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Biden administration notified Congress on Friday of weapons package made up of thousands of bombs, missiles, and artillery shells

The Biden administration notified Congress of an $8 billion weapons package for Israel, including thousands of bombs, missiles and artillery shells, in one of the largest new arms sales since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

The weapons package, which congressional officials received notification of late on Friday afternoon, also includes the planned sale of thousands of bombs, air-to-air missiles and precision munitions, according to U.S. officials familiar with the sale.

The new weapons package includes some items that could draw objections from Democrats who have opposed the transfer of large bombs to Israel amid concerns over the civilian toll of the war in Gaza. The proposed sale includes a set of guidance kits designed to be fitted to large MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, as well as BLU-109 bunker buster bombs, one of the officials said. Also included are AMRAAM and Hellfire missiles and 155mm artillery rounds.

At least $6.75 billion would fund two different kinds of precision kits, small diameter bombs and 2,000-pound bombs, the officials said.

The planned weapons sale, which comes just weeks before President Biden hands over power to President-elect Donald Trump, is the largest the U.S. government has authorized for Israel since the massive $20 billion weapons package the administration approved in August. Israel was also informed of the move, said an Israeli official, who said that the country expected the weapons to begin arriving in 2025.

“We will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense,” said an administration official familiar with the deal, which still requires congressional approval to move forward. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment. The new weapons package was reported earlier by Axios.

Arms sales to Israel have been a troublesome issue for the Biden administration, which organized an airlift of bombs and other munitions to Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and militants seized some 250 hostages.

The resulting Israeli military offensive against Hamas has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose figures don’t say how many were combatants. The war, which has largely been carried out with U.S.-made weapons, has reduced much of the coastal enclave to ruins while thousands of people have also struggled with famine-like conditions in the territory, according to Palestinian health officials and a United Nations-backed hunger-monitoring mechanism.

Some leading Democrats and others in Congress have urged Biden to curb weapons sales to Israel to reduce civilian deaths in Gaza and pressure Netanyahu into accepting a cease-fire that would halt the war and free remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

The Biden administration invested substantial amounts of time and political capital pushing fruitlessly for a cease-fire agreement. Israeli officials met with mediators in the Qatari capital Doha on Friday to continue discussions on a possible deal, but gaps remain between the sides, according to Arab officials familiar with the talks. Hamas said Friday that the current negotiations were serious and that the group was seeking a deal at the earliest possible time. Netanyahu’s office on Thursday said he had authorized his negotiating team to continue talks in Doha.

Biden had decided in May to pause delivery of one set of 500- and 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, amid fears that an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah could cause further harm to civilians. The administration later lifted its hold on the delivery of the 500-pound bombs but continues to withhold the 2,000-pound munitions.

“The Biden administration has been walking the fine line, sometimes using ammunition supplies, especially 2,000-pound bombs, as a warning sign to Israel,” said Ofer Shelah, a former head of Israel’s parliamentary subcommittee on military force buildup and now a defense expert at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.

“Everybody’s waiting for Trump” to understand how policy will change, he said.

A congressional official said that the new weapons sales could run into opposition from progressives in Congress. Democratic committee leaders in the House or the Senate could hold the weapons requests, delaying their approval. If the sales pass the committee review, progressives could also bring a vote of disapproval that would be unlikely to block the weapons but could slow delivery.

“Biden did this so that they could take the credit while delivering Trump a political problem,” the official said.

Israel’s Defense Ministry in December thanked the White House for supporting Israel with weapons and ammunition throughout the war. Netanyahu in June had angered the White House when he publicly criticized the U.S. for withholding munitions to Israel, coinciding with policy disagreements over the military operation in Rafah.

The $8 billion package sent to Congress on Friday comes in addition to a separate $680 million sale of JDAM kits and small-diameter bombs, which the administration sent to Congress in November.

“These are arms shipments that he already committed to transfer to Israel months ago. However, the urgency with which he’s doing it does indicate that he wanted some symbolic value to it” in terms of the strength of the bilateral relationship, said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York.

