Good morning from the Financial Times, today is Monday, June 9th, and this is your FT News briefing.
Syria is about to reconnect to the global economy and Italians are voting to define their citizenship rules.
Plus, European fintech companies want to bring retail investing to the masses.
I'm Josh Gabbard -Doyant, and here's the news you need to start your day.
After years of being locked out of the global banking system, Syria is about to be reconnected to the world's most important payment network.
The country's new central bank chief says Syria's banks will soon rejoin the SWIFT international payment system, helping to formalize trade and improve access to foreign currency.
It's a major step in rebuilding after a 14 -year civil war ended last December.
The new government's fortunes took a big turn last month when US president Donald Trump lifted American sanctions.
Officials in Damascus are also in talks with the IMF, World Bank, and regional leaders.
they're trying to unlock new financing to support Syria's recovery efforts.
Italians will continue voting today in a two -day referendum that will answer a big question.
How long should it take to become an Italian citizen?
A yes vote will reduce the time it takes for full -time foreign residents to be eligible to apply for citizenship.
that's going to go down from 10 years to five.
But the right -wing government of Prime Minister Giorgia Maloney is campaigning hard against the referendum.
Here to discuss the vote is my colleague Amy Kasmin.
Amy, hello. Hey there.
Okay, so first of all, Amy, how did this referendum come about?
Italians have become increasingly aware of the large number of young people, foreign educated in Italy without Italian citizenship.
The issue of the changing demographics was really driven home last year after Italy's Olympic women's volleyball team won the gold medal at the Paris Olympics with a team whose star players were basically the children of migrants.
It caused a real emotional debate, I would say.
At that point, a group of left -wing or progressive politicians started a petition to call for a reform of the citizenship laws to make it faster for migrants living in Italy and their children to be naturalized and become Italian citizens.
Right, and what do proponents of the vote say will be the benefits to the country as a whole?
Look, Italy is a very rapidly aging society.
you have a quarter of the population over the age of 65, and only 12 % of the population are 14 years and younger.
Now, amid this young population, you have a very large chunk of them who are foreigners.
Currently, 11 % of all the kids enrolled in Italian schools are foreign nationals.
Now, for a society that is rapidly aging, they need young people to work to keep the pension system afloat.
Also from the activists, there's a kind of human rights perspective that it's unfair to basically have children that are being raised, educated, growing up in Italy, and constantly somehow being told they're not really Italian, they don't really belong to society.
And what about on the other side of this, how are opponents campaigning against this referendum?
So the opponents led by Giorgia Maloney's government, they argue that the rules are fine as they are that they do naturalize a lot of people every year.
But their way of campaigning has in fact been to not campaign, to ignore the referendum, to ensure that it's shut out of the state broadcaster rye, and ensure that there's not not much very clear debate about the issues, about what would change.
In order to be successful, 50 % of eligible voters must turn out.
If the turnout to the referendum falls below that level, the referendum is not valid.
It's not binding. It'll have no impact.
And so is it likely to pass?
What are poll watchers saying?
In fact, I think the government strategy is likely to be successful.
The effort of shutting out the referendum from kind of the public discourse and ignoring it is likely to succeed in making sure the referendum fails.
Amy, what do you think this vote tells us about how people in Europe are thinking about citizenship right now?
Well, it's very obvious that the question of who should be a citizen is a very, very live question in many societies.
Italy is certainly not the first country to have to deal with the fact that, you know, it is becoming a magnet for migrants.
I mean, Italy is a country that had a very, kind of, blood -based conception of who is an Italian.
If you're the descendant of Italians, you're an Italian.
So there really are these two conceptions of citizenship, like are you a citizen based on blood or are you a citizen based on living, working, contributing, growing up here and basically considering a country your home.
And even if this referendum here in Italy fails now I don't think that the issue of who makes an Italian or who should be an Italian is going to go away very easily.
Amy Kasmin is the F .T.'s Rome correspondent.
Thanks so much, Amy.
Thank you. U .S. companies with risky credit ratings are selling their junk bonds fast. They're racing to get ahead of July 7th, that's when the 90 -day pause on President Trump's reciprocal tariffs will expire.
At that point, trade uncertainty could make it a lot harder to offload bad debt.
The high -yield bond market cratered when Trump imposed his Liberation Day tariffs back in April, with only $8 .6 billion in sales that month.
Just one week into June, the value of junk bond sales has already surpassed that figure.
The American bank Charles Schwab is known as the pioneer of everyday brokerage accounts for regular consumers.
It was founded back in the 1970s with the idea that everyone could be an investor, and it offered low fees to allow them to do so.
Now, a German fintech platform is trying to replicate the model in Europe.
Scalable capital serves retail investors in several European countries, and just completed a funding round with a valuation of one and a half billion Euros.
But becoming Charles Schwab is easier said than done.
Here to tell us about it is the FT's Ivan Livingston.
Hi, Ivan. Hi, how's it going?
Good. So Ivan, tell us first why Europe doesn't have something similar to Charles Schwab already.
I would say there's two major reasons why the European market is different.
And for one, there's no real single European market when it comes to financial services because every country will have regulators and local institutions, and so it's quite fractured.
And secondly, there's not the same investing culture that there is in the U .S. where ordinary people – what you call retail investors – are very active in buying stocks.
In the US, you might have a dentist in Arizona who is watching CNBC and actively managing their investments and Europe doesn't have the same individual driven retail investing culture.
That's beginning to change with apps like scalable capital.
They're becoming more popular with younger investors that are following these trends online, but we're certainly not where the US is in that regard. Interesting.
And as I mentioned, Scalable Capital is trying to change that.
Tell me a bit more about the company.
So Scalable Capital is, is one of these larger startups that's trying to tackle this gap in the market of digital retail investing.
They are backed by BlackRock and other institutions and they've raised 155 million euros in new funding in order to expand from their base in Germany.
and they see an opportunity to become a pan -European player.
What are they saying they're gonna do with the money that they've just raised?
It's a combination of things.
For one, they want to build up their balance sheet to give them more financial security.
But a lot of the money will also be targeted towards expansion into other markets.
They're looking at countries like France, Italy, the Netherlands as areas where they can become a broader European Charles Schwab.
Each market in Europe has its own regulators and so it would be a slow process to build up in those markets.
But they saw a surge of activity in April around the tariff announcements and that kind of frenzied activity is good for their bottom line and fees.
What would it mean for Europe if Scalable does reach this goal of becoming the next Charles Schwab and introducing retail investing into Europe?
I think that if scalable capital or a similar player is able to become a pan -european powerhouse, it could really encourage more people to invest and that in turn could eventually help revitalize and provide energy to the European capital markets which have been a bit less vibrant than in the U .S. and there's always talk of a pan -european capital market and perhaps if there was you know, pan European investment platforms, eventually everything could move in that direction.
That's the FT's European deal correspondent, Ivan Livingston.
Thanks, Ivan. Thank you.
The latest episode of the Next 5 Podcast is all about the future looking CFO. I speak with Anna Manns, CFO at Nestle.
We've got to be really attuned to the pace at which the consumer is changing.
Chris Thorn, UK CFO at Suez.
We're seeing a huge amount of exchange impacting the UK waste market.
And Salvatore Lombardo, CPTO at Cooper.
If you want to do forecasting, how can you do this if you don't have visibility?
You can listen to the full episode of The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts.
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