Good morning. Talks between senior US and China officials continue in Madrid. Germany’s far-right party gains more support. Adolescence wins six Emmys. Listen to the day’s top stories.
— Teo Chian Wei
A US delegation led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and a Chinese group headed by Vice Premier He Lifeng meet again today in Madrid for talks. Included in the agenda are national security issues and TikTok. Officials were also expected to prepare for a potential meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping as soon as October.
Germany’s far-right partytripled support in municipal elections in the industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia, intensifying pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government to revive growth and push through reforms. Anti-immigration AfD increased its share of the vote by 9.4 percentage points to 14.5% and narrowly missed winning the mayor’s race in Gelsenkirchen, according to preliminary results.
The European Central Bank’s current interest rate cycle has come to its end, or very close to it, Austrian central bank governor Martin Kocher told the FT. Meanwhile, Trump predicted a “big cut” from the Federal Reserve this week.
China’s economic activityslowed more than expected for a second month with a sharp slump in investment, adding to the likelihood that policymakers will roll out more stimulus. Production at Chinese factories and mines expanded 5.2% in August from a year earlier. Retail sales and pre-owned home prices were worse than forecast.
Check out our Markets Today live blog for all the latest news and analysis relevant to UK assets.
Deep Dive: Love, Royally
Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in 2018. Photographer: Matt Dunham/WPA Pool/Getty Images
Trump's love for the Royal Family has been leveraged by the UK in the months since he retook the White House, in order to curry favor with an unpredictable leader prone to picking fights with allies that often result in diplomatic and economic strains.
Royal biographer Hugo Vickers says Prime Minister Kier Starmer “was playing to Trump’s Achilles heel,” with King Charles used as bait to lure him across the Atlantic for a state visit. “Starmer wants it for political reasons.”
It will be Trump’s second visit in two months, after the UK helped facilitate his trip to Scotland in July, which the president mostly used as an opportunity to promote his two golf resorts.
Morgan Stanley’s Dan Simkowitz coined the term derivative-ization, explaining why the industry’s markets revenue recovered from the long malaise, Paul J. Davies. Wall Street found ways to sell the same things to new people or in new forms and that turn simplicity back into higher margin complexity.
Horologer Ming is an inventive Malaysian watch brand founded by Ming Thein, a finance guy and photographer with a degree in physics from Oxford who launched the indie out of Kuala Lumpur in 2017. Prices start from about £3,200.
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