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Companies operating in Paris, such as Lime, must pull scooter fleets by Sept. 1

PARIS—People in the French capital have voted to ban electric-scooter rental services from its streets in a hotly debated referendum, a dark signal for an urban transportation market that the city helped pioneer.

Electric-scooter rentals lost in a landslide, with 89% of the relatively few people who participated Sunday voting against the services, according to final tallies released by the city.

As a result, the three companies that pay for contracts to operate in Paris, including the U.S.-based company Lime, will have to yank their fleet of a combined 15,000 e-scooters in the city by Sept. 1, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said Sunday.

The ban marks the first time that any major city globally that had offered contracts for e-scooter rentals in the center of town has made a complete U-turn on its policy, the companies said. It is a blow to scooter companies such as Lime, which had pointed to Paris as an example of how their services could be effectively regulated.

Paris’s regulatory scheme, which automatically limited the top speed of the scooters and required users to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines, has inspired elements of new tender offers or expansions of systems in cities including New York, London and Madrid, said the companies that currently operate in Paris. They also include the Franco-Dutch company Dott and Germany’s Tier Mobility.

Turnout for the vote in Paris on Sunday was low, with 103,084 people voting, or 7.5% of those registered. That compares with more than a million, or 74% of registered voters in Paris, for the second round of the presidential election last year.

The scooter companies said in a joint statement that the low turnout reflected what they called restrictive rules that discouraged the services’ users, with only 21 polling locations listed across the city and no electronic voting. “This led to an extremely low turnout, heavily skewed toward older age groups, which has widened the gap between pros and cons,” they said.

The companies said that their electric-bike rental services in Paris, which aren’t affected by the vote, will continue to operate.

Paris’s City officials had called for the vote because they said the rental scooters were still, despite regulations, clogging sidewalks and were a factor in an increasing number of traffic accidents and injuries from privately owned and rental scooters. The city also argues that the scooters cut into use of public transit.

In the run-up to the election, the three scooter companies argued that they have worked hard to improve their services since their chaotic debut half a decade ago, when scooters littered the streets and angry residents threw them in the Seine River. They note that they now have 400,000 riders making about 1.7 million trips a month.

The companies campaigned with social media ads targeting younger people who make up the bulk of their users, and hiring influencers on services such as TikTok to urge people to vote in favor of the services. “Paris without scooters means your trip home costs more than your night out,” one ad read.

The companies said more accidents come from bikes and privately owned scooters, not their rental ones, in part because rental scooters’ top speed is limited at 12 miles an hour, and they automatically slow to less than 10 miles per hour in crowded streets.

The companies cited data showing that as many as one-fifth of e-scooter rides in Paris replace motor-vehicle trips, reducing overall carbon emissions.

New cuts to total over a million barrels a day, potentially sending crude prices higher

A group of large oil producers led by Saudi Arabia said Sunday they would cut more than a million barrels of output a day starting next month, a surprise move that upset Washington and could raise crude prices amid concerns about the global economy.

The output cut adds to a reduction of 2 million barrels a day agreed to in October by the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and a group of other producers led by Russia. Taken together, the output cuts amount to about 3% of the world’s petroleum production taken off the market in seven months.

The decision marks another moment when Saudi Arabia, once a reliable U.S. security partner, is setting energy policy at odds with Washington as the West confronts Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. has sought to reduce revenue for Russia—one of the biggest oil and gas producers in the world—through sanctions and a price cap, but OPEC+ moves helped prop up crude prices in much of 2022.

Russia nominally is part of Sunday’s action but its output cut—500,000 barrels a day—was announced weeks ago and was likely involuntary, as the damage to its economy from sanctions and the war deepens. Russian officials said they were extending their production cut for the entire year. Russian government revenue has been squeezed, the country’s biggest exports, gas and oil, have lost major customers, and the ruble is down more than 20% since November against the dollar.

