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Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, March 8th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

Stocks were hammered on Monday and oil prices whipsawed on fears of a potential Russian oil ban.

The U.S. Treasury has put U.S. banks on alert for Russian sanctions busters and Beijing reconfirmed

its loyalty to Moscow and Western sanctions could make their friendship even tighter.

Total bilateral trade between Russia and China is huge, I mean it's worth over a hundred

billion dollars, and this relationship will become even more concentrated now.

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

In financial markets yesterday, it was all about oil. More news about a potential ban on

Russian crude sent oil prices spiking as high as $139 a barrel than they tumbled down to $120.

Dittery investors sold off stocks and the S&P 500 ended the day down nearly 3%.

To find out more, I caught up with our U.S. Energy Editor, Derek Broward.

He's at a big oil industry conference in Houston right now.

So oil prices spiked when the market opened and went almost up to the record high,

actually Brent was only about six dollars away from the record high, and then they've

fell back through the days. It became clear that it isn't kind of an open shut case yet.

There isn't a blanket ban that's going to affect Russian oil exports.

If anything happens, it's likely to be an import ban, which is a bit different.

So traders kind of digested the news that yes, the U.S. was kind of changing its position,

but some other countries were saying no, we still need to keep these supplies intact,

...