year earlier, the highest fourth-quarter reading since Covid. Manufacturing and retail — hammered by tariff cuts and import competition — shrank 8.7% and 7% year-on-year, while mining (+9.9%) and agriculture (+8.4%) surged. Milei's approval rating slid to 36% in March (AtlasIntel), the lowest of his presidency. Investors still cheer falling inflation, relaxed currency controls and rebuilt FX reserves, but StoneX strategist Ramiro Blazquez Giomi warns the government will need to "give some air" to struggling industries before Milei's 2027 re-election bid. Milei wants to tilt the economy from manufacturing toward mining, energy, agriculture and tech — today only 12% of employment. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Ciara Nugent.
Mārtiņš Kazāks, governor of the Bank of Latvia and a member of the ECB's governing council, told the Financial Times that the European Central Bank has the "luxury" of not needing to rush to raise interest rates from their current 2% level, despite Middle East tensions. He spoke a week ahead of the ECB's April 30 rate-setting meeting, stressing that inflation expectations remain contained and that higher energy prices have so far produced limited knock-on effects on the rest of the economy. Kazāks argued that the "tough decisions we made in the past" to tackle the 2022 inflation surge gave today's ECB room to move deliberately, though "we will of course move if we see it is necessary". Investors are currently pricing in two quarter-point rate rises by the end of the year, taking the benchmark rate to 2.5%, according to Reuters data. They ascribe only a 15% chance to an April 30 hike. Oil prices have retreated from their post-Iran-war peak and European gas prices are nowhere near 2022 levels. Kazāks warned that "many of the wounds are still very fresh" from the war and "every week brings something new", justifying patience over pre-emption. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Olaf Storbeck.
Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, has told American allies that they must pay a "national security premium" for critical minerals sourced outside China, as Washington tries to break Beijing's stranglehold on supplies. Under the proposal, a club of trading partners — including Europe — would trade minerals at set minimum prices to protect investments in mining and processing, and outside producers such as China could face steep tariffs or other barriers aimed at preventing price undercutting. The scheme has already alarmed some allies, according to people familiar with private talks. Officials fear higher business costs and Chinese trade retaliation, at a time when wealthy economies are contending with energy-price shocks and inflation triggered by the war in Iran. Greer, drafting specific terms to share with partners, told the FT he blamed western "fixation on business costs" for the current dependence on China across key minerals. The proposal sits alongside a broader Trump administration effort to weaponise minimum-price mechanisms as industrial policy, similar to steel and aluminium floors in past cycles. Partners are watching for concrete dollar figures and coverage lists — which minerals, which countries, which tariff backstops. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Aime Williams.
Tesla has lifted its 2026 capital expenditure plan to $25bn — up from previous guidance of $20bn and roughly triple the $8.5bn invested in 2025 — as Elon Musk doubles down on self-driving taxis, electric "Semi" trucks, the Optimus humanoid robot and a giant new "Terafab" chip plant in Austin built jointly with SpaceX. Q1 revenue rose 16% to $22.4bn and net income climbed to $477mn from $409mn, the second-weakest quarterly profit figure in five years. Adjusted profits, stripping crypto losses and an 87% jump in stock-based pay to $803mn, were up 56% to $1.5bn. Tesla has retired its X SUV and S luxury sedan to focus on AI products. The robotaxi is still in pilot phase across a few Texas cities and Optimus mass production has slipped to July–August. Q1 capex jumped 67% to $2.5bn but Musk flagged a "very significant increase" for the rest of the year, citing the $660bn his Big Tech peers plan to spend on chips and data centres. Shares were down 1% in after-hours trade. Musk is also reshuffling his ecosystem: SpaceX has already absorbed xAI and the X platform and is preparing a June IPO at a $1.75tn valuation. Jefferies' Philippe Houchois warns the capex ramp could "fuel concern about funding" and revive the logic of an eventual Tesla-SpaceX merger. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Stephen Morris.
OpenAI has pledged up to $1.5bn to a new joint venture with a cluster of private equity firms, stepping up its push to corner the enterprise AI market ahead of rival Anthropic. The start-up will inject an initial $500mn of equity into the vehicle — internally called "DeployCo" — which will carry a $10bn valuation in a funding round expected to close in early May. OpenAI retains an option to add a further $1bn later. Investors including TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield and Goanna Capital will put in another $4bn. DeployCo will hire its own staff alongside OpenAI secondees and will charge clients — primarily the backing funds' portfolio companies — to embed AI into their operations. The venture sits alongside OpenAI's partnerships with McKinsey and Accenture as part of the assault on enterprise. The backers have been guaranteed a 17.5% annual return over five years, a floor OpenAI expects to beat, according to a person briefed on the plans. That is roughly the minimum a PE fund might target, and the guarantee reduces investor risk. In return, OpenAI secures "patient capital" tied to its distribution channel. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, George Hammond.
The Trump administration is in talks to inject up to $500mn into Spirit Airlines to help the low-cost carrier exit its second bankruptcy in nine months, Sujeet Indap and Christian Davies report for the Financial Times. The money would come as a senior loan with equity warrants that could eventually give the US government a majority stake — the latest in a string of Trump-era government stakes in private firms, alongside Intel and two rare-earth producers. Spirit's share price more than tripled on Wednesday after news of the talks leaked. Spirit entered its current Chapter 11 (US bankruptcy process) in August 2025 carrying nearly $3bn of financial debt, already having wiped out close to $1bn in a first bankruptcy exit in November 2024. The Iran war has pushed jet fuel from a projected $2.24 a gallon to nearly $5, currently about $4 — JPMorgan estimates the fuel shock adds $360mn to Spirit's 2026 costs alone. The carrier lost $2.76bn in 2025 despite cutting departures by a quarter and its fleet by almost 40%. Main creditors are Citadel Americas, Cyrus Capital, Ares and Pimco. Rivals and analysts are unhappy: Raymond James's Savanthi Syth says the bailout would keep "inefficient capacity" in the market, and United's Scott Kirby says commoditised-travel carriers should be "irate". Spirit employs more than 11,000 people in Trump's adopted home state of Florida. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Sujeet Indap and Christian Davies.
A March acid attack on 27-year-old activist Andrie Yunus — a vocal critic of expanding military powers under general-turned-president Prabowo Subianto — has intensified fears of democratic backsliding in Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy. Motorcycle riders threw a bottle of acid at Yunus's face as he drove home at night, leaving him with burns over 20% of his body and a sharp decline in vision in one eye. The attackers were identified as active-duty soldiers. The chief of the military intelligence agency where the soldiers work has stepped down, and four soldiers face trial this month in a military court. Rights groups say critics, campaigners and journalists have faced growing intimidation from government and military since Prabowo's 2024 election. "The attacks on activists and press freedom are indicators that our civic space is indeed shrinking, and this is affecting the quality of democracy," said Anis Hidayah of the National Human Rights Commission. The shock reverberates because Indonesia has spent a quarter-century building civilian oversight of the military after Suharto's three-decade dictatorship. Under Prabowo — a former Suharto-era general — reformasi-era firewalls are being tested, and military officers are returning to civilian roles. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, A. Anantha Lakshmi and Diana Mariska.
Nestlé's once-pioneering China business has collapsed into a spiral of distributor disputes, "channel stuffing" and leadership churn, according to a Financial Times investigation drawing on former and current executives. Greater China generated 5% of Nestlé's SFr89.5bn ($114.8bn) annual revenues last year, but sales in the region fell 10.2%, making it the Swiss group's worst-performing major market. Sales have declined in six of the past seven years, despite more than 30 factories and research facilities. Distributors including Feng Liqing, who has a 100-square-metre warehouse in Hebei full of unsold Nestlé stock, say the company pressed them to take on more inventory than the market could absorb to hit internal sales targets. Feng says she is owed about Rmb1mn ($147,000). Former executives describe the practice as an "easy way to achieve your bonus and show numbers" that ultimately alienates distributors and damages the brand. The China mess sits inside a wider governance crisis. CEO Mark Schneider was ousted in 2024, replaced by company veteran Laurent Freixe — who was fired a year later for an affair with a subordinate. Chair Paul Bulcke stepped down weeks later under shareholder criticism. Nestlé, founded 159 years ago, opened its first Shanghai office in 1908 and helped build China's modern dairy industry in the 1980s. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026, Madeleine Speed, Nian Liu and Thomas Hale.
China's electric vehicle revolution has reached an inflection point: last year, EVs including plug-in hybrids matched petrol cars in annual sales at 13.9 million units each, out of 27.8 million total, according to Shanghai-based consultancy Automobility. Five years earlier, petrol cars outsold EVs 23.9 million to just 1.3 million. The surge in lower-tier cities is now driven by BYD and Geely's cheaper plug-in hybrids and by a massive state-led charging build-out. China's central government has launched a three-year plan to lift public charging facilities from 21 million at the start of this year to 28 million by the end of next year — enough to support 80 million EVs, up from the more than 50 million already on the road. State media estimates the plan will generate about $28bn in equipment and construction spend. Research into range and charging speed is intensifying: CATL, the world's largest battery maker, this week unveiled cells powering a car for 1,500km on a single charge. Fuel price rises after the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February have added a new tailwind to EV demand, according to local dealers. Analysts including HSBC's Yuqian Ding expect lower-tier consumers to follow tier-one and tier-two trends but gravitate toward affordable local brands. Source: Financial Times, 22 April 2026.
The Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (SCAF) is not dead, but it is on probation. French and German mediators Laurent Collet-Billon and Frank Haun have been granted a ten-day extension, until 28 April, to try to restart the project, defence minister Catherine Vautrin announced. The programme — meant to replace the Rafale and the Eurofighter in 2040 — pits Dassault Aviation against Airbus Defence & Space in open conflict. A first study phase has already been funded to the tune of €3bn; the stakes now turn on opening a second phase budgeted in 2022 at roughly €8bn. The chief executives of Airbus DS and Dassault have not spoken for months. The mediators' reports, delivered on Saturday as scheduled, focused on three axes: intellectual property, workshare and export rights — all particularly difficult. In Germany, several voices — including Volker Mayer-Lay, air-force rapporteur for the conservative Bundestag group — considered the project all but buried over the weekend. In France, the DGA insisted mediation was continuing. Announced in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, SCAF has become, for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a point of principle: he does not want to be accused, as with the aborted EADS-BAE merger, of having torpedoed a European project. Source: Les Echos, 22 April 2026, Anne Drif.
Revolut is aiming for a valuation of up to $200bn when it lists its shares, according to investors briefed by the fintech, a flotation that would make founder Nik Storonsky one of the world's richest people. Executives have discussed an internal target range of $150bn to $200bn, although no formal target has been set and the company has indicated it will not list before 2028. Hitting the higher end would trigger an Elon Musk-style incentive award: Storonsky's stake rises sharply above $150bn and reaches around 40% of the company at $200bn, a package worth roughly $80bn. The London-based group has just secured a full UK banking licence after a four-year wait, allowing it to offer loans, and has applied for a US licence. Its November 2025 funding round valued it at $75bn, up from $45bn in 2024, with Nvidia joining as a backer. In the near term Revolut is preparing a secondary share sale in the second half of 2026 to let early backers - including Balderton Capital and Index Ventures - cash out part of their holdings at a valuation above $100bn. Pre-tax profits rose 57% to £1.7bn last year on £4.5bn of revenue, powered by a 67% jump in premium-subscription income. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Laith Al-Khalaf and Arash Massoudi.
John Ternus, a 50-year-old hardware engineer and 25-year Apple veteran, will take over as CEO of the $4tn company in September, at a moment when Apple is battling doubts over its position in artificial intelligence and confronting a more fragile global supply chain. Ternus has been the face of recent hardware bets including the "skinny" iPhone Air, the MacBook Neo (Apple's entry into affordable laptops) and the Vision Pro headset - the iPhone Air and Vision Pro both disappointed commercially. He replaces Tim Cook, continuing a tradition of promoting from within. Ternus beat more recognisable internal candidates including software head Craig Federighi and marketing chief Greg Joswiak. Cook's closest lieutenant Jeff Williams left Apple in November 2025 and later joined Disney's board. Alongside the succession, long-time silicon leader Johny Srouji was promoted to chief hardware officer, and the board has refreshed the top bench with CFO Kevan Parekh, operations chief Sabih Khan, general counsel Jennifer Newstead and AI chief Amar Subramanya. Ternus is best known for leading Apple's 2020 shift away from Intel chips to in-house silicon. He now also oversees software design teams as the company prepares to unveil a revamped Siri assistant, widely seen as Apple's most visible test of its ability to catch up in generative AI. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Michael Acton.
Sotheby's has struck a deal with US private capital firm KKR to borrow up to $100mn secured against the fees clients owe it on auction purchases. The facility, agreed in February, pays an interest rate of over 8% and is repayable in 2029. It has not yet been drawn down. The auction house plans to use the money to advance proceeds to sellers soon after a sale - Sotheby's standard terms are to pay sellers 45 days later - and for general working-capital needs. The deal adds another layer of debt seven years after billionaire Patrick Drahi's leveraged buyout of Sotheby's. The auction house now has more than $1bn of debt across public bonds and bank facilities. After years of losses and a lacklustre art market, 2025 swung to a $53mn pre-tax profit (vs a $190mn loss the year before). Moody's has upgraded its outlook to positive and S&P to stable, but the credit ratings remain junk at B3 and B-minus. Last week Sotheby's also priced an $825mn bond offering at a yield of roughly 8.5%, toward the higher end of price discussions. Separately, the house has been offering 7% interest to sellers willing to delay being paid out - another sign of how tight the cash-flow situation remains. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Euan Healy, Josh Spero and Antoine Gara.
