TheChek News Flow

Investors pile billions into New York office market

Rebound in CMBS borrowing tied to city’s skyscrapers signals thaw after pandemic chill

Investors are piling back into New York office buildings, lending billions of dollars to property developers in a sign big money managers see the return-to-office wave as a much-needed salve to the market.

Owners of four New York skyscrapers have tapped the commercial mortgage-backed securities market to refinance their debts in recent weeks, raising $3bn, according to documents reviewed by the Financial Times and data from Bank of America.

That has lifted borrowing tied exclusively to NY offices in the CMBS market to $11bn this year, with office financings in US securitised markets at their highest level since 2021, before the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates.

Importantly for property developers and the city, which depends heavily on the corporate sector for tax income, investors are opening their purse strings to buildings not considered trophy assets, including older towers. They see it as a sign debt markets are finally thawing for highly leased skyscrapers, particularly in crowded business districts along Sixth and Park Avenues, in Times Square and by Pennsylvania Station.

“Office is back,” said Mario Rivera, head of asset-backed securities at Fortress, a trend he put down to corporate policies demanding a return to in-person work. Pointing to a rebound on Sixth Avenue, a corridor filled with law firms, hedge funds and other financial institutions, he said “the market was shunning that space for a while but that’s no longer the case”.

Developers have clinched more than 20 CMBS financings backed solely by office properties in the US this year, up from eight for the whole of last year and none in 2023, according to BofA strategist Alan Todd. The CMBS market is just one place developers borrow to finance their properties.

Real estate developer Paramount raised $900mn in late July to refinance the debts of 1301 Sixth Avenue, home to French bank Crédit Agricole and law firm Norton Rose.

A few blocks north, Blackstone secured $850mn in debt in May, including more than $600mn through the CMBS market, as it invested alongside developer Fisher Brothers in 1345 Sixth Avenue. The tower is the future home of law firm Paul Weiss, which will pay about $81mn a year for the space, according to documents circulated to investors.

Apple’s New York City home opposite Penn Station was also refinanced by owner Vornado, raising $450mn. And the Durst Organisation clinched a $1.3bn financing backing the old Condé Nast and Skadden headquarters in Times Square, which it has since leased to companies including social media company TikTok and law firm Venable.

The deals point to a stabilisation in New York’s office debt market and a broadening of investor willingness to underwrite loans to developers. Last year and at the start of 2025, real estate businesses raised billions of dollars against a handful of marquee buildings, including a $3.5bn debt package for Rockefeller Center and a $2.9bn mortgage on The Spiral, a new building in Hudson Yards that houses HSBC.

The amount of office space available to lease has been shrinking as big companies expand in the city, according to real estate adviser CBRE. Midtown Manhattan availability rates dropped to 15.5 per cent in the second quarter from 18.2 per cent a year earlier.

Meanwhile, weekday use of the city’s subway system is rebounding, with average paid rides nearing 4mn a day, 72 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, according to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“Investors are seeing declining vacancy rates and net positive leasing trends . . . and saying maybe we’ve identified the floor in some of these markets,” said Matt Salem, head of real estate credit at KKR.

Salem added insurers had been big buyers of office debt this year, with investors seeking a slice of many of the NYC financings. KKR has purchased some $400mn of office-backed CMBS this year, he noted.

Investors nonetheless caution the recent dealmaking does not signal an all-clear in the office market and note the New York financings are all for buildings where a high proportion of space is already leased to blue-chip tenants, with properties that have not been renovated or are struggling to attract tenants still facing problems.

The deals also have lower leverage ratios than would have been typical before the pandemic, in a sign that lenders are requiring added protection to finance the transactions. In some cases, developers have invested extra equity in the property deals to make the debt balances more tolerable for creditors to underwrite.

“It is a tale of haves and have nots,” said Ben Hunsaker, head of structured credit at Beach Point Capital. “People are looking at availability in Park Avenue offices or Central Park view offices and are saying we can lend on this again . . . If you go out two blocks over it gets pretty ugly. I don’t know how much marginal demand comes for that.”

Market slump and new tax-free regime have made UK capital a more attractive destination, experts say

A depressed prime property market and a new tax-free regime have made buying in London more attractive to wealthy United Arab Emirates residents over the past year, according to their advisers.

Property agents and tax lawyers told the Financial Times that purchasers included UAE nationals and long-term UK expats, with some looking to relocate and others wanting a foothold in London at decade-low prices.

“The uptick in interest from the Middle East has been quite marked in the last three or four months,” said James Forbes, co-founder of Forbes Gilbert-Green, a London property advisory firm. “There’s an obvious increase in activity. London is looking cheaper than it was.”

Prime property in the UK capital has been in a slump over the past decade in part because of higher housing levies, uncertainty over Brexit and non-dom tax changes. House prices in Kensington and Chelsea fell to their lowest since 2013 in May 2025.

In her first Budget last October, chancellor Rachel Reeves abolished non-dom status and initiated a tax regime under which rich foreign arrivals or those returning to the UK after a decade overseas do not pay tax on their foreign income and gains (FIG) for four years.

A tax lawyer who specialises in the Middle East said: “I’ve got one British expat client who’s been in Dubai for a long time and he is now moving back to the UK and taking advantage of the new four-year FIG regime.”

Reeves was told by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent fiscal watchdog, to expect 25 per cent of non-doms with trusts to quit the UK in response to the crackdown on their tax status, which began under the previous Conservative government.

Stuart Bailey, head of prime central London sales at estate agent Knight Frank, said: “If you are from the UAE, for example, and of a generation that has not yet bought in London, both the suppressed pricing and the four-year FIG regime present a good time to buy.”

“Non-doms being pushed out of London certainly doesn’t benefit the wider economy, or the government with reduced stamp duty being collected, but it works well for opportunistic buyers, with less competition all the better,” he added.

Property values in Dubai have soared in recent years, with average prices per square foot up 67 per cent since July 2019, according to data analytics group Reidin. Luxury properties have gained particularly quickly, giving some homeowners in the UAE’s biggest city a chance to cash in.

UAE nationals accounted for 3 per cent of overseas buyers in prime central London in the year to July, up from 0.6 per cent the previous year, according to Knight Frank, which declined to provide absolute numbers. 

There are about 1mn Emirati nationals, according to official figures, and prime London sales comprise a small part of the overall residential property market.

Liza-Jane Kelly, head of London residential at estate agent Savills, said she had found homes for two returning British expats in the past three months. Both of them wanted UK education for their children, and one cited tax reasons.

“One said they’ve been in Dubai for 15 years, and it’s changed, and it’s got a lot busier,” Kelly said. The returnees bought in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, respectively, spending between £4mn and £6.5mn, she said.

Becky Fatemi, executive partner at Sotheby’s UK International, said recent changes standardising

UAE school holidays made spending family time in the UK easier, with some families looking to split the year between the UAE and Europe.

Despite July and August typically being quiet months, Fatemi said her company had experienced its busiest summer in three years, with buyers taking advantage of the dip in values to snap up sites that historically would not have come to market.

Interest in UK property goes beyond homes: Middle East family offices and wealthy individuals have invested £245mn in UK commercial real estate so far this year, compared with just £25mn for all of 2024, according to Knight Frank.

Reeves has been told by Treasury officials that fears of a mass non-dom exodus have been overstated and that there are encouraging signs that some wealthy people are deciding to move from Dubai to London. But there is no guarantee new arrivals will settle for the long term.

The Treasury said: “The UK remains a highly attractive place to live and invest. Our main capital gains tax rate is lower than any other G7 European country and our new residence-based regime is simpler and more attractive than the previous one.”

Official enquiries about grid connections suggest need for speedy energy access will support fossil fuel use

Developers looking to set up big data centres in Britain are exploring linking them up to the country’s main gas pipelines, as a boom in the industry triggers a rush for energy access.

Five large data centre projects in the south of England have made formal enquiries to National Gas about connections, the private owner of Britain’s gas transmission pipelines told the Financial Times.

Potential customers had indicated they were interested in building gas-fired power stations on site to provide steady power in the face of long lead times to connect directly to Britain’s electricity grid, the company added. 

“The national gas transmission network is ready to play a key role in facilitating this critical investment today while working in partnership with the electricity networks,” said Ian Radley, chief commercial officer at National Gas, which is owned by Australian asset manager Macquarie. 

The enquiries mark the first sign of data centres’ interest in connections big enough to need the transmission network, following media reports of interest in connections to the regional distribution network.

While National Gas declined to disclose details about the five projects, it said they would require roughly 2.5 gigawatts of capacity combined — equivalent to electrical capacity that could potentially supply several million homes.

