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Most people driving through Napa County, California’s famed wine region, see only beauty. Steven Burgess sees something different. Spotting clumps of juniper along the edge of a multimillion dollar property, he calls out the combustible shrub’s local nickname: “green gasoline!” The 49-year-old volunteer firefighter and former vintner is giving the Financial Times a history tour,

Fourteen years ago, I told a well-informed friend that Barack Obama was considering picking Joe Biden as his running mate in the 2008 election. “You’ve got to be kidding,” came the riposte. “Biden is way past it.” Similar obituaries were being penned only two weeks ago as Biden’s poll numbers dropped below even Donald Trump’s

Elon Musk has taken advantage of a recent rebound in Tesla’s stock price to sell $6.9bn worth of shares in the electric carmaker since the end of last week, according to a series of regulatory filings late on Tuesday. The sales are the first since the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive sold $8.5bn of stock

Liz Truss, frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest, has rejected business pleas for her to meet prime minister Boris Johnson and rival Rishi Sunak to “agree a common pledge” on tackling the cost of living crisis. Speaking in Darlington on Tuesday during the latest hustings in front of party members, the foreign secretary pushed back

Game developer Roblox became the latest company in the video game industry to report a slowdown in growth, with a drop in a closely watched sales metric triggering a share price tumble in after-hours trading. The company, whose eponymous platform helps players design their own games, went public through a direct listing in March 2021,

Liz Truss is facing an early fight with the Bank of England if she becomes the next UK prime minister after signalling she will give ministers powers to override City regulators seen to be holding back post-Brexit reforms. The foreign secretary has vowed to press ahead with a law allowing ministers to “call in” regulatory

Global equity markets had modest declines at the open on Tuesday, with traders awaiting US inflation data that would inform the Federal Reserve’s plans to tackle inflation. Europe’s benchmark Stoxx 600 opened down 0.1 per cent and Germany’s Dax index lost 0.3 per cent in early trading. The FTSE 100 traded flat. Trading was also

The typical household energy bill in Britain is forecast to soar to £4,420 next April, more than three times the level it was at the start of 2022, stoking calls for increased state support for families facing energy poverty. But why has Britain’s energy price cap, which dictates a maximum that suppliers can charge the

Carlyle Group’sousted chief executive Kewsong Lee asked for a pay package worth up to $300mn over five years and resigned from the US private equity group after its co-founders refused to even discuss the deal, multiple people with knowledge of the matter said. Lee crafted the deal during negotiations with his consultants and Carlyle this

Grim news about the UK economy keeps mounting. Last week, the Bank of England forecast a 15-month recession, with inflation peaking at more than 13 per cent. The energy price cap, which limits how much households can be charged, is now forecast to soar 80 per cent in October from today’s record levels, pushing many

The writer is a science commentator InnerCity Weightlifting, a non-profit gym in Boston, Massachusetts, recruits personal trainers from deprived backgrounds to get rich clients into shape. The unlikely pairings, aimed at steering youths away from a troubled life on the streets, produce more than just honed biceps: affluent gym-goers have spontaneously offered trainers extra job

SoftBank’s record $23.4bn quarterly loss, a pledge of heavy cost-cutting and an hour of public self-criticism by its founder Masayoshi Son could push the Japanese billionaire to reconsider a management buyout of the technology conglomerate. Analysts and investors said the latest results, which delivered fresh signs that SoftBank is preparing to sell key operations such

Vladimir Putin must think the leaders of Europe were born yesterday. The Russian president has made it perfectly clear that he will use tight restrictions of natural gas supplies as an economic weapon in the coming winter, but European politicians and central bankers still talk of a Russian embargo as a mere possibility. There is

Household energy bills in Britain are projected to peak at more than £4,420 a year on average next spring, posing a “fresh shock” for households already enduring a cost of living crisis. The energy consultancy Cornwall Insight on Tuesday raised its forecasts for Britain’s price cap following an announcement by the energy regulator Ofgem of

We have to entertain the notion that Keir Starmer is good at politics. He has scrubbed Labour of the worst of the left. He has turned extinction-level opinion polls for his party into almost fine ones. He has — mark this — the eternal trait of the political winner: he unhinges his critics. Why, then,

This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter sent straight to your inbox every weekday. Good morning. Liz Truss’s interview with the FT continues to make waves at Westminster. I know that sounds like the kind of thing that I’m contractually obliged to write, but

Taipei has warned that China could use military drills around the island to establish control over the entire Taiwan Strait, impeding international shipping and air traffic and strengthening Beijing’s efforts to deny the US military access to the area. The warning from foreign minister Joseph Wu came as the People’s Liberation Army said it was

When buyout groups Hellman & Friedman and Permira began stalking a takeover of business software giant Zendesk in February, they tried to bring in a third partner for what would be a large deal. They called Blackstone, a firm that manages more than $125bn in private equity assets and that they each knew well from

Economists love a good mystery. Before the pandemic, one thing they puzzled over was the steady rise in the number of self-employed people in Britain’s labour market — a stronger trend than in most other developed countries. Now there is a new mystery: where on earth they’ve all gone. When the pandemic hit, the ranks

The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and Gramercy There are times when one wants to be wrong. I have felt this way several times in the past 15 months, whether in warning last year that inflation would not prove transitory or cautioning that the Federal Reserve was rapidly

It is fitting that the taxpaying public gets to hear a candid appraisal of the government’s pandemic venture capital fund by accident. What limited information there is about the £1.1bn portfolio of 1,190 start-up companies in the Future Fund has been published somewhat reluctantly, in dribs and drabs. But minutes from the audit committee of