Finance, in brief

The oil price

Brent passed $105 after the biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the war began [1], and American petrol is 32% dearer than a year ago at $4.22 a gallon [18]

Government borrowing costs

the US ten-year rate reached 4.95%, its highest since 2023 [21], and long British government borrowing costs are the highest in nearly 30 years [8]

Households cutting back

1-800-Flowers sold 12.9% less in its quarter as shoppers held back [39], and the US government shelved a copper tariff because it would raise prices before November's elections [29]

Central banks turning tougher

traders put a 70% chance on a US rise next Wednesday after wholesale prices climbed [13], and Japan's central bank is expected to raise to 1.25% at its meeting next week [5]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Finance too.

• Cargo ships being attackedHigh ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1Europe's central bank raised rates to 2.5%. Oil had just passed $100 again, and it lifted its growth forecast anyway.
2. 2Oil passes $105 as tankers are hit
3. 3US wholesale prices climb 5.4%
4. 4Bets on a US rate rise jump past 70%
5. 5Bond yields reach multi-decade highs

Watch the US consumer price figures on Friday: governor Christopher Waller has said he would consider voting for a rise if inflation comes in hot, and the forecast for the month, leaving out food and energy, is 0.2%. [16][15]

Brent crude, the price of a barrel of oil traded internationally, jumped more than 4% on Thursday to $105.30, and traded above $107 later in the day. [1][20]

The rise followed the biggest wave of attacks on shipping since the war between the United States and Iran began in February. [23]

The United States destroyed five Iranian tankers on Tuesday, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carried a fifth of the world's oil before the war, has largely stopped. [18]

Oil was $87.16 a month ago and $67.91 a year ago. [26]

Oil sets the cost of moving everything else, so this is the number behind Thursday's rate rise in Europe and the bets on an American one next week. [1][13]

Also seen in World, Climate and Food.

The producer price index measures what American companies charge each other, before anything reaches a shop.

It rose 0.4% in August and 5.4% over twelve months, up from 4.8% in July and from a 0.1% monthly rise the month before. [9][11][12]

Energy prices alone rose 4.2% in the month, after falling for two months. [9] Prices for transport, warehousing, hospital care and airfares all jumped. [14]

Leaving out food and energy, the monthly rise was 0.2%, below the 0.3% economists had forecast. [10]

This is the first of two inflation readings that decide next Wednesday's US rate meeting, and it pushed the odds of a rise above 70%. [13][14]

Traders raised the chance they put on the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, lifting rates next Wednesday.

The figure moved from about 60% in the morning to more than 70% after the wholesale price report, and one reading reached 73%. [19][14][15]

The US rate has sat between 3.50% and 3.75% since December. [14] A majority of the economists polled by Reuters still expect no rise this year. [23][24]

Traders and economists are reading the same figures days before the meeting and reaching opposite answers. [14][23]

Governments borrow by selling bonds, and the yield is what they have to pay to find buyers.

The US ten-year rate climbed above 4.9% on Thursday, its highest since October 2023, and hit 4.95% after a government buyback. [20][21]

The thirty-year US rate is the highest since 2007, long British rates the highest in nearly 30 years, and long French rates the highest in more than twenty. [8]

The two-year US rate rose 15 hundredths of a point in one day. [8]

Mortgage rates and company loan rates follow these numbers, so this is where a war's oil price reaches an ordinary borrower. [22]

The US Treasury said it would buy back up to $6bn of its own longer-dated bonds on Thursday, a move meant to support their price and hold borrowing costs down.

It bought $5.19bn, short of the maximum, and yields rose further afterwards. [21]

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, had raised the programme from $4bn last month, but banks had expected about $8bn. [22]

He said the sell-off does not reflect what he called underlying market fundamentals. [22]

Bessent is trying to lower his own government's borrowing cost, and the market has moved the other way twice this week. [21][22]

President Donald Trump told his party's convention on Wednesday that his administration would pay every adult American citizen $5,000 if Republicans win control of both houses of Congress in November. [31][8]

Economists told CNBC the payment is unlikely to happen and would push prices up if it did.