The enquiries suggest that the need for speedy energy access will support fossil fuel use despite tech groups’ professed enthusiasm for cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Data centres have always needed lots of electricity to run their processes and air conditioning to cool down. But they are becoming even more energy intensive because of artificial intelligence. The Nvidia-made chips that power most facilities consume far more electricity than traditional cloud computing systems for web hosting or business applications. 

The UK government is trying to expand the UK’s AI computing capacity and encourage data centres to be built in the country, as part of what it has billed as a “decade of national renewal”.

Ministers have selected the Teesworks former steel site in north-east England as the location for their second so-called AI Growth Zone, people briefed on the matter told the FT last month.

But delays in securing connections to Britain’s electricity grid — as well as high electricity prices — have for several years posed a big problem to electricity users and generators. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang this year warned Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that the UK was lagging global rivals in AI infrastructure development, despite its talent and potential. 

The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental body, estimates that data centre power demand could more than double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2045 — slightly more than Japan’s entire electricity use today.

Data centres in the US are increasingly turning to gas-fired power stations despite pressure to cut carbon dioxide emissions, as they race to meet growing demand. 

Siemens Energy, the German energy equipment manufacturer, credited soaring demand for gas-fired turbines for data centres in the US as it posted a record order backlog of almost €136bn in August. 

More than 85 gas-fired power facilities are being developed around the world to meet data centres’ burgeoning energy demands from AI, according to research from Global Energy Monitor.

Gas connections are rarely used to power data centres full-time. But as many AI companies rush to build out computing capacity, there can often be a lag between securing valuable real estate, development permits and chips, and connecting a facility to the grid. 

Gas is seen by some in the industry as a way of bridging that gap, allowing data centres to come online quicker while providing backup generation. Once electricity connections are ready, the on-site gas-fired power station could switch to a backup role, National Gas said.

Elon Musk’s xAI used several gas turbines to power its “Colossus” data centre in Memphis, which houses more than 100,000 Nvidia chips, when it first came online last year. Some of the turbines have since been removed after the site’s grid connection was secured.

Teodora Kaneva, head of smart infrastructure and systems at trade group TechUK, said connections to electricity grids, as well as high electricity prices, were “one of the biggest challenges for investments in the UK”. 

“We had a recent case where we had a data centre which needed extra [capacity] — they were meant to receive that in September this year, but now they’re receiving it in 2037,” she said.

The enquiries registered with National Gas are not guaranteed to result in connection requests, with industry advisers noting that companies could simply be exploring their options.

“You make sure that if option 1, 2, 3 and 4 don’t work, you have another option further down the line,” said Luisa Mostarda, senior energy consultant at real estate group Savills.

In a crypto winter, the consequences could be painful for investors

When Charles Ponzi was arrested 105 years ago he had just raised as much as $20mn in seven months. Thousands of Americans had fallen for his scam investment scheme that promised to double their money in 90 days.

Depending on whether you are a signed-up crypto bro or not, bitcoin is either a brilliant innovation to move the world away from corruptible fiat currencies or a vast confidence trick. The advent of bitcoin treasury companies that raise debt and equity merely to buy bitcoin is, by extension, either genius financial engineering, or something akin to a Ponzi scheme upon a Ponzi scheme.

Such shorthand may be clumsy — crypto does not explicitly rely on new investors to remunerate existing ones as Ponzi did; and fraud, though sometimes connected with crypto, is not inherent to it. But there are still alarming similarities, most obviously the mood of cultish exuberance. Over the past year, bitcoin is up more than 80 per cent, four times the gain of the trendily tech-heavy Nasdaq index; who knows — it might manage 100 per cent in 90 days at some point.

Now consider a more recent parallel. Collateralised debt obligations — the mortgage derivatives that boomed in the years up to 2008 — were, again like crypto, a hyped asset class with little fundamental value (thanks to the ropey underlying loans that mortgage brokers were originating to meet feverish CDO demand).

As the fever peaked, CDOs were so hot that financial engineers dreamt up the CDO-squared — made from an amalgam of other sliced-and-diced CDOs, which in turn had sliced and diced the original ropey mortgages. Disaster, predictably, ensued. 

Bitcoin treasury companies are in a sense the CDO-squareds of the crypto universe. If you thought bitcoin mania was over the top, how much more so is the BTC — a company that either in part or entirely puts its cash into bitcoin or other crypto coins.

These are groups that were previously struggling tech designers, marketing companies or education consultancies, have thrown in the day job and punted on bitcoin. There are now dozens of them.