Uniper strives to protect LNG fleet from risk of Russian seizure

Chief Mike Lewis says company has stabilised since its forced nationalisation

The boss of German’s energy importer Uniper has said the company is working to protect its fleet of liquefied natural gas tankers from seizure by nations friendly to Russia.

The company, the EU’s biggest buyer of gas from Russia before 2022, was hit with a €14bn penalty by a Russian court in March as part of an international dispute with the subsidiary of state-backed gas company Gazprom.

Mike Lewis, Uniper’s chief executive, said while there was no indication that Moscow was seeking to enforce what the company has called a “politically motivated” penalty, he was still concerned that Russia could get allies to target its shipments of LNG.

“We have vessels around the world,” he told the Financial Times. “So the question is, if you dock in a country and you are discharging gas into that gas system, could there be a challenge there?”

Uniper has become one of the casualties of the upending of business ties between Moscow and the West since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, taking a €4bn hit last year after the seizure of its Moscow-based power generation business by the state.

However, the Düsseldorf-based company won a victory over Gazprom in an internationally-recognised tribunal in Sweden in June, which awarded Uniper €13bn over gas that was not delivered by Gazprom.

The St Petersburg court ruling in March was part of a failed attempt by Russia to block the Swedish arbitration.

Data from maritime analytics provider Kpler shows that four tankers chartered by Uniper — which buys LNG from Azerbaijan, Australia and the US — have docked in ports around the world since the ruling, including close Russia allay China.

Lewis said Uniper, which was nationalised after it suffered a €19bn loss because of Putin cutting gas supplies to Europe in 2022, was carefully looking at the countries it dealt with and conducting legal analysis to assess the risk of action against its fleet.

Moscow has threatened to seize the assets of “naughty” European and US companies in retaliation against western seizures of Russian assets worth hundreds of billions of euros.

Austria’s OMV, the Czech Republic’s Net4Gas, France’s Engie and the Netherland’s Gasunie have all faced similar Russian court rulings in a bid to stop international arbitration cases against Gazprom. 

But some analysts believe that other countries would not seize tankers or their cargo on behalf of Russia as that would risk disputes with western nations.

“I don’t see any government risking its own reputation and position in order to help Russia enforce [the financial penalties] against Uniper,” said Agnieszka Ason, a senior visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Still, the case illustrates the challenges of unpicking economic and business ties between Russia and Germany, which for decades depended on cheap Russian gas to power its industrial sector.

It comes as Uniper prepares to float a portion of its shares as part of a plan to return it to private ownership after the €13.5bn government bailout. The business posted a profit of around €6bn in 2023, and made its first payment to the German government in September.

The company last month lifted its guidance for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation to €2.5bn to €2.8bn, from a previous estimate of €1.9bn to €2.4bn, after resolving unspecified legal issues.

Lewis said Uniper’s victory against Gazprom in the international tribunal was important for its return to private ownership, even if it was unlikely to receive the money “any time soon”.

The ruling enabled Uniper to end a multibillion dollar gas contract with Gazprom Export that would have run into the mid-2030s. It was important to no longer have that liability “hanging over us”, Lewis said

The British chief executive, who has headed Uniper since June 2023, said the company was “very much in a stronger position” than 18 months ago, making it “an attractive proposition for any potential future investor”.

F1’s growing young audience attracts array of consumer brand sponsors

Kit Kat, Louis Vuitton, and McDonald’s are among the companies attracted to rising awareness around the sport

Formula One is attracting a new wave of sponsorships from consumer brands, as the global racing series and its teams win over a new generation of fans.

The sport has attracted record attendances of 6.5mn for events in 2024, thanks to the Netflix Drive to Survive effect and a rising profile in Hollywood on the back of F1 themed films.

Nestlé’s Kit Kat, which will become F1’s “official chocolate bar” next season, and luxury group LVMH, including the Moët & Chandon, Tag Heuer and Louis Vuitton brands, are among the recent additions to the competition’s growing list of blue-chip sponsors. McDonald’s, Toymakers Lego Group and Mattel’s Hot Wheels have also signed deals with F1 this year.

