ReportWire

Tag: economy and economic indicators

  • China censors women modeling lingerie on livestream shopping — so men are doing it | CNN Business

    China censors women modeling lingerie on livestream shopping — so men are doing it | CNN Business


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Donning a sassy piece of silk lingerie, a male model grooves to the beat and forms a heart shape with his fingers during a livestreaming session on Douyin, one of China’s most popular video-sharing platforms.

    His modeling performance is the latest illustration of the kind of entrepreneurial innovation sometimes needed to bypass China’s rigorous internet censorship, a dragnet that can ensnare seemingly innocuous activities – in this case retailers selling women’s underwear online.

    China deploys one of the world’s most stringent censorship regimes, with a track record of blocking out not just politically sensitive information but images of women’s bodies deemed marginally racy.

    Several businesses specializing in selling lingerie through livestreaming have had their sessions cut short after they featured a female model and their brush with internet censorship came to light in January.

    Hence the use of men instead.

    On one of the sales channels, a man is seen dressed in black lingerie, standing next to a mannequin showing a similar outfit, in what appears to be a screenshot of a livestream broadcast on Alibaba

    (BABA)    ’s Taobao Live, a streaming platform for the e-commerce giant.

    In another image, a different male model put on a pink slip dress and silky shawl, accessorized with cat ear headbands.

    In one livestream clip, carried by multiple state media outlets, an owner of an online venture said he was simply trying to play it safe.

    “This is not an attempt at sarcasm. Everyone is being very serious about complying with the rules,” the man, who identified himself as Mr Xu, said.

    The emergence of male lingerie models has caused mixed views online in China, from merriment and annoyance to reluctant acceptance.

    “So what should I do if I want to promote and showcase lingerie in the live broadcast session? It’s very simple, find a man to wear it,” read one comment on China’s microblogging site Weibo.

    A man in a mini slip dress and velvet robe models beside a woman in pajamas in a video posted on Douyin on February 17, 2023.

    Livestreaming sales of products is a multibillion-dollar industry in mainland China, and was given a major boost during the three years of the country’s strict Covid lockdowns that battered many bricks and mortar businesses.

    As of June last year, the number of livestreaming e-commerce users in mainland China is over 460 million, according to the Academy of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a body affiliated with Beijing’s commerce ministry.

    A 2021 report by iResearch, a Beijing-based firm specializing in measuring audience growth online, predicted the livestream sector would be worth as much as $720 billion this year.

    Male models are not the only workaround.

    On Douyin, the Chinese domestic version of TikTok, other female models have circumvented the censorship by showcasing the latest style of lingerie on themselves on top of a t-shirt they are already wearing.

    Others displayed the items on mannequins.

    In 2015, China led a crackdown on television shows exposing actresses’ cleavage, forcing some of the most popular costume dramas to zoom in on their faces to avoid getting into trouble with the broadcast authorities.

    Having male influencers promoting female-oriented products is not new in China, either.

    One of the industry’s most successful livestream shopping influencers is Austin Li Jiaqi, who made his name as the “Lipstick King” after selling 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes in 2018.

    As one of China’s biggest internet celebrities, Li also peddles cosmetics, skincare products and fashion apparel, often applying products he’s selling to his own face.

    Even outside of China, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have faced criticism for restricting the sharing of images involving partial nudity, especially of women.

    Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, restricts the sharing of breasts, although it says it intends “to allow images that are shared for medical or health purposes.” But even Meta’s own Oversight Board has called on the company to make its policy less confusing and more gender inclusive.

    YouTube says it prohibits “the depiction of clothed or unclothed genitals, breasts, or buttocks that are meant for sexual gratification,” but it may age-restrict other images or videos involving nudity.

    Source link

  • Treasury secretary rules out bailout for Silicon Valley Bank | CNN Politics

    Treasury secretary rules out bailout for Silicon Valley Bank | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday ruled out a federal bailout for Silicon Valley Bank following its spectacular collapse last week.

    “Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out, and we’re certainly not looking,” Yellen told CBS News when asked if there will be a bailout. “And the reforms that have been put in place means that we’re not going to do that again.”

    Also Sunday, Shalanda Young, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, stressed in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “State of the Union” that the US banking system at large was “more resilient” now.

    “It has a better foundation than before the [2008] financial crisis. That’s largely due to the reforms put in place,” Young said on “State of the Union.”

    Yellen said she’s been hearing from depositors all weekend, many of whom are “small businesses” and employ thousands of people. “I’ve been working all weekend with our banking regulators to design appropriate policies to address this situation,” the Treasury secretary said, declining to provide further details.

    SVB collapsed Friday morning after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history.

    California regulators closed down the tech lender and put it under the control of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC is acting as a receiver, which typically means it will liquidate the bank’s assets to pay back its customers, including depositors and creditors.

    Despite initial panic on Wall Street over the run on SVB, which caused its shares to crater, analysts said the bank’s collapse is unlikely to set off the kind of domino effect that gripped the banking industry during the financial crisis.

    But the collapse has prompted a bailout debate in Washington as lawmakers assess the fallout.

    Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Collins in a separate interview on “State of the Union” that she doesn’t support a bailout “at this time” but cautioned, “It’s still very early.”

    “We cannot keep bailing out private companies because there’s no consequences to their actions. People, when they make mistakes or break the law, have to be held accountable in this country,” she said.

    While relatively unknown outside Silicon Valley, SVB was among the top 20 American commercial banks, with $209 billion in total assets at the end of last year, according to the FDIC. It’s the largest lender to fail since Washington Mutual collapsed in 2008.

    Source link

  • Norfolk Southern balks at compensating homeowners in East Palestine | CNN Business

    Norfolk Southern balks at compensating homeowners in East Palestine | CNN Business


    Washington, DC
    CNN
     — 

    Jim Stewart was getting ready to sell his home in East Palestine, Ohio, and retire. Then came the derailment of a Norfolk Southern train on February 3, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and nearby water, and he fears crashing the value of his home.

    He and his wife hoped to put their three-bedroom home on the market this spring, as prices were still high and inventory was low. Alternatively, they talked about his son’s family buying a house that was on the market down the street from Stewart.

    But even though state officials are saying the water is safe to drink, convincing potential homebuyers otherwise is an uphill battle.

    “Since the derailment, I lost all those options,” he said. “Who is going to buy contaminated land? The older people are willing to stay and live it out. The younger bunch, they are smarter. They’re thinking of their families. I wouldn’t want my grandchildren here. We don’t know if the ground is going to be good enough to grow grass. There are too many unknowns.”

    Stewart, 65, recently voiced his fury and sadness about what he lost to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw on a February 22 Town Hall about the derailment on CNN.

    “You burned me,” he told Shaw. “We were going to sell our house. Our value went phoom,” pointing his hands down.

    Shaw was asked point blank by another resident if Norfolk Southern was ready to buy Stewart’s house, he replied only, “we’re going to do what’s right for this community.” That wasn’t satisfactory for Stewart or many of the other participants at the Town Hall.

    “I lost everything now,” Stewart says he told Shaw.

    Stewart works as a manager at a commercial baking company.

    “I worked hard. I’m still working,” he says he told Shaw. “I’m in the 44th year at my job. I wanted to get out. Now I’m just stuck.”

    Stewart fears he lost a tremendous amount of the value of his home, which he bought in 2016 for $85,000.

    The property was worth about $135,000 a month ago, according to an estimate from Zillow. Lack of transactions since then make a current estimate difficult.

    “I’ll never get that. I’ll be lucky to get what I paid for it, if that,” he said of the estimate. In addition, Stewart believes it would cost a lot to do the repairs and tests to ensure the home is safe.

    “At whose expense? That’s the biggest issue right now,” said Stewart. “At whose expense are we going to do things to make sure it’s okay?”

    Stewart isn’t the only one that was angry with Shaw and Norfolk Southern for the railroad’s refusal to offer to compensate the community for the property value that has been destroyed by the derailment.

    At Thursday’s Senate hearing on the crash, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Shaw four different times to commit to compensating homeowners, only to hear Shaw repeatedly reply, “Senator, I’m committed to do what’s right.”

    Markey said that wasn’t an acceptable answer.

    “Will you commit to insuring that these families, these innocent families do no lose their life savings in their homes and small businesses? The right thing to do is to say, ‘Yes we will.’” Markey told Shaw. “These families want to know long term are they just going to be left behind. Once the cameras move on, once the national attention dies down, where will these families be? I think they’re going to be in the crosshairs of the accountants of Norfolk Southern saying ‘We’re not going to pay full compensation.’”

    Paying the homeowners and businesses wouldn’t necessarily be difficult for Norfolk Southern.

    With a population of about 5,000 people, there are roughly 2,600 residential properties in East Palestine according to Attom, a property data provider. The average value of a property there in January of this year, prior to the derailment, was $146,000, according to Attom.

    Taken together, the value of all residential real estate in the town adds up to about $380 million, including single family homes and multi-family properties.

    Those values are only a fraction of the money that Norfolk Southern earns. Last year it reported a record operating income of $4.8 billion, and a net income of $3.3 billion, up about 9% from a year earlier. It had $456 million in cash on hand on its books as of December 31.

    It’s been returning much of that profit to shareholders, repurchasing $3.1 billion in shares last year and spending $1.2 billion on dividends. And it announced a 9% increase in dividends just days before the accident.

    A year ago its board approved a $10 billion share repurchase plan, and it had the authority to buy $7.5 billion of that remaining on the plan as of December 31.

    Asked by Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, at Thursday’s hearing, “Will you pledge to no more stock buybacks until a raft of safety measures have been completed to reduce the risk of derailments and crashes in the future,” Shaw again dodged the question by answering only with, “I will commit to continuing to invest in safety.”

    And the company also invests a great deal of money in lobbying, spending $1.8 billion on lobbying in 2022, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks lobbying and political contributions expenditures.

    Those lobbying expenses also came under attack by senators at the hearing, especially since Shaw would not commit to supporting the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate since the derailment to improve railroad safety. Asked if he would support or oppose the legislation, Shaw wouldn’t endorse all of the provisions of the bill, but he responded “we are committed to the legislative intent to make rail safer.”

    A big payout probably isn’t what many in East Palestine are looking for, said Jim Warren, manager and co-owner of Kelly Warren and Associates Real Estate Solutions, in Boardman, which is about 15 miles away from East Palestine. They just want a home that’s safe to live in and to be made whole on its value, he said.