According to brokerage firm Peel Hunt, there are now more than 160 BTCs globally. All have been inspired by the story of Michael Saylor, who did just this with his software company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and has been rewarded with more than 20-fold growth in the company’s share price since 2020. Strategy’s market capitalisation is now well over $100bn, triple the value of State Street.

In the iconoclastic world of bitcoin and BTCs, the concept of safeguarding company funds by a corporate treasurer in low-risk instruments goes out of the window — and into bitcoin. And more than that, the company then raises fresh equity, or issues a stream of debt or convertible bonds to expand those crypto holdings. Peel Hunt describes this as a “flywheel”.

For investors, the main appeal seems to be that they can plug into the upward momentum of crypto valuations, with built-in leverage.

In addition, there are multiple layers of arbitrage. First, depending on your location, there may be a tax play. In some jurisdictions, such as Japan, a corporate structure like a BTC would attract a lower rate of capital gains tax than a direct investment in crypto. In others, BTCs could be sheltered from tax altogether via tax-free stocks-and-shares wrappers.

Regulatory arbitrage may also be a draw. Crypto ETFs, for example, have yet not been authorised in the UK for retail investors; a BTC skirts that restriction. And for institutional investors, a corporate structure may circumvent a mandate that blocks them from holding crypto or other alternative assets directly.

In a relentlessly rising market, dodging roadblocks such as this, and maximising returns through leveraged BTCs, may feel smart. The market’s exuberance has certainly been boosted by Donald Trump’s government, particularly via his recent executive order to pave the way for 401(k) pensions to buy crypto, and his “Genius Act”, which will boost digital assets more broadly. (The Trump family’s own media company has itself pursued a $2bn bitcoin treasury strategy.)

As long as the bull run continues, BTCs — not very different from a Ponzi scheme upon a Ponzi scheme or a CDO-squared — may prosper. But “crypto winters”, as the “bros” discovered in 2018 and 2022, tend to be harsh; come the next one, BTC investors are likely to find the misery is squared, too.

Japanese billionaire’s deal for OpenAI and Intel came after careful courting of US president

Anti-establishment and with a history of losing and gaining vast fortunes, it may be no surprise that Donald Trump and Masayoshi Son see eye-to-eye. 

But the past eight months have deepened the rapport, raising the financial stakes for both the US and Japan and creating an unofficial diplomatic channel between the SoftBank billionaire founder and the US president.

SoftBank has become a crucial foreign investor in the US. The Japanese group is increasing its stake in OpenAI and has invested $2bn in Intel while eyeing a takeover of the struggling chipmaker’s foundry business. The US government’s intention to take a 10 per cent share in Intel will intertwine the two further, as would SoftBank’s ambitious plans for a mammoth robotics and AI complex in Arizona.

While Son’s dealmaking spree has been welcomed in Washington, avoiding the suspicion faced by other outside investors, he needs to maintain his relationship with Trump should he want control over more physical and politically sensitive assets.

Nippon Steel’s tortured attempt to buy US Steel — blocked first by then-president Joe Biden — was only greenlit by Trump after he was given a “golden share”. 

“In Washington, with Trump, with those around him . . . Masa has become the go-to guy on Japan,” said Joshua Walker, chief executive of Japan Society, a non-profit focused on relationships between the two countries.

“Everyone wants Masa and Japan to be successful but any time such an important relationship . . . narrows down to one person, it can get dangerous. If it all blows up, that could have wide-ranging ramifications,” he added.

Son has been cultivating close ties to Trump ever since the president’s first term, visiting the White House repeatedly, chatting on the golf course and promising jobs and investment through the kind of grand public announcements that appeal to the US leader. 

Son is “a dealmaker who’s not afraid to take big swings, not all that different to a big real estate developer”, said a US-based executive who has worked with both men. “There’s a huge commercial element to everything Trump does: will this be good for America’s bottom line? Masa understood that very early on.”

Son’s courting started with a $50bn investment pledge in Trump Tower in December 2016. He promised a further $100bn almost a decade later when Trump was re-elected. Weeks after that, the SoftBank boss was flanked by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison as he promised to lead a $500bn artificial intelligence data centre project dubbed Stargate. 

“In the US, with all of these plans, it’s hard to rein him in,” said one person who is close to the billionaire.

People close to Son said he has learnt that proximity to power in the US is necessary to fulfil his ambitions — including his oft-stated goal of being the man who brings about humanity’s next stage using AI. 

