Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, April 16th. This is your FT news briefing.

Stocks hit further highs and treasuries rallied yesterday on more rosy data about the U.S.

economy and Dubai is hoping to lead the way into a future full of driverless cars.

Plus Joe Biden has imposed tough new sanctions on Russia, rattling the country's currency

the rubble, so far that it hasn't been too painful. It's just going to be super important to watch

now what the tone is between the two countries and whether these sanctions are effectively going

to get easier or tougher over time. I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

Stock indices around the world hit new highs on Thursday after more good news about the U.S.

economy came out. U.S. Treasuries also rallied and that's a reversal of the trend we've seen for

most of the year. The yield on the benchmark 10-year treasuries slid to 1.53%. Here's our U.S.

capital markets correspondent Colby Smith. So yesterday we got a really stellar retail sales report

and also further evidence that the labor market is improving with jobless claims and typically when

we've had really strong economic data, we've had treasuries sell off pretty sharply because investors

are kind of looking ahead to higher growth and inflation and people look for riskier assets.

But this time around we saw pretty much the polar opposite response when it comes to U.S.

government debt in particular. And investors were kind of scratching their heads to figure out why

that was the case. Some people pointed to some of the concerning news on the vaccines front

with the J&J pause and further kind of geopolitical tensions perhaps with Russia in the U.S.

as helping create a bid for treasuries in a way. And at the same time just given how far we've come

in treasury yields since the start of the year, people have been also anticipating that we might see

somewhat of a pullback. Colby Smith is our U.S. capital markets correspondent.

Those tensions between Washington and Moscow, Colby was talking about.

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