    “The people around here don’t want a lot,” he said. “We don’t chase the flashy items like other places in the world. We want to grow up, raise our kids, make a living, and have a nice place to live, that’s all we want.”

    This area, like the rest of the country, saw the real estate market heat up over the past few years with multiple offers on homes and properties selling over the asking price. But, Warren said, unlike other parts of the country the market stays fairly steady in this part of Ohio.

    “Our area doesn’t move up as much and it doesn’t move down as much,” he said. “We don’t have the big swings.”

    Warren’s firm currently has two listings in the town.

    “That’s no more nor less than usual,” he said. There are only ever about ten properties on the market there, he said.

    But, he added, “if your property is contaminated, that is a concern for yourself and for any buyer.”

    As with any real estate purchase, an appraisal and tests for safety would need to be done for homes in East Palestine. But like Stewart, Warren said it is not yet clear who will pay for the additional tests on water and ground contamination for that peace of mind.

    “For all we know, the county might cover it, or the EPA or Ohio state government. That remains to be seen,” he said.

    Overall, Warren said, he expects homes to continue to be bought and sold in East Palestine.

    “We don’t foresee the market tanking, we foresee steady growth,” he said. “After all the hype is gone, we are still living here. We’re going to have to figure it out because this is our home.”

    Source link

  • Takeaways from the February jobs report | CNN Business

    Takeaways from the February jobs report | CNN Business


    Minneapolis
    CNN
     — 

    February’s jobs report had a little something for everyone.

    For workers, there were jobs; for employers, there were workers filling shortfalls caused by the pandemic; for the Federal Reserve, there were indications that the labor market was loosening and wage pressures were easing.

    Then again, the total of 311,000 net jobs added was significantly higher than expectations of 205,000, and the unemployment rate surprisingly grew to 3.6%.

    The report was a “mixed bag” at a time when the Fed — which this week signaled a more hawkish approach after a strong batch of recent economic data — is weighing to go lighter or heavier on rate hikes.

    Here are some takeaways from Friday’s report:

    Economists were anticipating that January’s blockbuster 504,000 net job gain was an anomaly due to a combination of factors such as annual data adjustments, warm weather and employers hoarding workers.

    But the US labor market in February showed that, overall, it remained fairly resistant to the Fed’s yearlong barrage of interest rate hikes. The latest employment snapshot from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed only a slight downward revision to the January jobs total.

    “This report, it’s not about the Federal Reserve, it’s not about inflation, it’s about you; it’s about how workers are doing,” said Claudia Sahm, founder of Sahm Consulting and a former Fed economist. “And once again, we had a month in which we were adding jobs on net, and this is really good for workers.”

    There are also encouraging signs for employers, she said, noting some of the biggest gains were in industries that have been suffering from the deepest shortages since the pandemic.

    The leisure and hospitality industry added 105,000 jobs in February, accounting for 34% of the entire month’s total gains and putting the sector that much closer to matching its pre-pandemic levels. As of February, the leisure and hospitality industry was 410,000 jobs, or 2.42%, shy of February 2020 employment levels, a CNN analysis of BLS data shows.

    “Right now, we’re still in a phase of getting back to normal in terms of not having labor shortages, not having the costs of serving customers rise and rise,” Sahm said. “I would much rather see us get back to normal by workers coming back as opposed to customers going away.”

    Despite the Fed hammering out a succession of rate hikes during the past year, construction employment hasn’t yet faltered. In February, the construction industry added 24,000 jobs, marking 12 consecutive months of employment growth.

    “Contractors are continuing to work through existing backlogs that have grown over the past two years as new opportunities arose and supply chain issues extended construction timelines,” wrote Nick Grandy, construction and real estate senior analyst at RSM US.

    Notable sectors that recorded job losses during the month were in information, which was down another 25,000 jobs (-0.8%); transportation and warehousing, which was down 21,500 jobs (0.3%); and manufacturing, which was down 4,000 positions.

    While the headline job figure and relatively minimal losses show overall strength, there is an indication of a pullback across industries. The BLS’ employment diffusion index, which shows the percentage of 250 industries that added jobs, fell to 56, which is the lowest reading since April 2020.

    “That indicates that the impact of high interest rates is spilling over to more industries,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

    The labor market has remained extremely tight and fairly out of whack for the past three years. Friday’s report showed that “a modicum of slack crept back into the jobs market,” wrote Wells Fargo economists Sarah House and Michael Pugliese.

    The unemployment rate moved to 3.6% from its 53-year-low of 3.4%. That increase was in part due to more people reentering the workforce and joining the ranks of the unemployed, which the BLS classifies as people without jobs actively searching for work.

    February’s employment report showed a 0.1 percentage point increase in the labor force participation rate to 62.5% — the highest it’s been since April 2020.

    The average workweek ticked down to 34.5 hours from a revised 34.6 hours, signaling a “significant overall drop” in labor demand, said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network.

    Still, with the prime-age employment to population ratio increasing to 80.5% — on par with early 2020 levels — there may be little space left for sustained labor supply gains, according to Matt Colyar, a Moody’s Analytics economist.

    “February’s figure, apart from early 2020 readings, is higher than any rate during the previous decade-long expansion,” Colyar noted. “Even in corners of the economy where demand has slumped, businesses have shown little appetite to lay off workers en masse. As other sectors continue to hire rapidly, an acceleration in wage growth will remain a looming threat.”

    A softening in average hourly earnings is helping fuel hopes for a soft landing.

    At 0.2% on the month, wage growth was below expectations and measured 4.6% year over year.

    “There were signs in today’s report that progress on inflation can be made without torpedoing employment,” the Wells Fargo economists noted.

    As of February, the annualized rate of wage growth during the past three months is slightly under 3.6%, a pace seen when inflation was below the Fed’s target, said economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    “Perhaps most important from the Fed’s perspective is the slowdown in wage growth,” Baker wrote in a statement. “The 3.6% annual rate over the last three months can hardly be seen as posing a serious threat of inflation. This slowing in the average hourly wage, coupled with the 4% rate reported in the fourth quarter Employment Cost Index, should provide solid evidence that wage growth has slowed sharply.”

    A hot batch of January economic data helped to send the Fed into a more hawkish turn. Fed Chair Jerome Powell told members of Congress this week that the Fed is prepared to increase the pace of its rate hikes if warranted.

    “The latest economic data have come in stronger than expected, which suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated,” Powell told lawmakers.

    There’s still more data to come before the Fed meets for its two-day policymaking meeting on March 21-22, notably the Consumer Price Index, Producer Price Index and the Commerce Department’s retail sales report. However, Friday’s jobs report likely won’t spur a more dovish turn from the Fed, said Sean Snaith, an economist and director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Forecasting.

    “We didn’t go from a four-alarm fire to a five-alarm fire with this data report, but the inflation flames aren’t out either,” he wrote in a note Friday. “And nothing today indicates that the Fed needs to change its more aggressive approach to raising interest rates.”

    Still, economist Gregory Daco cautioned that the Fed shouldn’t fall into the trap of confirmation bias by letting the stronger-than-expected economic data influence the analysis of Friday’s jobs report and next week’s CPI report.

    The Fed may see the low unemployment rate and the robust job gains as fueling wage growth, said Daco, chief economist at EY Parthenon.

    “Our view, however, is slower job growth in the goods sector, easing hours worked and moderating sequential wage growth momentum and a rise in the labor force participation rate indicate a welcome easing of labor market tightness,” Daco noted. “While we acknowledge this report was by no means a weak one, we also observe that some of the job gains were in sectors where there has been a structural employment shortfall — health care and education in particular. Employment strength in those sectors may not be indicative of cyclical wage pressures, but rather easing structural constraints.”

    Source link

  • China appoints Li Qiang, a trusted ally of Xi Jinping, as premier | CNN

    China appoints Li Qiang, a trusted ally of Xi Jinping, as premier | CNN


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s rubber-stamp legislature has appointed Li Qiang, a long-time aide of leader Xi Jinping, as premier, the man tasked with reviving the world’s second-largest economy after three years of zero-Covid restrictions.

    The National People’s Congress endorsed Li in a largely ceremonial vote at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Saturday morning. Li got 2,936 votes, with three votes cast against him and eight abstained.

    Li, 63, is one of the most trusted protégés of Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades. He will replace outgoing Premier Li Keqiang, who had been Xi’s second in command since 2013.

    Traditionally, the premiership is an influential role in charge of the economy, although over the past decade, its power has been eroded by Xi, who has taken almost all decision-making into his own hands.

    Even so, much of the new premier’s efforts are likely to be concentrated on trying to turn around the fortunes of the Chinese economy, which recently set a GDP growth target for this year of about 5% – the lowest in decades.

    That will be no easy task: China is in the midst of a historic downturn for the all-important housing market, consumer spending is sluggish, and unemployment remains high among the youth. And local governments are saddled by debt.

    Business confidence has plummeted following an unprecedented regulatory crackdown on the private sector and increased uncertainties about China’s future policy. Relations between the United States and China are at their lowest point in decades, leading to escalating tensions in technology and investment. Foreign investment in China has slumped.

    Xi identified Li Qiang, a former Communist Party boss of Shanghai who presided over the city’s chaotic two-month lockdown, as the man to take on these challenges during a leadership reshuffle in October.

    Born in the eastern province of Zhejiang, Li started his career as a worker at an irrigation pumping station. He received his undergraduate education in agricultural mechanization at a college in the city of Ningbo and then worked his way up through the provincial bureaucracy.

    His career took off after he served as Xi’s de facto chief of staff when Xi was the party chief of Zhejiang province between 2002 and 2007.

    Li is the first premier since the Mao era not to have previously worked at the State Council, China’s cabinet, as vice premier, analysts say.

    It was Li’s personal ties with Xi that appear to have clinched his promotion over more qualified candidates, Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, said when Li was promoted last year.

    But some analysts said his tenure in Shanghai, particularly before last year’s Covid lockdown, pointed to a pragmatic, pro-business style.

    During Li’s time there, Tesla built its first gigafactory outside the United States in the city. Tesla has sole ownership of that factory, the first foreign automaker in China to wholly own its plant.

    “China’s business environment should turn more friendly, at least, in the coming two years” under Li, who is likely to support private companies and foreign investors, Citi analysts said in a research report.

    In 2019, Li also oversaw the launch of China’s Nasdaq-style stock market on the Shanghai stock exchange.