Home Depot, the $350bn US home-improvement giant, is spending billions of dollars to attract more professional contractors and builders as high interest rates and a frozen housing market weigh on do-it-yourself shoppers. A series of deals has added wholesale distributors of roofing shingles, drywall and HVAC equipment to the group. CEO Ted Decker told the FT that with housing turnover flat and no growth in new construction, "our growth has to come from share capture right now". Professionals account for about 9mn customers and roughly $90bn of Home Depot's $165bn in annual sales - more than half - but executives say the total pro market is worth $700bn, and "we have the right to win all" of it, per CFO Richard McPhail. In 2024 Home Depot acquired roofing-and-landscaping distributor SRS Distribution for $18.3bn, and added drywall and steel-framing specialist GMS for $5.5bn last year. SRS has 1,200 locations and is opening 40 to 50 more a year. Home Depot is also opening 17 flatbed distribution centres to ship products directly to job sites. The cost of a typical remodelling project has risen 45% since 2019. Executives forecast total sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5% in 2026, well below pre-pandemic averages. Rivals are also consolidating: Lowe's paid $8.8bn for Foundation Building Materials last year; Brad Jacobs's QXO just bought insulation group TopBuild for $17bn. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Gregory Meyer.
Private capital firm EQT and Canadian pension fund Omers have offered to increase their investment in German broadband provider Deutsche Glasfaser to nearly €5bn, to avoid losing control of the heavily indebted business to its lenders. The two investors have already put €4bn into Glasfaser; they would add about €850mn in preferred equity, with lenders injecting €400mn of new super-senior debt, according to four people familiar with the matter. They were forced to act after failing to find another backer to take a stake in the group, which carries over €7bn of gross debt. EQT and Omers bought Glasfaser from KKR in 2020 for €2.8bn, with EQT taking 51% and Omers the rest. A €1.7bn refinancing proposed in December was rejected by creditors, who had offered to take over the company. The refinancing would shift more debt to the holding-company level. Founded in 2011, Glasfaser is Germany's second-largest fibre broadband provider and serves more than 2.6mn homes, but has struggled to attract customers away from rivals, cutting its coverage goal from 6mn homes to 3.2mn by 2032. Both investors have faced pain elsewhere: EQT handed its French nursing-home group Colisée to lenders last year over a €1.8bn debt pile, and Omers wrote off its 31% stake in UK's Thames Water in 2024. "A big cleansing moment for the company, but they are not out of the woods yet", said James Ratzer of New Street Research. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Kieran Smith, Daniel Thomas and Ivan Levingston.
Thales, the French electronics group, saw a dramatic surge in defence order intake in the first quarter of 2026, with air and anti-missile defence orders up 71% to more than €2.2bn. Total group order intake climbed 23% to over €4.6bn, while Q1 revenue rose 7.2% to €5.3bn, beating expectations. The boom was driven by demand for Thales's SAMP/T air defence system in Europe and the Middle East, including a near-€8bn Danish contract that anchors Thales's "European iron dome" initiative, developed with France and Italy as an alternative to Germany's US-Patriot-based plan. Each SAMP/T battery comprises 48 missiles for a combined value of €500mn, with 50% of the value coming from the Thales-supplied radar and command system, and 10% from each missile. Discussions are ongoing with Switzerland, Turkey and Estonia - with the Estonian evaluation driven by delayed US Patriot deliveries as Washington prioritises its own Iran-war needs. Thales also signed a defence telecom satellite contract with Luxembourg and teamed with Airbus and Radmor for a similar Polish satellite. The one weak spot: cyber and digital orders fell 7%, the fourth consecutive quarterly decline. Aerospace order intake also slipped 1%. Despite the strong Q1, Thales confirmed rather than raised its 2026 targets (6-7% revenue growth to €23.3-23.6bn). Shares fell more than 3% at Tuesday's open as markets judged the cyber weakness more important than the defence surge. Source: Les Echos, 21 April 2026, Anne Drif.
Airbus has acquired Quarkslab, a French offensive-and-defensive cyber specialist, its third cyber-defence acquisition after buying German firm Infodas in 2024 and British encryption specialist Ultra last month. The deal expands Airbus's cyber workforce for the defence and intelligence sectors to 1,600 people, adding 300 new experts from Quarkslab. The acquisition is led by Alix Carmona, head of cybersecurity at Airbus Defence and Space. Quarkslab, founded by former Airbus engineer Frédéric Raynal, specialises in code obfuscation - techniques that turn software into "black boxes" to counter AI-driven intrusions - and has been selected by Google to test product vulnerabilities. Airbus already integrates Quarkslab's Qshield product into its helicopters and satellites to prevent reverse engineering and protect intellectual property. The deal comes three years after Airbus tried and failed to acquire Atos's defence cyber business. Airbus's earlier acquisition of Ultra, from UK aeronautics group Cobham, brings high-level encryption and key management used across the Five Eyes alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and NATO, including air-ground communications encryption. Infodas, bought in 2024 with its 250 experts, secures communication gateways between security levels in armed forces (e.g. restricted vs secret). It was intended to support pan-European programmes like SCAF (the Franco-German-Spanish fighter). Airbus also secures France's RIFAN and Syracuse defence satellite communications systems, and contributes to Europe's Iris2 constellation. Source: Les Echos, 21 April 2026, Anne Drif.
Almost two years into his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer has made his boldest public pivot to Europe yet, telling the nation that "Brexit did deep damage to our economy" and promising a "more ambitious" rapprochement. But diplomats and analysts warn the window may have already closed: the package of measures to be agreed at July's EU-UK summit will, by the government's own estimate, lift UK GDP by just 0.3% over the next decade and a half - a fraction of the 4% Brexit hit estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility (or 8%, per a US study cited by Chancellor Rachel Reeves). The summit deal so far covers removing food-and-drink export checks and relinking EU and UK carbon pricing. A youth mobility scheme for 18-to-30-year-olds is still under negotiation. EU officials say Labour's "reset" is hampered by sticking to manifesto red lines that rule out a customs union or single market rejoin - "like old wine in new bottles", one diplomat said. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee criticised the reset as lacking "direction, definition and drive". Brussels has little incentive to move faster: "We have a list of 10 priorities that are far higher," said one EU diplomat. Nigel Farage's Reform UK, topping the polls, has vowed to tear up any reset. The first 18 months of talks have "sapped confidence on both sides", with Labour's hoped-for quick wins - like restoring access for touring musicians - rebuffed as "cherry-picking". Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Peter Foster, George Parker and Andy Bounds.
Donald Trump extended the US ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday, one day before its scheduled expiry, at the request of Pakistan and because Iran's government was, in his words, "seriously fractured". The US president wrote on Truth Social that he was holding back from another attack "until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal". Vice-president JD Vance had been due to travel to Pakistan for talks, but cancelled after the ceasefire move. Brent crude rose almost 6% to more than $100 a barrel earlier in the day as traders braced for the negotiations to collapse, before easing back to around $99.15 (up about 4%). Trump said the US would keep its blockade of Iranian ships trying to exit the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway Tehran has effectively shut since the start of the war, now in its eighth week. The Pentagon is deploying another carrier strike group, the largest US military build-up in the Middle East since 2003. Earlier negotiations in Islamabad, involving Vance, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, ran 21 hours without a breakthrough. Iran's Tasnim news agency said messages exchanged this week had produced "no meaningful progress", and Iran's ambassador to the UN accused the US of piracy after it seized an Iranian vessel off Oman. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Abigail Hauslohner and Lauren Fedor.
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire code-editing start-up Cursor (parent company Anysphere) for $60bn, months before Elon Musk's rocket maker targets a record-breaking IPO. If SpaceX walks away, it pays a $10bn termination fee — among the largest in history. Cursor was valued at $29bn in a November funding round and its annualised revenue surpassed $2bn earlier this year, powered by AI coding tools for software engineers. The deal fits Musk's consolidation spree. He merged X with xAI last March, then folded both into SpaceX in February at a $1.25tn valuation. SpaceX's IPO is expected to value the group at $1.75tn, the largest flotation ever. The purchase is aimed at helping xAI catch up with AI rivals whose models have outstripped its own. xAI lost $6.4bn in 2025 (up from $1.56bn in 2024), while Starlink's operating profit reached $4.42bn (up from $2bn). Cursor's revenue has come under pressure as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google release their own coding models; its latest Composer model is built on top of an open-source model from China's Moonshot AI. Cursor would gain access to SpaceX's compute, including the Colossus supercomputer built in 122 days. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, George Hammond and Stephen Morris.
Prolonged disruption to the Strait of Hormuz threatens a global food shock, leading agricultural traders warned at the FT Commodities Summit. Iran's closure of the strait and the US naval blockade have rerouted oil tankers through the Panama Canal, where queue times have stretched to around 40 days and oil tanker operators are paying millions of dollars to jump the line. Grain and other bulk shipments face rising freight costs and delays; some routes have already seen shipping rates rise 50 to 60%, according to Clarksons' Louisa Follis. Pablo Galante Escobar told the summit that sustained disruption will force substitution across energy and food markets, requiring "significantly higher prices to incentivise new sources of supply" or new demand replacement. Higher bunker-fuel costs are forcing ships to slow down, cutting effective capacity in dry-bulk markets — "introducing inefficiency to the system overall", per Follis. The risk, traders argue, is that the market has not priced a multi-quarter disruption. Vijay Chakravarthy, chief risk officer at Louis Dreyfus, said investors assumed a short war: "Nobody is prepared for it." Even another six months of disruption could damage the 2027 crop cycle via fertiliser supply and farmer cash-flow stress. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026.
Deutsche Telekom is considering a full merger with its American arm T-Mobile US, which would create one of the world's largest telecoms groups and strengthen its hand in future dealmaking, according to people briefed on the discussions. Under the plan, a new holding company would make an all-stock bid for shares of both existing operations, with Deutsche Telekom already the largest shareholder in T-Mobile US with a 53% stake. The holding company is likely to be headquartered in a European country other than Germany, with potential dual US and European listings. Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telecoms group with a market capitalisation above €142bn, has relied heavily on the growth of T-Mobile US, which merged with Sprint in 2020. T-Mobile US has a market value of $215bn and now competes directly with Verizon and AT&T. Talks are at a preliminary stage and both companies declined to comment on speculation. Any transaction would require German and US political and regulatory approval: the German government owns roughly 14% of Deutsche Telekom, and state development bank KfW controls a similar stake. CEO Tim Höttges, who also chairs T-Mobile US, has long highlighted the more consolidated US market as more favourable to operators. Source: Financial Times, 21 April 2026, Kieran Smith and Ivan Levingston.
Facing a fuel-price surge driven by the Middle East war, Sébastien Lecornu's government announced Tuesday evening an expanded package of aid: €170m per month, up from €70m under the previous scheme. After farmers and fishermen, the prime minister is extending the mechanism to small construction firms (BTP) and to roughly 3 million lower-income high-mileage workers including care assistants. For fishermen, state aid previously reached 20 cents per litre of non-road diesel (GNR); it should rise to 30–35 cents per litre from May, subject to European Commission approval. For farmers, the current €20m envelope is being multiplied by four, equivalent to about 15 cents per litre of GNR consumed. Support for hauliers — introduced last month at 20 cents per litre — will be extended into May. Transport minister Philippe Tabarot has opened talks with taxi and ride-hail (VTC) representatives, who may receive further measures. April's payments are expected to be disbursed in May. Source: Les Echos, 21 April 2026, Hortense Goulard.
Higher-education minister Philippe Baptiste announced on Monday evening in Le Parisien a "Choose France for Higher Education" plan — act two of the 2018 "Bienvenue en France" scheme initiated by then-prime minister Edouard Philippe. From the 2026 academic year, tuition fees for most non-EU foreign students will jump: €2,895 for an undergraduate degree and €3,941 for a master's, compared with the standard French rates of €178 and €254 respectively. The 2018 rules had been sidestepped — only around 10 universities out of 78 (La Rochelle, Le Havre, Grenoble Alpes, Paris Panthéon-Assas) fully applied differentiated fees — but mass exemptions will no longer be allowed. "Differentiated fees are the rule, exemption the exception," Baptiste insists. Each university can exempt up to 10% of non-EU students, and top performers will be eligible for a French government scholarship. Within two to three years the reform is expected to generate about €250m per year for universities, seen as badly needed in a tight budget context. The government also wants to prioritise science and engineering to support reindustrialisation. The reform will apply by decree to new arrivals and to students changing cycle, excluding scholarship holders. Source: Les Echos, 21 April 2026, Marie-Christine Corbier.
Oliver Blume, Volkswagen's chief executive, announced Tuesday in Manager Magazin that the group was working on a further cut of "up to one million additional units of capacity" to align with world-market realities — without specifying countries or sites. The group, which still sold 11 million vehicles in 2019, has been running a large adaptation plan for more than a year to deal with weakening European demand and collapsing sales in China. In China, still its largest market, Volkswagen has already removed one million units of local production capacity. In Europe, the carmaker must cut nearly 700,000 vehicles of German capacity — it closed the Dresden plant at the end of 2025, a first in 90 years of existence. Audi also shut a plant in Brussels. Last month, management announced 50,000 job cuts in Germany, also affecting Audi and Porsche. Volkswagen is not alone: according to Inovev, 13.7 million vehicles were built in Europe (UK included) last year, down from 17.5 million in 2019. Stellantis announced last week the end of car production at Poissy. Source: Les Echos, 21 April 2026, Lionel Steinmann.
Anthropic has committed to spend more than $100bn on chips and computing power from Amazon, its biggest deal yet to secure AI capacity after running into supply constraints. The $380bn lab will receive up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity to train and run its Claude model over the next decade, with close to a fifth arriving this year. Amazon will invest $5bn immediately into Anthropic at current valuation and up to $20bn more over time, on top of $8bn already invested since 2023. Anthropic's annualised revenue has surged from $9bn at the end of last year to more than $30bn, with coding tool Claude Code straining capacity and causing outages during peak hours. Earlier this month Anthropic signed with Google and Broadcom for roughly another 5 GW. At current prices $100bn buys only about 2 GW, but the cost of compute is expected to keep falling over the decade of the deal. The agreement cements a pattern of circular investments between AI labs and cloud suppliers: the partner invests in the lab, the lab buys its chips. Amazon is building Project Rainier, a 2.4 GW campus in New Carlisle, Indiana, and wants to anchor Anthropic on its Trainium chip family as a rival to Nvidia's GPUs. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, George Hammond and Rafe Rosner-Uddin.
