Emmanuel Macron is within striking distance of a historic re-election as French president after clinching a first-round lead against his far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen. Investors should be relieved, but not complacent. Round two on April 24 will be a close-run affair. Early results show France’s establishment parties in tatters. An increasingly fragmented electorate is looking for new answers after ...

Oops. Looks like Elon Musk isn’t joining Twitter Inc’s board after all. Less than a week after Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal excitedly tweeted that the world’s richest man would get a seat, he’s now been forced to backpedal after saying Musk declined the offer. Musk was supposed to take up his post, Agrawal wrote in a memo subsequently posted ...

  Chase UK has many finance folk scratching their heads. Britain doesn’t need another online-only bank. It already has a host of scrappy upstarts making little headway against a handful of dominant traditional lenders. So why is JPMorgan Chase & Co spending time and money pursuing UK customers? If it wins a couple of percentage points of market share, the ...

  The central bank needs some new tools to navigate the unique challenges that are likely to confront the euro-zone economy. The war in Ukraine has left Europe facing both greater supply chain disruptions and higher prices for raw material, problems exacerbated by the region’s dependency on Russia energy. Against this backdrop, the European Central Bank (ECB) must find a ...

Bloomberg Travel disruption continued to hit UK holidaymakers as officials warned of expected queues at airports later in the week and motorists faced fuel shortages. Both EasyJet Plc and British Airways had more cancellations, though the airlines said those flights had been called off in advance. According to FlightAware data, British Airways canceled 7% of flights today and delayed 19%. ...

  Bloomberg Sichuan Airlines Corp suspended one of its employees after contentious comments he posted online were unearthed, highlighting growing jitters in China after a deadly air crash last month. An internet user took to Weibo to ask the carrier to prevent the staff member in question — identifiable as an ethnic Mongolian Chinese national called Ayingga — from flying ...

  Bloomberg Clearpay Finance Ltd is partnering with mall landlord Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield in the UK, continuing the buy-now-pay-later provider’s expansion into brick and mortar retail globally. Customers at 13 stores in Westfield’s pair of giant London shopping centers will be given the option to pay in installments through Clearpay, which is known as Afterpay outside Europe. It adds to Clearpay’s UK ...

  Bloomberg London’s Heathrow airport will ramp up hiring “as fast as possible” after passenger numbers surged last month to the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The 4.2 million travellers passing through the facility during March represents a more than seven-fold jump from a year earlier, according to a statement on Monday. The hub, once Europe’s busiest, is racing ...

Bloomberg JD.com Inc’s billionaire founder Richard Liu has stepped down as chief executive officer of China’s No. 2 online retailer, joining tech tycoons that exited top management roles after Beijing’s sweeping internet-sector crackdown. Xu Lei, who was recently promoted to president after more than a decade at the company, takes the helm of the e-commerce titan effective immediately. Liu’s lieutenant ...

Bloomberg The European Union’s top diplomat is urging member states to quickly provide Kyiv with the weapons it has asked for, as Ukraine braces for Russia to step up its campaign in the country’s east, according to people familiar with weekend discussions. Josep Borrell told EU diplomats a decision is needed in days and not weeks, and the bloc must ...