    Source link

  • Court rejects DOJ bid to transfer Texas immigration lawsuit because of alleged ‘judge shopping’ | CNN Politics

    Court rejects DOJ bid to transfer Texas immigration lawsuit because of alleged ‘judge shopping’ | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge on Friday rejected a Justice Department bid to push back against alleged “judge-shopping” in a case brought by Texas and other Republican states against a Biden administration immigration policy.

    US District Judge Drew Tipton denied a request from the DOJ that he transfer the lawsuit to a court other than his own.

    The judge said he was unconvinced that Texas’ choice of filing the case in his in division – the Southern District of Texas, Victoria division, where Tipton is assigned every civil lawsuit that is brought there – was creating a public perception of unfairness.

    Tipton, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, pointed to comments a DOJ attorney made during a hearing last month about the request, in which the attorney confirmed that he believed the judge would be impartial in the case.

    “In light of the Federal Defendants’ repeated and genuine expressions of confidence in the impartiality and fairness of this Court, it is difficult to accept their argument that ‘public perception’ – if such a concept could be beheld singularly – is meaningfully different than the Defendants,” Tipton said in Friday’s opinion, which called the Biden administration’s public perception claims “speculation.”

    “The Court does not believe it is appropriate to transfer a case that is in the proper venue due to a speculative public perception of bias that conflicts with the Federal Defendants’ own statements,” he wrote.

    The judge went on to assert that “transferring the case because of a public concern that a judge in a single-judge division is biased may well legitimize that concern.”

    The Justice Department’s motion to transfer the case pointed out that at least seven Texas lawsuits against the Biden administration have been filed in the Victoria Division, all but guaranteeing Tipton will hear the cases.

    Texas has a tendency of funneling its lawsuits against the Biden administration into divisions where most or all cases are assigned to an individual judge. In filings, the DOJ argued that Texas can “circumvent the random assignment system by never filing in Divisions where they have a non-trivial chance of not knowing what judge they are likely to be assigned.”

    Tipton did not weigh in directly on Texas’ broader pattern of where it files cases. Tipton said there was the limited 5th Circuit case law on when a case should be transferred because of judge-shopping concerns, and after quoting one such case, he wrote that it is “no well-kept secret that litigation involves strategy.”

    The Justice Department made similar requests to Judge James Wesley Hendrix and Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, in cases filed in their courthouses challenging, respectively, Biden regulations for investors and the annual spending bill the president signed last year.

    Like Tipton, Hendrix and Kacsmaryk are viewed as conservative judges and all three have ruled against the administration in previous cases brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other Republican state attorneys general.

    Source link

  • The US economy added 311,000 jobs in February, outpacing expectations | CNN Business

    The US economy added 311,000 jobs in February, outpacing expectations | CNN Business


    Minneapolis
    CNN
     — 

    The US economy added 311,000 jobs in February, according to the latest monthly employment snapshot from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Friday.

    That’s a pullback from the blockbuster January jobs report, when a revised 504,000 positions were added, but shows the labor market is still emitting plenty of heat.

    The unemployment rate ticked up to 3.6% from 3.4%.

    February’s net job gains surpassed economists’ estimates for a more modest month, with only 205,000 to be added. Separately, downward revisions to December’s and January’s totals weren’t that drastic.

    While Friday’s report is a strong one, that’s actually bad news in the broader context of the Federal Reserve’s campaign to curb high inflation, said PNC Financial Services chief economist Gus Faucher.

    “It’s much hotter than the economy can run, and so this means the Fed is going to have to continue to hike interest rates,” he told CNN. “And that makes a recession more likely.”

    Barring a surprisingly low Consumer Price Index inflation report next week, Faucher said he expects the Fed to go forward with a half-point rate hike at its March 21-22 meeting, which would be a higher pace than the recent, more moderate quarter-point increase.

    The Fed has been battling for almost a year to slow the economy and crush the highest inflation in 40 years, but the labor market continues to defy those efforts.

    “Coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Fed’s first rate hike, we never thought we would see the economy churning out 311,000 more jobs this month,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist of FwdBonds, in a statement. “The party is on and the labor market is having a blast. The economy clearly is not landing, it is soaring.”

    The monthly job gains remain well above pre-pandemic norms, when roughly 180,000 jobs were added per month between 2010 and 2019, BLS data shows. However, the labor market remains tight and imbalances continue to persist in the ongoing recovery efforts from the devastating pandemic.

    Labor turnover data released earlier this week for January showed that there were 1.9 job openings for every person looking for one. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has frequently highlighted how the labor market remains short of pre-pandemic growth projections by more than 3 million people.

    The pandemic accelerated expected demographic trends (the aging out of the massive Baby Boom generation) with increased retirements; people also dropped out of the workforce for care-related needs and health concerns such as long Covid; and there were hundreds of thousands of workers who died from Covid.

    February’s employment report showed a 0.1 percentage point increase in the labor force participation rate to 62.5% — the highest its been since April 2020. However, it remains below pre-pandemic levels of 63.4%.

    Additionally, there was some upward movement in the jobless rate, which increased 0.2 percentage points to 3.6%.

    “Contributing to upward pressure here, there were more people looking for work,”said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.

    Industries with notable job gains included leisure and hospitality, retail trade, government and health care. After being crushed during the pandemic, the leisure and hospitality has been steadily adding back employees and trying to meet increased demand from consumers shifting their spending from goods to services.

    Average hourly earnings — a closely watched metric as the Fed seeks to evaluate the impact of rising wages on inflation — grew 0.2% month-on-month and were up 4.6% over the year before.

    Source link

  • Former Ohio House speaker convicted in $60 million bribery scheme | CNN Politics

    Former Ohio House speaker convicted in $60 million bribery scheme | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A former Republican speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives was convicted by a federal jury Thursday on racketeering conspiracy charges in connection with a $60 million bribery scheme.

    Former Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Mathew Borges, who was also convicted Thursday, could face up to 20 years in prison for orchestrating the scheme to accept bribes in exchange for ensuring the passage of a billion-dollar bailout for a nuclear energy company.

    “As presented by the trial team, Larry Householder illegally sold the statehouse, and thus he ultimately betrayed the great people of Ohio he was elected to serve,” said US Attorney Kenneth Parker.

    Steven Bradley, an attorney for Householder, expressed disappointment with the verdict.

    “We will take some time to discuss and evaluate our legal options moving forward and will most certainly pursue an appeal,” he said. “Larry is looking forward to going home and spending time with his family after what has been an exhausting seven week trial.”

    CNN reached out to an attorney for Borges for comment.

    The release did not explicitly identify the nuclear energy company involved in the scheme but noted that utility company FirstEnergy Corp. previously agreed to pay a $230 million penalty for “conspiring to bribe public officials and others” as part of a deferred prosecution settlement.

    Jennifer Young, a manager for external communications at FirstEnergy Corp., told CNN that “while it would be inappropriate to comment on the verdict, FirstEnergy has taken decisive actions over the past several years to strengthen our leadership team and ensure a culture of strong ethics, integrity and accountability across the company.”

    Jeffrey Longstreth, Householder’s longtime campaign and political strategist, and Juan Cespedes, a lobbyist, previously pleaded guilty to their roles in the racketeering conspiracy.

    Beginning in March 2017, FirstEnergy began making quarterly $250,000 payments to Householder’s tax-exempt social welfare account named Generation Now, US attorneys in Ohio’s southern district laid out in their case.

    Householder’s team then used that money to support the passage of House Bill 6, a $1 billion bailout that saved two nuclear power plants operated by FirstEnergy Corp., and stop a ballot effort to overturn the law.

    Millions of those dollars went to Householder’s bid for speaker, to other state House candidates likely to support him and to his team’s own pockets.

    Householder spent over $500,000 of those funds to “pay off his credit card balances, repair his Florida home and settle a business lawsuit,” according to prosecutors.

    Borges used about $366,000 for his own benefit and used another $15,000 to bribe an Ohio Republican operative for information on the number of signatures collected on the ballot referendum opposing HB 6, the news release said.

    Householder and his associates were arrested and charged with racketeering conspiracy in July 2020.

    Source link

  • Buying bank stocks before a recession used to be madness. Not anymore | CNN Business

    Buying bank stocks before a recession used to be madness. Not anymore | CNN Business


    London
    CNN
     — 

    Investors are bucking tradition this year by piling into big bank stocks just as major economies are expected to either slow down or fall into recession.

    The Stoxx Europe 600 Banks index, a group of 42 big European banks, climbed 21% between the start of the year and late February — when it hit a five-year high — outperforming its broader benchmark index, the Euro Stoxx 600

    (SXXL)    . The KBW Bank Index, which tracks 24 leading US banks, has risen by a more modest 4% so far this year, slightly outpacing the broader S&P 500

    (DVS)    .

    Both bank-specific indexes have surged since lows hit last fall.

    The economic picture is far less rosy. The United States and the biggest economies in the European Union are expected to grow at a much slower rate this year than last, while UK output is likely to contract. A sudden recession “at some stage” is also a risk for the United States, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told CNN Monday.

    But the widespread economic weakness has coincided with high inflation, forcing central banks to raise interest rates. That’s been a boon for banks, helping them make heftier returns on loans to households and businesses, and as savers deposit more of their money into savings accounts.

    Rate hikes have buoyed the stocks of big banks, but so too has a greater confidence in their ability to weather economic storms 15 years after the 2008 global financial crisis nearly toppled them, fund managers and analysts told CNN.

    “Banks are, generally speaking, much stronger, more resilient, more capable to [withstand a] recession,” than in the past, said Roberto Frazzitta, global head of banking at consultancy Bain & Company.

    Interest rates in major economies started climbing last year as policymakers launched their campaigns against soaring inflation.

    The steep rate hikes followed a prolonged period of ultra-low borrowing costs that started in 2008. As the financial crisis ravaged economies, central banks slashed interest rates to unprecedented lows to incentivize spending and investment. And, for more than a decade, they barely budged.

    Banks are a less attractive bet for investors in that environment as lower interest rates often feed into lower returns for lenders.

    “[The] post-crisis period of very low interest rates was seen as very bad for bank profitability, it squeezed their margins,” said Thomas Mathews, senior markets economist at Capital Economics.

    But the rate hiking cycle that got underway last year, and shows few signs of abating, has changed investors’ calculations. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday that interest rates would rise more than people anticipated.

    Higher potential returns for shareholders are drawing investors back into the sector. For example, the average dividend yield for bank stocks in Europe — the amount of money a company pays its shareholders every year as a proportion of its share price — is now around 7%, said Ciaran Callaghan, head of European equity research at Amundi, a French asset management firm.