Kevin Warsh, 56, begins his Senate banking committee confirmation hearings on Tuesday as Donald Trump's nominee to chair the US Federal Reserve. Warsh — a former Fed governor (the youngest ever when appointed in 2006), Morgan Stanley banker and son-in-law of Republican megadonor Ronald Lauder — lost the job to Jay Powell eight years ago and has spent 15 years criticising the institution from the outside. He plans big changes: cutting the Fed's $6.7tn balance sheet, scrapping the quarterly "dot plots" (anonymised rate-path forecasts from the 19 policymakers) and curbing Fed officials' media exposure. Trump wants deep rate cuts; Warsh has a long hawkish paper trail but has recently adopted the Greenspan-era argument that an AI productivity boom will enable steep easing. Fed funds futures now price less than a 50 per cent chance of a single 25 basis-point cut in 2026 after the Iran war reignited inflation. Chris Waller — who lost the chair race to Warsh — has publicly called balance-sheet shrinkage "inefficient" and "stupid", warning it could lift long-term Treasury yields and mortgage rates. Senate Democrats have already flagged roughly $100mn of "undisclosed" Warsh assets. Warsh's confirmation is blocked by Republican senator Thom Tillis until the criminal probe of Powell by US attorney Jeanine Pirro is dropped. Powell's term ends 15 May; he says he will stay on as pro tem chair until Warsh gets the 51 Republican votes needed to win. Trump has threatened to fire Powell if he does not leave "on time". Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Claire Jones and Amelia Pollard.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Commerzbank have publicly criticised UniCredit, accusing the Italian bank of "hostile" tactics in its €35bn bid to take over the Frankfurt-based lender. UniCredit chief executive Andrea Orcel on Monday unveiled a new business plan for Commerzbank, arguing it has "consistently underperformed" and that a combined group could lift net income to about €5.1bn in 2028, well above current projections. Commerzbank formally rejected the approach, calling it "misleading" and "a speculative attempt to dismantle Commerzbank's successful business model". Merz said at a banking-association event in Berlin that while Europe needs large lenders, "this does not mean that every type of takeover is welcome in Germany", rejecting "aggressive" methods. UniCredit is already Commerzbank's largest single shareholder after building a stake in 2024, but has been blocked from a full takeover by German government opposition. Its most recent €35bn offer was tabled last month and rejected. Orcel argued the deal would be "an in-market merger of two complementary banks that have tried to come together for 25 years", delivering pan-European cost synergies above what purely domestic deals could achieve. UniCredit has projected up to 7,000 job cuts. Commerzbank shares rose 1.2% in Frankfurt; UniCredit fell 3% in Milan. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, Simon Foy and Florian Müller.
Pablo Hernández de Cos — former Bank of Spain governor and, since 2025, general manager of the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS, the central banks' central bank) — is the most qualified candidate to succeed Christine Lagarde as ECB president, according to a poll of 20 monetary policy experts by London-based think-tank OMFIF. He scored an average mark of 1.77 (1 = highest, 5 = lowest) across nine dimensions including crisis management, leadership and consensus building, narrowly ahead of Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel (1.9), former Dutch central bank chief Klaas Knot (1.92) and outgoing French governor François Villeroy de Galhau (1.94). ECB board member Isabel Schnabel came fifth at 2.57. Lagarde's eight-year term expires only in October 2027, but "a soft lobbying process has already started", OMFIF vice-chair John Orchard told the FT, suggesting a decision could come earlier. The FT reported in February that Lagarde expected to resign early so outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz could fill the role ahead of the pivotal 2027 French presidential election. The renewed inflation risk from the Iran war may derail that timing — Lagarde told Bloomberg TV: "When there [are] big clouds on the horizon, the captain does not leave the ship." Hernández de Cos is seen as a centrist with a slight dovish tilt; Nagel and Knot are moderate hawks. Spain and Germany have never held the top job in the ECB's 27-year history, but the European Commission is already run by a German (Ursula von der Leyen), which works against Nagel. Late compromise candidates have often emerged in past races — Lagarde's own 2019 nomination surprised observers. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Olaf Storbeck.
Tokio Marine, Japan's largest listed insurer, has revealed that its tie-up with Berkshire Hathaway is designed to produce a pipeline of billion-dollar insurance acquisitions. Berkshire took a 2.5% stake in Tokio Marine last month for ¥287.4bn (about $1.8bn) and agreed to reinsure an undisclosed portion of Tokio Marine's total risk, capping its potential stake at 10% for now. "M&A is key," Tokio Marine head of corporate planning Kenichi Sakakibara told the FT. The Japanese group has completed five large international property-and-casualty deals worth roughly $19bn since 2008, including Philadelphia Consolidated ($4.7bn, 2008), HCC Insurance ($7.5bn, 2015) and Privilege Underwriters ($3.1bn, 2019). Berkshire has capital but "some constraints" in integrating acquired insurers globally; Tokio Marine offers the operational expertise. The structure resembles Berkshire's 2015 arrangement with Insurance Australia Group, recently extended to 2029, where "a significant portion" of National Indemnity's reinsurance premiums now come from the partnership. The deal matters because Berkshire successor Greg Abel has warned that private-capital inflows into insurance markets are eroding returns, prompting Berkshire units to pull back from new policies. Berkshire priced a ¥272bn ($1.7bn) yen bond on Friday to fund the investment. The three big Japanese non-life insurers control about 90% of their home market. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, David Keohane, Harry Dempsey and Eric Platt.
Jeff Bezos is close to a $10bn fundraising deal at a $38bn valuation for Project Prometheus, his AI lab focused on systems that understand the physical world and can transform engineering and manufacturing. The round extends an initial $6.2bn raised in November 2025 and includes JPMorgan and BlackRock among new investors. Bezos himself is among the initial investors. The venture is the first operational role the Amazon founder has taken since stepping down as CEO in 2021. Alongside the lab, Prometheus is raising tens of billions of dollars for a separate holding company that aims to acquire equity stakes in businesses it expects to be disrupted by the technology it builds - engineering, architecture and design companies in particular. The holding would have access to portfolio-company data to train Prometheus's AI systems, creating a vertically integrated data-and-deployment flywheel. Prometheus is based in San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich, led by Bezos and co-CEO Vikram Bajaj. It has hired hundreds of staff, including AI scientists, industrial experts, and infrastructure engineers. Earlier this month the FT reported that Prometheus poached Kyle Kosic, a former OpenAI employee and xAI co-founder who led Musk's Colossus supercomputer project, to work on compute infrastructure. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Cristina Criddle and George Hammond.
Sefe — the former Gazprom Germania that Berlin seized after Russia's 2022 assault on Ukraine — is preparing its first privatisation step. Chief executive Egbert Laege told the FT the company will raise €1.5bn–€2bn in a capital increase (issuing new shares to dilute the German government's current 100 per cent stake) and use the proceeds to expand its regulated infrastructure assets. Sefe, short for Securing Energy for Europe, owns gas storage, pipelines and a UK-based trading arm previously known as Gazprom Marketing & Trading. The capital increase will be the first dilution of the state's full ownership. Under European Commission rules, Berlin must sell down at least 75 per cent of its stake by the end of 2028. Laege said the Iran war had accelerated the privatisation rationale by highlighting the value of reliable, non-Russian gas suppliers to Europe — while also pushing gas prices higher. Subsequent steps could include further sell-offs or an IPO, though Laege said an IPO in the short window may be "a bit difficult". The company's role in German energy security may limit which investors Berlin will accept. Sefe intends to keep its regulated infrastructure arm and trading arm together, rebuffing speculation it might be broken up. A possible merger with Uniper (the gas importer Berlin nationalised in 2022 after Russia cut supplies) has been studied but Laege is working on the assumption of a standalone process. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Verity Ratcliffe.
Europe's flagship joint armament programmes are unravelling one after another, to the benefit of US suppliers. The SCAF (future combat air system), led by France, Germany and Spain through Dassault, Airbus and Indra, is nearing its end: the 18 April deadline for reconciliation between Éric Trappier (Dassault) and his German Airbus counterpart has been pushed out, and both Berlin and Madrid are tilting towards the American F-35. Same story for the MGCS (the Franco-German future main battle tank), where the industrial split and the schedule have stalled: France has already drawn up an internal plan to replace its Leclerc tank alone by 2037 if needed. The Eurodrone (Airbus, Dassault, Leonardo) is running eight years late; only about fifteen units have been ordered to date, against hundreds of US MQ-9 Reapers already in service. The figures confirm the shift. According to the European Defence Agency (EDA), more than 60 per cent of armament purchases by the 27 member states between February 2022 and June 2023 were made outside the EU, and 63 per cent from US manufacturers. Total orders over that period top €100bn, against €52bn in all of 2021. On the order books, the US F-35 dominates — Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway and the Czech Republic are customers — while the French Rafale sells mostly outside Europe (India, UAE, Greece, Croatia, Indonesia, Egypt, Serbia). Raytheon's Patriot and Lockheed Martin's THAAD have captured most European air-defence demand, pushing the Franco-Italian SAMP/T aside. Several causes explain this swing. US delivery times — 18 to 36 months for an F-35 vs 5 to 7 years for a Rafale in wartime — remain decisive. NATO interoperability, the maturity of already-serial-produced systems, and faster integration into allied command chains also matter. European joint programmes, by contrast, suffer from fragmented governance: each state demands its industrial share, which stretches schedules and lifts costs. France has been pushing since 2017 for a European defence industrial and technology base (EDITB); the facts show that battle is, for now, largely lost. Source: Les Echos, 20 April 2026, Anne Drif.
France's car industry has slipped to 5th place in Europe by production volume. In 2025, French plants assembled roughly 986,000 cars, up 15.5 per cent year-on-year on a post-crisis rebound but still well short of the 3.7 million produced in 2002. France is now overtaken by Germany (4.03 million), Spain (1.77 million), the Czech Republic (1.44 million) and Slovakia (1.07 million). Its share of European car production has fallen to about 9 per cent, from 11 per cent in 2013. The drivers are structural. French carmakers — Stellantis (PSA–FCA) and Renault — have steadily offshored small-car assembly, the historic pride of the French industrial base, to Spain, Morocco, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where labour and energy are significantly cheaper. The upmarket end has stayed elsewhere: Renault's electric R5, a 2024–2025 commercial success, is built in Douai, but the Peugeot 208 is assembled in Slovakia, the Citroën C3 in Slovakia and Trnava. The closure of the Stellantis Poissy plant, to be announced in the coming days, symbolises the shift. The site, which makes the DS3 and DS4, will not be replaced by a new model. The picture is not uniformly bleak. Renault's electric R5 and R4 are meeting European demand, and France remains both groups' R&D and design headquarters. But the underlying trend is clear: France has become a distribution market more than a production country. Rebalancing would require either a marked cut in production costs, a durable technological edge (electric, hydrogen, software), or a coordinated EU industrial policy with Germany. All three are missing. Source: Les Echos, 20 April 2026, Julien Dupont-Calbo et al.
Oil markets face more turbulence as Middle East tensions collide with a seasonal dip in demand, Gary Pedersen, the new head of Gunvor, told the FT. The International Energy Agency expects global demand to drop by 1.5mn barrels a day in the second quarter - the biggest fall since the Covid-19 pandemic - while OPEC projects a more modest 500,000 b/d decline. Pedersen warned that prices could be driven more by headlines than by underlying supply and demand during April to June. Gunvor, the world's fourth-largest independent oil trader, generated more than $1.6bn of gross profits in Q1 2026 - matching its entire 2025 total. Pedersen, who took over following a management buyout in December, said the firm had prepared for the Iran conflict by reviewing risk exposures ahead of the war and has traded throughout, including buying "significant volumes" released from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Gunvor has focused on moving physical oil rather than derivatives, to minimise "stress risk" from extreme price swings. The company is emerging from a turbulent period in which Washington labelled it a "Kremlin puppet" and blocked it from acquiring overseas assets from Russia's Lukoil, culminating in the departure of owner Torbjörn Törnqvist and the management buyout. The US is now Gunvor's main focus, holding more than $4bn of assets and accounting for roughly a third of its trading. Pedersen has signalled interest in buying refining assets. The buyout left him and partners owing several billion dollars to Törnqvist, tied to his 86% stake in the $6bn company. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Malcolm Moore.
France and Germany have drafted separate proposals that would grant Ukraine only "symbolic" benefits in a pre-accession phase to EU membership, falling short of Kyiv's hopes of fast-track entry following any peace deal with Russia. Germany is pushing for "associate membership" status - a seat at ministerial and leaders' meetings, but no voting rights and "no automatic application" of the EU budget. France calls its version "integrated state status", under which access to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and European cohesion funds would be "postponed to a post-accession phase". President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued for accession as early as 2027, but the EU's biggest members have resisted Commission proposals that would rip up the existing slow accession process. The CAP and regional funds together make up about two-thirds of the EU budget, and France requires a referendum for each new member - a politically risky discussion ahead of next year's French presidential election, with far-right frontrunners already eyeing farmers' concerns. A Ukrainian official called the proposals "shadow membership". One important concession: the EU's mutual defence clause (Article 42.7) "could be made de facto applicable through a mere political declaration", per the German paper - a meaningful security boost with NATO membership off the table. Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who had vetoed opening membership talks with Ukraine, was recently defeated in elections, unblocking some process but not changing the fundamental reluctance of France and Germany. Source: Financial Times, 20 April 2026, Paola Tamma, Henry Foy and Christopher Miller.