Thomas Josnik, head of motorsport at Puma, which has sponsorship deals with F1 and teams including Ferrari and Aston Martin F1, said the rise of a “much wider and much younger audience” had “made F1 much more attractive”.

“It’s not about the pure sport any more,” he added. “It’s more about the entire culture and the entire culture around the sport, including fashion, celebrities, and music,” he added.

Under the ownership of US group Liberty Media, F1 has positioned itself as a premium sports and lifestyle brand, with a young and diverse fan base. The company generated $632mn of sponsorship revenue in the 12 months to the end of the third quarter of this year, more than double the amount it made in the entirety of 2019, according to an investor presentation.

The races in Melbourne, Silverstone, Texas and Mexico City, each attracted more than 400,000 attendees. On top of Texas, Mexico City and Montreal, F1 has also added US races in Miami and Las Vegas, boosting attendance figures in North America.

“With five events in North America now, it’s much easier for brand marketers in the west to justify the spend,” said Jonathan Jensen, an academic and consultant who follows F1.

Brand awareness has also shot up thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive, a behind the scenes series that took drivers and team bosses mainstream.

Films such as Rush (2013), which tells the story of the rivalry between former drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, have “raised the F1 consciousness around Hollywood”, said Joe Cobbs, professor of sports business at Northern Kentucky University, while a new F1 film starring actor Brad Pitt is set to be released next year.

“F1 drivers and teams became much more recognisable in the US, which enabled consumer brands to more readily activate F1 sponsorships effectively in the American market,” Cobbs added.

F1 estimates that 42 per cent of its 750mn fan base is under 35 years old. The percentage of female fans has increased to roughly 41 per cent from 37 per cent in 2018.

As attendances and digital audiences rise, a growing percentage of team sponsors are B2C companies, according to analysis provided by Cobbs and fellow academic Jonathan Jensen. In 2023, more than 63 per cent of team sponsors were consumer facing, with the remainder being B2B, up from 55.9 per cent in 2020, when Drive to Survive took off on Netflix.

The average value of a team sponsorship deal is now just above $5mn, almost double 2019 figures, according to Nielsen Sports. Deals are also shorter, down from an average of 5.2 years in 2019 to 3.2, allowing a greater quantity of sponsorship deals and partners.

Demand among sponsors has moved beyond the main F1 racing series.

F1 Academy, a racing league designed to produce female drivers, has signed up a range of consumer-facing brands, including Tommy Hilfiger, Charlotte Tilbury, Puma, American Express, and Red Bull.

The racing teams have also won over consumer-facing companies. Chipotle Mexican Grill struck a sponsorship deal with Haas F1 in 2023, while clothing retailer Adidas will become the clothing partner for Mercedes F1 team in 2025. Ferrari announced a partnership with whisky brand Chivas Regal in November, and McLaren with telecoms provider T-Mobile in October.

“The story of superhuman [efforts] will never get tired,” said Kate Dalton, head of brand and marketing at Aston Martin F1. “Definitely through Netflix and now much more in places like TikTok, that has just come to life again, and people are seeing it with fresh eyes.”

Behind-the-scenes sports content has always done well for TikTok, which has a content partnership with the Aston Martin F1 team, according to Aoife Moran, sports marketing lead in Europe at the social media platform.

“It’s not just the stories and how they’re performing on track, it’s the mechanics, the engineers, all of those people behind the scenes that make it matter,” Moran said. “That emotive storytelling through content creation . . . those are the moments that land well on TikTok . . . they’re not broadcast stories.”

Neko’s full-body scan costs £300 and has a 45K waiting list. Is it worth it?

The FT’s Innovation Editor tries the affordable MOT

When I celebrated my 50th birthday (some time ago now), my dear wife gave me some sobering advice: “It’s all about maintenance now,” she said. She was not wrong.