    By comparison, the dividend yield for the S&P 500 currently stands at 2.1%, and for the Euro Stoxx 600 at 3.3%, according to Refinitiv data.

    European bank stocks have risen particularly sharply in the past six months.

    Mathews at Capital Economics attributed their outperformance relative to US peers partly to the fact that interest rates in the countries that use the euro are still closer to zero than in the United States, meaning that investors have more to gain from rates rising.

    It can also be put down to Europe’s remarkable reversal of fortune, he said.

    Wholesale natural gas prices in the region, which hit a record high in August, have tumbled back to their levels seen before the Ukraine war, and a much-feared energy shortage has been avoided this winter.

    “Only a few months ago people were talking about a very deep recession in Europe compared to the US,” Mathews said. “As those worries have unwound, European banks have done particularly well.”

    But European economies are still fragile. When economic activity slows down, bank stocks are typically among those hit hardest. That’s because banks’ earnings are, to varying extents, tied to borrowers’ ability to repay their loans, as well as to consumers’ and businesses’ appetite for more credit.

    This time around, though — unlike in 2008 — banks are in a much better position to withstand defaults on loans.

    After the global financial crisis, regulators sprang into action, requiring lenders, among other measures, to have a large capital cushion against future losses. Capital is made up of a bank’s own funds, rather than borrowed money such as customer deposits.

    Lenders must also hold enough cash, or assets that can be quickly converted into cash, to repay depositors and other creditors.

    Luc Plouvier, a senior portfolio manager at Van Lanschot Kempen, a Dutch wealth management firm, noted that banks had undergone “structural change” in the past decade.

    “A lot of the regulation that’s been put in place [has] forced these banks to be more liquid, to have much more [of a] capital buffer, to take less risk,” he said.

    Joost de Graaf, co-head of European credit at Van Lanschot Kempen, agreed.

    “There are not any hidden skeletons in [banks’] balance sheets as far as we know.”

    — Julia Horowitz contributed reporting.

    Source link

  • What’s changed since Powell last headed to Capitol Hill | CNN Business

    What’s changed since Powell last headed to Capitol Hill | CNN Business


    Minneapolis
    CNN
     — 

    Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is set to appear before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday to deliver the first part of his two-day semiannual monetary policy testimony before Congress.

    It’s his first appearance before the committee since June last year, when inflation was on its way to 9%.

    Powell is expected to speak to the progress the US central bank has made in its yearlong campaign to rein in high inflation by ratcheting up its benchmark interest rate from near zero to between 4.5% to 4.75%.

    Inflation has slowed in recent months, measuring 6.4% in January after hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June. However, the battle is not yet won, and Powell and other Fed officials have cautioned that disinflation will be bumpy and there’s a long “ways to go.”

    Fed policymakers have warned in recent weeks that interest rates will likely have to remain higher for longer in order for inflation to settle down to the central bank’s 2% target.

    This time last year, Powell’s congressional address came on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, surging gas prices and a significant escalation in US inflation. The economy continuing to rebound and repair itself from the lingering effects of the pandemic — including the disruptions of the Omicron variant.

    Faced with a strong labor market, uncertain geopolitical developments and surging inflation, Powell told members of Congress then that he’d likely propose a quarter-point rate hike at the central bank’s forthcoming meeting.

    It’s now March 2023, and the central bank is faced with an “extraordinarily strong” labor market, ongoing geopolitical uncertainty and stubborn inflation. However, there are signals that some inflationary pressures have eased: China’s economic growth was recently downgraded; and supply chain disruptions are easing, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported Monday.

    The markets are currently expecting the Fed to make another quarter-point rate hike during its next meeting two weeks from now: The CME FedWatch Tool is showing a 69.4% probability of such a hike. However, the perceived chances of a half-point increase (at 30.6%) have grown considerably during the past few weeks. One month ago, the probability for a half-point increase was 3.3%, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

    Still, several major pieces of economic data — including the latest labor turnover report, monthly jobs report, Consumer Price Index, Producer Price Index, and retail sales — are all due ahead of the Fed’s next policymaking meeting on March 21-22.

    Source link

  • JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Ukraine invasion is a top economic concern | CNN Business

    JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says Ukraine invasion is a top economic concern | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The war in Ukraine and US-China relations are two of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s largest economic concerns, he said Monday.

    “The thing I worry the most about is Ukraine,” he told Bloomberg Television in an interview Monday morning. “It’s oil, gas, the leadership of the world, and our relationship with China — that is much more serious than the economic vibrations that we all have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.”

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began more than a year ago and has roiled the global economy, leading to energy and food price shocks, along with global supply chain disruptions that fueled surging inflation across the world and led to painful interest rate hikes from the world’s central banks.

    “This is the most serious geopolitical thing we’ve had to deal with since World War II,” Dimon said Monday, also highlighting the war’s impact on relations with China.

    Beijing enjoys a close relationship with Moscow, and the Chinese government has been purchasing Russian energy and supplying machinery, electronics, base metals, vehicles, ships and aircraft, throwing the Kremlin an economic lifeline.

    In recent months, tensions between the United States and China have increased as the countries compete for dominance of the microchip industry and argue over tariffs, US support for Taiwan and potential spy balloons.

    Dimon said JPMorgan Chase is taking an active role in improving the relationship between the United States and China by advising and engaging with both governments on keeping cordial relations. He’s hoping that “cooler heads prevail” but he doesn’t believe a business solution exists to ease growing disputes. While JPMorgan Chase does a fair share of business with Beijing, it’s the government, not private enterprise, that has to smooth tensions, he said.

    “We probably should have started resetting this 10 years ago,” he said. The US government has to sit down and have a “very serious conversation with the Chinese government,” he said.

    Dimon added that he believes the war in Ukraine could continue for years to come.

    On the home front, Dimon is still holding out hope for the possibility that the Federal Reserve can execute a soft landing — lowering interest rates while avoiding recession. But overall, his outlook remains cloudy.

    “A mild recession is possible, a harder recession is possible,” he said Monday. “I think there’s a good chance that inflation will come down, but not enough by the fourth quarter — the Fed may actually have to do more,” he said.

    Dimon did note that the US consumer is still very healthy: Home prices and wages are high, households still have more money in their bank accounts than they did before the pandemic and they’re still spending it.

    Consumers are in great shape, he said. “But that’s going to end at some point.”

    Still, even if America does enter a recession, he said, consumers are much stronger and will be able to better withstand a downturn than they were in 2008.

    Source link

  • Turkey’s earthquake caused $34 billion in damage. It could cost Erdogan the election | CNN

    Turkey’s earthquake caused $34 billion in damage. It could cost Erdogan the election | CNN

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    The devastating earthquake that hit Turkey on February 6 killed at least 45,000 people, rendered millions homeless across almost a dozen cities and caused immediate damage estimated at $34 billion – or roughly 4% of the country’s annual economic output, according to the World Bank.

    But the indirect cost of the quake could be much higher, and recovery will be neither easy nor quick.

    The Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation estimates the total cost of the quake at $84.1 billion, the lion’s share of which would be for housing, at $70.8 billion, with lost national income pegged at $10.4 billion and lost working days at $2.91 billion.

    “I do not recall… any economic disaster at this level in the history of the Republic of Turkey,” said Arda Tunca, an Istanbul-based economist at PolitikYol.

    Turkey’s economy had been slowing even before the earthquake. Unorthodox monetary policies by the government caused soaring inflation, leading to further income inequality and a currency crisis that saw the lira lose 30% of its value against the dollar last year. Turkey’s economy grew 5.6% last year, Reuters reported, citing official data.

    Economists say those structural weaknesses in the economy will only get worse because of the quake and could determine the course of presidential and parliamentary elections expected in mid-May.

    Still, Tunca says that while the physical damage from the quake is colossal, the cost to the country’s GDP won’t be as pronounced when compared to the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, which hit the country’s industrial heartland and killed more than 17,000. According to the OECD, the areas impacted in that quake accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.

    The provinces most affected by the February 6 quake represent some 15% of Turkey’s population. According to the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, they contribute 9% of the nation’s GDP, 11% of income tax and 14% of income from agriculture and fisheries.

    “Economic growth would slow down at first but I don’t expect a recessionary threat due to the earthquake,” said Selva Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul. “I don’t expect the impact on (economic) growth to be more than 1 to 2 (percentage) points.”

    There has been growing criticism of the country’s preparedness for the quake, whether through policies to mitigate the economic impact or prevent the scale of the damage seen in the disaster.

    How Turkey will rehabilitate its economy and provide for its newly homeless people is not yet known. But it could prove pivotal in determining President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political fate, analysts and economists say, as he seeks another term in office.

    The government’s 2023 budget, released before the earthquake, had planned for increased spending in an election year, foreseeing a deficit of 660 billion liras ($34.9 billion).

    The government has already announced some measures that analysts said were designed to shore up Erdogan’s popularity, including a near 55% increase in the minimum wage, early retirement and cheaper housing loans.

    Economists say that Turkey’s fiscal position is strong. Its budget deficit, when compared to its economic output, is smaller than that of other emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. That gives the government room to spend.

    “Turkey starts from a position of relative fiscal strength,” said Selva Bahar Baziki of Bloomberg Economics. “The necessary quake spending will likely result in the government breaching their budget targets. Given the high humanitarian toll, this would be the year to do it.”

    Quake-related public spending is estimated at 2.6% of GDP in the short run, she told CNN, but could eventually reach as high as 5.5%.

    Governments usually plug budget shortfalls by taking on more debt or raising taxes. Economists say both are likely options. But post-quake taxation is already a touchy topic in the country, and could prove risky in an election year.

    After the 1999 quake, Turkey introduced an “earthquake tax” that was initially introduced as a temporary measure to help cushion economic damage, but subsequently became a permanent tax.

    There has been concern in the country that the state may have squandered those tax revenues, with opposition leaders calling on the government to be more transparent about what happened to the money raised. When asked in 2020, Erdogan said the money “was not spent out of its purpose.” Since then, the government has said little more about how the money was spent.

    “The funds created for earthquake preparedness have been used for projects such as road constructions, infrastructure build-ups, etc. other than earthquake preparedness,” said Tunca. “In other words, no buffers or cushions have been set in place to limit the economic impacts of such disasters.”

    The Turkish presidency didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Analysts say it’s too early to tell precisely what impact the economic fallout will have on Erdogan’s prospects for re-election.