Donald Trump said on Sunday that the US guided missile destroyer USS Spruance had seized the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska in the Gulf of Oman after it tried to breach the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. The destroyer fired on the vessel, "blowing a hole" in its engine room, before troops from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit boarded it. Washington had already placed Touska under Treasury sanctions. Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters called the intervention "maritime piracy" and vowed retaliation. Oil surged on the news. Brent crude (the international benchmark) climbed as much as 7.9 per cent to $97.50 a barrel before easing back to $95.40, up almost 6 per cent. WTI (the US benchmark) rose 6 per cent to $89.01. S&P 500 futures fell 0.6 per cent and the Stoxx Europe 600 futures 1 per cent. Trump simultaneously threatened to knock out "every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran" if Tehran refuses a deal, raising fresh concerns about potential war crimes. He said US forces would be ready to board Iranian ships "even as far east as the Pacific Ocean". Planned talks in Pakistan — with envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — look uncertain: Iran's Tasnim News Agency said Tehran will not send negotiators while the blockade stands. Futures now imply less than a 50 per cent chance of a single quarter-point Fed rate cut this year, and an NBC poll shows two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the war. Source: Financial Times, 19 April 2026, James Politi, Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Michael Acton.
Brad Jacobs' QXO has struck a $17bn cash-and-stock deal to buy US insulation distributor TopBuild, valuing TopBuild at $505 per share — a 23 per cent premium to its Friday close. Forty-five per cent of the consideration is cash, the rest stock. The combined group will have more than $18bn in annual revenue and become the second-largest publicly traded building products distributor in North America, pairing TopBuild's dominant insulation franchise with QXO's strength in roofing and waterproofing. The deal is Jacobs' latest bolt-on in a fast-moving roll-up. He created QXO in late 2023 with the explicit goal of building a $50bn giant in the fragmented building products sector, repeating the playbook that built United Rentals and XPO Logistics. In 2025 QXO bought Beacon Roofing Supply for $11bn, and earlier this year Kodiak for $2.25bn. Earlier in 2026 QXO raised $3.75bn of fresh equity — investors included Apollo, Singapore's Temasek and Affinity Partners, the private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner — to fund further deals. Jacobs says the TopBuild fit adds scale and exposure to large, complex projects "like data centres". Jacobs' activity is accelerating consolidation in US building products. Home Depot bought GMS for $5.5bn last summer and SRS Distribution for $18.25bn in 2024. Source: Financial Times, 19 April 2026, Oliver Barnes and Julia Rock.
Russia-friendly former Bulgarian president Rumen Radev is on course to win Bulgaria's parliamentary elections outright, in a result that could stabilise the country's politics after eight snap votes in five years but push the EU and Nato member closer to Moscow. His leftist Progressive Bulgaria (PB) bloc is projected to take more than 43 per cent of the vote and 129 of 240 seats, according to independent results from pollster AlphaResearch. Official final results are due Monday. Radev stepped down as president in January to run for prime minister. The centre-right GERB party of former premier Boyko Borisov is projected to win only 40 seats, its junior partner — the DPS of US- and UK-sanctioned oligarch Delyan Peevski — 23 seats. The liberal We Continue the Change (PP-DB) is on 36 seats; far-right pro-Russia Revival falls to 12 (from 33). Together with PP-DB, PB would hold the constitutional supermajority needed to overhaul the judiciary in one of the EU's most corrupt countries. Radev focused on anti-corruption and has refused coalition talks with Borisov or Peevski. Radev has been reluctant to condemn Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, criticised EU sanctions, tried to stop Bulgaria's Eurozone accession (which took effect this January) and said he wants to "restore relations with Russia". Valérie Hayer of Renew Europe called him "Putin's Trojan horse". Analysts note, however, that Bulgaria's strong reliance on EU funds, pro-European opposition in parliament and a split electorate make a full Orbán-style turn toward Moscow unlikely. Population: just under 6.7mn. Source: Financial Times, 19 April 2026, Marton Dunai.
On Thursday 16 April in the evening, Altice France accepted an offer from a consortium grouping Orange, Bouygues Telecom and Iliad to buy SFR for €20.35bn. The deal — signed on DocuSign, no champagne — ends fourteen years of French telecoms warfare since Free entered mobile in 2012 and twelve years after Patrick Drahi acquired SFR. The market drops from four to three operators. Drahi followed negotiations from Tel-Aviv, "blocked by the war in the Middle East": he gave the green light at 4 pm, the press release was finalised by 8 pm. Talks nearly collapsed twice. A first offer of €17bn landed on 14 October and was rejected by Drahi. After two months of frozen ground, both sides gave way, and due diligence started in early January with 400 to 500 people mobilised in the first weeks of 2026. A revised offer came in early April, then an improved version on Friday 10 April. By Tuesday evening everyone was ready to sign. By Wednesday morning "the mood had suddenly cooled" and "the ghost of 2016 had resurfaced" — a reference to the failure of the "Jardiland" operation that, ten years earlier, had seen Orange try and fail to buy Bouygues Telecom. Buyers were at €17bn, Drahi wanted €23bn; the deal was struck at just over €20bn. Each side worked under a code name: "Rainbow" at Altice, "Mont-Blanc" at Bouygues, "Mosaïque" at Iliad, "Voltaire" at Orange. On the Orange side, Christel Heydemann — an École polytechnique graduate like Drahi — played a key role, advised by Laurence Hainault (Evercore). At Iliad, CEO Thomas Reynaud and new CFO Thomas Kienzi were backed by Perella Weinberg (Gilles Tré-Hardy) and Bredin Prat (Florence Haas). Lawyers now have until 15 May to produce the legal documentation; Drahi will then need to wind down his other European telecoms assets and deleverage in the United States. Source: Les Echos, 19 April 2026, Thomas Pontiroli, Romain Gueugneau, Mehdi Laghrari and David Barroux.
Airbnb is adding independent hotels to its platform, as the company synonymous with short-term lets turns to traditional accommodation to revive growth. A pilot now lets users in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Madrid pick from a range of boutique hotels alongside private homes. The San Francisco-based group is undercutting the fees charged by Booking.com and Expedia, with Jesse Stein — appointed Airbnb's first head of hotels in January — saying the company is offering a "very competitive commission structure ... relative to the other players in the space". Two pressures sit behind the move. First, Airbnb wants business travellers, who prefer the predictability of hotels: global business travel spending reached $1.6tn in 2025 according to the Global Business Travel Association. Second, regulation is biting: New York's 2023 rules curtailed short-term tourist rentals, and Airbnb said in its November earnings call that it had been unable to convert millions of New York searches into sales. The growth picture is the trigger — revenues rose just 10 per cent in 2025, the slowest pace since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the share price is up only 2 per cent since the December 2020 listing of the $85bn business. CEO Brian Chesky said in September he was "not happy" with growth and planned "to layer on many businesses" to expand faster. Competition will be hard. Bernstein analyst Richard Clarke flagged the difficulty of breaking into the hotel reservations market dominated by Booking.com and Expedia. Hilton, Marriott and InterContinental Hotels Group are themselves running "soft" and "conversion-friendly" partnerships to add independent hotels to their networks without the cost of new builds. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Stephanie Stacey.
Iran said on Saturday that the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which roughly one fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes — would not fully reopen and remained under "strict control" of its armed forces. The statement, from the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Command Headquarters, came after Donald Trump said the US would maintain its Navy blockade of Iranian ports. The US president warned Iran not to "blackmail" the US and claimed ceasefire talks were "going actually along very well". Two incidents underlined how fragile traffic in the strait has become. UK Maritime Trade Operations said an Indian-owned crude oil tanker, the Sanmar Herald, was fired on by two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gunboats despite having received clearance to transit; the ship turned back and seafarers were heard shouting "Mayday" on open radio. Separately, a container ship operated by France's CMA-CGM was struck, damaging some containers without triggering a fire. Most other vessels turned back into the Gulf; only a handful of ships with Middle Eastern or Chinese ownership made it through overnight. A 14-day US–Iran ceasefire expires late Tuesday. Trump claimed on Friday that Iran had agreed to suspend its nuclear programme indefinitely and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium — a claim Iranian officials, including top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, flatly denied. Oil and gas prices had fallen on Friday on optimism about a full reopening; Saturday's reversal reinstates the risk premium. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Andrew England, Alice Hancock and James Politi.
Chelsea this month reported a £262mn pre-tax loss in 2024-25, a record for a Premier League club, under owners Clearlake Capital and financier Todd Boehly, who bought the club for £2.5bn almost three years ago. Under previous oligarch-owner Roman Abramovich, the club lost about £1mn a week for almost two decades — a pace the current owners have now outdone. Since the takeover, Chelsea have spent about €1.7bn (£1.5bn) on players, parted ways with four head coaches, and not agreed on whether to modernise Stamford Bridge or move elsewhere. The financing is private-equity style. At its core sits a $500mn payment-in-kind note from Ares Management to Chelsea's holding company 22 Holdco, carrying interest at 11.2 per cent that rolls into the principal (which stood at £595.9mn last June and falls due in 2033); a separate entity is on the hook for another £794mn of loans. The owners committed £1.75bn at the outset and still have £1.3bn on hand. Revenues rose 4.8 per cent to £490.9mn in 2024-25 and are expected to reach about £700mn this year, boosted by winning the inaugural Fifa Club World Cup. Chelsea is now profitable on an operating basis. Player trading has offset some spend: €1.75bn of signings vs. €921mn of sales. Contracts often run seven years or more, letting the club amortise player fees over longer periods to stay inside financial regulations. Stamford Bridge is the strategic stumbling block. Its 40,000-capacity generated £86.7mn of match-day revenue last year vs. £160mn at Manchester United's 74,000-seat Old Trafford. An Earl's Court move has dimmed after two councils approved plans without a stadium. Just over half of 4,000 Chelsea Supporters' Trust survey respondents said they were "very unconfident" the club is being run for sustained success. Champions League qualification — worth €75mn-€80mn this season — hangs on the last six games, with Chelsea sitting sixth. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Samuel Agini.
In the run-up to its weeks-long war with Israel and the US, Iran's military was quietly mining the Ukraine war for strategic lessons. The Financial Times reviewed more than 300 articles published over five years in a dozen Iranian defence publications affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and regular Armed Forces staff colleges. The central theme: Tehran must shift towards cheaper, smarter, more dispersed warfare — mass-produced drones, more mobile combat units, artificial intelligence in target selection, and sharper cyberwarfare capabilities. Several articles carry the names of now-prominent (or recently killed) figures. Hossein Dadvand, a senior combat-college commander north of Tehran, published recommendations citing Ukraine's defence-production resilience and use of 3D printers to mass-produce drones. Kioumars Heydari and Abdolali Pourshasb, two commanders who have both run the Iranian Army, co-authored a 2023 paper in Strategic Defence Studies warning of weak forward planning against "emerging threats". Aziz Nasirzadeh — the former defence minister killed in an air strike on 28 February — had co-authored a piece urging Tehran to rebuild its neglected fighter fleet by buying Russian Su-35s, and another arguing the US Air Force was losing effectiveness through ageing equipment and failed modernisation. Analysts — Nicole Grajewski at Sciences Po, Afshon Ostovar, Farzin Nadimi at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Michael Connell at the Center for Naval Analyses — say the journals matter less for their conclusions than for what Iran is paying attention to: drones, cyber, AI, air defences, and internal weaknesses such as discrimination by poverty and ethnic background, suicidal thoughts among soldiers, and military hospitals over-reliant on private-sector suppliers. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Jacob Judah.
The Iran war is costing French public finances dearly. According to Les Echos, the government is set to announce a first wave of around €4bn in savings to meet its 2026 deficit target, almost two months after the surprise outbreak of the conflict. The cuts could affect both central-government spending and the social security budget; some sources point to a renewed trim of employer payroll-tax exemptions on wages up to 3 times the minimum wage (SMIC). Budget Minister David Amiel has convened the Public Finance Alert Committee on Tuesday, with parliamentarians, local officials, business and union representatives. The macro picture has deteriorated. Bercy revised its forecasts on Tuesday: 2026 growth cut by 0.1 point to 0.9 per cent (with activity nearly flat in H2), and inflation raised to 1.9 per cent for the full year — well above the 1.3 per cent baked into the budget. National Assembly Budget rapporteur Philippe Juvin notes that the 2025 deficit estimate moved from 5.4 per cent to 5.1 per cent, with the 2026 budget built on a 5 per cent assumption. The crisis is cutting into tax receipts and inflating unforeseen spending: about €70mn in subsidies has already gone in April to farmers, fishermen and road hauliers, and the Prime Minister is preparing "a new package of aid for May". But the dominant effect is debt-service cost, with the additional bill estimated at around €4bn — driven by inflation-linked bonds becoming more expensive and new issuance happening at higher rates. The playbook is familiar: in 2025, Bercy froze or cancelled €8bn of central-government appropriations between April and June and curbed health-insurance spending by €1.7bn. Those unpopular calls allowed France to land at 5.1 per cent deficit, better than expected. The government's target is now 5 per cent of GDP this year. Source: Les Echos, 18 April 2026, Sébastien Dumoulin and Stéphane Loignon.
