Nickel continued its march higher on Thursday, hitting a one-year high above $14,700 a tonne.

Steven Mnuchin, US Treasury secretary, has reaffirmed Washington’s determination to enforce US sanctions against Iran and to exclude those who disobey from the dollar system.

Strong earnings in wealth management helped Morgan Stanley to an expectation-beating set of second-quarter results, even as the bank recorded a steeper fall in fixed income revenue than its peers.

Honeywell on Thursday reported better than expected second-quarter profits driven by strength in its aerospace business and delivered a slightly rosier full-year outlook.

Global stocks were unnerved on Thursday as investors absorbed more earnings news and measured indications that global trade disputes may not be resolved any time soon.

Blackstone beat expectations for distributable earnings and recorded an “unprecedented” surge in assets under management to $545bn in its final quarter as a publicly traded partnership.

Brussels hit Qualcomm with a €242 million fine on Thursday, punishing the US chipmaker for unlawfully dumping its products at below-cost in order to stymie rival suppliers to Chinese tech firms Huawei and ZTE.

G7 countries have agreed a compromise on how to change the international tax regime to ensure fair taxation of big multinationals, including tech giants such as Google and Facebook that often make profits in countries where they have little physical presence, according to the French hosts of a G7 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers.

Planned cryptocurrencies such as Facebook’s Libra will need to be tightly regulated or they could destabilise the global economy and risk being used for money-laundering and the financing of terrorism, according to a working group set up by the G7 group of major western economies and Japan.

The European Commission has cleared Vodafone’s blockbuster takeover of Liberty Global’s cable networks in Germany and eastern Europe after the UK company offered concessions to help seal approval for one of the biggest telecoms takeovers over the past decade.

Anglo American has flagged a strong performance from its Brazilian iron ore business ahead of next week’s half-year results.

The first unexplained wealth order targeted at suspected serious organised crime in the UK has been deployed against a businessman in the north of England, whose property empire is suspected of being funded by criminal associates involved in drug and firearms trafficking.

Reach, the owner of British newspapers including the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, is in talks to buy some of JPI Media’s portfolio.

Britons carrying out home improvements and bagging charity shop deals helped support the UK retail sector in June, with sales confounding gloomy expectations to provide a boost to gross domestic product growth in the second quarter.

The global trade war contributed to a nearly two-fifths fall in profits at Volvo during the first half of the year, leading the Swedish automaker to seek cost savings of SKr2bn (£172m) and slash hundreds of jobs.

EasyJet said it has hired rival Ryanair’s operations chief as it reported a rise in revenue despite intense competition in the European short-haul market.

Stonegate Pub Company, the owner of Slug & Lettuce, has agreed to buy pub group Ei in an all-cash offer that values Ei at £3bn including net debt.

Online fashion retailer Asos warned profits would be more than a third lower than expected this year due to a botched warehouse upgrade that limited the availability of stock to shoppers in the US and Europe. 

Earnings at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, fell again in the second quarter, but the pace of the drop eased after a strong pick up in sales in June. 

SAP, Europe’s largest software company, blamed US-China trade tensions for disappointing second-quarter profits that sent its shares down as much as 10 per cent.

The Australian dollar climbed on Thursday after the country’s unemployment rate held steady in June and the economy added full-time jobs.

The Bank of Korea has unexpectedly cut interest rates for the first time in three years amid growing concerns about the country’s economic outlook as Japan’s export controls on high-tech materials to South Korea and China’s slowing economy pile pressure on Asia’s fourth-largest economy.

Japanese exports continued to slump in June against a backdrop of slowing global growth and persistent trade tensions, while a larger than forecast fall in imports took the country’s trade balance back into surplus.

IBM’s revenues have fallen for a fourth straight quarter, pointing to continued pressure on its older products and services despite years of trying to reposition itself in growth markets like cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain.