The FT News Briefing is supported by Equinole, the UK's energy partner.

Learn more at equinole.co.uk

Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, July 29th and this is your FT News Briefing.

The US economy shrank for two consecutive quarters.

Energy companies are making record profits. So why is the major French utility struggling?

Plus tech earnings this week were all over the place and so were the market's reactions to them.

I'm Joanna Gao, in for Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

One commonly used definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of shrinking GDP.

That's exactly what happened in the US in the first half of the year,

according to figures released yesterday. But the US says don't call it a recession.

The FT's Kate Dugod explains.

So the US recession is determined by a group of researchers at the National Bureau of Economic

Research and they include a whole host of things, not just GDP but also the labor market among

other sort of economic factors. And we won't know for a long time whether or not the NBR

classifies this as a recession. They're not expected to though because the labor market in the

United States remains extremely strong. Unemployment is at 3.6%, which is just like a hair over where it

was before the pandemic. So although this fits one widely used criteria of a recession, it does not

meet the standards of a recession in the United States. How did markets respond to the news?

So we saw a big reaction in the Treasury market with investors betting on a slightly more

dovish Fed on maybe a less aggressive pace of rate hikes. We also saw expectations of growth come

down as expressed in the Treasury market. That said, we did see a little bit of a rally in stocks.

That's a continuation of what it started after Jay Powell had signaled that a 75 basis point

...