The two mediators appointed in mid-March to unlock the Système aérien du futur (SCAF) — Laurent Collet-Billon, former head of France's Direction générale de l'armement (DGA, the defence procurement agency), and Frank Haun, former chief of German tank maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann — have delivered their reports. The ball is now in the court of the French and German governments, as the CEOs of Airbus Defence & Space and Dassault Aviation have stopped speaking to each other for months. Their talks with the industrial players focused on three axes: intellectual property, work share, and export rights. The deadlock is unchanged. Dassault demands clearer industrial leadership on the combat-aircraft pillar, currently split equally between Dassault, Airbus Germany and Airbus Spain — a redistribution Berlin rejects. Emmanuel Macron hoped to save the programme announced with Angela Merkel in 2017, on which €3bn of studies have already been committed out of a €100bn total project. According to Handelsblatt, the mediators found no deal and Friedrich Merz wants a final call by Tuesday, ahead of the informal meeting of the 27 EU heads of state in Cyprus on Thursday and Friday. The French DGA, however, says "mediation is still ongoing". In Germany, the aerospace industry and the IG Metall union are pushing for two separate aircraft, keeping common pillars for drones and a "combat cloud". Conservative MP Volker Mayer-Lay is calling for an immediate switch to the two-aircraft solution. Dassault CEO Eric Trappier had himself flagged the date at the early-April "Guerres et paix" forum: "We will meet again on 18 April". Source: Les Echos, 18 April 2026, Emmanuel Grasland and Anne Drif.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is in a bitter internal fight over conscription, and the anti-Nato, pro-Moscow wing is winning. Rüdiger Lucassen — a 74-year-old former Bundeswehr colonel and ex-helicopter pilot, and one of the most pro-American figures in the party — stepped down as AfD defence spokesperson after eight years, days before colleagues were due to vote on removing him. He was replaced by Jan Nolte, a western Hesse MP who, as recently as 2024, gave interviews to Izvestia, the Russian paper co-founded by one of Vladimir Putin's closest friends. Conscription was suspended in Germany in 2011. On paper, the AfD favours reintroducing it; in practice, at a recent party retreat, the leadership decided to dodge the topic entirely. The flag-bearer of the AfD's ethnonationalist wing, Björn Höcke, led the backlash — telling the Thuringia parliament to imagine their sons and grandsons blown up on a foreign battlefield, and refusing to support conscription in a country that, in his words, had nothing worth defending but "drag queen performances in kindergartens", deindustrialisation, mass immigration and wartime guilt. The eastern faction, where sympathy for Russia and suspicion of the US run highest, has the electoral muscle — the AfD polls up to 40% in parts of the east, is tracking first in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and could take Saxony-Anhalt in September. Founded in 2013 during the eurozone crisis, the AfD has radicalised rather than moderated as it has grown — landing a record second place (21%) in last year's federal elections. Some western MPs still back Chancellor Friedrich Merz's rearmament and defence minister Boris Pistorius, but the line from several eastern members of the Bundestag is that military sovereignty should not be "top priority" while spending needs to be cut, and that Russia is not really an opponent. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Laura Pitel (with additional reporting by Max Seddon).
Wealth advisers at big US banks and independent brokerages generated more than $2bn in servicing fees since 2017 by steering individual investors into private market funds, before lucrative upfront commissions, according to an FT analysis of regulatory filings covering 16 funds run by Blackstone, Blue Owl, Apollo and KKR. The disclosure lands as the same retail investors now try to leave: more than $20bn of withdrawal requests hit private credit vehicles in the first quarter of the year. The fee stack is layered. Servicing fees — paid annually for managing the client's account — run 0.25% to 0.85% of the investment; placement fees of 0.5% are charged up front (sometimes capped at 0.85% combined); brokerages can also charge commissions of up to 3.5%, averaging around 2%. Blackstone leads on payouts. Its property fund Breit and credit fund Bcred have attracted more than $100bn in combined net assets since 2020 and paid $280mn in broker servicing fees last year alone. Breit recently lifted its cap on such payments from 8.75% to 10% of gross capital raised, freeing up hundreds of millions of additional adviser compensation. Breit has already paid brokerages more than $500mn in commissions. The return gap from those fees is visible. Breit's lowest-fee share class has earned over 9.3% a year since 2017; the highest-fee class only 8%. Bcred returns since its 2021 launch are 9.5% vs 7.8%. Blackstone counters that a majority of its evergreen assets sit in share classes with no commissions or servicing fees, and that its funds have outperformed public benchmarks by roughly 60% since inception. Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick said alternatives make up just 5% of financial-adviser assets, and that the bank has "harmonised" fees so advisers are not incentivised to push one fund over another. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Antoine Gara, Amelia Pollard, Eric Platt and Harriet Clarfelt.
Michelin CEO Florent Menegaux has made the strategic call that the tyre group cannot export mass-market production from Europe any more: the cost gap with Asia is too wide, Chinese rivals are now entering passenger-car tyres, and 2025 group revenues fell 4.4% to €26bn on a softer US truck market. His response is to keep only the highest-end tyre production in France — racing, aviation landing gear, and a moon-rover tyre Michelin is pitching to Nasa for the Artemis missions — while diversifying aggressively into polymer composites (materials used in sealants, fabric coatings, aviation, energy, construction). The French footprint is already shrinking. Michelin closed two truck and van tyre plants last year (Vannes in Brittany, Cholet in western France), cutting more than 6% of its French workforce — 1,200 jobs. Clermont-Ferrand, the group's 140-year-old home, now employs about 10,000 people, one third of the 1980s peak. The historic Cataroux plant is being converted into a start-up and research hub. Local unions fear more cuts as most French plants run below capacity — only the Bourges aeroplane tyre factory is doing well. France still hosts half of Michelin's 30 European plants; the Americas have a similar count, and Asia 15. The diversification math matters. Polymer composites generated €1.3bn in sales in 2025 (€1.7bn including recent purchases), a fraction of group revenues but the group's most profitable business at 15% margins. Michelin did three US composite acquisitions last year for around €1bn combined enterprise value, and Menegaux says the group plans to make at least that many every year globally. Menegaux also warned that the EU's looming Chinese-tyre tariffs and its "Buy European" automotive framework should not become a "stipend" that removes the incentive to innovate. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Sarah White.
Helion Energy, the US nuclear fusion start-up backed by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, has told the FT it "remains on track" to supply Microsoft with commercial electricity through the grid in 2028 — a deadline that would make it the first fusion company ever to do so. CFO Pragav Jain said the Washington-state generator being built for Microsoft would be a "sub-scale commercial unit", less efficient than the full-scale systems Helion hopes to deploy later. Helion has also signed a 500-megawatt deal with steelmaker Nucor for 2030, and Axios reported last month that OpenAI was in talks to buy electricity from the company. The claim divides the sector. Helion is one of the best-funded fusion players — $1bn raised, a $5.4bn valuation in its latest round — but smaller than Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has raised about $3bn and plans its first commercial plant in the early 2030s with Google as offtake customer. US government scientists reached "net energy gain" (more power out than in to trigger fusion) but no start-up has matched that, let alone built a commercial plant. Rivals argue Helion's 2028 timeline "doesn't add up" and criticise its silence on how it will handle high-energy neutrons, which damage reactor structures. Helion says it is developing a material with "its own kind of healing mechanism" but has disclosed little to protect IP from "copycats". According to the Fusion Industry Association, 89% of private fusion companies believe the technology will be on the grid by the 2030s. Helion's edge, if real, is its design. It does not plan to use turbines; instead it would generate electricity directly from the changing magnetic field as the plasma expands, inducing current in surrounding coils. One fusion investor described this as "the holy grail" — in theory, it would let Helion make commercially useful electricity with a smaller net energy gain than rivals need. The company is testing a pre-commercial machine meant to "demonstrate electricity from fusion", but Jain declined to say whether it was close to break-even. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Ryohtaroh Satoh.
The FT reports from Longhui county in Hunan that China's 300mn-strong migrant labour force is increasingly staying put — a quiet reversal of four decades of rural-to-urban movement. A state-run labour agency in Longhui says that since 2023 job listings have fallen while the number of jobseekers has risen; the same recruiter says the county's sports-shoe factories now employ 200–300 people, down from close to 3,000 at peak, blaming the US–China trade dispute. A construction worker interviewed at a mah-jong parlour says monthly pay on Guangdong building sites has dropped from Rmb 15,000–16,000 at peak to Rmb 7,000–8,000 today. A marble tiler says a Dongguan project on pause could pay Rmb 20,000 a month, versus around Rmb 4,000 locally: "Whatever the pay is, I will take it." The macro explanation is the combination of a multi-year property and construction slump with a structural shift away from labour-intensive manufacturing. Ernan Cui at Gavekal Dragonomics says urban labour markets are weakening "across construction, manufacturing, and services", and that new jobs are increasingly concentrated in AI-related sectors — creating a structural skills mismatch with displaced older workers. Jenny Chan at Hong Kong Polytechnic University says workers in their late forties through early sixties are being caught out by industrial upgrading and fall back on farming and odd jobs. Inter-provincial migration has been declining since 2015. Wages for those who still move are higher than for intra-provincial migrants, but in 2024 they grew more slowly. The politics are starting to show. In November, China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs held a work conference that explicitly flagged workers' "large-scale returning and staying in the countryside". Beijing has issued guidelines to boost jobs for migrants, including transport subsidies for inter-provincial travel. A local recruiter frames the risk bluntly: "Practically every village now has a number of stranded workers. In terms of social order, it's not great." Beijing does not publish annual data on returnees, but analysts believe the trend has accelerated since 2023. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, William Langley (with additional reporting by Tina Hu).
An FT Magazine feature visits the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where professor Hod Lipson and his students are building "robot metabolism" — modular robots that can assemble themselves from simple parts, repair themselves, and, they hope, eventually reproduce. The lab's current building blocks are white plastic rods called "truss links" (developed by PhD graduate Philippe Wyder) and a new generation of triangles (master's student Sylvester Zhang). A paper in Science Advances last summer described what the group called the first robot system to grow from single parts into a full 3D robot while systematically improving itself — without external machinery. Lipson's life quest: identify "the 20 building blocks to make all possible robots", a deliberate parallel to the roughly 20 amino acids that encode biological life. The context is that robotics has become AI's lagging twin. Large language models swallowed the hype, the capital and the PhDs; robots, Goldfeder says, "doesn't work yet", which is precisely what makes it interesting to this group. Lipson's thesis is that the next leap cannot come from bigger models: "the brains have moved forward, and now it's time for the bodies to catch up — in nature, there is never a mind without a body." The lab's exemplar project is "a machine that manufactures another machine, and that machine just walks right out". The commercial horizon Lipson sketches is radical: consumers would one day buy not a finished robot but a bagful of modular blocks that self-assemble into whatever task they are asked to perform. The reality is less tidy. At Penn, Mark Yim — a pioneer of modular robotics — concedes that the 2000 promises of "versatility, affordability and reliability" remain unmet: "they can't do anything, they're super expensive and they break all the time." At MIT, CSAIL director Daniela Rus calls the reproducing-robot demonstrations "very simple as compared to the promise". Even so, the Columbia lab shipped a small victory at a weekly meeting witnessed by the FT: eight of Zhang's triangles wriggled millimetre by millimetre across a linoleum corridor, snapped into a snake, then split into two tetrahedra that folded themselves up — a primitive act of robotic reproduction. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Oliver Roeder.
Berlin is preparing to cut Germany's 2026 growth forecast from 1% to 0.5%, as the impact of the US-Iran war on energy prices derails hopes of a recovery. The downgrade would leave Europe's largest economy on the brink of a fourth consecutive year of de facto stagnation, even as a €1tn debt-funded public-spending push ramps up. The economy ministry said growth lost "noticeable momentum" in Q1 2026 against the backdrop of the Middle East conflict. Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced a €1.6bn package to ease rising fuel prices. Commerzbank chief economist Jörg Krämer now sees just 0.3% working-day-adjusted growth in 2026, versus 0.4% in 2025, what he calls "a black zero". Goldman Sachs estimates the €1tn fiscal push will add only 0.5 percentage points to 2026 GDP. Germany's energy-intensive chemicals industry is hit hardest: production is back to late-2004 levels (Bundesbank data), and companies are closing sites amid low capacity utilisation. Q1 insolvencies reached their highest level in more than 20 years, exceeding the 2009 financial-crisis peak, and unemployment is now 30% above pre-pandemic levels. Ifo head Clemens Fuest warns "stagnation is the new normal". Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Olaf Storbeck and Anne-Sylvaine Chassany.
UK-based streaming platform OnlyFans is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20% to San Francisco fund Architect Capital, at a valuation of more than $3bn. A deal could be signed as early as next month. It comes after the late-March death of owner Leonid Radvinsky; control of the company will remain with the family trust, led by his widow Katie. OnlyFans generated $7.2bn of user revenue in 2025 and paid a record $701mn dividend to its owner last year alone. The platform had earlier sought a valuation above $5bn when considering a majority sale, but the shift to a minority process has reduced the stake value. Architect entered exclusive negotiations late last year, beating rival suitors including Los Angeles-based Forest Road Company, backed by British billionaires David and Simon Reuben. Architect is using a special-purpose vehicle (SPV — a stand-alone entity used for a single deal) with other co-investors. As part of the transaction, OnlyFans will work with Architect to develop new financial-services products for its creators, who often struggle to access traditional banking. Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American entrepreneur who acquired OnlyFans' parent Fenix International in 2018, died at 43 of cancer. The deal opens the door to further disposals while keeping the family trust in control. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Daniel Thomas, Kieran Smith and Oliver Barnes.
Two of Hong Kong's biggest conglomerates — Jardines and Li Ka-shing's CK Hutchison — are in talks to combine their supermarket chains into a single dominant grocer. Jardines wants to buy CK's ParknShop and merge it with its own Wellcome brand, a deal likened to Tesco buying Sainsbury's in the UK or Walmart merging with Costco in the US. The two chains together controlled almost 90% of Hong Kong's supermarket category in 2023, according to the US Foreign Agricultural Service citing Euromonitor. Insiders claim that, factoring in e-commerce competition and cross-border shopping into mainland China, the combined group would hold under 50% market share. Talks are not imminent and no valuation has been disclosed. In parallel, CK Hutchison is exploring an initial public offering of parent AS Watson — owner of Superdrug and The Perfume Shop in the UK — targeting up to $30bn. When CK last put ParknShop up for sale in 2013, bids only reached $3bn to $4bn. The deal reflects Jardines' pivot toward a private-equity-style model under new CEO Lincoln Pan, formerly co-head of private equity at PAG. It also continues CK Hutchison's asset rotation, which includes the sale of UK Power Networks, the planned sale of its non-Chinese ports, and the mooted IPOs of AS Watson and its global telecoms business. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Arjun Neil Alim and Zijing Wu.