The production cut will hit an oil market that was widely seen as tightly balanced between supply and demand, meaning it could swing prices up. If there are higher prices, it could stoke inflation and complicate decisions for central bankers, who are caught between trying to tame rising prices and propping up a teetering banking system.

The White House doesn’t view production cuts as a good idea at the moment given the uncertainty in the market, the National Security Council said in a written statement on Sunday.

“We’re focused on prices for American consumers, not barrels, and prices have come down significantly since last year, more than $1.50 per gallon from their peak last summer,” the NSC said. “We will continue to work with all producers and consumers to ensure energy markets support economic growth and lower prices for American consumers.”

Saudi Arabia said it would shoulder most of the output cuts, pledging to cut production by a further 500,000 barrels a day starting in May through the end of the year. The announcement was unusual in that it didn’t involve many members of the OPEC cartel or the larger group with Russia called OPEC+, with just a handful of countries promising lower production levels.

According to people familiar with the decision, it was negotiated primarily between the Saudis and Russian to get ahead of a global slowdown and raise prices to fund Saudi Arabia’s ambitious domestic projects and replenish Russia’s reserves.

The oil producers announced their decision less than a month after a bank run led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, sparking a panic in financial markets and raising recession fears. The Saudis were among the biggest losers in the ensuing crisis, with its recently acquired, nearly 10% stake in Credit Suisse Group AG losing almost all its value after a run on the Swiss bank’s shares.

Oil prices had been trending downward since late last year on global recession fears, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, nearing $70 a barrel last month. Prices have come back up to close to $80 a barrel in recent days after supply disruptions in Iraq, but some in OPEC see oil demand taking a hit in a recession. The price moved beyond $85 a barrel after the announcement, before falling slightly.

Saudi Arabia’s state press service called Sunday’s production cut “a precautionary measure aimed at supporting the stability of the oil market.”

The decision surprised analysts who follow OPEC and Saudi moves closely.

“Given the preventive nature of OPEC decisions, there is clearly something OPEC knows about demand trends and inventories that we have yet to discover fully in overall supply and demand balances,” said Christyan Malek, global head of energy strategy at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Ole Hansen, an oil analyst at Denmark’s Saxo Bank, said the decision to cut production again reflected concerns over the U.S. economy, where interest rates are widely expected to increase. The Saudis likely feel more comfortable cutting output to raise prices because U.S. production is no longer as nimble as it once was and undercut any reduction by pumping more, he said.

Saudi Arabia and Russia were joined by OPEC members Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Algeria. Outside OPEC, Oman and Kazakstan agreed to reduce output.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, is in the midst of a plan to use his country’s gusher of oil revenue to transform its economy, rework its landscape and upend its conservative culture. As prices hit $100 a barrel last year, the kingdom accelerated plans for its so-called gigaprojects, which include a new city in the desert, as well as Red Sea resorts and a built-from-scratch tourism industry.

The kingdom’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman —the crown prince’s half brother—has said the country is more focused on the future now, and on delivering Prince Mohammed’s projects, known collectively as Vision 2030. He has been among the top officials implementing what is known as a Saudi Firs economic policy, consolidating power in OPEC and promising last year to act quickly if he saw the market turning in the wrong direction.

Prince Abdulaziz has been concerned that traders and hedge funds were shorting oil, meaning they took positions betting that oil prices would fall, and he appeared to have decided to fight back, according to people familiar with the matter.

The production cut could add to Riyadh’s problems with Washington. The cuts announced in October ratcheted up tensions with the Biden administration, coming a few months after the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia to heal relations and just before congressional elections.

At the time, the White House accused OPEC+ of actively supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin. President Biden promised unspecified consequences for Saudi Arabia, though relations improved after the president’s Democratic Party did better than expected in the midterm elections.

OPEC+’s decision to unexpectedly curb its output deeper comes as markets have been rattled by the shut down of 470,000 barrels a day of exports from Iraq.

Federal authorities in Iraq said a week ago it had won a long-running arbitration case against Turkey over control of crude exports from Iraqi Kurdistan to Turkey, halting supplies from the semiautonomous region.

