Author: admin

The US federal government will not publish official data on inflation for October, depriving policymakers at the Federal Reserve of key information as they consider whether to cut interest rates.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics canceled the release of the closely watched consumer price index (CPI) for October, citing the government shutdown – the longest in history, before it ended earlier this month – and stating it could not “retroactively collect” the data required for the report.

The decision, announced on Friday, heightens uncertainty around the strength of the US economy. Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, had already likened the central bank’s task of guiding the economy, without standard data on its performance, to “driving in the fog”.

Price growth remains above typical levels, according to recent CPI releases. Donald Trump, who for months denied inflation was still high, has in recent weeks taken several steps to tackle concerns around affordability.

Fed officials, under pressure from persistent demands from Trump, are meanwhile weighing whether to cut interest rates. The central bank raised rates aggressively in 2022 and 2023 to combat inflation, and started cautiously cutting them late last year.

Powell has made clear he planned to trade carefully in the absence of important information on the economy’s strength, and direction. “We’re going to collect every scrap of data we can find, evaluate itand think carefully about it,” he said last month. “What do you do if you’re driving in the fog? You slow down.”

That said, a speech by one Fed policymaker lifted expectations of another rate cut in December. John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said on Friday that he still saw “room for a further adjustment in the near term” to rates.

The latest jobs report, for September, was a mixed bag, with 119,000 jobs added, but the unemployment rate ticked up to its highest level since 2021, and growth estimates for the preceding months were revised lower.

The September jobs report was also disrupted by the shutdown, and released more than a month later. The complete October report will not be released at all, although data on the number of jobs created or lost in that month will be published alongside the full report for November – a week after the next Fed meeting.

A member of the BBC’s board has resigned after stating he was cut out of the discussions that led up to the shock resignation of its director general, Tim Davie.

Shumeet Banerji, a tech industry executive, was away in the crucial days before the departure of Davie and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness.

The pair quit after tense board discussions over how to respond to allegations of liberal bias made by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. Prescott left that role in the summer.

More details soon …

Verra has published VMR0016 Flaring or Use of Landfill Gas, v1.0 in the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program. This constitutes a revision to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) methodology ACM0001: Flaring or use of landfill gas (external).

VMR0016 applies to project activities that involve the destruction of methane emissions and the replacement of fossil fuels. Projects achieve this by capturing landfill gas and flaring the methane, using it to produce electricity or thermal energy, and/or supplying it to consumers through natural gas distribution networks, dedicated pipelines, or trucks. The methodology is globally applicable.

Both ACM0001 and AMS-III.G.: Landfill methane recovery will be inactivated as standalone methodologies under the VCS Program as of December 1, 2026, and replaced by VMR0016.

VMR0016 includes the following revisions:

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, along with collaborators at Northwestern University, have developed a noninvasive approach to treat one of the most aggressive and deadly brain cancers. Their technology uses precisely engineered structures assembled from nano-size materials to deliver potent tumor-fighting medicine to the brain through nasal drops. The novel delivery method is less invasive than similar treatments in development and was shown in mice to effectively treat glioblastoma by boosting the brain’s immune response.

The findings were published this month in PNAS.

Glioblastoma tumors form from brain cells called astrocytes and are the most common kind of brain cancer, affecting roughly three in 100,000 people in the U.S. Glioblastoma generally progresses very quickly and is almost always fatal. There are no curative treatments for the disease, in part because delivering medicines to the brain remains extremely challenging

“We wanted to change this reality and develop a noninvasive treatment that activates the immune response to attack glioblastoma,” said Alexander H. Stegh, PhD, a professor and vice chair of research in the WashU Medicine Taylor Family Department of Neurosurgery and co-corresponding author of the study. Stegh also is research director of The Brain Tumor Center at Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and WashU Medicine. “With this research, we’ve shown that precisely engineered nanostructures, called spherical nucleic acids, can safely and effectively activate powerful immune pathways within the brain. This redefines how cancer immunotherapy can be achieved in otherwise difficult-to-access tumors.”