From that date, I began to notice that my body’s operating system was not as robust as it once was. I tried to cut down on the alcohol and keep up the exercise. But my joints became creakier. My recovery time from long cycle rides became more sluggish. My sleep was more fitful. An umbilical hernia unexpectedly popped up.

It rapidly dawned on me that my body was decaying. (Martin Amis clearly arrived at his own intimations of mortality quicker than me: he observed that you spend the first 40 years of your life saying ‘Hi’ and the next 40 saying ‘Bye’.) In such circumstances, a maintenance plan is needed.

Maintenance is the promise of Neko Health, a Swedish start-up backed by billionaire Daniel Ek of Spotify that offers a fashionable full-body scan at two London clinics. The data shows that men are 50 per cent less likely to seek medical advice than women, due to some mix of pride, laziness, macho recklessness or a lack of access. As Neko says, regular inspections are mandatory for cars, so why not prioritise our bodies in the same way?

Hjalmar Nilsonne, the co-founder and chief executive of Neko Health, tells me that he wants to transform healthcare in the same way that Elon Musk revolutionised the car industry with Tesla. Nilsonne comes from a family of doctors but rebelled by becoming a software engineer and entrepreneur. His vision for a more effective healthcare system gives consumers better access to their data, in turn allowing them to make more informed choices lifestyle choices. The £299 hour-long session includes a skin scan, blood tests, body and circulation examinations and a doctor’s consultation – cheaper than those from the celebrity-endorsed Prenuvo (from $2,500) and the AI-assisted Ezra (from $1,495), which both offer MRI scans, with heart and spine screenings at an additional cost. 

Jason Goodman, Ezra’s chief commercial officer, says the company already operates in 20 cities in the US and will be launching in London in early 2025. Ezra’s MRI screening, which takes less than an hour, can check for more than 500 different conditions in 13 organs. It can pick up problems, such as prostate cancer, that Neko’s scan would be unlikely to detect. Ezra picks up “something meaningful”, including early stage cancers, in about seven per cent of scans, Goodman says. 

Back at Neko’s London Marylebone clinic, it’s all pastel shades and smiley staff. The first, and to me most novel, scan is a full-body skin examination. Stripped to my underwear, I step into a brightly lit pod with cameras that record 2,000 images. I later discover that I have an astonishing 580 moles or markings, all recorded in a digital library. Neko can use machine-learning tools to track their evolution in future annual scans. Then follows a standard series of blood, hand grip, electrocardiogram and blood and eye pressure tests, all of which I have undergone elsewhere before.

Tests complete, I am ushered into another pod with revolving doors and a giant screen displaying a slightly ungainly digital avatar and all my health data. Adam Wright, a cheery doctor who splits his time between Neko and the NHS, first asks about my medical history (relatively uneventful apart from an appendectomy), diet (respectable, chocolate aside) and lifestyle (stressful) and then talks me through the findings. “The ethos of what we’re doing here revolves around proactive and preventative healthcare,” he says. “We’re trying to discover subtle changes that can go undetected for a long time which left unmanaged or unfound can lead to future problems.”

It comes as no surprise to learn that my blood pressure, cholesterol levels and BMI are all slightly high (I’m a deadline-junkie journalist). Nor that a more Mediterranean diet, reduced alcohol intake and strength-building exercises are advised to reduce these readings and improve muscle mass. The doctor recommends I wear an Aktiia bracelet to monitor my blood pressure levels; a week later, it’s consistently elevated enough to warrant a GP visit. About one per cent of the 5,000 Neko users in Sweden have been found to have far more serious conditions, such as aortic aneurysms or malignant melanomas. These users are immediately referred to Neko’s specialists, their own doctors or other consultants. Neko’s extensive data helps to inform rapid treatment. 

I ask the doctor whether Neko’s relaxing spa-like ambience is an appropriate place to deliver grim news. He would far rather talk to patients in such surroundings, he answers, than in the middle of a noisy, chaotic public ward. 

