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The World
In a Brother Act With Putin, Xi Reveals China’s Fear of Containment: China’s leader, Xi Jinping, flew into Moscow this week cast by Beijing as its emissary for peace in Ukraine. His summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, however, demonstrated that his priority remains shoring up ties with Moscow to gird against what he sees as a long campaign by the United States to hobble China’s ascent. Talk of Ukraine was overshadowed by Mr. Xi’s vow of ironclad solidarity with Russia as a political, diplomatic, economic and military partner: two superpowers aligned in countering American dominance and a Western-led world order. The summit showed Mr. Xi’s intention to entrench Beijing’s tilt toward Moscow against what he recently called an effort by the United States at the full-fledged “containment” of China. (New York Times)
Antony Blinken says China will be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027: US secretary of state tells lawmakers that China is monitoring how the world is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Blinken appears before congressional committee to explain his department’s budget request for the next fiscal year. (South China Morning Post)
China now sees itself as a global power—and it is starting to act like one. Long reluctant to inject itself into conflicts far from its shores, Beijing is showing a new assertiveness as Xi Jinping begins his third term as the country’s head of state, positioning China to draw like-minded countries to its side and to have a greater say on global matters. China is emerging from three years of “zero-Covid” isolation to a far more unfriendly West, and signaling that it feels it has the military and economic heft to start shaping the world more to its interests. (Wall Street Journal)
Russia is overhauling how oil companies are taxed, aiming to bolster state revenues by capturing a bigger share of crude sales that often exceed the G7-imposed price cap on the country’s exports. The Kremlin will from April shift to an indicator pegged to Brent, the international crude benchmark, for calculating taxes on oil exports, a move it expects to generate an additional Rbs600bn ($8bn) of annual revenue by reducing the market “discount” on Russian oil. (Financial Times)
China's Rise to Russia's Most Important Trade Partner. (Statista)
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said that four new military bases under a defense agreement with the U.S. would be located in various parts of the Philippines, including in a province facing the South China Sea. Last month, Marcos granted the U.S. access to four sites, on top of five existing locations under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which comes amid China's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea and towards Taiwan. (Reuters)
Mexican president calls U.S. State Department 'liars' after rights report: Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador forcefully rejected criticism of his government's record on human rights, describing reports of official abuses made in a new U.S. State Department study as "lies."The report issued on Monday said there were credible reports in Mexico of unlawful or arbitrary killings by police, military, and other officials; forced disappearance by government agents; as well as torture and inhuman treatment by security forces. (Reuters)
UN: 26% of world lacks clean drinking water, 46% sanitation. A report issued on the eve of the first major U.N. conference on water in over 45 years says 26% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to safe drinking water and 46% lacks access to basic sanitation. The U.N. World Water Development Report 2023, released Tuesday, painted a stark picture of the huge gap that needs to be filled to meet U.N. goals to ensure all people have access to clean water and sanitation by 2030. (Associated Press)
North Koreans are at growing risk of starvation: Reports of terrible hunger are emerging from the closed-off state. The UN reckons that between 2019 and 2021, 42% of North Koreans were malnourished. And as a result of poor weather conditions and a shortage of fertilizer—in part due to the country’s self-imposed three-year quarantine—it had an especially poor harvest last year. Total food production was only 4.5m tonnes, down by 3.8% compared with the year before, according to South Korea’s rural development agency. That is more than 1.2m tonnes less than the un’s World Food Programme estimated in 2019 was needed to feed the country. (The Economist)
Emmanuel Macron, France president, defended his unpopular plan to raise the retirement age as being key to repairing the public finances but acknowleged public anger over his government’s decision to pass the law without a parliamentary vote. “Do you think I enjoy doing this reform? No,” said Macron in a televised interview. “But there are not a hundred ways to balance the accounts . . . this reform is not a luxury or a pleasure, it’s a necessity for the country.” (Financial Times)
Americans Are More Likely Say Economic Benefits of Oil Exploration Outweigh Environmental Concerns: President Joe Biden's decision to approve an oil drilling plan in Alaska known as the Willow project attracted considerable controversy, but a recent Morning Consult survey shows Americans are more likely to back such development due to its perceived economic benefits than oppose it due to environmental concerns. Nearly 1 in 2 U.S. adults said they support the ConocoPhillips project, including 48% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans. Support for Willow rises among older generations, with 60% of baby boomers backing the project. Among the generations, support for Willow is lowest with Gen Zers (28%), while about 2 in 5 millennials back the development. Considering oil developments in general, more than 1 in 2 Republicans said they believe the positive economic impacts of oil developments outweigh the negative environmental impact, while about 1 in 3 Democrats agree. (Morning Consult)
Economy
