Keep knowledgeable with free updates
Merely signal as much as the World myFT Digest — delivered on to your inbox.
This text is an on-site model of our FirstFT e-newsletter. Signal as much as our Asia, Europe/Africa or Americas version to get it despatched straight to your inbox each weekday morning
Good morning.
Right this moment we start with a scoop out of Brussels: The EU is making ready a back-up plan price as much as €20bn for Ukraine after the bloc’s leaders didn’t agree a €50bn four-year bundle for the war-torn nation earlier this month.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoed the EU’s earlier plan, however this scheme sidesteps his objections through the use of a debt construction that doesn’t require unanimous backing from all 27 member states. The association is much like that used to fund short-term work-support schemes in the course of the top of the Covid pandemic.
An individual briefed on the discussions stated there isn’t a “technical drawback” to offering funds finance to Kyiv, however that politically “it’s extra sophisticated”. Here’s what EU leaders need to make the plan a success.
Associated tales:
Bid for lunch with the FT’s Martin Wolf, Gideon Rachman or our editor, Roula Khalaf, with all proceeds going to the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign charity. Bid now or discover out who else is on the menu at ft.com/appeal.
4 extra prime tales
1. JPMorgan Chase captured nearly a fifth of all US financial institution income within the first 9 months of 2023, capitalising on a yr of turmoil for the nation’s monetary sector to emerge much more dominant. Its US banking subsidiary earned $38.9bn in income — about 18 per cent of the trade’s complete — according to FT calculations.
2. Israel’s defence minister has warned of a rising threat of a regional battle within the Center East as tensions with Iran improve. Yoav Gallant instructed a parliamentary committee yesterday that Israel was being attacked in a “multi-arena warfare” from seven areas, which he recognized as Gaza, the West Financial institution, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. Here are the latest developments from the region.
3. Huge Tech has vastly outspent enterprise capital teams with investments in generative synthetic intelligence start-ups this yr, with Microsoft, Google and Amazon putting a sequence of blockbuster offers final yr that amounted to two-thirds of the $27bn raised by fledgling AI corporations in 2023. Here’s what this means for the much-hyped sector.
-
Apple: The tech large has been banned from promoting the Watch Sequence 9 and Watch Extremely 2 within the US after the White Home refused to grant a reprieve from a commerce tribunal’s ruling over patent infringement.
4. The UK tax authority opened 23 per cent extra circumstances on worth added tax avoidance in 2022-23 than the earlier yr, new information from a freedom of data request has revealed. HM Income & Customs opened 109,413 VAT circumstances within the 12 months to March 31 2023, in contrast with 88,673 the yr earlier than. Here’s why HMRC has increased scrutiny.
We’re additionally studying . . .
Probably the most-commented tales of 2023
![A photograph posted on a Wagner-linked Telegram channel shows burning plane wreckage near the village of Kuzhenkino in the Tver region north-west of Moscow](https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fb7a3936d-07ba-4536-8fbe-573fe1106ae4.jpg?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1)
Maybe unsurprisingly, the items that almost all engaged the FT’s readers in debate this yr was information on the warfare in Ukraine. One story which drew over 2,200 feedback got here at a essential level of the warfare in January, once we reported that Germany was resisting pressure from other western allies to ship its Leopard 2 battle tanks to help Kyiv in its counteroffensive towards Russia (Berlin later relented).
In August, the demise of the rebellious Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had led his infamous Wagner paramilitary group in a failed mutiny towards Moscow, additionally attracted vigorous dialogue and hypothesis: was this an act of retribution from Vladimir Putin?
Thanks for studying and bear in mind you possibly can add FirstFT to myFT. You too can elect to obtain a FirstFT push notification each morning on the app. Ship your suggestions and suggestions to firstft@ft.com
Extra contributions from Sarah Ebner and Emily Goldberg