“Would Masa still be investing like this in the US if Trump wasn’t there? I would argue most of this would be happening anyway. Masa sees the opportunity to invest in one of the largest infrastructure and consumer players in the world, OpenAI, and the opportunity to invest in key US chip infrastructure in the US. It’s all consistent with his strategy,” said David Gibson, an analyst with MST Financial.

So far, Son’s investments have not included control of the kind of strategic physical job-heavy assets, such as steel, that can raise political hackles. If that follows, analysts and insiders suggest that the more US employment SoftBank can plausibly create, the more protected he would be, including under any administration after Trump.

Son was burned before by the blocking of Nvidia’s acquisition of SoftBank-owned Arm, the UK chip design company, in 2021 by the Biden administration. If it had gone through, that deal could have made the Japanese group one of the largest shareholders in Nvidia.

SoftBank’s own share price has also soared more than 60 per cent this year. Some investors have bought in for the success of Arm, others for exposure to OpenAI or in the hope of capital being returned through planned public offerings from the group’s tech-heavy investment vehicles, the Vision funds. 

Investors willing to look past Son’s biggest blow-ups — most notably the billions lost on WeWork — said his biggest wins were more important: Alibaba, Arm, TikTok owner ByteDance and, they hope, OpenAI. 

Those investors are also having their bets hedged by the group’s discount to net asset value still standing at close to 40 per cent, according to SoftBank’s most recent earnings report, meaning the market values it at significantly less than the sum of its assets.

Sceptics said the discount existed because of how hard it was to quantify the risks of what Son has already announced, including raising financing for Stargate. OpenAI is also itself enmeshed in painful talks with Microsoft to allow it to move further away from its roots as a non-profit — negotiations that will affect SoftBank’s investment.

Increasingly, it seems Son’s plans will centre on the US, rather than China, where SoftBank still maintains deep ties, including the stake in ByteDance.

“SoftBank has sort of made a decision here that we’re going with the United States, not China,” said David Boling, former US trade official and director of Japan and Asia trade at Eurasia Group in Washington.

Of Korean descent and having finished high school in California and studied economics and computer science at Berkeley, Son has long cast himself as sitting halfway between Silicon Valley and Japan. That helped him strike a deal with Steve Jobs to bring the iPhone to Japan in 2008, giving SoftBank a decisive edge in mobile.

His first big move in the US came in 2013 with the $22bn purchase of telecoms group Sprint, a deal that stirred national security concerns but went through after he agreed to remove Huawei equipment. Then his closeness to Trump appeared to pay off when Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile was approved in 2020.

That proximity is becoming a cause of concern not just for some investors but for Japanese diplomats, cautiously trying to work the situation to their advantage but railing against Son’s position as a gatekeeper.

“It has sometimes been irritating that there have been discussions going on at the highest level to which bureaucrats and senior politicians are not necessarily informed or involved,” said one senior diplomatic figure in Tokyo.

The same person admitted that in a White House where normal lines of communication have been broken or changed, Japan knows that the advantages of the relationship still outweigh any discomfort — even if that balance could suddenly shift.

“The dilemma is that if [Son is] not close to Trump, he’s not usable,” said Kuihiko Miyake, visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto and a former Japanese diplomat. “If he’s too close, it’s dangerous.”

Dans une lettre adressée au chef de l’État, le diplomate Charles Kushner, en poste à Paris, pointe «l’absence d’action suffisante» du gouvernement français face à «la flambée de l’antisémitisme» dans le pays. Le Quai d’Orsay dénonce des propos «pas à la hauteur de la qualité du lien transatlantique entre la France et les États-Unis».

L’accusation ne vient cette fois-ci pas de l’État hébreu, mais des Américains. L'ambassadeur des États-Unis en France Charles Kushner dénonce «l'absence d'action suffisante» du président Emmanuel Macron contre l'antisémitisme, rejoignant les critiques du premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahou. Dans une lettre adressée au chef de l'État obtenue dimanche par l'AFP, l'ambassadeur exprime «sa profonde inquiétude face à la flambée de l'antisémitisme en France et à l'absence d'action suffisante de (son) gouvernement pour le combattre».

