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Steven Eisman, best known for betting on the collapse of the US housing market, has been put on indefinite leave of absence by his employer Neuberger Berman after saying he was “celebrating” the destruction of Gaza.

A managing director at New York-based Neuberger Berman since 2014, Eisman featured in the Michael Lewis book The Big Short. His character was played by actor Steve Carell in the 2016 film version. In the adaptation, Carell’s character was given the name of Mark Baum.

His comments on his X account, which included the Neuberger Berman logo, responded to a graphic post showing burning buildings, with people shouting in agony, apparently as a result of an Israeli attack.

The video was posted with comments about the lack of international concern over such incidents and said: “The world is silent.”

Eisman replied to the post on Thursday: “We are not silent. We are celebrating.”

He later apologised for his remark, writing that he had intended to refer to Israel’s attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon. He has since deleted the account involved altogether.

Eisman became famous for shorting collateralised debt obligations backed by US housing mortgages before their collapse in 2007 and 2008.

Eisman’s future at the firm remains uncertain, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company, which on Friday evening said Eisman had been put on indefinite leave of absence, had said earlier that his “personal comments on social media are his alone and he does not speak for Neuberger Berman. Even though Mr Eisman has acknowledged that he mistook the content of the post he responded to, his actions on social media were irresponsible and objectionable”.

Eisman has taken a strong pro-Israel stance on X and issued posts on the subject regularly against those who have criticised the country.

His strident commentary has extended to politics as well. Earlier this week he stated that if Kamala Harris won the US presidential election and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress he expected the US market to go “straight down”. He has predicted that Donald Trump will win the election.

A Harvard lawyer by training, Eisman gave up the profession to become a financial analyst at Wall Street investment bank Oppenheimer. He later moved to the Connecticut-based hedge fund FrontPoint Partners, eventually focusing on the mispricing of subprime residential mortgages. He left FrontPoint in 2011 and set up his own fund, Emrys Partners, the following year. He joined Neuberger after Emrys closed.

Neuberger Berman, once owned by the collapsed Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, spun off as an employee-run investment firm in 2009. Since then the company has prospered. The investment company at present has $481bn of assets under management with 739 employees, according to its website.

Nike’s outgoing chief executive, John Donahoe, is an Ivy League-educated former tech executive and Bain consultant. The man who will take his place, Elliott Hill, started at Nike as an intern and spent his entire career at “the swoosh”, bar a brief stint as an assistant trainer for the Dallas Cowboys football team.

The difference in profiles is stark, and one that Nike hopes will reassure shareholders while energising staff for the monumental task ahead — shaking off an existential crisis that has threatened its position as the world’s biggest sportswear maker and one of its most recognisable brands. Sales have been slowing, its products have fallen out of fashion and its retail strategy has been out of step with consumer preferences.

To regain its authority in the industry, the board decided, Nike needed an experienced insider rather than a professional executive to lead it. Despite his history with Nike, however, Hill will have his work cut out for him.

Current and former employees, people familiar with the executive transition and initial readouts from Wall Street analysts signal that Hill will receive a warm welcome from staff when he takes the helm on October 14. The reaction to hiring back Hill — who is coming out of retirement — was overwhelmingly positive within Nike, according to one current employee. “Elliott is truly a revered leader at the company,” they said.

“I worked with so many people during my three decades at Nike, and Elliott was by far one of the most inspirational, most supportive and most down-to-earth colleagues I ever knew,” Scott Reames, Nike’s internal historian who retired in 2021, said in an email. “Judging by the way my phone has been blowing up since the announcement I am FAR from alone on this!”

The abrupt executive transition comes after months of speculation on Wall Street about Donahoe’s future at Nike. At the time of his appointment, in late 2019, the company had already articulated goals of hitting $50bn in revenue and ramping up online sales directly to consumers — benchmarks that an experienced executive with stints at Bain and eBay would be well qualified to achieve. 