Is the body scan worth it? In better-resourced public healthcare systems, most of Neko’s tests would be routinely offered. And Neko’s scans are not designed to detect many medical conditions, such as the torn meniscus in my knee that had been previously diagnosed elsewhere. But it is always a worthwhile exercise to step out of your daily routine and check in on your body. Relieved that my health MOT showed nothing major had yet broken down, I nevertheless resolved to eat less, sleep more, watch my blood pressure and lift weights. Money spent on maintenance is never wasted.

UK altnets count cost of ‘gold rush’ end after collective losses surpass £1bn

Alternative network providers under pressure to demonstrate they can be profitable businesses not just builders

Alternative network providers have proliferated in the UK over the past 15 years, spurred by the promise of winning broadband business in the race to roll out full-fibre across the country.

But although some have made their mark in reshaping the market, the majority have failed to fulfil their original targets as they take on incumbents BT and Virgin Media O2.

Collective losses among the so-called altnets hit £1.3bn in 2023, according to a survey of the companies’ most recently published accounts by research group Enders Analysis, which warns the picture will not improve this year. James Barford, director of telecoms, said “2024 might well be worse due to increasing interest costs”.

Investors have poured billions into backing dozens of these challenger businesses but they have been hit by a rise in interest rates, increasing costs and financing difficulties, just as many struggle to persuade customers to ditch the incumbents in favour of them.

A senior executive at an asset manager that invests in digital infrastructure said they were “very concerned about the state of the UK altnet market”, saying “a large chunk of them are uneconomic” due to limited take-up by customers. They predicted there would be “a lot of failures” and lenders “sitting on fairly material losses”, with investors currently holding on to avoid writedowns.

Some fear a predicted wave of consolidation between full-fibre providers will be at valuations below the capital invested.

Vicente Vento, founder and chief executive of investment management firm DTCP, which is an investor in London altnet Community Fibre, warned that banks in the past few years had “financed projects that probably in hindsight shouldn’t have been financed”.

“The main differentiation that we’ve seen is there’s been assets that have been building projects, and then there are companies that have turned into businesses,” he added.

A report published by Enders Analysis in October said weaker than expected penetration was a critical driver for the collective losses.

They estimated a 40 per cent take-up rate — in other words, that at least four in 10 homes or businesses subscribed to an altnet’s services once they were available to their home or premises — was required for a reasonable return, but predicted that most altnets were expected to reach less than half of that within five years of installing their infrastructure.

Among the altnets with the highest penetration, Community Fibre by October had more than 310,000 customers but this was out of 1.3mn premises passed, while another London-based operator, Hyperoptic, had by September passed more than 1.73mn premises but only gained just over 340,000 customers.

One senior infrastructure investor — whose company has backed a UK altnet — agreed there had been a “gold rush” period during which the challenges of building, operations and penetration were underestimated.

They added that some businesses should not have been funded and may even go bankrupt, with their assets likely to be bought by rivals at a lower price than the cost to build.

“There is a sentiment problem,” they said while retaining a degree of bullishness over eventual customer adoption. “There’s no question that the characteristics that attracted us to them in the first place still remain because these are expensive things to build but they’re not expensive things to run.”

The investor added a “big focus in the industry is on cash flow break-even — making sure these businesses can self-fund themselves without having to rely on external sources of capital”.

Ben Terry, a senior investment director at investment manager Amber Infrastructure — which is a majority shareholder in south coast-based toob, a minority shareholder in Community Fibre and former investor in rural provider Airband — said investors’ ability to ride out the headwinds would be determined by factors including performance, access to further capital and the relative returns in comparison to competing infrastructure investments. 

He expects altnets to continue to prioritise commercialisation over infrastructure rollouts in 2025 as part of attempts to demonstrate “a clear trajectory to profitability and self-funding”.

Consolidation, he added, was “firmly on investors’ agendas and many discussions are under way” but sticking points included valuations.

Causes for optimism in the sector include incumbent BT’s Openreach reporting losses to competitors, the introduction of an industry-wide policy mandated by regulator Ofcom dubbed “One Touch Switch”, which aims to make it easier for customers to change providers, and a flurry of new debt raises being secured this year.