A spokesman for Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government said it had reached a preliminary agreement to resume exports through Turkey this week but added the deal would have to be approved by the Iraqi parliament. Oil executives from companies operating the region said any restart of shipments may be short-lived.

Russia confiscates passports from senior officials to stop defections

Kremlin tightens Soviet-era travel restrictions on senior officials and executives

Russia’s security services are confiscating the passports of senior officials and state company executives to prevent overseas travel, as paranoia over leaks and defections spreads through Vladimir Putin’s regime.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still raging, security officers have tightened up travel requirements within the state sector, demanding the surrender of travel documents from some prominent figures and former officials, said several people familiar with the matter.

The increased pressure reflects deep suspicion in the Kremlin and FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, about the loyalty of Russia’s civilian elite, many of whom privately oppose the war in Ukraine and are chafing over its impact on their lifestyles.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, confirmed Russia had tightened the restrictions on foreign travel for some who work in “sensitive” areas. “There are stricter rules for this. In some places they are formalised and in some places they depend on a specific decision . . . about specific employees,” he told the FT. “Since the start of the special military operation, more attention has been paid to this issue.”

Since Soviet times, Russian officials with access to mid-level state secrets have been required to leave their passports in a safe run by the “special department” embedded in their ministries and companies. But Russia’s security services rarely enforced the rules, according to former officials and executives.

This changed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, when security services began warning against travel to countries such as the US or UK. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year restrictions were applied much more broadly and depend heavily on the whims of individual security officers embedded in state institutions, the people said.

For this reason security measures differ across state institutions, with some asking even medium-level figures to refrain from foreign travel and others giving senior officials blanket permission to travel abroad within reason.

Executives at one major state industrial company are banned from travelling more than two hours’ drive from Moscow without official permission, one of the people said.

In other cases, FSB officers have asked former officials who previously had access to state secrets to surrender their passports, and even some who never had access, said people familiar with the matter.

Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official, said passport restrictions had now expanded beyond individuals with security clearance.

“Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,” she said.

Russia’s security services have almost total leeway to interpret the rules under revisions to laws on state secrets, espionage, and treason, said Prokopenko. She quit the central bank after the invasion last year and is now a visiting fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

“Basically any information can be deemed secret, so the embedded FSB officers start telling you that you have sensitive information. What is it? Why is it secret and who decides that? Nobody knows,” Prokopenko said.

Peskov said the decisions “depend on the specific area of work” of both the company and the individual. “They may be more or less sensitive,” he said.

The Kremlin has also made some efforts to extend the informal ban to more officials. Following a series of public scandals over leaked footage of MPs holidaying in Dubai and Mexico, Russia’s lower house of parliament in January required lawmakers to notify superiors about overseas work trips.

At least seven regions have issued strong recommendations against foreign travel to local officials, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant.

In February, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the notorious Wagner paramilitary group, called for a total ban on foreign travel for officials, as well as responsibility for their relatives’ “amoral behaviour, ostentatious displays of wealth, and misuse of luxury goods”.

The moves have come as discontent grows among the elite with the sputtering war effort and its impact on their lifestyles. Once able to spend their riches on mansions, yachts, and boarding schools for their children in the west, Russia’s officials and oligarchs are now chafing at being confined to countries not deemed “unfriendly”, several members of the elite told the FT.

That discontent spilled out into the open this week after Ukrainian media published an alleged recording of a conversation between Farkhad Akhmedov, a sanctioned Russo-Azerbaijani oligarch, and Iosif Prigozhin, a Kremlin-connected music producer whose wife, a prominent singer, performed at a pro-war concert alongside Putin last year.

The call included complaints about Russia’s growing international isolation and pressure from the security services. Akhmedov could not be reached for comment but a person close to him said the recording was genuine. Prigozhin — who is not related to the warlord — has said the recording was “distorted partially or fully” and vowed legal action against the person who recorded it.

