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The World
Russian President Vladimir Putin met China’s Defense Minister Li Shangfu in Moscow and both men hailed military cooperation between the two nations, which have declared a “no limits” partnership. Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Moscow last month for meetings with Putin. Russia and China have moved to further strengthen their economic, political and military ties since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February last year. (South China Morning Post)
The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord. The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says. That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article. (Washington Post)
Poland and Hungary have temporarily halted imports of Ukrainian grain despite a warning from Brussels that such unilateral action would contravene EU trade policy. After Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the EU scrapped customs duties and quotas on Ukrainian grain imports and rerouted some shipments from blockaded Black Sea ports via Polish and Romanian roads and railway networks. The announcement by Poland and Hungary is an attempt to placate their farmers amid a grain glut that has sent prices crashing in their domestic markets as cheap Ukrainian grain undercuts local producers. (Financial Times)
Thousands of Czechs demonstrated in Prague's central square, calling on the government to quit as they protested over high inflation and energy prices. Police did not give estimates of the size of the protest, named "Czechia against poverty". The protest, like a similar demonstration in March, was organized by non-parliamentary political party PRO, which has criticized the center-right government of Prime Minister Petr Fiala for its handling of the energy crisis that has hit Europe since Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago. (Reuters)
China is booming — and French luxury houses like LVMH and Hermès are reaping the benefit. China has helped deliver a "blowout quarter" for luxury companies, per Bloomberg. It's also firing on all cylinders domestically, with manufacturing growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade. "The reopening has come off more positively and with less hitches than anyone had hoped," Morning Consult economic analyst Jesse Wheeler tells Axios. "Consumers are out there spending." With Chinese adults saving almost one in three earned dollars in 2022, "there’s a lot of excess savings in consumers’ bank accounts," says Wheeler. (Axios Markets)
Senior Saudi officials were planning to meet with leaders of the Palestinian militant and political group Hamas to discuss renewing diplomatic ties which have been cool since 2007, part of a diplomacy spree led by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman that has seen Riyadh move closer to Iran. Re-establishing ties between Iran-backed Hamas, which is a U.S. designated terrorist group, and the Saudi kingdom would mark a setback for efforts by the U.S. and Israel to establish a military alliance between Israel and other Sunni-majority countries against Iran and its allies. They also complicate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of normalizing relations with Riyadh, with opposition to Iran as their primary shared interest. Hamas was invited to the kingdom by Saudi leaders, Hamas officials said. Senior officials are expected to land in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, late Sunday. The effort to re-establish ties is being pushed by Iran and Syria, said Saudi officials. (Wall Street Journal)
Brazil's Rare Trade Surplus With China: China is Brazil’s main trading partner. According to data aggregated by Santander, China accounted for 31.3 percent of Brazil's exports in 2021. This was followed by the United States (11.2 percent), Argentina (4.2 percent) and the Netherlands (3.3 percent). Brazil’s main supplier was again China (22.8 percent), followed by the United States (17.7 percent), Argentina (5.3 percent) and Germany (5.1 percent). As the following chart shows, Brazilian-Chinese bilateral trade has been strengthening year-on-year, increasing by some 11 percent in 2022 with a total trade increase of $157.5 billion, according to the UN’s Comtrade database. These figures may differ from other sources, if they are based on different indicators. Another clear trend is that Brazil exports more to China than it imports from it - a rarity, as China, the globe’s manufacturing giant, is usually a greater exporter. (Statista)
In an early test of strength in the race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Adam B. Schiff has a notable financial edge over Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, according to federal campaign documents. While Schiff and Porter both raised millions of dollars in the first three months of the year, Schiff ended the first quarter of 2023 with $24.7 million cash on hand, while Porter had $9.5 million. (Los Angeles Times)
America braces for historic trial between Dominion and Fox News. Dominion Voting Systems tomorrow will square off in court against Fox News, more than two years after filing a $1.6 billion defamation suit accusing the network of knowingly airing disinformation about election fraud in the 2020 presidential contest. The trial could set an important First Amendment precedent and shape political coverage by one of America's most powerful media outlets. The big picture: Successfully suing for defamation in the U.S. is intentionally difficult — but legal experts believe Dominion has an especially strong case. Dominion not only has to prove that Fox News made false statements, which it already has done, but also must demonstrate malice and that those false statements caused harm. Unintentional errors, for example, wouldn't meet the legal threshold. (Axios)
Merck-Moderna Vaccine Helps Keep Patients Free From Skin Cancer: Adding a personalized cancer vaccine to the blockbuster drug Keytruda kept more melanoma patients in remission than the immune therapy alone, co-developers Moderna Inc. and Merck & Co. said in their first detailed presentation of a key study. About 79% of people who received both treatments stayed cancer-free 18 months later in a mid-stage trial, compared to 62% of people who received only Merck’s Keytruda, the companies said Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. Side effects with the vaccine were generally mild, such as fatigue, they said. (Bloomberg)
53% of women feel lonely at work: The survey was conducted by TheList, Berlin Cameron, and Benenson Strategy Group, and found that 30% of senior women said they don’t have anyone to talk to about work. This data may not be very surprising. Senior executives of all genders experience loneliness in the workplace, as the number of people they can have “no-agenda conversations” with dwindles with each jump up the corporate ladder. (The Broadsheet)