Max Gilbert, managing director at investment bank Houlihan Lokey’s technology group — which has advised on deals including altnet Lit Fibre’s sale to CityFibre — said investor sentiment was unlikely to materially improve in the near-term.

However, he added the sector had “gone through a reset period” and a “meaningful number” of altnets were expected to be break-even in terms of ebitda during the course of the next year.

Others take a more pessimistic view. An executive at a digital infrastructure investor said it had passed on about 10 different proposals to invest in UK altnets over the past three years because of what they argued were risks in their assumptions on pricing, profitability and competition.

They added consolidation was inevitable but “nobody wants to take a bath”. One altnet it examined in the past 12 months it valued at half the amount of invested capital.

Cesar Bravo, a director at Hamburg Commercial Bank, an altnet investor, said it had taken a step back from the market without giving specifics but was now looking at potential deals and seeing key performance indicators increasingly baked into covenants from the beginning.

“It’s a sector that still carries strong fundamentals and there will be businesses or investment opportunities that will still be attractive.”

US set for IPO comeback as private equity firms seek to offload holdings

Bankers hope strong 2024 gains for Wall Street equities and pro-business policies will drive listings rebound

Wall Street bankers are gearing up for a revival in initial public offerings as private equity groups seek to tap buoyant US equities markets to offload some of their flagship holdings.

Several private equity-backed groups have already filed paperwork with securities regulators for IPOs, including medical devices company Medline and software maker Genesys.

Bankers and analysts are expecting a flurry of listing announcements in the first half of 2025, after blockbuster gains by US stocks in 2024 and on hopes president-elect Donald Trump will cut regulations and taxes.

Investors and bankers have also been encouraged by strong share price gains following recent deals. Shares in nine of the 10 largest IPOs of 2024 ended the year above their listing price, with half of them — led by social media group Reddit — recording triple-digit gains.

“Successive improvement and more activity, that’s the headline,” said Eddie Molloy, global co-head of equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley. “With an [economic] backdrop that is a bit more certain, more of a pro-business bent to regulatory policy and the Fed [cutting interest rates], we should be busier for sure.”

The expected rush of US IPOs comes after a drought in the past three years as the Federal Reserve’s campaign of sharp rate rises, which began in 2022, curbed investor demand for new listings.

Higher rates reduce demand for assets that are considered high-risk, or which are valued on the promise of growth far in the future — both common features of newly-listed companies. Economists have scaled back their forecasts for how quickly the Fed will cut interest rates over the next 12 months, but nonetheless expect rates to fall further after the central bank announced three consecutive cuts in late 2024.

US listings raised $32bn in 2024, excluding special purpose acquisition companies, according to Dealogic, up almost 60 per cent on 2023.

Few observers are predicting a return to the dealmaking mania of the pandemic period, when huge government and central bank stimulus programmes boosted markets and led to a surge in IPOs that peaked at $150bn in 2021.

However, bankers are hopeful that equity capital markets activity will top the pre-2020 average of $38bn.

“Large [private-equity backed] IPOs will be the most important theme,” Molloy said.

The trend is partly driven by private equity firms under pressure to return cash to backers after the long dealmaking drought. It also reflects a shift in investor appetite after many were burnt by bad bets on lossmaking start-ups during the pandemic-era IPO rush.

“These are companies that generally speaking are larger and more profitable, and will therefore be more palatable for public market investors,” said Jeremy Abelson, founder and portfolio manager at Irving Investors, a growth-focused fund that invests in private and public companies. “The difference between now and 2021 is that in 2021 there was significant enthusiasm for mediocre businesses. We won’t see that again for a very long time.”

Fintech will also be a closely watched theme in the first half of 2025, with Swedish buy now, pay later group Klarna expected to be one of the first large venture-backed companies to brave the market.

San Francisco-based mobile banking group Chime has also renewed its plans to go public after initially aiming to list more than two years ago. Chime has previously discussed with investors a valuation of between $15bn and $20bn — a similar size to Klarna — according to two people familiar with the talks, though tech and financial stocks have made strong gains since last month’s US election, which could help lift its final valuation. Chime declined to comment.

