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Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Friday, June 23rd, and this is your FT News Briefing.

People are getting worried about high mortgage rates in the UK,

and Germany is hitting up the US for natural gas.

Plus, Sierra Leone is holding a presidential election this weekend.

We'll talk about how the country's incredibly high inflation might sway voters.

I'm Sonia Hudson from Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The Bank of England raised interest rates by half a percentage point yesterday.

They're now at the highest level since 2008.

Homeowners are worried they won't be able to afford higher mortgages when their fixed rate

contracts run out. James Pickford writes about property and mortgages for the FT, and he's been

looking into this issue. Hi, James. Hi.

So, James, before we get into the rates themselves, can you talk a little bit about how UK mortgages

typically work? Well, the UK, unlike many other countries,

it's kind of dominated by fixed rate mortgages, where a borrower will take a mortgage over 25

years, but the rates will be fixed for two or three or five or seven or ten years.

And that makes it slightly cheaper than fixing over a longer period, as happens in other countries.

And people have got very used to particularly an ultra low interest rate environment,

so having very cheap mortgages. But of course, that's coming under a huge amount of pressure now,

because of these rate rises. From what I understand, experts expect repossessions to go up as a

...