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The World
Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff says the “postponement of U.S. assistance for Kyiv being debated in Congress would create a ‘big risk’ of Ukraine losing the war with Russia.” Andriy Yermak’s remarks “were some of the frankest yet from a senior Kyiv official as uncertainty swirls over the future of vital U.S and European Union assistance packages.” (Reuters)
“Senators began blaming each other for the looming potential failure to provide additional aid to Ukraine as fragile negotiations over a national security package continued to break down.” At least a dozen Republican senators “walked out of a classified briefing led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Biden officials on the status of Ukraine’s war effort Tuesday afternoon.” (Washington Post)
Europe “faces a ‘huge risk of terrorist attacks’ over the Christmas holiday season because of tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas,” EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson warned. The warning came following “a terror attack targeting tourists in Paris last weekend.” (Times of London)
Wall Street CEOs Head to Washington With Capital-Rule Concerns: Dimon says rules curb loans, Solomon notes ‘financial shocks’. Fiercely-debated rule proposals have spilled into mainstream. (Bloomberg)
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Moore v. U.S., its most significant tax case in decades. The case “stems from one piece of the 2017 tax law regarding accumulated overseas earnings of foreign corporations. But conservative groups are hoping the justices will reach much further and issue a ruling that could prohibit any future tax on billionaires’ wealth and unrealized capital gains.” (Wall Street Journal)
The Social Security Administration “has been grappling with a customer service mess that threatens to grow worse before it gets better.” Since 2011, cuts to the agency’s customer service budget “total 17 percent after adjustments for inflation, and staffing fell to a 25-year low last year” — even as the number of beneficiaries rose by 22% over the past decade. (New York Times)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is “ending his months-long blockade on hundreds of military promotions,” agreeing to “release all of his holds on military officers at the 3-star level and below. A hold will remain in place for the roughly 10 nominations for 4-star generals and officers.” (The Hill)
House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry, who served as interim speaker for three weeks after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, will not seek re-election. McHenry, who was first elected in 2004, “played a leading role in negotiating key pieces of legislation, including the debt ceiling deal earlier this year.” (Axios)
“Male members of Generation Z in the U.S. are more interested in STEM fields than their female counterparts.” While “85% of males born between 1997 and 2011 state they are very or somewhat interested in at least one of these sectors,” just 63% of their female peers say the same. (Gallup)
Economy
US job openings fell to their lowest level in more than two years in October, another sign of a cooling labour market that sparked a rally in government debt as traders bet on less aggressive monetary policy from the Federal Reserve. The job-openings data offers more evidence that the US central bank’s efforts to damp demand with high interest rates is working — although officials insist cuts to rates are not on the cards in the near term. US businesses advertised 8.7mn job vacancies in October, down from 9.6mn in September, according to the labour department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released on Tuesday. It is the lowest level of openings since March 2021. (Financial Times, CNBC)
A recent Lancet study estimated that high temperatures led to 490 billion lost hours of labor in 2022, causing global GDP to be $863 billion smaller than it “would otherwise have been. That is more than triple the amount lost from extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods.” (The Economist)
Xi Jinping is moving to extend his power over China’s financial system. The Chinese Communist Party this week issued a “detailed ideological statement” that made it clear “that it expected banks, pension funds, insurers and other financial organizations in China to follow Marxist principles and pay obedience” to Xi. (New York Times)
Moody’s cut its outlook on China’s sovereign credit rating to negative on Tuesday, “citing growing risks of persistently lower midterm economic growth and the overhang from a crisis in the property sector.” Moody’s cited “rising evidence that the government and state companies would provide financial support to weak regions.” (Financial Times)
Ireland took in $6.8 billion in corporation tax receipts in November in a recovery “after three months of falls, alleviating fears that a bonanza from international technology and pharmaceutical companies in the country had peaked.” (Financial Times)
CVS Health will change how it sets prices on prescription drugs “and scrap a complex model that typically sets how much pharmacies get reimbursed and what patients pay for those medications.” CVS said the plan, which will take effect in January 2025, “will use a ‘sustainable and transparent’ formula to determine a medication’s price and the corresponding reimbursement pharmacies receive from pharmacy benefit managers.” (CNBC)
Technology
The surge in Bitcoin’s price this week “comes thanks to optimism about the possibility of a Bitcoin ETF, as well expectations for Fed rate cuts buoying riskier assets — but this isn't just a market forces thing.” Binance’s settlement with the U.S. government requires it “to create an effective anti-money laundering system — under the watchful eye of an independent outside party who reports to federal regulators.” (Axios)
Hackers accessed nearly seven million profiles of 23andMe customers, “including in some cases users’ ancestry reports, zip codes and birth years.” The hackers “reused old usernames and passwords from other websites to break into 23andMe customer accounts — a rudimentary but effective technique called credential stuffing.” (CNN)
ASM International NV, a Dutch manufacturer of chipmaking gear, will invest $324 million in a U.S. headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company is set to hire 500 people for the new facility “on top of more than 800 it already employs in the state.” (Bloomberg)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company will “establish a research and development center in Japan focused on artificial intelligence.” Huang said Japan “has the technical expertise and the industrial capability to create its own artificial intelligence.” (Nikkei Asia)
Microsoft is detailing several new features “coming to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI’s latest models. Copilot will get support for GPT-4 Turbo soon, alongside an updated DALL-E 3 model, a new code interpreter feature, and deep search functionality inside Bing.” (The Verge)
Smart Links
Apple’s market cap closes above $3 trillion. (CNBC)
Washington Post journalists plan 24-hour strike amid prolonged contract talks. (Reuters)
Elon Musk’s xAI Startup Seeks to Raise $1 Billion in Equity. (Bloomberg)
Chinese automotive chip manufacturers plan to invest billions in Hong Kong amid city’s push to reindustrialize. (South China Morning Post)
Japan bond liquidity worse under easing, BOJ review finds. (Nikkei Asia)