Donahoe met those demands ably, steering Nike through the Covid-19 pandemic and even managing to return to sales growth by the end of 2020, less than a year into the role. As diversity, equity and inclusion became a focus of large companies, he won early praise from staffers for listening to their concerns.

But his downfall was his known weakness: unlike previous Nike leaders, such as his predecessor Mark Parker, Donahoe was not a “product guy”, someone with their finger on the pulse of design. Retailers from JD Sports to Foot Locker spoke freely in recent months of hotter sneakers from Adidas, On, New Balance and Hoka. 

Nike’s decision to vacate shelf space at partner retailers in favour of its own direct-selling strategy — which predated Donahoe but accelerated under his leadership — only opened the doors for competitors to take market share.

Even Donahoe’s management style marked him as an outsider. From the start of his brief reign, he told employees he wanted new ideas presented in black-and-white, bullet-pointed PowerPoints, rather than colourful, creative pitches.

Board members were actively discussing succession plans this summer, one person said, and also considered two other internal Nike candidates, Craig Williams, president of geographies and marketplace, and Heidi O’Neill, president of consumer, product and brand. But Williams, who joined in 2019 from Coca-Cola, and O’Neill, who came to Nike in 1998 from Levi Strauss, could not match Hill’s decades of experience.

In a post on X, former Nike marketing staffer Kyle Stack wrote that “to have a 30-year Nike vet lead the company is reassuring . . . Hill experienced Nike’s frenetic growth in the ‘90s as part of the sales org. He understands the business as well as anyone.”

Hill, who turns 61 on October 2, will become Nike’s fifth-ever chief executive, and the third Nike lifer after co-founder Phil Knight and Parker. The only Nike CEO before Donahoe to join from outside the company was William Perez, a former SC Johnson executive who lasted in the top job for just over a year.

Nike has hired back other executives with ample internal experience over the past year, including Tom Peddie, former vice-president of North America, who will help the company rebalance its wholesale partnerships.

Nike’s efforts to turn itself round are entering a crucial stretch. The company is expected to report quarterly earnings on October 1, detailing the important back-to-school period that analysts look to for indications of demand for basketball shoes and hoodies. Nike has also set its first investor day in nine years for November, where it will lay out a vision in greater detail for shareholders who have grown worried about the recent stock slides. 

Shares of Nike are down more than 20 per cent in 2024, though the stock rose 6 per cent on Friday.

Jay Sole, managing director at UBS, wrote on Friday that “Hill is an experienced, effective leader who could put Nike back on a growth path.” However, that “sentiment could turn more bearish as the market realises Nike’s fundamentals likely aren’t great and there are probably no quick-fixes to Nike’s issues”, he added.  

Sole pointed out that Hill’s experience in sales, rather than product development, could be a weak point for the company that has been slow to introduce compelling new sneakers in recent months.

Changes atop Nike will not stop the tide of competitors eating into its popularity. “What is unchanged is the heightened competitive environment framed by emergent brands and certain resurgent legacy brands,” wrote John Kernan, managing director of TD Cowen.

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Internal opposition removed. Powerful capitals and political forces neutered. Enough overlapping responsibility in her team to ensure she’s the only possible arbiter of actionable power. By appointing a new slate of European commissioners in her own image, president Ursula von der Leyen this week ensured she will enter her second five-year stint at the head of the EU’s executive with an ever-tighter grip on the Brussels machine.

On Tuesday, von der Leyen unveiled a tapestry of political compromises. She handed out grandiose titles to important member states such as France, Spain and Italy while keeping the key levers of power in the hands of her allies — and herself.

A day earlier, she disposed of her most prominent internal critic, the erstwhile French commissioner Thierry Breton, with a deft piece of political horse-trading; convincing French President Emmanuel Macron to send a more amenable replacement in exchange for one of those grandiose titles. 

In a maze of overlapping responsibilities and shared policy control, von der Leyen has unveiled a team of “equals” with enough complexity and chaos to ensure she is above the fray.

Even people involved in the formation of her team — known as the college of commissioners — describe it as “a matrix”, “a complicated structure” and “a lot of cross links”. 

