Ukraine’s new prime minister said she’s likely to seek new International Monetary Fund financing to shore up the nation’s fiscal needs with no end to Russia’s assault in sight.
Yuliia Svyrydenko, a 39-year-old ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy became Ukraine’s second female head of government last week. The cabinet overhaul was part of an effort to move into position presidential loyalists who can potentially win favor with Trump. Svyrydenko took office 11 weeks after her team at the Economy Ministry secured a deal with Washington over access to Ukraine’s natural resources.
She laid out the country’s budget squeeze in stark terms. Global donors have so far earmarked only half of the estimated $75 billion that the war-strained budget requires over the next two years, she said.
“If the baseline scenario assumes the war will continue into next year, it is very likely we will have a new IMF program,” Svyrydenko told Bloomberg News in her first interview since taking office. Economic and military scenarios will be on the agenda during the August visit, “to determine whether a new program would be reasonable and what its likely parameters could be,” she said.
Microsoft accused Chinese hackers of exploiting vulnerabilities in its SharePoint software that have led to breaches worldwide in recent days. Two Chinese nation-state actors have been exploiting these vulnerabilities in SharePoint, Microsoft said in a blog Tuesday. The flaws were discovered in instances of the software installed on customer servers rather than in the cloud, the company said. Governments, businesses and other organizations across the globe have been breached because of the vulnerabilities, leading to the theft of sensitive information.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered support for Jerome Powell amid regular attacks from Trump administration officials, saying he sees no reason for the Federal Reserve chair to step down. “There’s nothing that tells me that he should step down right now,” Bessent said on Fox Business. Powell has been under fire from Trump for months for leading the Fed in holding fast on interest rates. US Treasuries edged. higher.
Nigeria’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged and signaled it will maintain a tight monetary policy stance until inflation risks subside. The 12-member monetary policy committee kept the benchmark rate at 27.5%, Governor Olayemi Cardoso said during a briefing in the capital, Abuja, today. That matched the prediction of all seven economists in a Bloomberg survey.
Olayemi Cardoso, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg
Severe storms are triggering flooding in parts of Europe following weeks of extreme heat, while temperatures on the Italian island of Sicily climb to 44C. A powerful low-pressure system delivered heavy precipitation as it moved east into central Europe today, after dumping a month’s worth of rain across parts of England, according to Tom Morgan, a meteorologist with the UK Met Office.
Cyclists in heavy rain on the Baltic Sea island of Moen, Denmark, on July 22. Photographer: INGRID RIIS/AFP
Major tech firms should commit to fully powering data centers with renewable energy by 2030, said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. Big tech also must be responsible in its use of water for cooling, Guterres said as he presented the UN’s new report on the energy transition. “AI can boost efficiency, innovation and resilience in energy systems, but it is also energy hungry,” Guterres said. “This is not sustainable — unless we make it so.”
Universal Music’s $775 million bid for Downtown Music faces a full-scale investigation by EU watchdogs over concerns the deal could stifle the market for services to artists signed with independent labels. The planned deal would allow Universal to acquire commercially sensitive data of rival record labels and to remove “an important competitive force” in the market for the supply of artist and label services, the European Commission said in a statement.
The International Monetary Fund said imbalances in the global economy have increased, driven principally by domestic policies in the US and China that tariffs will do little to address. In its annual assessment of the external sectors of the largest economies, the institution said there was a “sizable” widening of current account balances by 0.6 percentage point of global economic output in 2024. Around two-thirds of that is attributable to “excessive” increases in surpluses and deficits that the IMF deems inconsistent with fundamentals and a signal of risks for the global economy.
