Keith Fray

The company is thriving as weight-loss drugs boom, but investors see warning signs it has reached ‘peak enthusiasm’

In a bid to boost manufacturing, the Republican candidate is promising sweeping tariffs. Critics warn they would cause huge damage and heighten global tensions

In the second part of a series on economic nationalism, we look at where Chinese companies are setting up shop to get around tariffs and barriers

Benin is trying to achieve what few countries on the continent have managed: transform its raw materials into finished goods

Fatai Oluwa, a patternmaker in Lagos, Nigeria’s teeming commercial capital, has started sleeping in the tailor shop where he works, often on his cutting table, so he can save on soaring commuter costs. Since the snap removal last year of petrol subsidies by Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu, the 24-year-old says the return bus fare for the 64km journey to his home in Ogun state has doubled to N7,000 ($4.50). That is a ruinous bite out of his monthly pay cheque of roughly $95, which also supports…

South Africa’s electorate will on Wednesday decide whether to give the African National Congress a further five years in charge of the country that it has governed continuously since the first post-apartheid election in 1994. The vote is widely seen as a referendum on the competence of the one-time liberation party over those 30 years. Africa’s most industrialised nation has changed dramatically from the hopeful early days of the “rainbow nation” under President Nelson Mandela to the power outa…

Since the great financial crisis of 2007-08 regulators have engaged in the biggest push to de-risk the global financial system since the 1930s. Yet instability and flawed risk management have proved extraordinarily resistant to this regulatory onslaught. The collapse last year of Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th largest in the US, exposed very basic mistakes, not least a failure to hedge against the risk of surging interest rates undermining the value of its US government bond holdings. There foll…

One of Bill Clinton’s top advisers memorably said that he would like to be reincarnated as the bond market “because you can intimidate everyone”. But in recent years, the most powerful fixed-income market of all has been scaring its own regulators.The $26.5tn US Treasury market is the biggest and most liquid in the world and Treasury securities are held by investors and central banks across the globe. The market is the mechanism by which the Federal Reserve executes monetary policy and through w…

As Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and his Treasury team work through the detail of fiscal policy ahead of the Budget on March 6, officials in Manchester are occupied by a very different set of problems. By last week, council offices in the northwestern city were experiencing queues of 70 to 80 refugees every day in search of housing, according to Bev Craig, leader of the Labour-controlled authority. This comes on top of acute problems with homelessness and a 16,000-strong waiting list for social housin…

Even during the first blush of the honeymoon period that attended China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, it was clear that Washington and Beijing were — as a Chinese idiom has it — “sharing a bed but dreaming different dreams”. Bill Clinton, the then US president, hailed China’s membership as “removing [Beijing’s] government from vast areas of people’s lives” and promoting political reform. Jiang Zemin, China’s then leader, had a different take. He warned that America’s real…