Those on the outside are more blunt.

“It’s deliciously balanced in a way that there are enough people on each issue to ensure they will never all agree,” said a senior EU diplomat involved in the lobbying for commission portfolios. “Which means she’s always going to be the one making the final decision.”

“Without a doubt, she’s coming into this next five years even stronger than before,” the diplomat added.

At an informal gathering of her new team of commissioners, von der Leyen encouraged the five incumbents who served in her first term to explain to the 21 newcomers what to expect. The message was clear: the supporting chorus might be different, but the lead actor remains the same. 

“Welcome to The Ursula Show,” quipped one person in attendance.

An admitted workaholic, the slight 65-year-old lives in a small apartment on the 13th floor of the EU’s Berlaymont headquarters. Former office space has been refashioned into sparse living quarters, meaning she sleeps just footsteps from her desk.

“She’s the hardest working of all of us,” said a person who works closely with her. “It’s often brutal to keep up.”

Diligent and details-focused to the point of driving some of her aides to distraction, von der Leyen has over the past five years greatly expanded the power of her office at the expense of both EU institutions and the prime ministers and presidents she was appointed by.

She responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by centralising decision-making around herself, delivering outcomes such as a pan-EU vaccine programme and a rapid sanctions programme against Moscow that was co-ordinated with the US White House.

As domestic political turmoil has weakened the clout of Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — two offices that have traditionally steered EU priorities — von der Leyen has pitched herself as the answer to Henry Kissinger’s mythical question: “who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”.

Few decisions are now reached in Brussels without the approval or at least acquiescence of “the 13th floor”.

Critics say she routinely overstretches her powers and bypasses proper due process. She is subject to an ongoing legal demand to publish private text messages with Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, during the race for Covid-19 vaccine contracts.

But admirers, including many EU leaders, revere her ability to get things done by cutting through the byzantine layers of European bureaucracy.

Born in Brussels in 1958, where her father was one of the original German Eurocrats, von der Leyen enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1978 under a false name and police protection due to kidnap threats related to her father’s prominent political career.

She later graduated in Hannover as a doctor of medicine, before raising her young family in California for four years while her husband worked at Stanford University.

A mother of seven, she was first elected to the German state parliament of Lower Saxony in 2003. She would serve 14 years in chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, first as minister for family affairs, then labour and social affairs and finally defence.

In 2019 she was plucked from relative obscurity by Merkel and Macron to lead the European Commission after more prominent alternatives failed to win political backing. She landed in Brussels underestimated by many who assumed she could be easily manipulated by national capitals and the commission bureaucracy.

Those same bureaucrats now worry that with five years’ experience, a more amenable commission and continued weakness in Paris and Berlin, nothing is left to stand in the way of her personal ambition and drive.

henry.foy@ft.com

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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Conservative brand was “bust and broken” as the party’s leadership pledged to fight the next general election bashing believers in the green transition and “net zero” policies.

Addressing over 3,000 people gathered at a conference centre in Birmingham, Farage declared: “This weekend is when Reform UK comes of age.”

With a huge union jack hanging over the stage, Farage entered the auditorium on Friday afternoon doing US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s signature move of pointing at the audience, many of whom were wearing caps emblazoned with the words “Make Britain Great Again”.

Farage announced this week that he was ending the arcane corporate structure the party has had since its inception in 2019, and would therefore be relinquishing his majority shareholding. 

The existing company would be dissolved, and a new “limited company with guarantee” set up. “You the members will own this party, not me,” Farage said on Friday, to rapturous applause.

The MP for Clacton in Essex also vowed to model the party’s strategy going forward on that of the Liberal Democrats, by building a strong base of local campaigners and ruthlessly targeting seats where the party came second in the last general election on top of its five wins.

Earlier in the day, deputy leader Richard Tice told the Financial Times the party planned to fight the next election against the “extreme cult of net zero”.

“In the same way that immigration for us was a big battleground, I want to make the next general election about net zero,” he said on the fringes of the conference.