Brian Bethune of Boston College said it makes no economic sense, because adding spending to a supply shortage makes the shortage worse. [31]

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis put the inflation caused by pandemic-era payments at about 2.6 percentage points. [31]

It arrives while the same government is shelving a copper tax to show it is lowering costs, and bond investors read the promise as more borrowing to come. [29][20]

The US government has not decided whether to tax imports of refined copper, two people told Reuters, because dearer copper would raise costs for carmakers, builders and electrical manufacturers. [29]

The country imports about half the copper it uses and has two working smelters. [29]

Copper prices are at record highs because buyers have been stockpiling ahead of a tax that may never arrive, which is also keeping metal out of markets elsewhere. [29]

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick was asked to recommend by June whether to impose 15% from January 2027, rising to 30% in 2028. [29]

A tax meant to rebuild American mining collides with a promise to lower the cost of living, eight weeks before an election. [29]

A household cannot buy less petrol this month, so when petrol costs more the money comes out of whatever can wait.

On Thursday it showed up as Primark warning that its sales are down 3%, and its owner losing 8.6% of its value in a morning.

the step is a household cutting the purchase it can postpone: clothing sales down 3%, and the shares fell 8.6% the same morning

the same step one rung further down, because a gift is easier to skip than a coat: 1-800-Flowers took 17.6% fewer orders over the year

the US government hit the same limit from the other side and dropped a tax that would have raised the price of wiring and cars

the same squeeze counted in barrels, as OPEC lowers how much oil it thinks the world will burn for the fifth month running

Give people long enough and they do drive less, move closer to work or buy a smaller car, and then the cut lands on the fuel as well.

None of them can see the whole chain, and it begins with tankers that cannot get through the Strait of Hormuz.

Spot gold fell 0.9% to $4,359.19 an ounce on Thursday and US gold futures fell 1.3%. [23] Silver dropped 4% to $64.56, platinum 4.6% and palladium 3.9%. [23]

Gold pays no interest, so when the return on safe lending rises, holding gold costs more.

Earlier the same day gold had been up 0.3%, before the wholesale price figures landed. [24] One gauge put the spot price at $4,340.99 at 9am in New York. [25]

Gold usually rises on an inflation scare. It fell on this one, because the scare made a rate rise more likely. [23]

Oracle, an American company that sells business software and rents out computing power, said revenue grew 30% in the quarter to 31 August.

Sales of cloud infrastructure more than doubled to $7.4bn and net income reached $4.68bn. [32] Its shares rose 7% after hours, though they are still down 22% this year. [32]

The company spent $55.66bn on buildings and equipment in its last financial year and expects that to approach $70bn in this one. [33]

Oracle is borrowing to build data centres, which puts it in the queue for the same savings governments are bidding for. [33][8]

Adobe, the American company behind Photoshop, beat revenue expectations for its third quarter. Revenue from its newest AI products grew more than 150% on the year. [34]

The company named Anil Chakravarthy as its next chief executive last week; Shantanu Narayen, who has led it since 2007, becomes executive chair on 1 December. [34]

Its finance chief left in June, and the head of its creative business steps down on 27 September. [34]

Adobe and Oracle both reported strong AI demand on the day one research firm said the AI share boom is near its end. [32][43]

OPEC, the group of oil-producing countries that set output quotas between them, cut its forecast for how much more oil the world will use in 2026 to an extra 380,000 barrels a day. [27]

It was the fifth cut in a row. The group still expects more consumption than the International Energy Agency, which now thinks demand will fall outright this year. [27]

OPEC raised its 2027 forecast in the same report. [27]

OPEC's figures are the most optimistic in the industry, and even they now show the world adding less oil use than the group expected in the spring. [27]

The benchmark European gas price, the Dutch TTF contract, is at its highest since the end of 2022, trading around 79.21 euros a megawatt-hour after passing 80 the day before. [28]

European storage tanks are about 67% full, against a five-year average of 84% at this point in the year. [28]

Asian buyers are paying more for shipped gas, which makes it harder for Europe to attract cargoes before winter. [28]

Europe goes into the heating season with less gas in store than usual, and that is the other half of the inflation its central bank raised rates against. [28][1]

The average price of a gallon of petrol in the United States is $4.22, about 32% higher than a year ago. [18]

Diesel reached an all-time high of $5.94 a gallon and has kept climbing since. [18]

Diesel matters more than its share of sales suggests, because it powers the lorries and trains that move nearly everything else.