    The president’s approval rating was low even before the quake. In a December poll by Turkish research firm MetroPOLL, 52.1% of respondents didn’t approve of his handling of his job as president. A survey a month earlier found that a slim majority of voters would not vote for Erdogan if an election were held on that day.

    Two polls last week, however, showed the Turkish opposition had not picked up fresh support, Reuters reported, citing partly its failure to name a candidate and partly its lack of a tangible plan to rebuild areas devastated by the quake.

    The majority of the provinces worst affected by the quake voted for Erdogan and his ruling AK Party in the 2018 elections, but in some of those provinces, Erdogan and the AK Party won with a plurality of votes or a slim majority.

    Those provinces are some of the poorest in the country, the World Bank says.

    Research conducted by Demiralp as well as academics Evren Balta from Ozyegin University and Seda Demiralp from Isik University, found that while the ruling AK Party’s voters’ high partisanship is a strong hindrance to voter defection, economic and democratic failures could tip the balance.

    “Our data shows that respondents who report being able to make ends meet are more likely to vote for the incumbent AKP again,” the research concludes. “However, once worsening economic fundamentals push more people below the poverty line, the possibility of defection increases.”

    This could allow opposition parties to take votes from the incumbent rulers “despite identity-based cleavages if they target economically and democratically dissatisfied voters via clear messages.”

    For Tunca, the economic fallout from the quake poses a real risk for Erdogan’s prospects.

    “The magnitude of Turkey’s social earthquake is much greater than that of the tectonic one,” he said. “There is a tug of war between the government and the opposition, and it seems that the winner is going to be unknown until the very end of the elections.”

    Nadeen Ebrahim and Isil Sariyuce contributed to this report.

    This article has been corrected to say that the research, not the survey, was conducted by the academics.

    Sub-Saharan African countries repatriate citizens from Tunisia after ‘shocking’ statements from country’s president

    Sub-Saharan African countries including Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Gabon, are helping their citizens return from Tunisia following a controversial statement from Tunisian President Kais Saied, who has led a crackdown on illegal immigration into the North African country since last month.

    • Background: In a meeting with Tunisia’s National Security Council on February 21, Saied described illegal border crossing from sub-Saharan Africa into Tunisia as a “criminal enterprise hatched at the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” He said the immigration aims to turn Tunisia into “only an African country with no belonging to the Arab and Muslim worlds.” In a later speech on February 23, Saied maintained there is no racial discrimination in Tunisia and said that Africans residing in Tunisia legally are welcome. Authorities arrested 58 African migrants on Friday after they reportedly crossed the border illegally, state news agency TAP reported on Saturday.
    • Why it matters: Saied, whose seizure of power in 2021 was described as a coup by his foes, is facing challenges to his rule at home. Reuters on Sunday reported that opposition figures and rights groups have said that the president’s crackdown on migrants was meant to distract from Tunisia’s economic crisis.

    Iranian Supreme Leader says schoolgirls’ poisoning is an ‘unforgivable crime’

    Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday said that the poisoning of schoolgirls in recent months across Iran is an “unforgivable crime,” state-run news agency IRNA reported. Khamenei urged authorities to pursue the issue, saying that “if it is proven that the students were poisoned, the perpetrators of this crime should be severely punished.”

    • Background: Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country over the last few months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of parliament, said that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far, citing an unnamed, “reliable source.”
    • Why it matters: The reports have led to a local and international outcry. While it is unclear whether the incidents were linked and if the students were targeted, some believe them to be deliberate attempts at shutting down girls’ schools, and even potentially linked to recent protests that spread under the slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom.”

    Iran to allow further IAEA access following discussions – IAEA chief

    Iran will allow more access and monitoring capabilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agency Director General Rafael Grossi said at a press conference in Vienna on Saturday, following a trip to the Islamic Republic. The additional monitoring is set to start “very, very soon,” said Grossi, with an IAEA team arriving within a few days to begin reinstalling the equipment at several sites.

    • Background: Prior to the news conference, the IAEA released a joint statement with Iran’s atomic energy agency in which the two bodies agreed that interactions between them will be “carried out in the spirit of collaboration.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said he hopes the IAEA will remain neutral and fair to Iran’s nuclear energy program and refrain from being affected “by certain powers which are pursuing their own specific goals,” reported Iranian state television Press TV on Saturday.
    • Why it matters: Last week, a restricted IAEA report seen by CNN said that uranium particles enriched to near bomb-grade levels have been found at an Iranian nuclear facility, as the US warned that Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb was accelerating. The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, rejected the recent IAEA report, which detected particles of uranium enriched to 83.7% at the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran, saying there has been ‘“no deviation” in Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.

    A new sphinx statue has been discovered in Egypt – but this one is thought to be Roman.

    The smiling sculpture and the remains of a shrine were found during an excavation mission in Qena, a southern Egyptian city on the eastern banks of the River Nile.

    The shrine had been carved in limestone and consisted of a two-level platform, Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former minister of antiquities and professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University said in a statement Monday from Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities. A ladder and mudbrick basin for water storage were found inside.

    The basin, believed to date back to the Byzantine era, housed the smiling sphinx statue, carved from limestone.

    Eldamaty described the statue as bearing “royal facial features.” It had a “soft smile” with two dimples. It also wore a nemes on its head, the striped cloth headdress traditionally worn by pharaohs of ancient Egypt, with a cobra-shaped end or “uraeus.”

    A Roman stela with hieroglyphic and demotic writings from the Roman era was found below the sphinx.

    The professor said that the statue may represent the Roman Emperor Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor who ruled from the year 41 to 54, but noted that more studies are needed to verify the structure’s owner and history.

    The discovery was made in the eastern side of Dendera Temple in Qena, where excavations are still ongoing.

    Sphinxes are recurring creatures in the mythologies of ancient Egyptian, Persian and Greek cultures. Their likenesses are often found near tombs or religious buildings.

    It is not uncommon for new sphinx statues to be found in Egypt. But the country’s most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, dates back to around 2,500 BC and represents the ancient Egyptian Pharoah Khafre.

    By Nadeen Ebrahim

    Ziya Sutdelisi, 53, a former local administrator, receives a free haircut from a volunteer from Gaziantep, in the village of Buyuknacar, near Pazarcik, Kahramanmaras province on Sunday, one month after a massive earthquake struck southeast Turkey.

    Source link

  • Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

    As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.

    Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.

    Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

    Crime in Manhattan

    While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

    Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

    Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

    The National Guard and Minnesota

    Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

    Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

    Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

    Trump’s executive order on monuments

    Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

    Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

    Vandalism in Portland

    Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

    Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

    Russian expansionism

    Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

    Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

    Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

    NATO funding

    Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

    NATO’s existence

    Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense.

    There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

    We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

    Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

    James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

    The cost of NATO’s headquarters

    Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

    Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

    The Pulitzer Prize

    Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

    Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

    Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

    The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

    Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

    Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

    Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

    Trump and Nord Stream 2

    Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

    Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

    The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

    The Obama administration and Ukraine

    Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

    Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

    Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

    Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

    Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

    Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

    Trump and job creation

    Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

    Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

    Tariffs on China

    Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

    Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

    The trade deficit with China

    Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

    Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

    Trump and the 2020 election

    Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

    Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

    Democrats and elections

    Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

    The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

    Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

    IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

    Military equipment left in Afghanistan

    Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

    Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

    As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

    The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

    Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

    Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

    The border wall

    Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

    The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

    Latin America and deportations

    Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

    In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

    For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

    Source link

  • More rate hikes are needed, says Fed’s Mary Daly | CNN Business

    More rate hikes are needed, says Fed’s Mary Daly | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Federal Reserve policymakers will need to raise interest rates higher and keep them there longer to tackle the higher prices caused by sticky inflation, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said Saturday.

    “It’s clear there is more work to do,” Daly said in a speech at Princeton University. “In order to put this episode of high inflation behind us, further policy tightening, maintained for a longer time, will likely be necessary.”

    Daly acknowledged that high inflation and the aggressive policy action taken by the Fed to bring it down have caused panic on Main Street and Wall Street. “The responses range from fearing these actions will tip the economy into a recession to fearing they won’t be enough to get the job done,” she said.

    That fear has led volatile market swings upon each release of new economic data as uncertainty leads investors to “look for answers in the immediate,” said Daly, “but achieving our mandated goals takes time and a broader view.” The Fed’s current tightening regimen, she said, “was and remains appropriate given the magnitude and persistence of elevated inflation readings.”

    High inflation levels in goods, housing and other sectors along and strong economic data, she said, has led her to question the momentum of disinflation.

    Daly does not currently vote on Fed policy decisions but is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee and participates in policy meetings.

    Her speech followed a week of similar warnings from the Federal Reserve.

    Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari said last Wednesday that he’s “open to the possibility” of a larger interest rate increase in the Fed’s March policy meeting, “whether it’s 25 or 50 basis points.” (That’s a quarter or half of a percent. A basis point is one hundredth of one percent).

    Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic also said Wednesday that he believes the Fed needs to raise its policy rate by half a percentage point at the next meeting.

    On Thursday, Fed Governor Christopher Waller warned that painful interest rates could go higher than expected, citing a slew of recent stronger-than-expected economic data.

    The Federal Reserve has lifted its target range for interest rates from near zero to between 4.5% to 4.75% over the past year in their fight against inflation. In February, they slowed the pace of their hikes to a quarter of a percentage point, down from half a percent in December. Inflation reached a 40-year high in 2022 but began to fall in the final quarter of the year. January’s inflation data showed that the rate of prices increases had inched up once again.

    Source link

  • China to increase defense spending 7.2%, sets economic growth target of ‘around 5%’ for 2023 | CNN Business

    China to increase defense spending 7.2%, sets economic growth target of ‘around 5%’ for 2023 | CNN Business


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China has set an official economic growth target of “around 5%” for 2023, as it seeks to revive the world’s second-largest economy after a year of tepid growth because of pandemic measures.

    It will also expand its defense budget 7.2%, marking a slight increase over growth the previous year.

    Both figures for the coming year were released at the opening of the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, which draws nearly 3,000 delegates to Beijing for the next eight days.

    “China’s economy is staging a steady recovery and demonstrating vast potential and momentum for further growth,” outgoing Premier Li Keqiang told delegates while delivering a government work report at the opening of the congress on Sunday.

    The economy added more than 12 million urban jobs last year, with the urban unemployment rate falling to 5.5%, according to the work report, which emphasized China’s focus on ensuring stable growth, employment and prices amid global inflation and set the GDP target.

    China also unveiled its annual military budget for 2023, which will increase 7.2% to roughly 1.55 trillion yuan ($224 billion) in a draft budget report released Sunday morning.

