Today’s agenda: Verdict against Marine Le Pen; US-Denmark talks; UK’s ‘awful April’; and Sam Mendes’s Holocaust film
Wall Street stocks posted their worst quarter in almost three years on fears that Donald Trump’s tariffs will usher in a period of stagflation in the world’s biggest economy.
What’s happening: The S&P 500 dropped 4.6 per cent in the first three months of 2025, the worst performance since the third quarter of 2022, FactSet data shows. The blue-chip index rose 0.6 per cent yesterday. Investors are bracing themselves for Trump’s “Liberation Day” event tomorrow, when the US president is expected to announce fresh tariffs on top of existing levies on imports of goods such as steel and aluminium.
Global reaction: European equities outperformed the US, in a marked shift from 2023 and 2024 when Wall Street zoomed past its rivals. Asian markets were mixed over the quarter, with Japan’s Topix sliding 4.5 per cent, China’s CSI 300 slipping 1.2 per cent, but Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rising 15 per cent and Korea’s Kospi up 3.4 per cent.
Here’s more on the tariff-fuelled uncertainty weighing on markets.
And here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today:
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Economic data: The UK, US, Eurozone, France, Germany, and Italy release manufacturing sector figures for March. The EU also reports inflation data for March and unemployment figures for February.
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UK: The increase in minimum wage rates takes effect today — sharply raising labour costs for employers of low-wage workers. Also, Britain’s highest court hears an appeal against a judgment that car finance brokers must fully inform customers about commissions on car loans, amid a looming multibillion-pound consumer redress scheme.
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Companies: Ivan Espinosa replaces Makoto Uchida as chief executive of Nissan. Niox Group and Pinewood Technologies issue results.
Five more top stories
1. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been banned from standing for office for five years with immediate effect and sentenced to jail after being convicted of embezzling EU funds. The court ruling, which analysts described as a “major turning point in French political life”, is likely to block Le Pen from running in the 2027 presidential election, in which she was one of the favourites.
2. Exclusive: DeepMind has been holding back the release of its world-renowned research as it seeks to retain a competitive edge in the race to dominate the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry. According to current and former research scientists, Google’s AI arm has introduced a tougher vetting process and more bureaucracy that has made it harder to publish studies about its work.
3. Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen is set to meet US secretary of state Marco Rubio this week in the first in-person, high-level diplomatic talks between the two countries since Trump’s re-election and his vow to “take control” of Greenland. Here’s what we know about the planned meeting.
4. The UK’s Pension Protection Fund has said it will invest 10 per cent of its assets in British infrastructure and scale-up companies if the government expands its remit to allow it to hoover up smaller schemes. The £32bn pensions lifeboat’s chief executive Michelle Ostermann said consolidating the defined benefit sector would “give better outcomes to members”.
5. Exclusive: Barclays’ private credit partner AGL has struggled to attract fresh investment almost a year after it announced a tie-up with the bank, damping hopes the deal could provide the British lender with firepower to compete in a $1.6tn market. The fundraising difficulties are one symptom of the slowdown in private markets.
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Lloyd’s of London: Bruce Carnegie-Brown, the insurance market’s outgoing chair, has endorsed Patrick Tiernan as it prepares for triple departures.
News in-depth
Klarna has brought “pay in four” loans to everything from food to fashion. Now it has a $15bn IPO in its sights. Can the Swedish fintech finally silence the Buy Now, Pay Later doubters?
We’re also reading and listening to . . .
Chart of the day
Global energy demand rose faster than usual last year, according to new data published by the International Energy Agency, as record temperatures across the world meant more power was used for cooling in the self-perpetuating loop between climate change and energy use.
Take a break from the news . . .
What They Found, Sam Mendes’s 40-minute Holocaust documentary, is both an unflinching confrontation with the horrors of Bergen-Belsen — where more than 52,000 people died, most of them Jewish — and a powerful meditation on the duty of bearing witness to atrocities then and now.
Read the full article here