Healey's Budget needs to sustain the stronger economy through gathering clouds There have been almost no Budget leaks. The chancellor's aides are using intelligence-style security measures to guard its secrets: the Budget has been split into compartments with very few given access to all of them. The IT has been locked down and ministers viewing the plans have to sign a digital promise not to brief media. Such security is a response to the feeling that speculation around the last Budget, sometimes informed by insiders, was economically destabilising. As a recent former defence secretary, Chancellor John Healey has embraced such strict procedures, and has approached most of his public engagements and interviews with a sturdy refusal to break the Budget omertà, akin to his fellow Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott's at times ultra-defensive stance on a cricket pitch. The economic news has been good - growth has been better than expected and the International Monetary Fund has endorsed the UK for standing out among the G7 countries for at least planning to cut borrowing.

Bank of America hit with $1.2bn fine for money laundering failings Bank of America has been fined $1.2bn (£910m) for failing to detect potential money laundering and other illegal activity, the US Treasury Department said on Tuesday. The banking giant failed to report over $5bn in suspicious activity to the government, $1bn of which posed national security and illicit finance risks, the Treasury said. Those failures included not flagging transactions that possibly involved Chinese money laundering networks or trade-based laundering with a substantial nexus to the southwest border, according to the Treasury. Our team is far along with and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by our regulators, Bank of America told the BBC. The announcement came less 24 hours before Bank of America was due to announce its quarterly earnings on Wednesday morning.

Australia's deaths to outnumber births by 2060s, report says Share Australia's deaths to outnumber births by 2060s, report says on social media Australia will see more deaths than births by the 2060s, hitting a milestone already surpassed by advanced economies including Japan, Germany and France, according to a government report. In its latest Intergenerational Report released on Monday, Australia's Treasury forecast that the country's population will hit 39.3 million by 2065-66, 1.8 million lower than projected in its last outlook in 2023. The number of Australians aged 85 or older is projected to triple by 2065-66, with immigration accounting for all population growth as the fertility rate falls to 1.34, the Treasury said. Despite plunging birthrates, the Treasury said it expects the economy to more than double in size by the mid-2060s, citing productivity gains due to artificial intelligence and greater workforce participation by women and older Australians. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said that while Australia's economy faces serious risks due to the demographic shift, it also holds "substantial" advantages compared with its peers.

The U.S. Treasury issued sweeping new sanctions against Iran this week, targeting the country’s airlines and their international service providers as it ramps up its effort to isolate Tehran from the global economy.

To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Figure caption, Chloe Moffat's father David says there'was no safeguarding' from the Treasury before Chloe took her own life The father of a civil service employee who took her own life the day after a meeting with her managers has said the lack of support given to her by the Treasury beggars belief. Chloe Moffat, 26, a personal assistant to a Treasury director, died on 20 May last year, after she was told of allegations she had shared sensitive confidential information about colleagues, which she denied. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, David Moffat said he did not feel the Treasury had taken responsibility for its part in her death. He added that her loss was devastating, and had torn such a big hole in our lives.

We develop an arbitrage-free deep learning framework for yield curve and bond price forecasting based on the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) term-structure model and a dynamic Nelson-Siegel parameterization of forward rates. Our approach embeds a no-arbitrage drift restriction into a neural state-space architecture by combining Kalman, extended Kalman, and particle filters with recurrent neural networks (LSTM/CLSTM), and introduces an explicit arbitrage error regularization (AER) term during training. The model is applied to U.S. Treasury and corporate bond data, and its performance is evaluated for both yield-space and price-space predictions at 1-day and 5-day horizons. Empirically, arbitrage regularization leads to its strongest improvements at short maturities, particularly in 5-day-ahead forecasts, increasing market-consistency as measured by bid-ask hit rates and reducing dollar-denominated prediction errors.

Tokenized U.S. Treasuries have emerged as a prominent subclass of real-world assets (RWAs), offering cryptographically enforced, yield-bearing instruments collateralized by sovereign debt and deployed across multiple blockchain networks. While the market has expanded rapidly, empirical analyses of transaction-level behaviour remain limited. This paper conducts a quantitative, function-level dissection of U.S. Treasury-backed RWA tokens including BUIDL, BENJI, and USDY, across multi-chain: mostly Ethereum and Layer-2s. We analyze decoded contract calls to isolate core functional primitives such as issuance, redemption, transfer, and bridge activity, revealing segmentation in behaviour between institutional actors and retail users. To model address-level economic roles, we introduce a curvature-aware representation learning framework using Poincaré embeddings and liquidity-based graph features. Our method outperforms baseline models on our RWA Treasury dataset in role inference and generalizes to downstream tasks such as anomaly detection and wallet classification in broader blockchain transaction networks. These findings provide a structured understanding of functional heterogeneity and participant roles in tokenized Treasury in a transaction-level perspective, contributing new empirical evidence to the study of on-chain financialization.

Thousands of civil servants at the heart of the UK government, including those working directly to support Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are using a proprietary artificial intelligence chatbot to carry out their work, New Scientist can reveal. Officials have refused to disclose on the record exactly how the tool is being used, whether the prime minister is receiving advice that has been prepared using AI or how civil servants are mitigating the risks of inaccurate or biased AI outputs. Experts say the lack of disclosure raises concerns about government transparency and the accuracy of information being used in government. After securing the world-first release of ChatGPT logs under freedom of information (FOI) legislation, New Scientist asked 20 government departments for records of their interactions with Redbox, a generative AI tool developed in house and trialled among UK government staff. The large language model-powered chatbot allows users to interrogate government documents and to "generate first drafts of briefings", according to one of the people behind its development.

The United States has finalised rules that limit investments in critical technology sectors in China such as artificial intelligence on national security grounds, the Treasury Department has announced. The restrictions will bar US citizens and permanent residents, as well as US-based companies, from engaging in transactions involving technologies including AI, semiconductors and quantum computing, the Treasury said in a statement on Monday. US investors will also be obligated to inform the Treasury about investments in some less advanced technologies "that may contribute to the threat to the national security of the United States", the Treasury said. The curbs, which are due to take effect on January 2, will ensure "US investment is not exploited to advance the development of key technologies by those who may use them to threaten our national security," said Paul Rosen, the assistant secretary of the Treasury for Investment Security. "US investments, including the intangible benefits like managerial assistance and access to investment and talent networks that often accompany such capital flows, must not be used to help countries of concern develop their military, intelligence, and cyber capabilities," Rosen said.

The United States Department of the Treasury has announced sanctions against Chinese makers of drone engines and parts that President Joe Biden's administration says have directly helped Russia mount long-range attacks in the war in Ukraine. The sanctions, issued on Thursday, target three entities and one individual for their involvement in the development and production of Russia's "Garpiya series" long-range attack drones. "The Garpiya has been deployed by Russia in its brutal war against Ukraine, destroying critical infrastructure and causing mass casualties," the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the measures. "Designed and developed by People's Republic of China (PRC)-based experts, the Garpiya is produced at PRC-based factories in collaboration with Russian defense firms before transferring the drones to Russia for use against Ukraine." Russia has recently used long-range drone attacks to penetrate Ukraine's air defences, wreaking havoc across the country, including a missile strike in the city of Poltava that killed 55 people and wounded 328.