Trump secure after suspected assassination try at golf membership

Good morning. We’ve got a number of banking tales to start out the week, together with extra updates on UniCredit’s controversial transfer on Commerzbank, Russia’s state lenders increasing into occupied elements of Ukraine and European governments promoting billions of euros of shares in bailed-out banks.

However first, we flip to Florida, the place Donald Trump was the goal of a suspected try on his life, simply two months after a gunman tried to kill him at a Pennsylvania rally.

Trump is secure after what the FBI is investigating as a possible assassination try on the previous US president, who was on the golf membership close to his Mar-a-Lago resort yesterday.

Regulation enforcement officers have detained a person who they stated had been hiding in bushes bordering the Trump Worldwide Golf Membership. They discovered an AK-47 model rifle with a scope, two backpacks and a GoPro digital camera within the bushes.

The potential assassination comes little greater than seven weeks earlier than he faces vice-president Kamala Harris in a tense and carefully fought presidential election. Right here’s what we all know up to now.

• Harris leads on financial system: The Democratic nominee has consolidated her polling lead over Trump on financial points, in line with the newest FT-Michigan Ross ballot.

The White Home race is within the house straight. Enroll for our US Election Countdown e-newsletter so that you don’t miss any updates. And right here’s what else I’m protecting tabs on as we speak:

• Starmer in Rome: The UK prime minister will meet his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni for recommendation on tackling small-boat migration.

• Murdoch succession: Courtroom hearings over the tycoon’s try and wrest management of his empire away from three of his kids are set to start as we speak.

• UN Safety Council: The physique meets for a briefing on the Center East, together with the humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza. Israeli air strikes killed six UN employees at a faculty within the territory on Wednesday.

5 extra high tales

1. High German officers weren’t briefed upfront about an invite for UniCredit to bid for a authorities stake in Commerzbank, in line with individuals conversant in the occasions, regardless of the transfer opening the door to a full takeover. JPMorgan Chase bankers who suggested Berlin invited UniCredit, creating an impression that the Italian financial institution’s curiosity was welcome.

2. Russia is consolidating its maintain on newly occupied areas of Ukraine by opening branches of its largest state banks in cities akin to Mariupol. Defying western sanctions, Vladimir Putin informed state corporations this 12 months there was “nothing to fear” by organising store in occupied areas, and Sberbank and VTB have begun to heed the decision.

• Army briefing: Kyiv’s gamble in Kursk is in query as Russia begins its counteroffensive, with the strategic rewards of the incursion nonetheless elusive.

3. Economists count on the US financial system to achieve a comfortable touchdown, in line with the latest Monetary Occasions-Chicago Sales space survey. The findings come simply days earlier than the Federal Reserve is predicted to start out chopping rates of interest, and counsel the nation’s financial system is headed for stable development, low inflation and wholesome employment.

• Fed milestone: After greater than a 12 months of protecting borrowing prices excessive, the financial institution is about to start out a cycle of easing in its momentous assembly this week.

• Gen Z spending: Regardless of weaknesses, how is the US financial system nonetheless so sturdy? A uniquely subsidised generation could also be a essential driver of consumption, writes analyst Meredith Whitney.

4. The top of the World Commerce Group has confused the necessity for world carbon pricing to stop “difficult and problematic” commerce disputes from environmental measures. The WTO is taking the lead in working for a world carbon pricing system with the IMF, OECD and UN, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala informed the FT.

5. Asking costs for UK properties rose at twice their long-term common tempo this month, as post-election stability and declining mortgage charges helped to gasoline a rebound in purchaser demand and draw extra sellers to the market. Learn the complete story.

The Huge Learn

Since returning to workplace final 12 months, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already achieved a major drop in Amazon deforestation and outlined wide-ranging inexperienced financial system plans for Brazil. However his authorities’s plan to spice up financial development has created an uneasy rigidity with the president’s aspirations for world local weather management, summed up in a single phrase: oil.

We’re additionally studying . . . 

• Copper crunch: BHP, the world’s largest miner, has warned that the bogus intelligence increase will exacerbate a looming world scarcity of the purple metallic.

• Apollo vs banks: Led by a onetime seller in demise profit settlements, the asset supervisor is taking over the most important conventional lenders in funding extremely rated multinationals.

• US chips: Business is finest positioned to tell American semiconductor technique and “outcompete” China, writes former Nationwide Safety Council official Meghan Harris.

• Rachel Reeves: Crucial factor the UK chancellor has to do is clarify how her plan for sooner development goes to work, writes Martin Wolf.

Chart of the day

European governments have offloaded greater than €16bn of bailed-out financial institution shares over the previous 12 months, in line with an FT evaluation, as they search to attract a line underneath the long-running results of the worldwide monetary disaster.

Take a break from the information

For 30 years, Lunch with the FT has featured a who’s who of our instances: dictators and dissidents, CEOs and communists, philosophers and fraudsters. Henry Mance, the FT’s chief options author, explains its magic.

Further contributions from Benjamin Wilhelm