Some observers have been surprised by the relative quiet in IPO markets considering the broader strength in US stocks over the past two years, with the S&P 500 rising almost 70 per cent from its 2022 lows. However, much of those gains have been driven by a small number of very large companies, rather than the smaller groups that typically float their shares.

Ryan Nolan, co-head of software investment banking at Goldman Sachs, said the broadening of stock market gains in the second half of 2024 had helped confidence. “There’s a lot more excitement and momentum,” he said.

Many private companies secured huge amounts of funding at inflated valuations in 2021, which reduced the urgency for further deals and made executives reluctant to accept new cash at a marked-down valuation. 

Samantha Lau, chief investment officer for small and mid-cap growth equities at AllianceBernstein, said private investors were now showing a “more realistic attitude” towards valuations. 

“Enough time has passed since 2021 that things will have to start to thaw,” she added.

Almost half of analysts polled by the FT accuse rate-setters of being ‘behind the curve’

The European Central Bank has been too slow to cut interest rates to help the Eurozone’s stagnating economy, many of the economists polled by the Financial Times have warned.

Almost half of the 72 Eurozone economists surveyed — 46 per cent — said the central bank had “fallen behind the curve” and was out of sync with economic fundamentals, compared with 43 per cent confident that the ECB’s monetary policy was “on the right track”.

The remainder said they did not know or did not respond, while not a single economist thought the ECB was “ahead of the curve”.

The ECB has lowered rates four times since June, from 4 per cent to 3 per cent, as inflation fell faster than expected. During that period, the economic outlook for the currency area continuously weakened.

ECB president Christine Lagarde has acknowledged that rates will need to fall further next year, amid expectations of lacklustre Eurozone growth.

The IMF’s latest projections show the currency bloc’s economy expanding by 1.2 per cent next year, compared with a 2.2 per cent expansion in the US. Economists polled by the FT are even more gloomy on the Eurozone, anticipating growth of just 0.9 per cent.

Analysts expect the divergence in growth will mean Eurozone interest rates end the year far lower than US borrowing costs.

Rate-setters at the Federal Reserve expect to cut borrowing costs by a quarter point just twice next year. Markets are split between expecting four to five 25 basis-point cuts from the ECB by the end of 2025.

Eric Dor, professor of economics at IÉSEG School of Management in Paris, said it was “obvious” that “downside risks for real growth” in the Eurozone were increasing.

“The ECB has been too slow in cutting policy rates,” he said, adding that this was having a damaging effect on economic activity. Dor said he sees an “increasing probability that inflation could undershoot” the ECB’s 2 per cent target.

Karsten Junius, chief economist at bank J Safra Sarasin, said decision-making at the ECB appeared to be generally slower than at the Federal Reserve and the Swiss National Bank.

Among other factors, Junius blamed Lagarde’s “consensus-oriented leadership style” as well as the “large number of decision makers in the governing council”.

UniCredit’s group chief economist Erik Nielsen noted that the ECB had justified its dramatic pandemic-era hikes by saying it needed to keep inflation expectations in check.

As soon as the risk of de-anchoring of inflation expectations evaporated, they should [have] cut rates as fast as possible — not in small gradual steps,” said Nielsen, adding that monetary policy was still overly restrictive despite inflation being back on track.

In December, after the ECB cut rates for the final time in 2024, Lagarde said that the “direction of travel is clear” and for the first time pointed out that future rate cuts were likely — a view that has long been common sense among investors and analysts.

She did not give guidance over the pace and timing of future cuts, saying the ECB would decide on a meeting-by-meeting basis.

On average, the 72 economists polled by the FT expect that Eurozone inflation will fall to 2.1 per cent next year — just above the central bank’s target and in line with the ECB’s own prediction — before falling to 2 per cent in 2026, 0.1 percentage points above the ECB forecast.

According to the FT’s survey, the majority of economists believe that the ECB will continue on its current rate-lowering trajectory in 2025, lowering the deposit rate by another percentage point to 2 per cent.

