Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, May 21st.

And this is your FT News Briefing.

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire. We'll hear from the FT's Katrina Manson

on whether it'll stick. And we work, lost billions of dollars, and more than a quarter of its

members in the first three months of this year. Plus, a lot of people say the federal reserves

quantitative easing is causing stock prices to rise. The Fed downplays this idea.

The FT's Rob Armstrong breaks down what all this money sloshing around the financial system

actually does. All the Fed can do is push money out there and make me like money less

as compared to stock. I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire yesterday. It would end

an 11-day conflict that's killed at least 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. It came a day after

the US stepped up pressure on Israel to end its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. But will this

truth hold up? Here's our US foreign policy and defense correspondent Katrina Manson.

From what people are telling me, this ceasefire could well stick. Both sides may couch what has

happened as a victory in their own right, even though they would disagree with the others reading

of it. The thing is, this has happened before, of course. In 2014, this went on for much longer,

more than 50 days. This time out, it's 11 days. People who look closely at the security side of

things say that Hamas spent a long time building up weapons in order to find a reason to launch them.

The status of Gaza Strip, the role of Hamas is relations with the Palestinian Authority.

All of those are still in play and extremely fractious. More widely than that, Arab Jewish relations

inside Israel have really come under the microscope. And I think that is something that Israel is

going to have to focus on in order to establish the calm that the Israelis clearly want. And also,

...