    The spending increase marks the second year in a row that the annual hike in military spending has exceeded 7% and tops last year’s 7.1% growth, amid rising geopolitical tensions and a regional arms race. As with other recent years, the figure stays well below the symbolically significant double-digit expansion.

    “The armed forces should intensify military training and preparedness across the board, develop new military strategic guidance, devote greater energy to training under combat conditions and make well-coordinated efforts to strengthen military work in all directions and domains,” Li’s work report said.

    The GDP target and military spending are among the most closely watched in the opening day proceedings, with the GDP target figure in particular being monitored this year as China emerges from its economically draining zero-Covid policy. The new figure appears modest against what some analysts had predicted could be a more robust aim for the year ahead.

    The NPC meeting is a key yearly political event that occurs alongside a gathering of China’s top political advisory body, with the events together known as the Two Sessions.

    This is the first Two Sessions since Chinese leader Xi Jinping secured a norm-breaking third term atop the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy in October. Xi is set to enter his third term as President, a largely ceremonial title, during the congress.

    China’s GDP expanded by just 3% in 2022, widely missing the official target of “around 5.5%” mainly due to prolonged Covid restrictions. It was the second lowest annual growth rate since 1976, behind only 2020 – when the initial Covid outbreaks nearly paralyzed the economy.

    In December, after the Communist Party abruptly ended its zero-Covid policy, a massive wave of infections swept across the country, throwing supply chains and factories into chaos. But the disruptions started to fade away in January, and the economic recovery picked up pace last month.

    Official data released Wednesday showed China’s factories had their best month in nearly 11 years in February, underscoring how quickly economic activity has bounced back following the end of the Covid exit wave. The services and construction industries also had their best performance in two years.

    Moody’s Investors Service has since raised its China growth forecast to 5% for both 2023 and 2024, up from 4% previously, citing a stronger than expected rebound in the short term.

    Analysts had predicted a difficult track to recovery for China amid global headwinds, which may have also been reflected in the conservative 2023 target of “around 5%” announced Sunday.

    The global economy will weaken further this year as rising interest rates and Russia’s war in Ukraine continue to weigh on activity, the International Monetary Fund estimated in January. Global growth will likely slow from 3.4% in 2022 to 2.9% in 2023.

    China is set to release its import and export data for the first two months of this year on Tuesday, which will provide a glimpse into demand for global trade.

    During the congress, the ruling Communist Party’s new economic team, including various ministers and financial chiefs, will be unveiled with other key appointments – already selected by the Communist Party leadership – also approved. Premier Li’s replacement will be formally appointed during the meeting, which runs until March 13.

    The new economic team will face the tough task of reviving the Chinese economy as it navigates a growing array of challenges, including sluggish consumption, rising unemployment, a historic downturn in real estate, and increasing tension with the United States over technology sanctions.

    The 7.2% increase in planned defense spending marks the first time in the past decade that the budget growth rate has increased for three consecutive years, as Beijing continues to modernize and build-up its military, while asserting pressure on Taiwan – the self-governing island democracy the Chinese Communist Party claims as its own despite never having ruled.

    China now controls the world’s largest navy by size and continues to advance its fleet of nuclear submarines and stealth fighter jets.

    The military budget expanded 7.1% to 1.45 trillion yuan in 2022, compared with 6.8% the previous year. The last year China’s annual defense spending grew by double digits was 2015. The size of this year’s budget is more than double that of ten years ago.

    Chinese officials have repeatedly sought to portray their military spending as reasonable relative to other countries like the United States – part of China’s bid to present itself as a peaceful power, despite its aggression in the region including its militarization of the South China Sea and heavy patrolling around Taiwan.

    During a press conference Saturday ahead of the opening day, NPC spokesperson Wang Chao said China’s defense budget maintained a “relatively moderate and reasonable growth rate.”

    “China’s defense expenditure as a percentage of GDP has remained stable over the years. It remains basically stable, lower than the world average,” Wang said.

    Source link

  • Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Republicans at CPAC make false claims about Biden, Zelensky, the FBI and children | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Maryland. And the members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics.

    Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat.

    Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence. Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl.

    And that’s not all. Here is a fact check of 13 false claims from the conference, which continues on Saturday.

    Marjorie Taylor Greene said the Republican Party has a duty to protect children. Listing supposed threats to children, she said, “Now whether it’s like Zelensky saying he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine…” Later in her speech, she said, “I will look at a camera and directly tell Zelensky: you’d better leave your hands off of our sons and daughters, because they’re not dying over there.”

    Facts First: Greene’s claim is false. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t say he wants American sons and daughters to fight or die for Ukraine. The false claim, which was debunked by CNN and others earlier in the week, is based on a viral video that clipped Zelensky’s comments out of context.

    19-second video of Zelensky goes viral. See what was edited out

    In reality, Zelensky predicted at a press conference in late February that if Ukraine loses the war against Russia because it does not receive sufficient support from elsewhere, Russia will proceed to enter North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in the Baltics (a region made up of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) that the US will be obligated to send troops to defend. Under the treaty that governs NATO, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and Zelensky didn’t say Americans should fight there.

    Greene is one of the people who shared the out-of-context video on Twitter this week. You can read a full fact-check, with Zelensky’s complete quote, here.

    Right-wing commentator and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon criticized right-wing cable channel Fox at length for, he argued, being insufficiently supportive of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Among other things, Bannon claimed that, on the night of the election in November 2020, “Fox News illegitimately called it for the opposition and not Donald J. Trump, of which our nation has never recovered.” Later, he said Trump is running again after “having it stolen, in broad daylight, of which they [Fox] participate in.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. On election night in 2020, Fox accurately projected that Biden had won the state of Arizona. This projection did not change the outcome of the election; all of the votes are counted regardless of what media outlets have projected, and the counting showed that Biden won Arizona, and the election, fair and square. The 2020 election was not “stolen” from Trump.

    NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND - MARCH 03: Former White House chief strategist for the Trump Administration Steve Bannon speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on March 03, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland. The annual conservative conference entered its second day of speakers including congressional members, media personalities and members of former President Donald Trump's administration. President Donald Trump will address the event on Saturday. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Bannon has a harsh message for Fox News at CPAC

    Fox, like other major media outlets, did not project that Biden had won the presidency until four days later. Fox personalities went on to repeatedly promote lies that the election was stolen from Trump – even as they privately dismissed and mocked these false claims, according to court filings from a voting technology company that is suing Fox for defamation.

    Rep. Jim Jordan claimed that Biden, “on day one,” made “three key changes” to immigration policy. Jordan said one of those changes was this: “We’re not going to deport anyone who come.” He proceeded to argue that people knowing “we’re not going to get deported” was a reason they decided to migrate to the US under Biden.

    Facts First: Jordan inaccurately described the 100-day deportation pause that Biden attempted to impose immediately after he took office on January 20, 2021. The policy did not say the US wouldn’t deport “anyone who comes.” It explicitly did not apply to anyone who arrived in the country after the end of October 2020, meaning people who arrived under the Biden administration or in the last months of the Trump administration could still be deported.

    Biden did say during the 2020 Democratic primary that “no one, no one will be deported at all” in his first 100 days as president. But Jordan claimed that this was the policy Biden actually implemented on his first day in office; Biden’s actual first-day policy was considerably narrower.

    Biden’s attempted 100-day pause also did not apply to people who engaged in or were suspected of terrorism or espionage, were seen to pose a national security risk, had waived their right to remain in the US, or whom the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement determined the law required to be removed.

    The pause was supposed to be in effect while the Department of Homeland Security conducted a review of immigration enforcement practices, but it was blocked by a federal judge shortly after it was announced.

    Rep. Ralph Norman strongly suggested the FBI had tipped off the media to its August search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort in Florida for government documents in the former president’s possession – while concealing its subsequent document searches of properties connected to Biden.

    Norman said: “When I saw the raid at Mar-a-Lago – you know, the cameras, the FBI – and compare that to when they found Biden’s, all of the documents he had, where was the media, where was the FBI? They kept it quiet early on, didn’t let it out. The job of the next president is going to be getting rid of the insiders that are undermining this government, and you’ve gotta clean house.”

    Facts First: Norman’s narrative is false. The FBI did not tip off the media to its search of Mar-a-Lago; CNN reported the next day that the search “happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all.” Rather, media outlets belatedly sent cameras to Mar-a-Lago because Peter Schorsch, publisher of the website Florida Politics, learned of the search from non-FBI sources and tweeted about it either after it was over or as it was just concluding, and because Trump himself made a public statement less than 20 minutes later confirming that a search had occurred. Schorsch told CNN on Thursday: “I can, unequivocally, state that the FBI was not one of my two sources which alerted me to the raid.”

    Brian Stelter, then CNN’s chief media correspondent, wrote in his article the day after the search: “By the time local TV news cameras showed up outside the club, there was almost nothing to see. Websites used file photos of the Florida resort since there were no dramatic shots of the search.”

    It’s true that the public didn’t find out until late January about the FBI’s November search of Biden’s former think tank office in Washington, which was conducted with the consent of Biden’s legal team. But the belated presence of journalists at Mar-a-Lago on the day of the Trump search in August is not evidence of a double standard.

    And it’s worth noting that media cameras were on the scene when Biden’s beach home in Delaware was searched by the FBI in February. News outlets had set up a media “pool” to make sure any search there was recorded.

    Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a former college and high school football coach, said, “Going into thousands of kids’ homes and talking to parents every year recruiting, half the kids in this country – I’m not talking about race, I’m just talking about – half the kids in this country have one or no parent. And it’s because of the attack on faith. People are losing faith because, for some reason, because the attack [on] God.”

    Facts First: Tuberville’s claim that half of American children don’t have two parents is incorrect. Official figures from the Census Bureau show that, in 2021, about 70% of US children under the age of 18 lived with two parents and about 65% lived with two married parents.

    About 22% of children lived with only a mother, about 5% with only a father, and about 3% with no parent. But the Census Bureau has explained that even children who are listed as living with only one parent may have a second parent; children are listed as living with only one parent if, for example, one parent is deployed overseas with the military or if their divorced parents share custody of them.

    It is true that the percentage of US children living in households with two parents has been declining for decades. Still, Tuberville’s statistic significantly exaggerated the current situation. His spokesperson told CNN on Thursday that the senator was speaking “anecdotally” from his personal experience meeting with families as a football coach.