Only 19 per cent of all polled economists expect that the ECB will continue to lower rates in 2026.

The economists’ forecast for ECB cuts is slightly more hawkish than those priced in by investors. Only 27 of the 72 economists polled by the FT expect rates to fall to the 1.75 per cent to 2 per cent range anticipated by investors.

Not all economists believe the ECB has acted too slowly. Willem Buiter, former chief economist at Citi and now an independent economic adviser, said that “ECB policy rates are too low at 3 per cent”.

He noted the stickiness of core inflation — which, at 2.7 per cent, is well above the central bank’s 2 per cent target — and record low unemployment of 6.3 per cent in the currency area.

The FT survey found that France has replaced Italy as the euro area country considered most at risk of a sudden and steep sell-off in government bonds.

French markets have been roiled in recent weeks by a crisis over former Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s proposed deficit-cutting budget, which led to the toppling of his government.

Fifty-eight per cent of survey respondents said they were most concerned about France, while 7 per cent named Italy. That marked a dramatic shift from two years ago, when nine in 10 respondents pointed to Italy.

“French political instability, feeding the risks of policy populism and rising public debt levels, raises the spectre of capital flight and market volatility,” said Lena Komileva, chief economist at consultancy (g+)economics.

Ulrike Kastens, senior economist at German asset manager DWS, said she was still confident that the situation would not spiral out of control. “Unlike [during] the sovereign debt crisis of the 2010s, the ECB has options to intervene,” she said.

Despite the concerns over France, the consensus among economists was that the ECB will not need to intervene in euro area bond markets in 2025.

Just 19 per cent consider it likely that the central bank will use its emergency bond buying tool, the so-called Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), next year.

“Despite the likelihood of turmoil in French bond markets, we think there will be a high bar for the ECB to activate TPI,” said Bill Diviney, head of macro research at ABN AMRO Bank.

Pressure will be on to reduce costs significantly if liquid air is to become mainstream

Renewable energy is not dead — despite the pessimism that has gripped markets since Donald Trump’s election. Regardless of what may happen stateside, countries in Europe are still pressing ahead with ambitious clean energy targets. The EU is expected to build on average 22 gigawatts of new wind farms alone every year between 2024 and 2030. Greater deployment of wind and solar will also bring benefits for other technologies — including newer energy storage methods such as liquid air.

Definitions of long duration energy storage (LDES) can vary but typically it is any technology that can store electricity for periods ranging from eight hours to weeks and months. This capability has long existed through pumped storage hydro plants — or water batteries — which use power at times of excess production to push water uphill, from one reservoir to a second. The water is then released from the upper reservoir through turbines to generate electricity when there is a need. But the geographic limitations of water batteries are driving interest in other LDES technologies.

Enter liquid air energy storage, which has no such geographic restrictions. This works by using electricity during periods of abundant wind and solar generation to clean, dry and refrigerate air until it liquefies. The liquid air is then stored in insulated tanks. When electricity is required, it is pumped at high pressure, reheated and expanded to produce a high pressure gas that powers a turbine.

The UK government-owned National Wealth Fund and FTSE 100 power company Centrica this summer participated in a £300mn fundraising to help build a liquid air energy plant near Manchester in the north-west of England that is planned to open in 2026.

When complete, the plant is expected to be one of the largest facilities of its kind globally with a storage capacity of 300MWh (megawatt hour) and power output of 50 megawatts. The syndicate backing the project — under development by private company Highview Power — also includes Rio Tinto and Goldman Sachs Power Trading. Highview is also planning a further four, bigger liquid air plants, including one in Scotland.

Like many LDES technologies, though, liquid air energy storage is expensive. Broadly speaking, for a first-of-a-kind project storage costs might be about £500 per kilowatt hour, versus about £300/KWh for a lithium ion battery.

In the UK, the government has proposed a “cap and floor” revenue mechanism for plants once they are operational to incentivise more facilities. LDES developers had long been campaigning for this. But the pressure will still be on to reduce costs significantly if liquid air energy storage is to move into the mainstream.