Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, July 29th, and this is your FT news briefing.

The Federal Reserve signaled that it's moving closer to tightening its monetary policy,

and what would happen if CEOs and government officials could be taken to court for harming the

environment? We'll take a look. Plus, India's big tech groups are going public,

but we'll investers pour in for these great, fuzzy tech companies. The question is at what point

and if these companies will ever become profitable? I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to

start your day. The Federal Reserve wrapped up a two-day meeting yesterday. It kept interest rates

near zero and said it would continue buying $120 billion worth of monthly assets. But the Fed also

indicated it's seen progress in the U.S. economy and the central bank signaled it's closer to

the point where it will ease the asset purchase program. The FT's Colby Smith breaks down what

that progress looks like. The key thresholds are really as it relates to inflation and the labor

market. Over the coming months, we've seen a really substantial rise in consumer prices. Now,

this has been largely isolated to sectors of the economy that were most impacted from the pandemic,

and areas that are very sensitive to any of the reopening trend that we have seen. So,

this has been in sectors such as airfares or hotel prices, use cars as well has driven a lot

of the surge. So, on the inflation front, they're seeing the type of bounce back that they

had hoped to see with the economy growing at the pace it has. On the labor market front,

we had a really strong report recently. There's been a little bit of a slowdown in the progress

there, but Powell indicated yesterday that he expects very, very strong gains in the coming

months as people return to the workforce. So, Colby, what about the spread of the Delta variant?

Did the Fed factor that in? Powell made a pretty interesting point on the Delta variant,

which is obviously something that market participants and economists and policymakers are paying

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