Nearly 40% of US data-centre projects scheduled to complete in 2026 are at risk of running more than three months late, according to satellite-analytics firm SynMax. The delays threaten the infrastructure behind AI rollouts by Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and others, raising concerns that the returns on hundreds of billions of dollars in announced capex (capital expenditure) will arrive later than expected. Hyperscalers (the largest cloud operators running mega data centres) are racing to build sites drawing 1 gigawatt or more — roughly a nuclear reactor's output. Only a handful will complete this year, including campuses by Amazon Web Services, Meta and Elon Musk's xAI. A flagship 1.4GW, 1,200-acre Oracle campus in Shackelford County, Texas (which will equip OpenAI with chips and compute) has cleared land for six of 10 planned buildings but shows visible construction on only one. SynMax now sees the first building ready in December at the earliest, while comparable-project benchmarks point to late 2027. A 1.2GW OpenAI-linked site in Milam County, Texas has one building under construction. Only a project in Abilene is on track. Bottlenecks: shortages of specialist workers (electricians, pipefitters), strained grid capacity, missing gas turbines and transformers, slow permits and rising local opposition. Remote sites are pushing labour costs up as much as 30%. SynMax estimates more than 60% of 2027 projects have not yet begun construction. Capstone's Josh Price describes a "regulatory lag" against the pace of developers. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Martha Muir, Nassos Stylianou and Aditi Bhandari.
Patrick Drahi has given the green light to the sale of SFR: Bouygues Telecom, Iliad and Orange have entered exclusive negotiations with Altice France on an offer valuing the targeted assets at €20.35bn enterprise value, up from €17bn in the October offer initially rejected by Altice's owner. The exclusivity period runs until 15 May to finalise terms. The split of price and value would be Bouygues Telecom 42%, Iliad (Free) 31% and Orange 27%. The perimeter excludes several Altice France assets: ACS/Intelcia, XP Fibre, UltraEdge, Altice Technical Services, and operations in French overseas territories. On the customer side, Bouygues Telecom would take the B2B (business) customer base, while the B2C (consumer) customer base would be split across the three buyers. SFR's mobile network in low-density areas would go to Bouygues Telecom; infrastructure and spectrum would also be shared. The consortium frames this as a "socially responsible" operation with a focus on jobs, promising higher investment in high-speed networks, cybersecurity and AI. The deal still needs consultation with employee-representative bodies, then regulatory clearances — notably on merger control (antitrust), historically a major hurdle to French telecoms consolidation. Source: Les Echos, 17 April 2026, Thomas Pontiroli.
Venezuela, the South American country with the world's largest proven oil reserves, is restoring official relations with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank after a seven-year break. The agreement, announced on Friday 17 April by Venezuela's Economy Minister, paves the way for financial normalisation under the government of Nicolas Maduro, as the country emerges from a long economic crisis marked by hyperinflation and a GDP collapse. The IMF had not conducted an Article IV consultation mission (the IMF's standard annual macroeconomic review of its members) since 2004. The World Bank had not approved a new loan since 2005. The thaw should allow Caracas to access the $5bn of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs, the IMF's reserve asset) allocated in 2021 but frozen due to diplomatic recognition issues — the United States and several European countries having contested the legitimacy of the Maduro government after the 2018 presidential election. The scope of the reset is limited at first: technical-assistance missions, macroeconomic surveillance, dialogue on monetary stabilisation. Large-scale financial programmes would require prior restructuring of external debt, estimated above $150bn across all creditors (sovereign bonds, state oil company PDVSA, arrears). For bond markets and oil-industry creditors, the rapprochement is the first signal that Venezuela is being readmitted into the international financial architecture. Source: Les Echos, 17 April 2026, Claude Fouquet.
Spain's competition regulator CNMC opened a formal probe into grid operator Red Eléctrica over "very serious" alleged infringements linked to the Iberian blackout of 28 April 2025, and launched separate "serious" infringement probes into power generators Iberdrola, Naturgy, Endesa and Repsol. It is the first time, nearly one year on, that Spanish authorities have assigned different degrees of wrongdoing to companies tied to the outage, which cut power to nearly 60mn people in Spain and Portugal. The CNMC opened five probes apiece into Iberdrola, Naturgy and Endesa, and one into Repsol. Against Red Eléctrica — whose parent is led by former Socialist minister Beatriz Corredor — the regulator is citing the law's provisions on scheduling of power generation, balancing the grid, information sharing and instructions to power suppliers. A 49-day Spanish government investigation completed in June 2025 had already spread blame between "bad planning" by the grid operator and errors at power plants. European grid operators earlier called the event "the first of its kind" and demanded continent-wide reforms. Final conclusions from the CNMC probes will take nine to 18 months. The regulator stressed that the indications of wrongdoing are not necessarily the causes of the blackout, which "had multiple causes". Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Barney Jopson.
Oil tumbled after Iran said it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and Donald Trump signalled Washington and Tehran were closing in on a deal to end a war that has shaken global markets. Brent crude settled 9.1 per cent lower at $90.38 a barrel, the lowest in five weeks, while European gas prices fell 7 per cent. The S&P 500 rose 1.2 per cent, on course for a third straight weekly gain, and is up more than 9 per cent in April as traders bet on de-escalation after the conflict sent a fresh burst of inflationary pressure through the world economy. On the ground, the picture stayed unsettled. Satellite tracking showed at least 25 vessels heading for the strait, including three container ships from French line CMA CGM, four Greek tankers and several Chinese vessels, but at least 12 that had begun the passage turned back. Iranian parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf dismissed Trump's claims, saying the strait "will not stay open" while the US naval blockade — ordered this week to prevent ships entering or leaving Iranian ports — remains in force. A fifth of the world's oil passed through the strait before the war; the seven-week closure has triggered a global energy crisis and handed Tehran leverage. A nuclear deal remains the main sticking point. Trump demands Iran hand over its 440kg stockpile of enriched uranium, while Tehran insists on its right to enrich and wants to rebuild its Natanz and Fordow enrichment sites, both bombed during Israel's 12-day war last June. Pakistan is mediating; the current two-week ceasefire expires Tuesday night. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Andrew England, Malcolm Moore, Humza Jilani and Steff Chávez.
Blue Owl co-founders Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz disclosed they are no longer using their shares in the investment group as collateral for personal loans, removing a long-running overhang on the firm's stock. "No equity interests in the company are currently subject to any pledges by our directors or executive officers," Blue Owl said in annual shareholder materials filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. Management provided alternative collateral to the lenders; the company had previously warned that a forced sale of the pledged stakes could "materially" hit its stock. The numbers behind the pledges explain the scale of the concern. Co-chief executive and chair Ostrover had pledged 43 million common units — worth $649mn at end-2025 — to secure his loan. Co-CEO Lipschultz had pledged 33 million common units, worth about $493mn. Common units exchange one-for-one into publicly traded shares. Blue Owl, which manages more than $300bn, has seen its stock slide more than 40 per cent over the past year on souring growth prospects and industry stress, and still trades below its $10 IPO price from 2021. Investors had feared that a further drop could trigger margin calls on the two founders, leading a lender to foreclose and dump shares on the market. The disclosure comes as Blue Owl grapples with redemption requests from several flagship private credit funds and is in the process of winding down an older vehicle. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Eric Platt.
Record high for metals in London: the LMEX index of the London Metal Exchange, which tracks six major industrial metals, hit an all-time high on Thursday, driven above all by aluminium made precious by the Iran war. The index has gained close to 12 per cent over four weeks. Despite the persistent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the spike in energy costs and global growth fears, prices are supported by hopes of an extension of the US-Iran ceasefire and early signs of de-escalation. Aluminium and copper together account for nearly three-quarters of the index. Aluminium is the main driver: its price has jumped more than 15 per cent since the start of the Iran war and touched a four-year high in London on Thursday before easing slightly on Friday to around $3,629 per tonne, according to Bloomberg. The market tightened sharply after strikes hit key Gulf capacity: the Middle East accounts for about one-tenth of global production, and JP Morgan describes a "black hole" of supply following Iranian strikes on two major smelters in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. LME aluminium stocks have fallen back below 400,000 tonnes, well below levels seen a few years ago; part of that metal is of Russian origin, which limits its usability for some Western buyers. Wood Mackenzie estimates there is "no way to avoid a significant deficit in the global aluminium market over the next eighteen months", with a shortfall potentially reaching 4 million tonnes this year. Copper is also contributing to the LMEX's rise — up 11 per cent over four weeks — but for different reasons: the return of Chinese buyers and expectations around possible US tariff decisions. It was trading around $13,270 per tonne on Friday, close to its closing record of January; Mercuria and BMO Capital Markets expect it could break that level in the coming weeks. Source: Les Echos, 17 April 2026, Samir Touzani.
European Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius visited MBDA in Bourges and Safran's AASM guided-bomb kit site in Montluçon on Thursday, alongside French ministers Alice Rufo (Armed Forces) and Benjamin Haddad (Europe). The aim: shape how the €60bn of European loans for Ukraine's defence will be allocated, as Viktor Orban's fall in Hungary unlocks the financing timetable. Of the 2,000 missiles that have struck Ukraine, 900 were ballistic: "To destroy just one, two to three anti-ballistic missiles are needed," stressed the Commissioner, while US Patriot production tops out at 750 per year and the Iran war is redirecting that flow into American stockpiles. The two French industrial champions laid out their case. Safran builds inertial navigation systems in Montluçon that equip AASM guided bombs able to target without GPS — technology the Americans lack (Patriot depends on GPS). "We beat Northrop Grumman and Honeywell, our main competitors," Franck Saudo, head of Safran's electronics and defence division, told the visit. France and Norway have ordered a large volume of AASM for Kyiv for more than NOK 7bn; AASM output has quadrupled in four years to 1,200 units in 2025. On MBDA's side, the Meteor missile travels at more than 5,000 km/h; the SAMP/T NG system co-produced with Thales — 150 km intercept range, 40,000 components with 60% from subcontractors — will be tested in Ukraine in 2026. Aster (the missile component of SAMP/T) output rose five-fold between 2024 and 2025 and is to double again in 2026, with production lead time down to 18 months from three years in 2022. MBDA plans €5bn of investment over the coming years. The political stake is to direct European funds to European industry, while Kyiv has already signed a €3.7bn contract with Raytheon for Patriot missiles made in Germany — co-financed by Berlin with the US — and Rheinmetall-Lockheed Martin and Diehl-Raytheon have formed transatlantic alliances. "Depending solely on a third-party industry can no longer work," Rufo concluded. Source: Les Echos, 17 April 2026, Anne Drif.
At the Banco BPM annual general meeting on 16 April, shareholders reappointed Giuseppe Castagna as chief executive and backed the outgoing board list, which won 58.87 per cent of the votes. The major event is Crédit Agricole's stronger entry onto the board of directors: the French bank's stake moved up from 20.1 per cent to 22.8 per cent and it secured four of the board's 15 seats. Its own list received 30.9 per cent of the vote, well ahead of Assogestioni (8 per cent). Crédit Agricole's four representatives will be Frédéric de Courtois, former senior executive at AXA; former Italian Finance Minister Domenico Siniscalco; Rossella Leide; and Alessio Foletti. Castagna welcomed the outcome, pointing to the three-year market performance — the stock has "risen by more than 200 per cent, generating shareholder returns of more than 300 per cent." He also recalled that Crédit Agricole "has never hidden its intention to move above 20 per cent", noting the European Central Bank has authorised the French group to rise as high as 29.9 per cent. "They are now on the board and it will be a new experience. They are all independent directors," Castagna said. A merger between Crédit Agricole's Italian subsidiary and Banco BPM "would have a solid industrial rationale", Fitch Ratings' analysts say, but remains unlikely in the near term: Fitch does not expect "developments on this potential deal in 2026". The political implications tied to Banco BPM's systemic importance in Italy complicate it, and the French group applies "very strict criteria", notably the wish "not to lose control over what it owns in Italy". Source: Les Echos, 17 April 2026, Olivier Tosseri.
Reed Hastings, Netflix co-founder and chair, will leave the board in June after nearly 30 years at the $450bn streaming giant. The announcement, combined with a weaker-than-expected Q2 forecast, drove Netflix shares down 9.6% in after-hours trading despite strong Q1 results. Q1 earnings reached $1.23 per share, well above Wall Street's 76-cent consensus, lifted by a $2.8bn break fee from Paramount after Netflix withdrew from the $83bn Warner Bros Discovery bidding war. Revenue was $12.3bn and net income $5.3bn, also boosted by recent price increases. But guidance of 78 cents for Q2 EPS missed the 84-cent Street expectation. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos praised Hastings for building "a company of risk-takers" and pointed to the World Baseball Classic in Japan as proof that Netflix's new live-engagement plays drive sign-ups and ad revenue. Citi analyst Jason Bazinet flagged that management kept its 2026 capital-allocation plan unchanged, disappointing hopes for larger buybacks or higher margin guidance. Investors are now focused on audience engagement as the core metric after the failed Warner Bros bid; Raymond James analysts note engagement is "now investors' most focused-on metric". Hastings, who began paring back responsibilities in 2020, will focus on philanthropy via the Hastings Fund. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Christopher Grimes.
Car windscreen repair group Belron — owner of Autoglass in the UK, Carglass in Europe and Safelite in the US — is targeting an Amsterdam IPO at a valuation of €30bn to €40bn, in what would be one of Europe's largest listings in years. Led by former AB InBev boss Carlos Brito, the group has chosen Amsterdam over New York after discussing both venues. Majority owner is Belgian conglomerate D'Ieteren (50.3% stake, also behind notebook maker Moleskine), which is not expected to offload the majority of its holding. Private equity group Clayton Dubilier & Rice owns 20.4%: it acquired a 40% stake in 2018 at a €3bn valuation, then partially rolled into a continuation vehicle (a special fund structure that lets PE firms keep a winning asset longer) in 2021 at €21bn. Other investors include Hellman & Friedman, Singapore's GIC, BlackRock, and management plus former CEO Gary Lubner (9.6% via his Atessa vehicle, also the UK Labour Party's largest donor). Belron was last valued at €32bn including €8bn of debt. Operating profits rose 10% to €1.26bn in 2025. The listing would revive a sluggish European IPO market that has lagged the US, where mega-tech listings dominate this year. No banks have been appointed, and timing could slip into 2027. In 2024 Belron carried out one of the largest debt-funded dividend recaps in private-equity history. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Ivan Levingston, Ashley Armstrong and Arash Massoudi.
