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Sri Lanka’s finance ministry has suspended payments on its government bonds, breaking what it called its “unblemished record of external debt service since independence in 1948” in a deepening economic and currency crisis. In a statement on Tuesday, the ministry said keeping up with repayments had “become impossible”, adding that “although the government has taken
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Finnish telecom equipment maker Nokia is exiting the Russian market permanently, becoming the latest western company to distance itself from the Kremlin and plan for a future in which sanctions persist. “For us, it has been clear since the beginning of the invasion that it is not going to be possible to continue our presence
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Fears about the outlook for global economic growth among large institutional investors have risen to their highest level in more than a quarter of a century, as Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its third month. A net 71 per cent of fund managers in March said they expected the global economy to weaken over the
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UK unemployment dropped back to its pre-pandemic level at the start of 2022, but the squeeze on living standards deepened, as earnings failed to keep pace with inflation despite record levels of vacancies. The jobless rate averaged 3.8 per cent in the three months to February, returning to lows last seen in 2019, the Office
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Because the word is more often applied to eveningwear, modernist furniture and a certain kind of footballer, we forget that academic theories can also be “elegant”. If one seems to explain a lot with a little, if it has few moving parts but great sweep, it can be so beautiful as to leave readers wishing
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“Are you happy with the amount of power that you have in your life?” the curator asks us. Oh God, I think, chugging my coffee, isn’t it a bit early for these kinds of questions? I’m meant to indicate my answer by walking either to an area marked “yes” or another marked “no” on the
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If Tsai Ing-wen’s plan works out, her country will start churning out up to 500 new electronics engineering experts annually from next year. On the orders of the Taiwanese president, five universities have set up “semiconductor academies”, each with a quota of producing 100 masters and PhDs a year. For Taiwan’s economy, the prospective experts
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One thing to start: Joe Biden will announce today he is relaxing restrictions on the sale of higher blends of ethanol in petrol — the White House’s latest bid to push down prices at the pump. Welcome back to another Energy Source. The risk of a record-smashing oil price leap over the summer appears to
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Offshore financial centres specialise in low-profile ownership arrangements for the wealthy. They cannot be enjoying their current blaze of publicity. Scrutiny is high because Russian oligarchs habitually use offshore centres. Enemies of UK chancellor Rishi Sunak have also asked whether these bolt-holes feature in his family’s controversial finances. Providing sophisticated legal and financial services —
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