    Tuberville claimed that today’s children are being “indoctrinated” in schools by “woke” ideology and critical race theory. He then said, “We don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore. You know, half the kids in this country, when they graduate – think about this: half the kids in this country, when they graduate, can’t read their diploma.”

    Facts First: This is false. While many Americans do struggle with reading, there is no basis for the claim that “half” of high school graduates can’t read a basic document like a diploma. “Mr. Tuberville does not know what he’s talking about at all,” said Patricia Edwards, a Michigan State University professor of language and literacy who is a past president of the International Literacy Association and the Literacy Research Association. Edwards said there is “no evidence” to support Tuberville’s claim. She also said that people who can’t read at all are highly unlikely to finish high school and that “sometimes politicians embellish information.”

    Tuberville could have accurately said that a significant number of American teenagers and adults have reading trouble, though there is no apparent basis for connecting these struggles with supposed “woke” indoctrination. The organization ProLiteracy pointed CNN to 2017 data that found 23% of Americans age 16 to 65 have “low” literacy skills in English. That’s not “half,” as ProLiteracy pointed out, and it includes people who didn’t graduate from high school and people who are able to read basic text but struggle with more complex literacy tasks.

    The Tuberville spokesperson said the senator was speaking informally after having been briefed on other statistics about Americans’ struggles with reading, like a report that half of adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.

    Rep. Jim Jordan claimed of Biden: “The president of the United States stood in front of Independence Hall, called half the country fascists.”

    Facts First: This is not true. Biden did not denounce even close to “half the country” in this 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He made clear that he was speaking about a minority of Republicans.

    In the speech, in which he never used the word “fascists,” Biden warned that “MAGA Republicans” like Trump are “extreme,” “do not respect the Constitution” and “do not believe in the rule of law.” But he also emphasized that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans.” In other words, he made clear that he was talking about far less than half of Americans.

    Trump earned fewer than 75 million votes in 2020 in a country of more than 258 million adults, so even a hypothetical criticism of every single Trump voter would not amount to criticism of “half the country.”

    Rep. Scott Perry claimed that “average citizens need to just at some point be willing to acknowledge and accept that every single facet of the federal government is weaponized against every single one of us.” Perry said moments later, “The government doesn’t have the right to tell you that you can’t buy a gas stove but that you must buy an electric vehicle.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. The federal government has not told people that they can’t buy a gas stove or must buy an electric vehicle.

    The Biden administration has tried to encourage and incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, but it has not tried to forbid the manufacture or purchase of traditional vehicles with internal combustion engines. Biden has set a goal of electric vehicles making up half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030.

    There was a January controversy about a Biden appointee to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., saying that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and that “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the commission as a whole has not shown support for a ban, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a January press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    Rep. Ralph Norman claimed that Biden had just laughed at a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl.

    “I don’t know whether y’all saw, I just saw it this morning: Biden laughing at the mother who had two sons – to die, and he’s basically laughing and saying the fentanyl came from the previous administration. Who cares where it came from? The fact is it’s here,” Norman said.

    Facts First: Norman’s claim is false. Biden did not laugh at the mother who lost her sons to fentanyl, the anti-abortion activist Rebecca Kiessling; in a somber tone, he called her “a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl.” Rather, he proceeded to laugh about how Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had baselessly blamed the Biden administration for the young men’s deaths even though the tragedy happened in mid-2020, during the Trump administration. You can watch the video of Biden’s remarks here.

    Kiessling has demanded an apology from Biden. She is entitled to her criticism of Biden’s remarks and his chuckle – but the video clearly shows Norman was wrong when he claimed Biden was “laughing at the mother.”

    Rep. Kat Cammack told a story about the first hearing of the new Republican-led House select subcommittee on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government. Cammack claimed she had asked a Democratic witness at this February hearing about his “incredibly vitriolic” Twitter feed in which, she claimed, he not only repeatedly criticized Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh but even went “so far as to encourage people to harass this Supreme Court justice.”

    Facts First: This story is false. The witness Cammack questioned in this February exchange at the subcommittee, former Obama administration deputy assistant attorney general Elliot Williams, did not encourage people to harass Kavanaugh. In fact, it’s not even true that Cammack accused him at the February hearing of having encouraged people to harass Kavanaugh. Rather, at the hearing, she merely claimed that Williams had tweeted numerous critical tweets about Kavanaugh but had been “unusually quiet” on Twitter after an alleged assassination attempt against the justice. Clearly, not tweeting about the incident is not the same thing as encouraging harassment.

    Williams, now a CNN legal analyst (he appeared at the subcommittee hearing in his personal capacity), said in a Thursday email that he had “no idea” what Cammack was looking at on his innocuous Twitter feed. He said: “I used to prosecute violent crimes, and clerked for two federal judges. Any suggestion that I’ve ever encouraged harassment of anyone – and particularly any official of the United States – is insulting and not based in reality.”

    Cammack’s spokesperson responded helpfully on Thursday to CNN’s initial queries about the story Cammack told at CPAC, explaining that she was referring to her February exchange with Williams. But the spokesperson stopped responding after CNN asked if Cammack was accurately describing this exchange with Williams and if they had any evidence of Williams actually having encouraged the harassment of Kavanaugh.

    Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana boasted about the state of the country “when Republicans were in charge.” Among other claims about Trump’s tenure, he said that “in four years,” Republicans “delivered 3.5% unemployment” and “created 8 million new jobs.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate in two ways. First, the economic numbers for the full “four years” of Trump’s tenure are much worse than these numbers Kennedy cited; Kennedy was actually referring to Trump’s first three years while ignoring the fourth, which was marred by the Covid-19 pandemic. Second, there weren’t “8 million new jobs” created even in Trump’s first three years.

    Kennedy could have correctly said there was a 3.5% unemployment rate after three years of the Trump administration, but not after four. The unemployment rate skyrocketed early in Trump’s fourth year, on account of the pandemic, before coming down again, and it was 6.3% when Trump left office in early 2021. (It fell to 3.4% this January under Biden, better than in any month under Trump.)

    And while the economy added about 6.7 million jobs under Trump before the pandemic-related crash of March and April 2020, that’s not the “8 million jobs” Kennedy claimed – and the economy ended up shedding millions of jobs in Trump’s fourth year. Over the full four years of Trump’s tenure, the economy netted a loss of about 2.7 million jobs.

    Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and an adviser to his 2020 campaign, claimed that the last time a CPAC crowd was gathered at this venue in Maryland, in February 2020, “We had the lowest unemployment in American history.” After making other boasts about Donald Trump’s presidency, she said, “But how quickly it all changed.” She added, “Under Joe Biden, America is crumbling.”

    Facts First: Lara Trump’s claim about February 2020 having “the lowest unemployment in American history” is false. The unemployment rate was 3.5% at the time – tied for the lowest since 1969, but not the all-time lowest on record, which was 2.5% in 1953. And while Lara Trump didn’t make an explicit claim about unemployment under Biden, it’s not true that things are worse today on this measure; again, the most recent unemployment rate, 3.4% for January 2023, is better than the rate at the time of CPAC’s 2020 conference or at any other time during Donald Trump’s presidency.

    Multiple speakers at CPAC decried the high number of fentanyl overdose deaths. But some of the speakers inflated that number while attacking Biden’s immigration policy.

    Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, claimed that “in the last 12 months in America, deaths by fentanyl poisoning totaled 110,000 Americans.” He blamed “Biden’s open border” for these deaths.

    Rep. Scott Perry claimed: “Meanwhile over on this side of the border, where there isn’t anybody, they’re running this fentanyl in; it’s killing 100,000 Americans – over 100,000 Americans – a year.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that there are more than 100,000 fentanyl deaths per year. That is the total number of deaths from all drug overdoses in the US; there were 106,699 such deaths in 2021. But the number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, primarily fentanyl, is smaller – 70,601 in 2021.

    Fentanyl-related overdoses are clearly a major problem for the country and by far the biggest single contributor to the broader overdose problem. Nonetheless, claims of “110,000” and “over 100,000” fentanyl deaths per year are significant exaggerations. And while the number of overdose deaths and fentanyl-related deaths increased under Biden in 2021, it was also troubling under Trump in 2020 – 91,799 total overdose deaths and 56,516 for synthetic opioids other than methadone.

    It’s also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled in by US citizens through legal ports of entry rather than by migrants sneaking past other parts of the border. Contrary to frequent Republican claims, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized thousands of pounds of fentanyl under Biden.

    Source link

  • Prosecutors want Sam Bankman-Fried to use a flip phone as part of a more restrictive bail package | CNN Business

    Prosecutors want Sam Bankman-Fried to use a flip phone as part of a more restrictive bail package | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    The use of a flip phone, or some non-smartphone, is one of several restrictions that prosecutors and Sam Bankman-Fried’s attorneys are jointly asking the judge to approve.

    The lawyers have been working to satisfy concerns raised by Judge Lewis Kaplan, who said he could “conceivably” revoke Bankman-Fried’s bail after he found there was a “threat” of witness tampering.

    The crypto entrepreneur reached out to the former general counsel of FTX and used a virtual private network, or VPN, days after the judge said he wanted to restrict the use of encrypted devices.

    Bankman-Fried was charged with multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud in what prosecutors allege is one of the largest financial frauds in US history. He pleaded not guilty to charges he misused customer funds in FTX to prop up related hedge fund Alameda Research, make venture investments, and donate to political campaigns to influence policy.

    Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond and is confined to the home of his parents, Stanford University law professors, in Palo Alto, California.

    Under the proposal, Bankman-Fried’s new laptop will “be configured so that he is only able to log on to the internet through the use of specified VPNs, and that the VPNs only permit the defendant to access websites that have been whitelisted through the VPNs.”

    Among the websites are programs he could use to prepare for his defense, including Zoom, Microsoft Office, Python, and Adobe Acrobat. Monitoring tools also would be installed on his laptop and he would be prohibited from buying electronic devices.

    Bankman-Fried also would be restricted from scrolling the internet, with his access limited to court-approved websites. The lawyers proposed several sites to help prepare his defense, including YouTube, read-only websites showing crypto prices, and research websites. Bankman-Fried also asked to view others for his personal use, including news sites, Netflix, Spotify, Uber Eats, Amazon and baseball and football sites.

    The judge previously raised concerns about Bankman-Fried’s access to his parents’ computers, cell phones and internet. Attorneys proposed the parents sign affidavits stating they won’t let their son use their devices, which would be password protected. In addition, each device would have software that would photograph or take video of the user.