Brian Jacobsen of Annex Wealth Management said diesel is driving wholesale inflation with no sign of slowing. [17]

Petrol and diesel reach a household before anything else does, and a higher interest rate does not make either cheaper. [18]

1-800-Flowers, an American flowers and gifts retailer, reported fourth-quarter revenue of $293.1m, down 12.9% on the year, and a wider loss than analysts had expected. [39]

The number of orders it took across the full year fell 17.6%.

The company said shoppers stayed cautious about spending on things they do not need, and it is weighing asset sales to fund a turnaround.

Its shares fell about 15% before the opening bell to $2.98. [39]

The company blames caution about spending on things people do not need, and it took 17.6% fewer orders across the year. [39]

Associated British Foods said sales at Primark, its cheap clothing chain, are expected to be 3% lower in the quarter ending 12 September than a year earlier, comparing the same stores. [7]

Its shares fell 8.6% in London on Thursday, the sharpest fall of the session. [7] Primark is one of Europe's biggest clothing retailers and sells mainly to households on tight budgets.

Primark sells to households with little spare money, and their fuel bills went up before their clothes budget did. [7]

Copart, an American company that auctions damaged and salvaged vehicles, reported quarterly revenue of $1.15bn, up 2.4%, but net income fell 17.4% to $327.4m. [40]

The number of vehicles it sold fell 2.9% in the quarter and 5.5% over the year, which the company put down to fewer insurance claims being made, while the price per vehicle rose 5.4%. [40]

The company announced an all-cash deal to buy ACV Auctions, and its shares rose 8.59% after hours to $33.39. [40]

Copart charged 5.4% more per car and sold 2.9% fewer of them, and its profit still fell 17.4%. Higher prices did not cover the missing volume. [40]

Nasdaq, which runs one of the largest stock exchanges in the United States, said its venture arm will invest $100m in Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. [35]

The two plan to launch Nasdaq Equity Tokens in the second quarter of 2027, so that shares can be traded and settled outside normal market hours.

Just after the announcement, Nasdaq won approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission to let certain shares trade in tokenised form. [35]

An established exchange is buying a stake in the kind of platform that competes with it, rather than waiting to be competed with. [35]

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is partnering with the payments firm Moov so that community banks and credit unions can accept and settle stablecoins, which are digital tokens meant to hold a fixed value in dollars. [36]

Moov already serves more than 1,000 such institutions.

The deal lands days before a US Senate vote on the Clarity Act, a bill that would split oversight of digital assets between two regulators. [36]

Banks have opposed it, warning that interest-like rewards on crypto exchanges would drain their deposits. [36]

Coinbase is offering the banks a share of the business they are fighting, a week before the vote that settles it. [36][37]

Kalshi, an American prediction-market platform, plans to ask regulators for permission to offer the country's first regulated perpetual futures tied to single shares, including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, people familiar with the plan told the Wall Street Journal. [38]

A perpetual future is a bet on a price that never expires, with a fee paid to keep the position open.

The trades have grown quickly outside the United States this year. [38]

A product built offshore is being brought inside American rules while the US Senate is still arguing about what those rules are. [38][37]

Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo on Wednesday, a passport-sized phone that opens into a 7.6-inch screen, starting at $1,999 and on sale from 23 October. [42]

Analysts had expected $2,300 to $2,500; Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley said Apple is prioritising adoption over near-term profit. [41]

Apple shares rose 3.5% on Thursday, breaking a long pattern of falling the day after a launch. [8][41]

The iPhone 18 Pro models cost $100 more than last year, which Apple linked to dearer components. [42]

Apple rose 3.5% on a day when nine of the eleven sectors in the S&P 500 fell. [8]

Capital Economics, a research firm that has been more optimistic than most about AI shares since 2023, said most of the eight gauges it uses to spot a late-stage bubble now point to one. [43]

Expected earnings growth for the S&P 500 is at levels last seen at the peak of the dot-com boom, and the index's concentration in a few big companies is at similar extremes. [43]

Foreign ownership of American shares is at a record high. [43]

The warning comes from the firm whose year-end forecast for the index has been above the consensus all year. [43]

The Dow Theory, an investing rule from the late 1800s, holds that a rise in industrial shares can only be trusted if transport shares rise too. [44]