“Both main parties are completely obsessed with it, they’re both completely wrong and it’s already killing our jobs in steel, automotive, oil refineries.”

Tice said the party would focus its campaigning where they saw Labour as most vulnerable, in the North East, coastal cities and the industrial Midlands, where “traditional socially conservative working-class [people] are being shafted by a high-tax, no-growth environment and by high energy bills”.

The party came second in 98 seats in July, of which 89 were won by Labour.

Tice said senior business people were approaching him regularly to say: “Thank god you’re speaking out [on green policies]. Privately I’m with you, publicly I have to pretend I want to buy green steel; I don’t.”

During his conference speech, Tice described energy secretary Ed Miliband as “the most dangerous man in Britain” for the economy.

Miliband wants to quadruple offshore wind capacity, double onshore wind and triple solar power to meet the target of cutting UK emissions from electricity generation to net zero by 2030.

The target is five years faster than the goal set out by the former Conservative government.

Reform UK is banking on the view that government investment in renewables will drive up energy prices over the next few years, an issue it would be able to capitalise on ahead of the next election.

Tice said he hoped the party’s membership would swell from 80,000 today to 150,000 next year, buoyed by hoped-for momentum from local elections in May where the party is targeting the new Lincolnshire mayoralty.

Tice said he was still a strong proponent of moving to an electoral system of proportional representation.

He claimed that PR would have prevented July’s Labour landslide and would have led instead to a coalition government that was “much more steady”. He claimed that politically the “most stable period in the last 15 years” had been the Tory-Lib Dem coalition of 2010 to 2015.

Tice would not be drawn on whether he would go into coalition with the Tories in the future.

“Until there’s a massive mea culpa, we’re going to go to war with them,” he said.

Speeches from Reform UK’s MPs and celebrity supporters leaned heavily on rightwing tropes on immigrants and trans people, with arguments that British culture and identity were being “eradicated”.

Lee Anderson, its MP for Ashfield, returned to targeting London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Comments earlier this year that the Labour politician had “given our capital city away to his mates” led to him losing the Conservative whip before he changed parties.

“I will never apologise to that man.” Anderson told the conference.

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UK foreign secretary David Lammy has been accused of a diplomatic blunder after he suggested that Azerbaijan had “liberated” the disputed Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The remark was made by Lammy on Monday in a new blog on the Substack website, where he plans to write more long-form pieces about world affairs and UK foreign policy.

“Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,” he said in the post. The sentence had not been removed or altered by Friday, despite sparking a wave of criticism.

The territory he was apparently referring to was Nagorno-Karabakh, an interpretation that has not been disputed by UK officials.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a short but bloody military operation to seize the tiny mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

In some 24 hours of fighting, the Baku government restored its control over the territory, which had been held by Armenia or local Armenian leaders since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a devastating war between the two historic enemies left it under Armenian control.

Though Baku seized territory that had been internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, the military action forced the entire Armenian population of the enclave — more than 100,000 people — to flee within a few days. Refugees spent days making a gruelling journey down the mountainside from Karabakh, leaving their homes and lives behind.

Many Armenians, who traditionally consider Karabakh a national and spiritual heartland, known to them as Artsakh, accused Baku of ethnically cleansing the region, something Lammy’s comment — and use of the word “liberate” to describe Baku’s military action — failed to reflect.

Britain has urged Azerbaijan and Armenia to engage in negotiations to end their long-standing conflict.

Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, former chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said on X that Lammy’s comments on a “vanity blog” appeared to be “contradicting long-standing UK policy” in a way that was “totally inappropriate and throws into question the foreign secretary’s judgment”.

The Foreign Office was forced to clarify on Friday that Lammy’s comment did not mark a change in the UK government’s stance on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nonetheless, the Armenian government is formally seeking further clarification from the UK in the wake of Lammy’s post, an Armenian official told the FT.

US congressman Brad Sherman also weighed in on X, saying the remarks were “a stain on UK foreign policy”, as he accused the UK foreign secretary of having “endorsed ethnic cleansing”.

Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House, said: “It’s a real gaffe by the foreign secretary.”

Accusing Lammy of the “simplification and conflation” of developments in various post-Soviet states, Broers said the foreign secretary was “misreading the situation” regarding Azerbaijan, and “reinforcing the talking points of an autocratic regime”.

The EU parliament accused Baku of undertaking ethnic cleansing in the disputed territory last year. Azerbaijan has denied the claim.

Elin Suleymanov, Azeri ambassador to the UK, said: “I don’t understand why there’s so much response to this blog by the foreign secretary, because what [Lammy] said is absolutely true . . . It reflects the longstanding position of the UK government, which has always been supportive of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

“For 30 years the territory of Azerbaijan was occupied by Armenian forces, and in 2020, Azerbaijan did liberate its territory.”

After the ceasefire in the region last September, Lammy urged on X that “Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians must be guaranteed safety and dignity”.

The title of the new Substack account is Lammy’s name rather than his ministerial title, but the blog was written by the foreign secretary in an official — rather than personal — capacity.

However, the Foreign Office refused to confirm if it had been reviewed internally within the department before it was published.

A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “There has been no change in UK policy. The foreign secretary supports the territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan and is encouraged by both sides engaging in meaningful dialogue. The UK will continue to support their commitment to lasting peace in the region.”

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A top Federal Reserve official has said he would support more aggressive interest rate cuts from the US central bank if the economic data deteriorates further, as he cautioned inflation is falling much faster than expected.

“If the data starts coming in soft and continues to come in soft, I would be much more willing to be aggressive on rate cuts,” Christopher Waller, one of the Fed’s governors, said in an interview with CNBC on Friday.

He added that if the data come in “fine” then he could see scope for the Fed to downshift to a quarter-point cut at the next meeting in November, a day after the November 5 US presidential election.

The comments from Waller, a leading voice on the Federal Open Market Committee, came two days after the central bank kicked off its first easing cycle in more than four years with a larger than usual half-point interest rate cut, which took the Fed’s benchmark rate to 4.75 per cent to 5 per cent.

His interventions underscore the Fed’s commitment to staving off a recession in the aftermath of the worst inflation shock in decades — a huge feat that many thought impossible at the onset of the crisis.

Fed chair Jay Powell on Wednesday said the larger than usual move was aimed at maintaining the strength of the US economy — not a response to the kind of crisis that necessitated bumper cuts in the past.

Waller on Friday echoed that sentiment, saying that in a “solid” labour market, the Fed was not “behind” in terms of offering relief to borrowers.

Waller was among officials who voted for the half-point rate cut, though his colleague Michelle Bowman dissented — the first time since 2005 that a governor has opposed a Fed rate decision.

Bowman on Friday explained her preference for a quarter-point cut, saying a “measured” pace would “avoid unnecessarily stoking demand”.

“I see the risk that the committee’s larger policy action could be interpreted as a premature declaration of victory on our price stability mandate,” she said, adding inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 per cent target and the economy is “strong”.

Waller said that recent data suggested inflation was “softening much faster than I thought it was going to” put him “over the edge to say, ‘look, I think 50 [basis points] is the right thing to do’.”

Waller had said before the quiet period ahead of this week’s Fed meeting that he was “open-minded” about the possibility of a larger cut, even as he suggested it hinged on there being further economic weakness.

Powell on Wednesday framed the cut as a “recalibration” of the Fed’s monetary policy settings given the downdraft in inflation and softening of the labour market.

Most officials project the central bank will make another half a percentage point worth of cuts over the two remaining meetings of the year.

Powell on Wednesday stressed the half-point cut should not be considered the Fed’s “new pace”, suggesting the central bank is likely to opt for a quarter-point reduction.

There is significant dispersion across officials’ estimates for rates this year and in 2025, when most officials forecast the policy rate will drop to 3.25 per cent to 3.5 per cent. Officials’ wide range of estimates suggest forthcoming meetings will like this past one will be a close call.

“We do have room to move, and that is what the committee is signalling through 2025,” Waller said.