Argumentaire de Netanyahou

Dans sa lettre, datée de lundi, l’ambassadeur américain reprend l’argumentaire de Benjamin Netanyahou qui, ces dernières semaines, a fait preuve d’une virulence inédite à l’encontre d’Emmanuel Macron sur le sujet de l’antisémitisme, provoquant une tension d’un niveau sans précédent. Le premier ministre israélien n’a pas digéré la décision du président français de reconnaître un État palestinien en septembre, lors de l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU à New York. Dans une lettre rendue publique mardi, le dirigeant israélien avait déclaré que la décision d’Emmanuel Macron «favorise la haine des Juifs dans les rues», donnant pour illustrer son propos une liste d’agressions à caractère antisémite récentes. La réplique du chef d’État français avait été cinglante, qualifiant cette réaction d’«abjecte» tout en assurant que «la France protège et protégera toujours les Juifs».

L’ambassadeur américain à Paris, par ailleurs père du gendre de Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, charge à son tour l’Élysée. «Il ne se passe pas un jour en France sans que des Juifs soient agressés dans les rues, des synagogues et des écoles dégradées, et des entreprises appartenant à des Juifs vandalisées. Le ministère de l’Intérieur de votre propre gouvernement constate que des écoles maternelles ont été ciblées par des dégradations antisémites». Selon lui, «des déclarations qui vilipendent Israël et des gestes en reconnaissance d’un État palestinien encouragent les extrémistes, fomentent la violence et mettent en péril la judéité en France». «Aujourd’hui, ce n’est plus possible de tergiverser : l’antisionisme, c’est l’antisémitisme, point», martèle le diplomate dans sa lettre.

Le représentant des États-Unis en France s’indigne également que «presque la moitié de jeunes Français disent ne jamais avoir entendu parler de la Shoah». «La persistance d’une telle ignorance nous pousse donc à nous interroger sur le programme scolaire dans les écoles de l’Hexagone», ajoute-t-il. Vantant les actions du président Trump en la matière et la capacité à «combattre l’antisémitisme, tant que nos dirigeants ont la volonté d’agir», l’ambassadeur américain en France exhorte le président français «à agir avec résolution».

«Allégations inacceptables»

Dans un communiqué, le Quai d’Orsay a réagi dès dimanche soir, disant «réfute(r) fermement» ces «allégations inacceptables». «La montée des actes antisémites en France depuis le 7 octobre 2023 est une réalité que nous déplorons et sur laquelle les autorités françaises font preuve d’une mobilisation totale», assure le ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Pour le gouvernement français, ces propos d’un diplomate américain en poste en France violent la Convention de Vienne de 1961, qui régit les relations diplomatiques, et consacrent le «devoir de ne pas s’immiscer dans les affaires intérieures des États». De tels propos «ne sont par ailleurs pas à la hauteur de la qualité du lien transatlantique entre la France et les Etats-Unis et de la confiance qui doit en résulter, entre alliés», insiste Paris, qui annonce convoquer l’ambassadeur ce lundi 25 août.

Lorsqu’Emmanuel Macron a annoncé fin juillet que la France allait reconnaître l’État de Palestine, dans la foulée, plus d’une dizaine de pays occidentaux parmi lesquels le Canada, ainsi que l’Australie, ont appelé d’autres pays du monde à faire de même. L’Assemblée générale de l’ONU prévue en septembre prend fin précisément le 23, jour de la nouvelle année juive et date avant laquelle Benjamin Netanyahou appelle Emmanuel Macron «à remplacer la faiblesse par l’action, l’apaisement par la volonté» dans la lutte contre l’antisémitisme.

Les actes antisémites sont en nette progression en France depuis le 7-Octobre 2023, date des attaques sans précédent du Hamas contre Israël et du déclenchement de la guerre à Gaza. Le contexte est particulièrement délicat puisque vit en France la plus grande communauté juive d’Europe occidentale, avec environ 500.000 personnes, en même temps qu’une très importante communauté arabo-musulmane, très sensible au sort des Palestiniens de Gaza.

Combined company would later separate coffee and beverage units

Keurig Dr Pepper KDP -0.18%decrease; red down pointing triangle is close to a roughly $18 billion deal for European coffee company JDE Peet’s, according to people familiar with the matter.

The combined company plans to later separate its beverage and coffee units, the people said, essentially unwinding the 2018 merger that brought together Keurig and Dr Pepper.

There are no guarantees a deal will come together, as discussions could always fall apart.

JDE Peet’s, based in Amsterdam, has a market value of around $15 billion. Keurig Dr Pepper’s is around $50 billion.

Dr Pepper continues to be a popular soda. Keurig Dr Pepper also owns 7UP and Snapple and recently purchased energy drink maker Ghost. Keurig Dr Pepper’s coffee business has long struggled, as competition among coffee companies has heated up.