Days after Martin Sion took over as CEO (replacing Henri Poupart-Lafarge), French rail equipment maker Alstom issued a severe profit warning. On Friday 17 April the stock plunged almost 30% at the Paris open, falling from €22.70 to €16.48. The problem lies not in the order book — above €100bn — but in industrial execution in the short and medium term. Organic revenue growth for fiscal 2025-26 came in at 7% to €19.2bn, in line with guidance. But adjusted operating margin fell to around 6%, versus the ~7% previously promised. Delays on major rolling-stock projects (the trainsets and locomotives delivered to rail operators) are weighing on margins and cash. As a result, the cumulative free-cash-flow target of €1.5bn over 2024-25 to 2026-27 has been dropped, and the medium-term 8% to 10% adjusted operating margin goal has been pushed beyond 2026-27. For the current year, management now guides around +5% organic growth, roughly 6.5% adjusted operating margin and positive free cash flow. An "operational transformation plan" will be unveiled at the audited results on 13 May. "Let's be clear, this is not how I had planned to start my mandate", Sion acknowledged. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Denis Fainsilber.
The European Commission is preparing the most significant relaxation of EU merger rules in over two decades, aiming to help European companies scale up to compete with US and Chinese rivals, according to draft guidelines seen by the Financial Times. Brussels will give greater weight to "innovation, investment and resilience of the internal market" when deciding whether to approve deals, broadening the criteria that since the 2000s had focused primarily on the effect of mergers on consumers (pricing power and choice). An EU official called the guidelines "a break from the past" and "an ambitious approach that reflects the realities of increasingly challenging global competition". The draft keeps effective competition as the core objective but notes that "the growth and scaling-up of firms... so as to reach the necessary size to compete globally, can be pro-competitive" and can have a "positive impact" on the EU. Citing a changed geopolitical context, the document argues the economy has "shifted towards more innovation-heavy sectors where both scale and innovation are critical to compete". The antitrust division is asked to pay closer attention to "scale, innovation, investment and resilience as pro-competitive factors that can benefit from a degree of consolidation". Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has championed this "new approach" supporting companies "scaling up in global markets". Resistance is coming from some liberal member states and parts of the Commission worried that looser rules would hurt innovation, dampen investment, and force consumers to pay more. Dealmakers and investors have long anticipated the reforms, which could unlock consolidation across European industries. The Commission declined to comment. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Barbara Moens.
Swiss group Barry Callebaut, the world's largest chocolate processor, cut its profit forecast and warned of the impact of falling cocoa prices, industry overcapacity and supply disruptions, sending its shares down more than 15%. The Zurich-based company now expects EBIT (earnings before interest and tax — the core operating profit) to fall by a "mid-teens" percentage in the current financial year, reversing earlier guidance for growth and underscoring the scale of the challenge facing new chief executive Hein Schumacher, who took over in January. In the first half, recurring EBIT fell 4.2% to SFr310.9mn ($397mn) in local currencies, and sales volumes declined 6.9% to 1.01mn tonnes — though the group said this outperformed the broader market. Schumacher blamed "the unique speed of the cocoa price market decrease combined with a competitive overcapacity market, volume declines and supply disruption". Barry Callebaut sells most of its chocolate under contracts that pass cocoa costs through to customers: it buys cocoa months ahead, so when prices fall fast it is still working through expensive stock while charging customers less. The company also flagged supply-chain disruption linked to the Iran war and a temporary factory closure in Canada. Jon Cox at Kepler Cheuvreux called it "more of a reset under the new chief executive" and pointed to structural pressures on demand, including GLP-1 weight-loss drugs ("In a GLP-1 world, how much will chocolate volumes still grow?"). Retail chocolate prices are still up about 10% year-on-year, weighing on consumption. Volumes should recover in H2; full-year decline is now forecast at 1–3%. Cocoa prices have more than halved in recent months. The stock had gained over 55% in the past year before Thursday's fall. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Susannah Savage.
Speaking to financial analysts gathered in Florence on Thursday 16 April, Luca de Meo announced the first transaction of Kering's new investment vehicle, "House of Wonders", which he had flagged upon taking over as CEO in September 2025. The move is a minority stake in Icicle, a Shanghai-based "quiet luxury" brand — the discreet, logo-free style of luxury — founded in 1997 by Ye Shouzeng, a former professor at Donghua University, and his wife Tao Xiaoma. Kering is investing more precisely in ICCF, the small group that owns Icicle and has also held about 10% of French fashion house Carven since 2018. Icicle has an estimated €300mn in revenue, manufactures 95% of its products in two ultra-modern factories in Shanghai (equipped with French Lectra cutting systems) and operates about 200 stores in China, three in Paris and a corner at Le Bon Marché. The brand works with cashmere and double-faced wool, with wool-and-silk trench coats or jackets priced over €1,000 apiece and more for coats. Its distribution approach is distinctive: in Shanghai, the company bought four buildings — two of them listed historic monuments in the former French Concession — to install Icicle and Carven flagships and a restaurant around a large garden. House of Wonders complements Kering Ventures, the group's first private-equity arm (which focuses more on younger companies such as the luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective), with a long-term support approach including expertise in distribution and commercial real estate. The strategic goal is twofold: to prove luxury brands can emerge outside Europe and to reduce Kering's dependence on Gucci. Icicle plans to use Pinault-family funding and know-how to accelerate its international expansion. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Philippe Bertrand.
Pluxee — the meal-voucher and employee-benefits specialist spun off from Sodexo two years ago — on Thursday 16 April reported solid first-half results despite regulatory turbulence in Brazil. Organic revenue rose 5.6% to €655mn, attributable net income rose 7.8% to €105mn, and EBITDA (operating profit before provisions and depreciation) jumped 12.9% to €242mn on the combined effect of volumes, rationalisation and acquisitions. Recurring free cash flow reached €210mn: 86% of EBITDA converted to cash, up 10 percentage points year-on-year. The geographic picture is darker. Latin America — 43% of operating revenue — grew 12.1% organically, while continental Europe, Pluxee's number-one market, barely moved (+0.7%). The gap widened in Q2: Europe -3.3% versus Latin America +10.1%. Total operating revenue came in at €306mn, below the €311mn analyst consensus. CEO Aurélien Sonet noted the group has signed €900mn in annualised volumes (full-year target €1.3bn) and that 30% of these volumes came from small and mid-sized companies (SMEs), an under-penetrated market. Brazil is entering regulatory turbulence. New rules cap meal-voucher commissions and shorten issuer reimbursement periods from early March; the system opens to new entrants in May. The impact on results will begin in H2 2026 and continue through H1 2027. Pluxee invests 9% of revenue in digital tools and AI to strengthen loyalty across its 800,000-merchant network, and targets "a return to a path of sustainable and profitable growth from the second half of fiscal 2027". Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Ninon Renaud.
Stellantis confirmed on Thursday 16 April 2026 the end of car assembly at its Poissy plant (Yvelines department, west of Paris) by the end of 2028. The announcement, made during the plant's works council meeting, closes a suspense of several months: the Paris region will soon lose its last remaining car-assembly plant. The site, opened in 1937 by Ford, later Simca's main factory before PSA took it over in the late 1970s (when it employed nearly 27,000 workers), today assembles the Opel Mokka and DS 3. Output — just under 90,000 vehicles in 2025 — is expected to drop to around 60,000 this year. The plant will not close. Stellantis is committing around €100mn to convert it into a hub dedicated to "the different lives of vehicles": producing spare parts for its other French sites (notably Hordain in the North, where the group builds its light commercial vehicles) and for the aftermarket. The plan includes €20mn to modernise the stamping shop with a new-generation press, a new engine line transferred from Vesoul (Haute-Saône) starting this autumn, a new paint shop, a vehicle-deconstruction line (salvaging viable parts for the aftermarket), and a 3D-printing capability. The existing Green Campus (R&D, support functions, Stellantis France HQ) remains in place. On employment, management is counting on natural attrition. The industrial headcount will fall from 1,800 workers today (1,500 of them genuinely operational) to 1,200 by 2030, without a social plan. Part of the €100mn budget will fund retraining. The majority union CFE-CGC welcomed "an important first step". The decision — echoing Renault's conversion of Flins — only partly addresses Stellantis's European overcapacity problem: most of its plants are running well below capacity, and Bloomberg has reported discussions with Chinese carmakers to use some lines. The May strategic plan will be closely watched. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Yann Duvert.
Anthropic's new AI model 'Mythos' has put banking regulators on high alert. The European Banking Authority's new president, François-Louis Michaud, told the press on 16 April 2026 that cybersecurity tied to Mythos is 'clearly a top priority' and is being discussed with international partners. Mythos, positioned by Anthropic as a tool to 'revolutionise cybersecurity', can reportedly identify thousands of critical flaws in the world's most widely used software — enough that Anthropic has withheld public release and only shared the model with a small group of large firms to let software vendors patch the holes first. In the US, major bank CEOs have been summoned by the Treasury; JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon said AI tools will intensify cyber risk, while Goldman Sachs' David Solomon confirmed Goldman has access to Mythos and is reinforcing infrastructure resilience alongside Anthropic. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey flagged cyber risk as the threat 'that never goes away' since the 2008 crisis. Banks' legacy IT systems (decades-old core software) are seen as particularly exposed because of layered modern tools and a highly interconnected sector sharing a narrow set of vendors for onboarding, KYC (Know Your Customer anti-money-laundering checks) and transaction processing. Michaud points to Europe's AI Act and DORA (the Digital Operational Resilience Act governing banks' IT-risk management) as defences. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Ingrid Feuerstein.
Chinese construction-equipment brands are accelerating their push into Europe, and France — the continent's largest market by size — sits in the cross-hairs. According to industry body Evolis, Chinese imports of French BTP (building and public works) equipment jumped from €200 million in 2024 to €260 million in 2025, even as total imports fell 15% to €2.7 billion; China's share of imports rose 3.3 percentage points to 9.6% in a French market worth €5.5 billion. Chinese machines from Hangcha, LiuGong, XCMG, Sany, Sunward and Zoomlion sell 15% to 30% cheaper than European and Japanese competitors such as Caterpillar, Komatsu, Liebherr, Volvo, Haulotte, Manitou and Mecalac. XCMG — world number four — is setting up a French construction-equipment subsidiary; LiuGong is doing the same and claims 85% distribution coverage by volume; Sany has operated a French branch since 2023. Rental leaders Loxam and Kiloutou have already signed supply deals. French major contractors Eiffage and Spie Batignolles say they remain loyal to premium European suppliers for now, but concede small electric machines may come from China. The European Commission, seized by Germany's VDMA, has opened an anti-subsidy probe on mobile cranes, and new tariffs already cover aerial platforms. Overall French equipment sales fell 1% in 2025, with large earthmoving down 13% — the second-worst year since 2014. Evolis warns the Chinese threat is 'a tsunami', especially in electric equipment. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Christophe Palierse.
Kering CEO Luca de Meo unveiled his strategic plan in Florence on 16 April 2026, branded 'ReconKering' around the motto 'True Luxury, Next Luxury'. True luxury is authenticity and craftsmanship; next luxury is new technologies, new consumers and new categories. Kering commits to doubling its recurring operating margin — 11.1% in 2025 — over the medium term. The group is restructured into four divisions (fashion and leather, jewellery, eyewear, group services) supported by five cross-company platforms (industrial, client, technology, sustainability and support functions). Gucci will push further into leather goods; Saint Laurent strengthens menswear and expands in Asia; Bottega Veneta extends beyond leather into full womenswear and menswear; Balenciaga is repositioned as an innovation brand for the next generation. Jewellery houses Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo and Qeelin merge into a single integrated unit anchored by the pending acquisition of manufacturer Raselli Franco. Kering Eyewear partners with Google to lead in 'luxury smart eyewear'. To reduce dependence on Gucci — which lost a third of its revenue in two years and halved group profits — a new House of Wonders fund will back young non-European brands, including Chinese labels, and Kering has teamed with the Italian manufacturing union H Moda. Operational discipline includes fewer but better-located stores, simplified assortments, tighter production and centralised media buying. Source: Les Echos, 16 April 2026, Philippe Bertrand.
China's economy expanded 5% year-on-year in Q1 2026, beating the Bloomberg consensus of 4.8% and accelerating from 4.5% in the previous quarter, landing at the top of Beijing's 4.5% to 5% full-year target. The beat was driven by high-tech manufacturing: March industrial output rose 5.7% year-on-year versus 5.3% expected, equipment manufacturing grew 8.9% over the quarter and high-tech manufacturing jumped 12.5%, with 3D printing equipment up 54%, lithium-ion batteries up 40.8% and industrial robots up 33.2%. Consumption remained soft — retail sales growth was 1.7% in March against 2.4% expected — and property investment fell 11.2% year-on-year; fixed asset investment rose only 1.7%. Capital Economics cautions that its China activity proxy (an alternative GDP gauge based on high-frequency indicators) showed growth of just 3% in January-February, arguing the headline upside was essentially construction and industry, with export strength doing the heavy lifting. The Iran war is expected to bite: Beijing's deputy statistics commissioner Mao Shengyong conceded China 'will definitely be affected to some degree' by the energy shock, which compresses margins in an already hyper-competitive industrial sector while easing deflationary pressure. Xi Jinping is due to meet Donald Trump in Beijing in mid-May, with markets hoping the year-long trade truce will be extended. Coface and the Conference Board flagged fading fiscal support and cautious homebuyers as the main domestic headwinds. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Joe Leahy, Wenjie Ding, Haohsiang Ko and Thomas Hale.
Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket and a FTSE 100 constituent, warned on 16 April 2026 that the war in the Middle East was clouding its outlook for the year to February 2027. The group guided adjusted operating profit to between £3 billion and £3.3 billion — 'a wider range of guidance than we were previously planning' — citing uncertainty over how long the conflict will last and its potential impact on UK households and the broader economy. Full-year results for the year to February 2026 were broadly flat: adjusted operating profit rose 0.8% to £3.1 billion (at the top of revised estimates, helped by a strong Christmas performance), while revenue climbed 4.6% to £66.6 billion despite rising employment costs and tough competition. Tesco captured 28% of the UK grocery market over the year, according to Worldpanel — its highest share in more than a decade. The company also announced a further £500 million in cost savings for the coming year, giving it firepower to fund additional promotions. Shares rose 3% on Thursday morning and are up 37% over the past 12 months, taking the market capitalisation to £30 billion. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Philip Stafford.
Spain's Repsol is poised to retake operational control of its Venezuelan oil assets under a deal to be signed on 16 April 2026 with Caracas, including state oil company PDVSA. The plan includes tripling production within three years and a 'guaranteed' payment system designed to avoid the pitfalls of past arrangements under which Caracas failed to pay up. The new framework does not resolve the roughly $4.55 billion that Repsol says Venezuela owes it for previously supplied gas and oil, but the guarantee covers future volumes. The agreement follows the Chevron-Caracas deal struck earlier this week and is part of a US-backed effort to rebuild Venezuela's oil industry after Washington captured former president Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. Repsol owns a 40% stake in the onshore Petroquiriquire asset (PDVSA holds the rest), currently producing around 45,000 barrels per day; Repsol plans a 50% output increase within 12 months and triple production within three years. It is also a partner with Italy's Eni in the offshore Perla gasfield. Venezuela holds the world's largest oil reserves but produces just 1 million barrels per day, down from a peak of 3.5 million. Donald Trump is pushing western oil firms to invest $100 billion in Venezuela, though ExxonMobil's Darren Woods called the country 'uninvestable' in January. The US Treasury on Tuesday authorised financial institutions to deal with Venezuela's central bank, and Caracas has passed hydrocarbons and mining reforms lowering taxes and weakening state control. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Jamie Smyth and Joe Daniels.
Gulf monarchies have discreetly raised almost $10 billion in private sales of dollar bonds in April 2026 — their first international borrowing since the Iran war hit the region's economies. Abu Dhabi placed $4.5 billion, Qatar $3 billion and Kuwait $2 billion, sidestepping public markets where borrowing costs have become less predictable. The issuance comes as Qatar has been forced to suspend LNG (liquefied natural gas) exports and oil flows from Kuwait and the UAE have been sharply reduced following near-complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Capital Economics expects all six Gulf states to record GDP contractions of 5% to 10% this year even if the war ends soon. The Gulf collectively controls more than $3.5 trillion in sovereign-fund and state-investor assets but remains a regular borrower to fund diversification. Abu Dhabi issued $2 billion through Goldman Sachs with a 4.6% coupon and earlier placed $2.5 billion via Standard Chartered; Kuwait's $2 billion was arranged by HSBC at a 4.8% coupon; JPMorgan ran Qatar's placement, listed on the London market. Abu Dhabi's 2026 international issuance is now $8 billion versus $3 billion for all of 2025. Five-year default-protection costs (credit default swaps, or CDS) on Abu Dhabi debt spiked to about 55 basis points last month from below 30 before the war, easing to 40 since the ceasefire. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf's biggest sovereign borrower, has not yet tapped private markets; it raised $13.5 billion in January-February versus $53 billion across all of 2025. Pimco said it remains 'ready to deploy further capital' to Gulf sovereigns. Source: Financial Times, 16 April 2026, Joseph Cotterill.
Since the Iran war broke out on 28 February, Britain, Italy and France — the new 'Bifs' — have seen their 10-year government borrowing costs rise by 0.45 to 0.5 percentage points, more than any other major European country. Investors are punishing the trio hardest because they combine already-stretched debt-to-GDP ratios with upcoming spending pressure on defence and energy independence. The UK priced a record £15bn syndication at 4.91%, the highest on a 10-year sale since 2008.
The six biggest US banks spent a record $33bn on share buybacks in Q1 2026 — 30 to 50% above analyst forecasts. JPMorgan ($8.33bn), Goldman Sachs ($5bn) and Citi ($6.3bn) all posted record repurchases, while Bank of America ($7.2bn) and Morgan Stanley ($1.75bn) hit multi-year highs. The surge reflects the Trump administration's deregulatory push, including a planned 5% cut in capital requirements for the biggest lenders.
Hermès shares fell as much as 13% on Wednesday after Q1 sales of €4.07bn came in 1% below last year (+5.6% at constant currency, vs +7.1% expected). France sales fell 2.8%, hit by collapsing tourist flows; Asia grew only 3.5% (vs 7.7% expected); the Americas were the one bright spot at +17%. Forty of the group's sixty concession stores are travel-retail outlets affected by air travel disruptions.
An FT investigation based on leaked documents shows Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) secretly bought a Chinese-built spy satellite called TEE-01B for ~$36.6mn in late 2024 and used it in March 2026 to photograph US bases before and after attacking them. The 0.5-metre-resolution satellite — ten times sharper than Iran's previous best — monitored at least nine US military sites across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Djibouti and Oman.
Uber is abandoning its 'asset-light' gig-economy model and committing over $10bn — more than $2.5bn in equity stakes and $7.5bn in vehicle purchases — to buy self-driving cars and take positions in their makers. It has announced partnerships with 12+ providers including Baidu, Rivian, Lucid, Waabi and Zoox, and plans to launch robotaxi services in at least 15 cities in 2026. Its shares are down 23% over six months as Waymo, Tesla and Zoox threaten to bypass the platform.
The biggest US banks used their Q1 earnings to quantify their exposure to private credit funds — loans made to the listed Business Development Companies (BDCs) that have been hit hard on the stock market — after the Financial Stability Board signalled a forthcoming report on the topic. The disclosed figures add up to more than $120bn: JPMorgan around $50bn, Wells Fargo $36bn, Citigroup $22bn, Bank of America around $20bn. 'It would take very large losses on private credit for the banks to be affected,' Jamie Dimon said, insisting the risk is 'not systemic'. Private-credit funds are facing heavy redemption requests, with some gating withdrawals; Goldman's David Solomon framed the stress as limited to retail investors, noting the bank raised $10bn for these strategies in Q1 and expects institutional demand to keep growing. BlackRock's Larry Fink echoed the point, saying institutions are increasing allocations as spreads widen and default rates stay within historical ranges. Moody's warned that vulnerabilities could worsen as 2026-2028 maturities refinance at less favourable terms, particularly for AI-exposed software loans. The SEC is broadly supportive ('if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen'), but the US Treasury has reportedly sent a questionnaire to the industry to map its performance and ties to banks and insurers. Source: Les Échos, 15 April 2026 — Bastien Bouchaud.
London-based fintech SumUp, known for its card-reader terminals used by small merchants, has started selecting investment banks for its IPO, which could value the company at more than $10bn, according to Bloomberg sources cited by Les Échos. The group is now leaning towards a London listing — a boost for a City that has suffered an IPO drought — although Amsterdam and Frankfurt are also in the race, and a US listing (once considered) appears to have been ruled out on the grounds that SumUp's commercial footprint in America is too small. Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and JP Morgan are expected to work on the transaction, with British advisory firm STJ Advisors LLP acting as independent financial adviser. Founded in London in 2012, SumUp now operates in 37 countries and claims more than 4 million merchants. In December it announced it had reached €1 billion of deposits on its pro accounts (1.5 million active users). It is expanding its product suite — cash deposit at point of sale launched in Italy, Spain and France in late 2025, and local IBANs rolling out in Italy in 2026 and France thereafter — and is evaluating whether to apply for a full banking licence (it currently operates under an electronic money institution licence). The group also plans to move beyond pure B2B by targeting consumers via cashback and loyalty programmes through its merchant network. Source: Les Échos, 15 April 2026 — Tifenn Clinkemaillié.
Seven months after being appointed CEO of Kering (owner of Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Boucheron), Luca de Meo — the former Renault boss — is preparing to unveil his strategic plan on 16 April in Florence, at the home of Gucci, which alone accounts for around 44% of Kering's revenues and two-thirds of its operating profit. The group comes into the event stabilising: Q1 revenues were flat overall but Gucci still dragged, and the stock fell almost 9% on Wednesday afternoon after the release. De Meo has moved fast on three fronts: management reshuffle (Francesca Bellettini now running Gucci from 17 September, two new divisional heads — industry and client — joining the executive committee in May; ex-Renault colleagues recruited around him); portfolio simplification (the group is reorganised around four divisions — fashion & leather goods, jewellery, Kering Eyewear, corporate — served by five 'centres of excellence'); and balance-sheet repair (Kering sold its beauty division to L'Oréal for €4bn in October, refinanced prestige retail real estate including a Via Monte Napoleone building sold to a Qatari investor, and deferred by two years its option on Valentino, of which it owns 30%). Net debt was cut by €2.5bn between end-2024 and end-2025. 32 Gucci stores closed in 2025, with about 100 more closures planned. Source: Les Échos, 15 April 2026 — Virginie Jacoberger-Lavoué and Philippe Bertrand.
France's "simplification of economic life" law was passed by the National Assembly on Tuesday 14 April and the Senate on Wednesday 15 April, keeping its Article 15 intact. That article lets major data centres be classified as a "project of major national interest", a status that speeds compatibility with zoning documents, grid connection, and recognition of overriding public-interest reasons. The stakes are large: major sites currently take 5 to 7 years to deliver in France, versus a target of around 10 months once the new status is granted — in line with Germany — compared with ~2 years for a standard building permit with no guarantee of success, says Régis Castagné, France head of Equinix (the world's biggest data-centre operator). France is the third-largest data-centre host in Europe, behind the UK and Germany. The government wants to position the country in the AI race: at the Paris AI Summit in 2025, Emmanuel Macron announced €109bn of French and foreign investments. Since then, about a dozen projects have been launched and one (€10bn) abandoned. A left-wing amendment aimed at reserving the status to French players was rejected — most major projects are led by US firms. Classification is not automatic (decree from the Prime Minister, criteria on critical size and sovereignty), and pressure will mount on grid operator RTE for connections. Environmental NGOs call the law a "catch-all" and question the environmental impact. Source: Les Echos, 15 April 2026, Joséphine Boone.
Amazon has confirmed it will acquire satellite operator Globalstar in a $11.57bn (€9.81bn) deal, paying up to $90 per share in cash or Amazon stock. The acquisition plugs Globalstar's 25 low-Earth-orbit satellites and — crucially — its prized MSS spectrum licences into Amazon's own Amazon Leo constellation, which is meant to reach 7,700 satellites but currently has only about 200 in orbit. Globalstar is also Apple's exclusive partner for satellite emergency messaging on the iPhone; Apple owns 20% of Globalstar, so the deal brings Amazon into Apple's ecosystem. For reference, SpaceX paid close to $20bn in 2025 for EchoStar and its spectrum, which has four times the bandwidth of Globalstar's — so Amazon will be limited to voice and messaging initially (not 4G/5G from space like Starlink's ambition). Amazon has separately promised a next-generation direct-to-device (D2D) system 'from 2028', without detail. Amazon is behind on its FCC commitment of 1,600 satellites by July 2026, has asked for an extension, and is lobbying the FCC to block Musk's plan to launch up to one million satellites. The company's share price has risen from $200 to nearly $250 since the first rumours in early April, with +4% on the deal announcement and +10% for Globalstar. The satellite-internet market is projected to reach $200bn. Source: Les Échos, 15 April 2026 — Thomas Pontiroli.
After nearly a decade of delays, Tesla's all-electric heavy truck, the Tesla Semi, is finally hitting US roads. A dedicated factory inaugurated in March 2026 in Sparks, Nevada will ramp through the year, with first deliveries set for summer. Two versions are sold: one with over 500 km (325 miles) of range, another exceeding 800 km (500 miles). According to a Tigress Financial note cited by the Wall Street Journal, Tesla should produce between 5,000 and 15,000 trucks in 2026 and up to 50,000 in 2027. Industry press puts the long-range version at up to $300,000; Tesla has not disclosed pricing publicly. California has earmarked nearly $200 million to subsidise more than 1,000 orders. Early fleet partners including PepsiCo and DHL (which ran a pilot praised by DHL North America transport president Jim Monkmeyer) report the truck meets expectations on long-haul payloads. Deployment is constrained by charging infrastructure: Tesla has mapped around 60 'megacharger' sites along major corridors, each capable of 1.2 MW of output — enough to bring the battery to 60% in half an hour. Diesel prices, driven higher by the Iran war, strengthen the economic case for fleets, though the truck remains a heavy upfront investment. A European launch is envisaged but has no timeline. Batteries are produced at the Sparks gigafactory in a new compact cube architecture derived from the Cybertruck. Source: Les Echos, 15 April 2026, Bastien Bouchaud.
Corporate dealmaking is breaking records despite a volatile macro backdrop. 22 M&A transactions worth more than $10 billion each were agreed in Q1 2026, according to London Stock Exchange Group data, beating the previous record of 21 in Q4 2015. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase both reported strong Q1 results helped by M&A fees, and Bill Ackman's Pershing Square this month tabled a $55 billion offer for Universal Music. Drivers include Donald Trump's rollback of Joe Biden's strict antitrust enforcement, defensive consolidation against AI disruption, and corporate strategies to expand in Europe or deepen a US footprint amid tariff frictions. Clouds are forming though: Goldman's investment-banking backlog (the pipeline of expected fees from announced but unclosed deals) has fallen from record levels, and JPMorgan's CFO said Middle East developments 'could have an impact on deal execution and timing'. The FT editorial board cautions that history is unforgiving: research over 40 years shows 70% to 75% of acquisitions fail. The 2015 cohort offers mixed lessons — Shell's takeover of BG Group largely delivered, but Charter/Time Warner Cable saddled shareholders with pain, AB InBev's SABMiller debt constrained it for years, and Kraft Heinz, 2015's signature deal, is now being split up and remains the decade's marquee failure. Boards, the FT warns, should 'think carefully, or risk making their investors pay'. Source: Financial Times, 15 April 2026, The editorial board.