Cold tumors warmed with STING

Glioblastoma tumors are known as “cold tumors” because they do not induce the body’s natural immune response as do so-called “hot tumors” that are easier to treat with immunotherapies. Researchers have developed ways to spark an immune reaction against tumors by stimulating a pathway within cells called STING, which stands for stimulator of interferon genes. STING is triggered when a cell detects foreign DNA and activates the immune system to respond to the threat.

Past studies have shown that drugs activating STING in glioblastoma tumors can prime the body’s immune system to better fight the cancer. However, these agents break down quickly in the body and must be delivered directly into the tumor to work. Because repeated dosing is required for sustained benefit, relying on direct intratumoral administration requires highly invasive procedures.

“We really wanted to minimize patients having to go through that when they are already ill, and I thought that we could use the spherical nucleic acid platforms to deliver these drugs in a noninvasive way,” said Akanksha Mahajan, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in Stegh’s lab and the first author on the study.

To overcome the problem, the Stegh team collaborated with co-corresponding author Chad A. Mirkin, PhD, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the Rathmann Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, and his team. Mirkin invented spherical nucleic acids, a class of nanostructures that arrange DNA or RNA densely around a nanoparticle core, and he has shown that they have greater therapeutic potency compared to the standard delivery methods. The WashU Medicine and Northwestern researchers prepared a new class of spherical nucleic acids with gold cores studded with short snippets of DNA to trigger activation of the STING pathway in specific immune cells. To deliver these drugs to the brain, the team turned to the nose.

Intranasal therapy has been explored as a potential delivery method for medications targeting the brain, but no nanoscale therapies had yet been developed using this method to activate immune responses against brain cancers.

“This is the first time that it has been shown that we can increase immune cell activation in glioblastoma tumors when we deliver nanoscale therapeutics from the nose to the brain,” Mahajan said.

The team wanted to show that this approach could be used to deliver the medicine selectively to the brain, and that it would act on the appropriate cells once it got there. For the first objective, they used a molecular tag on the spherical nucleic acid that was visible under near-infrared light. They found that the nanomedicine, when delivered as droplets into the nasal passages of mice with glioblastoma, traveled along the path of the main nerve that connects facial muscles to the brain. The immune response evoked in the brain by the medicine was concentrated in the specific immune cells, especially those in the tumor itself, and triggered some helpful responses in the lymph nodes. The medicine did not spread to other parts of the body where it might cause unwanted side effects.

Examinations of immune cells in and near the tumor showed that the therapy successfully activated the STING pathway and armed the immune system to fight the tumor.

When applied in combination with drugs designed to help activate T lymphocytes, another type of immune cell, the new therapy eradicated the tumors with just one or two doses and induced long-term immunity against their recurrence. Taken together, the results were much better than those of current STING-activating immune therapies.

Stegh cautioned that firing up the STING pathway isn’t capable of curing glioblastomas without reinforcement from other therapeutic approaches. Turning on the STING pathway by itself isn’t enough to fight glioblastoma, because the tumor has many ways to block or shut down the immune response that STING is meant to activate. His team is looking to add capabilities to their nanostructure that activate other immune responses. This could allow physicians to double or triple the therapeutic targets all in a single therapy.

“This is an approach that offers hope for safer, more effective treatments for glioblastoma and potentially other immune treatment-resistant cancers, and it marks a critical step toward clinical application,” said Stegh.

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Investments myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

Advertising agency WPP has struggled to stem an exodus of customers at the same time that it is tailoring its business model to address the changes which have been wrought across the industry through digitalisation and artificial intelligence.

Takeover speculation gave the company’s shares a small boost this week, but its market valuation remains almost two-thirds lower over the past 12 months. 

Clearly, the commercial challenges it faces required fresh perspectives. Philip Jansen joined as non-executive chair towards the end of 2024, while Cindy Rose was appointed as chief executive in September of this year. 