Over the last three months the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 3% while the Dow Jones Transportation Average has fallen nearly 8%. [44]

Paul Ciana of Bank of America said the loss of confirmation removes a condition that supported the market all year, and that trading volume in Norfolk Southern, FedEx and Union Pacific has fallen since May. [44]

Railways and trucking firms buy diesel by the tanker, and diesel is at a record high. [18] A rule written in the 1800s is picking up this year's oil bill. [44]

Shell's North American arm agreed to sell its stake in RISEC Holdings, which owns a 609-megawatt gas-fired power station in Rhode Island, to Constellation Energy for $715m. [45]

Separately it will buy all of Hunlock Creek Generating, a 169-megawatt gas plant in Pennsylvania.

Andrew Smith, Shell's president of trading and supply, said the company invests selectively and sells when conditions are attractive.

Both deals need regulatory approval and should close in the first quarter of 2027. [45]

Shell is swapping a New England power station for a Pennsylvania one while gas prices climb in Europe and Asia. [45][28]

Circle8 Group, a staffing company listed on Nasdaq, confirmed it has made a proposal to buy SThree, a London-listed recruiter that places people in science, engineering and technology jobs. [46]

SThree had gross revenue of about 1.3bn pounds in its 2025 financial year, and Circle8 said the combined business could approach $3bn. [46]

Circle8 said the deal is structured to be financed without issuing new shares, so existing holders would not be diluted. Talks are at an early stage. [46]

Circle8 says existing shareholders will not be diluted, which means the money comes from cash or borrowing rather than from new shares. [46]

A Hong Kong court convicted Dow Jones Publishing (Asia), the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, of deterring a reporter from taking up a trade union role. [47]

Selina Cheng, who chairs the Hong Kong Journalists Association, lost her job in July 2024 and brought the private prosecution herself; she said senior editors asked her to cut ties with the union. [48]

The court cleared the company of dismissing her over the role. Each charge carried a maximum fine of 100,000 Hong Kong dollars, about $12,750. [47]

The conviction lands on the company that owns the Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, one of the main suppliers of market information. [47][48]

Sinclair, an American broadcaster that owns local television stations, raised its guidance for political advertising to at least $375m for the 2025-2026 election cycle. [49]

Chief executive Chris Ripley said the US communications regulator's repeal of a 39% ownership cap, and a court decision striking down a rule limiting ownership of top-four stations, have produced the best regulatory setting for broadcast in years. [49]

The company has cut debt by $320m since the start of 2025, while ordinary advertising stays under pressure. [49]

Sinclair's own forecast is one count of how much money is about to be spent on November's elections. [49]

Oakley Capital Investments is a London-listed company that buys stakes in private businesses.

It said the value of its holdings rose 6% in the first half of 2026, to 1.29bn pounds or 782 pence a share, up from 738 pence at the start of the year. [50]

Its own shares still trade about 33% below that figure, against a long-run average gap of about 20%. [50] Management pointed to AI-related activity across its holdings. [50]

Oakley's holdings gained 6% while its own shares stayed a third below what those holdings are worth, a gap 13 points wider than its long-run average. [50]

Shareholders in WISeKey, a Swiss cybersecurity company listed in Zurich and New York, approved moving the group's holding company from Switzerland to the British Virgin Islands. [51]

The move is structured as a merger with a wholly owned subsidiary, agreed in June, and still needs its closing conditions met.

Chairman Carlos Moreira said the new structure is designed to support access to global capital markets. [51]

The vote decides which country's courts and company rules apply to everyone who owns a share in it. [51]

Residential electricity in California costs about 89% more than the American average and has risen nearly 9% in a year, CNBC reported from Los Altos during a heat alert with temperatures at 36C. [52]

The local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, asked small businesses to cut their usage.

Electricity, water and fuel together account for roughly 10% of total household spending in the United States. [52]

Electricity, water and fuel are the bills a household pays before anything else, and in California the power bill alone is up nearly 9% in a year. [52]

The dollar index, which measures the currency against a basket of others, slipped 0.1% to 98.738 early on Thursday before recovering during the day. [53][8]

Chris Turner of ING said the dollar remains soft despite higher energy prices and firm short-term American interest rates. [53]