“They screwed us, our children, their future, and their fate. Do you understand?” Akhmedov said on the call. “Screw them. We all understand what’s going on there. Go to the Maldives, to Dubai . . . I don’t know . . . to Altai, to Baikal, wherever you want, but stay away from Moscow,” he added.

How default swaps become instruments of mass deception

Recent Deutsche drama shows that CDS are a bad barometer of whether a bank is in trouble

Credit default swaps are a form of insurance against bond defaults. In this story, they feature as instruments of deception rather than “weapons of mass destruction”, the label once applied to all derivatives by Warren Buffett. You can speculate about whether investors were deceived by their own instincts or other factors. This does not change the story, or its takeaways.

The price of Deutsche Bank CDS spiked during the afternoon of Thursday, March 23, and the following morning. Boaz Weinstein, founder of hedge fund Saba and a CDS expert who once worked for Deutsche, highlighted this in a tweet. “[I am] hearing it’s partly due to counterparty hedging,” he wrote, “but the move is really violent.”

Other pundits piled on. They smelled blood. Deutsche has some common features with struggling Credit Suisse, which Swiss officials had jammed together with UBS days before. “Banking doom is back in Europe,” one tweeted. “Markets price 31 per cent default probability for DB subordinated bonds.”

Deutsche shares dropped more than 14 per cent. This generated big gains for short sellers. They had sold ahead about 3 per cent of Deutsche’s shares, according to filings.

The FT’s Lex column, which is no fun at all in a market panic, wrote that Deutsche was not going bust. That weekend, German officialdom did not jam Deutsche together with Commerzbank or anyone else by way of a rescue. Deutsche shares clawed back their losses over the next few days.

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to use new information to justify existing beliefs. Investors were already anxious about Deutsche. It is a famous, underperforming northern European bank, like Credit Suisse, though its period of risk-taking mismanagement was longer ago. Credit Suisse CDS had run up sharply before Swiss authorities stepped in.

But CDS are bad barometers of whether a bank is in trouble. “This is a quirky little market,” says one trading boss. “It is illiquid and trade reporting is patchy.” In the US, new CDS transactions cover corporate bonds worth about $3bn daily at far lower cost than that figure. This compares with transactions worth almost $50bn in the underlying bonds.

In addition, traders say as little as a quarter of CDS involve worried investors insuring against bond defaults. Banks, for example, often buy CDS on their own bonds to keep the risk exposure of their trading books within regulatory limits.

It is straightforward enough to calculate a one in three risk of default from a steep five-year CDS price, as Twitter habitués did. But the sum has two fatal flaws. First, it includes an estimate of the amount debtors might recover if an issuer defaulted. But EU and German financial regulators would step in before Deutsche was in such dire straits. Second, the sum does not compensate for the illiquidity of a market where small deals exert heavy sway on prices.

Derivatives are geared instruments. But if CDS are rising by 25-30 per cent in a few hours and bond prices are only falling 3 cents on the euro in response to the same risk, it suggests the price relationship is a loose one. This was what happened to Deutsche.

Investors, in the guise of Chicken Little, seemed not to notice. An acorn, in the form of a CDS spike, had fallen on their heads. They were convinced the sky was falling.

Regulators suspect that someone — vulpine short sellers, presumably — dropped that acorn deliberately. Andrea Enria, top supervisor of the European Central Bank has called for a market review. It would not be a total surprise if this recommended central clearing and greater trade transparency for CDS. Regulators always want more of both these things.

A more aggressive regulatory response would be to ban anyone from buying bank CDS if they did not have some exposure to the underlying bonds. The EU imposed a curb on purchases of so-called naked CDS on sovereign bonds in 2011 in the wake of the great financial crisis. It could extend the ban to CDS on the bonds of global systemically important banks — the world’s top-tier lenders.

I have a simpler solution: investors should try harder to distinguish between acorns and the sky falling on their heads. The characteristics of the CDS market mean the prices it generates are of anecdotal interest, rather than fundamental importance.

When panicking, stop, breathe, think. It works in physical emergencies. It should work in financial emergencies too.