The Fed approved another quarter-percentage-point interest-rate increase but signaled that banking-system turmoil might end its rate-rise campaign sooner than seemed likely two weeks ago. The decision marked the Fed’s ninth consecutive rate increase aimed at battling inflation over the past year. It will bring its benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 4.75% and 5%, the highest level since September 2007. Officials sent a hint that they might be done raising interest rates soon in their postmeeting policy statement. “The committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate,” the statement said. Officials dropped a phrase used in their previous eight statements that said the committee anticipated “ongoing increases” in rates would be appropriate. (Wall Street Journal)
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the Biden administration was not considering a broad expansion of bank deposit insurance or “blanket” guarantees for savers, dashing hopes of a sweeping government intervention to protect deposits in small and regional banks across the country. Speaking at a Senate hearing, Yellen said there could be “reasoned discussions” about whether the current $250,000 limit for insured deposits should be lifted as part of systemic reforms of the banking sector in the long term. (Financial Times)
Cryptocurrencies fall as investors weigh the Fed’s latest rate decision, bitcoin slides toward $25,000. (CNBC)
The FAANG era is apparently over. The U.S. market is dominated by just two stocks now. The combined weighting of Apple and Microsoft in the S&P 500 has risen to 13.3%, the highest level on record, while the influence of other big technology stocks has waned of late. Not since IBM and AT&T in 1978 have two stocks made up a greater share of the benchmark. (Wall Street Journal)
UK inflation jumps to 10.4%, surprising analysts: U.K. inflation accelerated for the first time in four months in February as high food and energy prices hit consumers battered by the nation’s cost-of-living crisis. Analysts had forecast inflation would slow to 9.9%. (Associated Press)
The SEC scrapped plans to vote on a rule that would have increased regulators’ visibility into financial risks at some hedge funds and private equity funds. After scheduling the vote last week, the five-member commission “decided to take a little more time” on the rule, an SEC spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on whether the cancellation owed to a lack of majority support from the commission, which is composed of three Democrats and two Republicans. (Wall Street Journal)
Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World: In a recent study, Harvard Business School Associate Professor Prithwiraj Choudhury examined how, when, and whether nonstop flights could spark an increase in new ideas. In a broad examination of flight and patent data, Choudhury and co-authors found that a 10 percent increase in nonstop flights between two locations led to a 1.4 percent increase in new patents between firms in those places. Choudhury and colleagues teased out an additional wrinkle. Meeting face-to-face—made easier with nonstop flights—matters most when collaborators are in different time zones or overcoming cultural distance. (Harvard Business School)
Technology
The U.S. government's threat to ban TikTok takes aim at what has become the most popular smartphone app in the country. TikTok’s scale presents an enormous challenge to lawmakers trying to argue that the app's national security threat outweighs the wishes of the millions of people and businesses that use the app. The TikTok app has been downloaded more times in the U.S. than any other social app since it merged with U.S. lip-syncing app Musically in August 2018. The app is expected to generate more than $11 billion in U.S. ad revenue by 2024, far outpacing rivals like Snapchat, Pinterest and Twitter. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to highlight the app's growth in remarks prepared for his first-ever Congressional testimony on Thursday and released Tuesday night by the House committee he will address. (Axios)
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will offer a broad series of promises to protect American users’ data and keep the app free from government interference in his upcoming testimony to Congress. “We will firewall protected U.S. user data from unauthorized foreign access,” he will say, according to a copy of the prepared remarks. “Tiktok will remain a platform for free expression and will not be manipulated by any government.” (The Information)
Google just launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT—and it wants you to make it better: Unlike Bing Chat, Bard does not look up search results—all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Google wants Bard to become an integral part of the Google Search experience. The company is now making the chatbot available for free to early users who sign up to a waitlist, to help test and improve the technology in what they say is still an experiment. But experts worry that pitching Bard as an experiment is a PR trick that larger companies use to reach millions of customers while also removing themselves from accountability if anything goes wrong. (MIT Technology Review)
Publishers Prepare for Showdown With Microsoft, Google Over AI Tools: Media executives want compensation for use of their content in ChatGPT, Bing and Bard. (Wall Street Journal)
Job listings site Indeed[dot]com told employees that it’s laying off 2,200 people, representing 15% of its headcount, according to a person with direct knowledge of the decision. Indeed CEO Chris Hyams broke the news to employees in an all-hands meeting on Wednesday morning, saying that the cuts would affect teams across the company and attributing the decision to broader economic pressures, a person who attended the meeting said. Employees whose jobs were cut were notified via email following the meeting. (The Information)
Smart Links
U.S. readies targeted screening for investment in Chinese tech. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Gen Z Is Racking Up Credit Card Debt Faster Than Any Other Generation. (Bloomberg)
ChatGPT can help you write a standout CV in seconds, job experts say. (CNBC)
Japan land prices recover from COVID to rise fastest in 15 years. (Nikkei Asia Review)
Top Web3 investors remain active despite funding dips. (Crunchbase News)