    Source link

  • Trump proposes building 10 ‘freedom cities’ and flying cars | CNN Politics

    Trump proposes building 10 ‘freedom cities’ and flying cars | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.”

    Commuters, meanwhile, could get around in flying cars, Trump said – an echo of “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon about a family in a high-tech future society. Work to develop vertical takeoff and landing vehicles is already underway by major airlines, auto manufacturers and other companies, though widely seen as years away from reaching the market.

    “I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,” Trump, who announced his third bid for the presidency in November, said in a four-minute video detailing his plan.

    He said he would launch a contest to charter up to 10 “freedom cities” roughly the size of Washington, DC, on undeveloped federal land.

    “We’ll actually build new cities in our country again,” Trump said in the video. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American dream.”

    Trump’s pitch comes the day before he is set to address the Conservative Political Action Conference in the Washington, DC, area, and as the 2024 Republican presidential field begins to take shape.

    The proposal is the latest in a series of early policy offerings from Trump, who in recent weeks has also said he would seek to ramp up domestic energy production, adopt a more isolationist foreign policy stance and purge the government and military of “warmongers and globalists,” and undo a Biden executive order that would require government agencies to submit annual public plans aimed at promoting equity.

    In December, the former president unveiled plans as part of his “free speech platform” that included vows to ban federal money from being used to label speech as misinformation or disinformation and to punish universities engaging in “censorship activities” with cuts to federal funding.

    Trump did not elaborate Friday on how he would pay for his latest proposal – leaving unanswered what could be the biggest question as Republicans in Washington seek to curb federal spending. He also did not explain how some elements of his proposal differ from similar Democratic plans.

    His plan, which was light on details, includes three additional planks: increasing tariffs on goods imported into the United States; providing families with “baby bonuses” that he said would “help launch a new baby boom”; and launching a beautification effort aimed at removing “ugly” buildings and revitalizing parks and public spaces.

    Trump did not explain what “baby bonuses” would amount to or who would qualify. It’s not clear how his proposal differs from the enhanced child tax credit, which wasn’t extended beyond 2021. A group of Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocates tried – but failed – to have it included in the $1.7 trillion spending measure in December. That proposal was blocked by Republicans.

    Trump on Friday also called for universal tariffs and imposing higher taxes on imported goods. He said he would escalate a trade battle with China, which he began during his four years in the White House. Doing so, he said, would jump-start American manufacturing.

    President Joe Biden has left tariffs in place on $350 billion of Chinese goods – nearly two-thirds of what the US imports from China – which were imposed by Trump.

    However, the costs of those tariffs are being passed on to American consumers, and contributing to inflation, experts say.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last year that those tariffs on Chinese goods have “imposed more harm on consumers and businesses” than on China.

    Chris Rupkey, chief economist at markets research firm FwdBonds, said Trump’s proposed economic plan is reflective of the onetime real estate developer’s efforts before taking office.

    “Builders build and make dreams a reality, but this plan looks like a stretch because the country cannot afford to undertake massive new projects when the national debt is over $31 trillion,” Rupkey said in an email. “There are some interesting ideas here, but this is not the right time for bold plans that dream big. There’s no money left in Uncle Sam’s till to pay for big dreams and daring projects.”

    The nation is in the midst of a “cost-of-living crisis” that makes this too expensive of a proposition, Rupkey added.

    Source link

  • What you need to know about this earnings season | CNN Business

    What you need to know about this earnings season | CNN Business

    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    About 99% of all S&P 500 companies have reported fourth quarter earnings and the results aren’t great.

    Companies listed in the S&P 500 index beat analysts’ earnings estimates by an average of just 1.3% last quarter. For context, that’s way down on the index’s 5-year average of 8.6%, according to FactSet data.

    What’s happening: There have been some steep and disappointing profit misses as corporate America feels the sting of sticky inflation and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes.

    Tech companies fared poorly this season: Apple

    (AAPL)     recorded a rare earnings miss while Intel

    (INTC)     and Google-parent company Alphabet also fell short of expectations.

    But it wasn’t all doom-and-gloom. Energy companies brought in yet another quarter of record profits, with Big Oil companies — such as Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and Shell — notching their most profitable years in history. Elsewhere, Tesla

    (TSLA)     reported record revenue gains and beat earnings expectations. Big box retailers Target

    (TGT)     and Walmart

    (WMT)     also surpassed estimates as US consumers kept on spending.

    Here’s what else traders need to know about the final few months of last year and beyond.

    Corporate profits could drop for the first time since 2020

    S&P 500 companies are on track to report a 4.6% drop in earnings year-over-year, according to FactSet data. That would mark their first earnings decline since the third quarter of 2020, when Covid shut down large swaths of the economy.

    Gloomy forecasts abound

    About 81 S&P 500 companies have issued negative earnings-per-share guidance for the first quarter of 2023, according to FactSet. That’s a lot higher than the 23 companies reporting positive guidance.

    There was no shortage of foreboding forecasts from top execs on earnings calls this season.

    Walmart beat estimates last quarter, but they also lowered expectations for future earnings.

    Home Depot

    (HD)     CEO Ted Decker said he was concerned that consumers were becoming less resilient to the economy. “We noted some deceleration in certain products and categories, which was more pronounced in the fourth quarter,” he said on an analyst call.

    Lowe’s executives, meanwhile, warned that they were preparing for a “more cautious consumer” this year.

    Investors feel like celebrating

    Wall Street traders appear to be taking this dour earnings season in their stride. The market is “rewarding positive earnings surprises more than average and punishing negative earnings surprises much less than average for the fourth quarter,” reports FactSet.

    Inflation is (still) a big deal

    More than 325 S&P 500 companies have cited the term “inflation” during their earnings calls for the fourth quarter. That’s well above the 10-year average of 157, according to FactSet document searches.

    But the worries over price hikes appear to be waning, at least a little bit. This marks the lowest number of S&P 500 companies using the “I”-word on their calls since the third quarter of 2021. Since last quarter, the number of inflation mentions has fallen by about 20%.

    ▸ ISM Services PMI — a report that measures the strength of the US service sector — is due out at 10 a.m. ET. The data is expected to show a slight slowdown in growth between January and February (54.5 in February vs. 56.5 in January. For context, a reading above 50 means the services economy is expanding).

    That deceleration would be a big deal. It would signal that the economy is beginning to cool and that the Fed’s efforts to fight inflation by raising interest rates are working. If services sector growth accelerates, however, it could signal that more aggressive rate hikes are ahead and send markets lower.

    ▸ Wall Street is anticipating (or dreading, depending on who you ask) next Friday’s unemployment report. The February data is expected to shed some light on a shockingly resilient labor market.

    Another unexpected surge in non-farm payrolls, like the 517,000 new jobs added in January, could indicate more Fed rate hikes are ahead. That could roil markets in this “good news is bad news” environment.

    Analysts expect that the economy added 200,000 new jobs last month, according to Refinitiv data.

    ▸ The Chinese economy surprised investors this week by quickly bouncing back from its zero-Covid shutdowns. China’s first consumer price index, producer price index and trade figures of 2023 are set to be released next week, which will show the full extent of the country’s rebound.

    “These numbers will offer the first official indications of mainland China’s reopening effect following the rebound seen in PMI numbers,” wrote analysts at S&P Global.

    Global manufacturing rose in February for the first time in seven months, according to the latest PMI surveys compiled by S&P Global. That growth was largely spurred on by China’s reopening.

    Shares of Silvergate Capital, a large lender to cryptocurrency firms, plunged nearly 60% — a record drop — on Thursday after the company told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it won’t be able to file its annual report on time and cited concerns about its ability to remain in business.

    The majority of Silvergate’s crypto clients, including Coinbase, Paxos, Galaxy Digital and Crypto.com, quickly cut ties with the bank amid the chaos.

    So what does it all mean?

    My colleague Allison Morrow explains: The California-based lender reported a $1 billion loss for the fourth quarter as investors panicked over the collapse of FTX, the exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried that is now at the center of a massive federal fraud investigation.

    FTX’s collapse in November rippled through the digital asset sector, forcing several firms to halt operations and even declare bankruptcy as liquidity dried up and investors fled.

    But unlike FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager and other crypto companies that folded last year, Silvergate is a traditional, federally insured lender that has positioned itself as a gateway to the crypto sector.

    It’s among the first major instances of crypto’s volatility spilling into the mainstream banking system — a scenario regulators and crypto skeptics have long feared.

    Source link

  • US is reviewing Huawei export license policy amid rising congressional scrutiny of China | CNN Business

    US is reviewing Huawei export license policy amid rising congressional scrutiny of China | CNN Business


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The US government is reviewing a policy that permits certain US exports to continue to Huawei, despite an overall push by the Trump and Biden administrations to block the Chinese telecommunications giant from receiving American technology.

    Alan Estevez, a Commerce Department official, told lawmakers Tuesday that the policy is “under assessment” as the agency conducts a “top-to-bottom review of our export control policies related to the [People’s Republic of China].”

    Estevez testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was holding a hearing to scrutinize China’s impact on US national security.

    In 2019, Huawei was one of a number of Chinese companies placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which prohibits US companies from trading specified items with entities named on the list unless they obtain a license to do so.

    US officials have expressed concerns that Huawei’s 5G wireless networking gear could allow the Chinese government to spy on American communications. Huawei has denied that it poses a security risk, and its founder has said the company would resist any Chinese government effort to obtain its data.

    According to Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul, between January and March of 2022 the Commerce Department approved more than $23 billion in license applications to trade with Chinese-affiliated companies on the Entity List. Confronting Estevez at Tuesday’s hearing, McCaul asked the Commerce Department to square the license approvals with the US government’s wider effort to sideline Huawei and similar companies.

    “A licensing rule of the previous administration that still stands for Huawei allows things below 5G, below cloud-level to go,” Estevez said, “and I will say that all those things are under assessment.”

    Entity List restrictions do not provide for a “blanket embargo” on exports generally, Estevez added, but rather reflect specific rules about particular exports.

    Separately, in 2020 the Commerce Department moved to prevent Huawei’s suppliers from selling the company semiconductor chips made by US-built software and equipment, unless those suppliers also obtained a license.

    Other parts of the US government have also moved against Huawei. The Federal Communications Commission has prohibited US wireless carriers from using federal funding to purchase Huawei networking gear, and last year also banned future approvals of Huawei equipment for sale in the United States, in the first use of the FCC’s equipment authorization authority for a national security purpose.

    Source link