Economy
Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink have warned investors to brace for the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates higher for a longer period of time, bucking the view that the central bank will cut rates later in 2023. The comments from two of Wall Street’s most prominent executives made the case that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and broader struggles among regional US banks will not be enough to deter the Fed from keeping rates elevated in its battle to curb inflation. (Financial Times)
Hank Paulson: ‘I think it’s pretty likely we will see a recession’. (Financial Times)
Warren Buffett leads global investors into 'cheap' Japan: Last week, financier Warren Buffett came to Tokyo for the second time in his life with a message for the world: there are bargains in Japan. And the Oracle of Omaha was not alone in his assessment. Last month, Citadel, the U.S. hedge fund led by billionaire investor Ken Griffin, decided to reopen an office in Tokyo that it had closed after the global financial crisis. This month, Steve Cohen, another billionaire investor, said his hedge fund, Point72 Asset Management, would expand its staff in Japan this year. Also making the rounds were powers of the private equity world. The steady stream of high-level Wall Street visitors points to growing interest in Japan's financial markets, where money is still available cheaply and assets are much less expensive than in other major markets, analysts say. (Nikkei Asia Review)
US manufacturing commitments double after Biden subsidies launched: Companies have committed more than $200bn to US manufacturing projects since Congress passed sweeping subsidies last year, as president Joe Biden’s effort to spark a new industrial revolution gains momentum. The investment in semiconductor and clean tech investments is almost double the commitments made in the same sectors in the whole of 2021, and nearly twenty times the amount in 2019, according to data compiled by the Financial Times. While the FT identified four projects worth at least $1bn each in these sectors in 2019, there were 31 of that size after August 2022. (Financial Times)
After a tumultuous year in the markets, America's preparedness for retirement has gotten shakier. More than half — 52% — of Americans are not on track to comfortably pay for their retirement, according to a new report from Fidelity, the nation's largest provider of 401(k) plans. 401(k) accounts lost 23% of their value last year, compared with 2021, per another recent Fidelity report. And 55% of those between the ages of 18 and 35 have put retirement planning and saving on hold, Fidelity notes. Between the lines: "Roughly half the workforce, we’re talking 50 plus million people, work for an employer that doesn’t offer a retirement plan," said David John, a senior policy adviser at AARP. That could mean a small business or gig work. And Millennials and Gen X-ers are far less likely to have traditional pensions than their Boomer counterparts, John said. (Axios)
Today’s homebuyers are exceptionally sensitive to mortgage rates with house prices so high — and they’ve found their tipping point. After years of government intervention following the great recession and the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic that kept mortgage rates artificially low, today’s buyers have a skewed view of what “normal” mortgage rates are. The majority of potential homebuyers, 71%, say they will not accept a 30-year fixed mortgage rate over 5.5%, according to a survey done in March by John Burns Research and Consulting. The current rate, however, is around 6.4%. In addition, 62% of buyers said they believed that a “historically normal mortgage rate” was below 5.5%. The average going back to 1971 is 7.75%, according to Freddie Mac. (CNBC)
Healthcare added 34K jobs in March as temp nursing demand wanes: Hospitals may be catching a break from labor woes, with new data showing employment growth and declining demand for contract labor. (Healthcare Dive)
Funding to Latin American startups plunged in 1Q23, hitting the lowest point in over two years amid a continued sharp contraction in late-stage dealmaking. Overall, investment in reported seed through growth stage financings in Q1 was down 84% from the year-ago quarter. (Crunchbase News)
Startup funding remains strong in the Triangle despite national slump: Startups in the Raleigh and Durham metro areas raised more than $414 million in the first quarter of the year. That's an increase of 34% from the last quarter and 61% year over year. The numbers are another indication that the Triangle's startup ecosystem is resilient in the face of national declines, despite rising interest rates and the scare of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Investments into Triangle startups also hit a record high last year. (Axios)
Technology
Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals: Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices. For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology. Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year. A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. (New York Times)
A US House Committee publishes a draft stablecoin bill, which proposes a moratorium on stablecoins backed by other cryptocurrencies, a CBDC study, and more. (Coindesk)
Americans are getting better at spotting false news: Stanford scholars find a smaller percentage of Americans visited unreliable websites in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. election than in 2016 – which suggests mitigation and education efforts to identify misinformation are working. (Stanford University)
General Motors’ electric future doesn’t include Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The automaker’s upcoming lineup of electric vehicles won’t support the popular smartphone projection systems in favor of a native Google infotainment system. The move, first reported by Reuters, means that owners won’t be able to project their phone’s screen on their vehicle’s dashboard infotainment display. The decision is intended to provide “seamless access” to the new Google-powered infotainment experience, including native versions of Google Maps, Google Assistant, Audible, Spotify, and more, GM says in a fact sheet explaining the new strategy. (The Verge)
Smart Links
New York venture seed funding fell in 4Q22. (WSJ)
Peak Real Estate: This Tiny Wyoming Community Has Some of the Country’s Priciest Mountain Homes. (Wall Street Journal)
College Presidents Are Less Experienced Than Ever — and Eyeing the Exit. (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
Rising stress in the world is the 'other global warming'. (Semafor)
Cybersecurity funding and deal count dropped from Q1 2022. (Crunchbase)