Between them, the two principals collectively acquired £286,900 worth of shares on November 13. Rose recently reassured shareholders that “in [her] first 60 days we are already moving at pace, with some initiatives already announced and more to come”.

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world

The writer is the former chair of the FDIC and author of the upcoming book ‘How Not to Lose a Million Dollars’

Smarting from recent election losses and growing voter discontent over the high cost of living, the Trump administration has renewed its assault on the Federal Reserve for keeping mortgage rates “too high”.

The administration is right to blame the Fed for the high costs of housing, but this is not because it has kept mortgage rates too high. It is because it kept them too low and for too long in years past. Housing affordability continues to be driven by supply shortages. Lower rates will increase demand, making housing inflation worse.

The great financial crisis led to a collapse in home prices and housing construction. In a desperate attempt to revive the economy and property market, the Fed resorted to the controversial practice of quantitative easing to lower longer-term rates on mortgages and US Treasuries. 

It purchased vast amounts of mortgage-backed securities, driving up their prices and thus lowering yields. The Fed gradually amassed $1.7tn in MBS — representing about 30 per cent of the total market. Mortgages trended down to the 4 per cent range. Pre-crisis they had hovered about 6 to 7 per cent (about where they are now). 

The Fed’s efforts initially made sense. However, it kept QE going far too long. Over the ensuing years demand rose, but supply did not keep pace, creating upward pressure on home prices. Then the pandemic hit. In March 2020, the Fed again embarked on massive purchases of mortgage-backed securities, reaching peak holdings of $2.7tn in 2021. Mortgage rates plunged, sinking as low as 2.65 per cent. Combined with the growing popularity of remote work, this led to a steep increase in the demand for homes, in a still supply-constrained market. The result was average annual home prices spiking by double digits. Home prices increased by 47 per cent between 2020 and 2024.

While ultra-low mortgage rates juiced new demand for housing, it had an even a bigger impact on refinance activity with homeowners rushing to secure lower rates. About one-third of outstanding mortgage debt was refinanced between 2020 and 2021. 

But this exacerbated supply constraints. As mortgage rates have normalised, housing inflation has moderated, but it is still too high at about 4 per cent. A major problem is the resale market, which has suffered from chronic undersupply. Homeowners do not want to give up their cheap mortgages by moving. So, the Fed’s actions had a double whammy: they produced red-hot housing inflation while worsening supply imbalances.

This whole sorry history demonstrates the folly of using demand-side stimulus in supply-constrained markets. Yet, the administration continues to prioritise demand-side measures to address housing affordability. It has proposed a 50-year mortgage which, by extending the loan term, would lower monthly payments. This could draw more buyers into housing markets, but only with mortgages that double their interest costs over the standard 30-year mortgage and take decades to build significant equity.

The proposal confuses home affordability with mortgage payment affordability. Working families need homes at prices they can manage and mortgages that help them build wealth.

Blue-state Democrat leadership — which contributed to shortages with restrictive zoning and permitting requirements — has finally caught on that supply is the key problem. California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington are all states that have embraced more permissive zoning and permitting requirements to expand the supply of low-cost, affordable homes. 

Bipartisan legislation, co-sponsored by senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren to cut red tape and provide financial incentives for new housing, has passed the Senate, but it needs a boost from the administration to pass the House. This would be far more productive than Fed bashing.

Fed chair Jay Powell has laudably committed to a continued run-off of the central bank’s portfolio of MBS and vowed that the Fed would not again intervene in that market with purchases.

Will the Fed’s next, Trump-appointed chair succumb to pressure and resume them, though? It would be ironic if, as Democrats finally embrace deregulation to address housing supply, Republicans embrace the failed demand-side approaches that caused the very inflation which helped elect President Donald Trump.

The GOP should own housing affordability as an issue, but to do so it must focus on building more homes, not the illusionary quick fix of monetary policy.