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The World
The EU has failed to agree a critical €50bn financial aid package to Ukraine after Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoed the proposal, throwing into doubt Europe’s ongoing support to Kyiv. The collapse of talks on the funding, seen as crucial for Ukraine’s financial stability into 2024, follows repeated failures by the US Congress to agree a $60bn aid package proposed by the White House. That has raised fears of weakening western resolve to sustain the country as it continues to battle against Russia. The failed efforts were announced hours after the leaders agreed to open accession talks with Ukraine — a milestone on Kyiv’s path to join the EU once the war with Russia is over and an endorsement by Brussels of the country’s western trajectory. (Financial Times)
Vladimir Putin “addressed his nation in a marathon news conference and call-in show for constituents in which he declared his belief that Russia will be victorious in the war. In contrast to last year, when he skipped the annual news conference and call-in show amid battlefield setbacks, Putin on Thursday brimmed with confidence and seemed to be banking that patriotism would propel him to reelection” in March. (Washington Post)
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that Putin “will wage war elsewhere if Russia defeats Ukraine.” He told reporters, “If Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there. Our support is not charity. It is an investment in our security.” (Politico)
Volodymyr Zelensky “accused Hungary of acting on behalf of President Putin to block billions of euros of economic aid for Ukraine.” (Times of London)
The average 30-year mortgage rate “dropped below 7% to its lowest level since early August.” Freddie Mac said the average is now 6.95%, down from 7.03% last week but still far above the 6.31% average one year ago. (Associated Press)
Wall Street and the Fed “are — for once — broadly in sync: The great monetary pivot is near as central bankers engineer a once-unthinkable soft landing in the world’s largest economy. That’s the big-picture takeaway after the Fed gave its clearest signal yet that its historic policy tightening campaign is over by projecting more aggressive interest-rate cuts in 2024,” which kicked off “one of the biggest post-meeting rallies in recent memory.” (Bloomberg)
Is Jerome Powell’s Fed Pulling Off a Soft Landing? (New York Times)
10-year Treasury yield drops below 4% after Fed signals rate cuts are ahead (CNBC)
Asian shares hit four-month peak as Fed pivot rally rolls on. (Reuters)
“Danish police said they prevented a terror attack after announcing that four people had been arrested.” Three suspects were arrested in Denmark and a fourth in The Netherlands. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, “This is extremely serious. It is of course — in relation to Israel and Gaza — completely unacceptable for someone to bring a conflict elsewhere in the world into Danish society.” (DW)
“One of the group, named only as Abdelhamid Al A, was accused by the prosecutor of having ‘started searching for an underground weapons cache in Europe no later than spring 2023’ on the orders of Hamas leaders based in Lebanon.” (The Guardian)
How the world agreed to move away from fossil fuels at COP28: The COP28’s UAE presidency employed a strategy during the two-week summit of issuing deliberately provocative drafts for a deal designed to force negotiators to reveal the outer limits of their positions and find common ground, according to the sources. The top envoys from the world's biggest climate polluters, the United States and China - relying on a personal relationship two decades in the making - together found the right words to describe the world's move away from oil, gas and coal and persuaded OPEC leaders to come along. (Reuters)
Many older Americans could pay less for 48 drugs “from chemotherapy treatments to growth hormones used to treat endocrine disorders” beginning early in 2024, the White House announced. The prices of the drugs “increased faster than the rate of inflation this year. Under a new law, drugmakers will have to pay rebates to the federal government because of those price increases,” with the proceeds “used to lower the price Medicare enrollees pay on the drugs.” (Associated Press)
Economy
Retail sales were up 0.3% in November from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Sales had been expected to decline “due to a myriad of issues, including uncertainty over the economy. Excluding car and gas sales, retail sales rose 0.6%.” (Associated Press)
Americans Are Spending on the Holidays After All. (Wall Street Journal)
Citigroup Inc. will shutter its municipal business, one of the most dramatic moves yet by Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser as she seeks to squeeze better returns out of the Wall Street giant. The bank decided the business, which has tumbled in the rankings for underwriting state and local debt, is “no longer viable given our commitment to increase the firm’s overall returns,” according to a memo to staff seen by Bloomberg News. (Bloomberg)
Temu is suing Shein in a U.S. court, “alleging that the fast fashion giant ‘bullied, intimidated, and even detained’ suppliers in China as part of a campaign of ‘mafia-style intimidation.’” Temu says Shein tried to “‘illegally interfere’ with its business and going so far as to confiscate merchants’ cellphones during meetings to obtain access to confidential information.” (The Guardian)
Navy Federal Credit Union “has the widest disparity in mortgage approval rates between White and Black borrowers of any major lender.” Navy Federal “approved more than 75% of the White borrowers who applied for a new conventional home purchase mortgage in 2022,” while less than half of Black borrowers who sought the same type of loan were approved. (CNN)
BRICS nations are expanding their African media presence “through its Moscow-headquartered broadcast network to counter Western narratives in the Global South. TV BRICS — which is centered on programming from member countries Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa — has in recent weeks signed partnership agreements with media companies in Kenya, South Africa, Egypt and Mozambique.” (Semafor)
Technology
Pope Francis is calling “for a binding global treaty on artificial intelligence, lauding its potential benefits while warning of its raw potential for destruction. He commented on the pitfalls of placing in human hands a ‘vast array of options, including some that may pose a risk to our survival and endanger our common home.’” (Washington Post)
Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner says Congress “hasn’t done enough work on artificial intelligence regulation in the U.S. to join Pope Francis’ proposal.” (Politico)
The growing use of artificial intelligence has become a significant risk to stocks, bonds and financial markets in general, according to a new report from the chief US financial stability regulator. It is the first time that AI was identified as a “vulnerability” by the Financial Stability Oversight Council in its annual report. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, who also chairs the FSOC, on Thursday predicted at a meeting of the council that the use of AI by banks, investors and other financial market players is likely to continue to increase. (Financial Times)
“A Republican-led campaign against researchers who study disinformation online” has turned its focus to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, “the most prominent American government agency dedicated to countering propaganda and other information operations from terrorists and hostile nations.” The center “is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants — including Facebook, YouTube and X — to censor Americans in violation of the First Amendment.” (New York Times)
The European Court of Justice is standing by a lower court ruling “that overturned a European Commission order to Amazon to pay back €250mn in taxes to Luxembourg, in a further blow to efforts from Brussels to crack down” on favorable tax deals. The Thursday ruling in a case that has been going on since 2017 is final and cannot be appealed. (Financial Times)
The British government is considering a “crackdown on social media access for children under the age of 16, including potential bans.” A study will begin as soon as next month “to gather evidence about the extent of potential harm to children from using social media.” (Bloomberg)
Alphabet is launching a new company called Renew Home that “will pull in some other projects from Nest and the rest of Alphabet to become a supposed one-stop shop for power savings and clean energy usage.” Renew Home will partner with power companies to obtain data on current power grid conditions and use that data “to change consumer habits.” (Ars Technica)
Smart Links
U.S. and China race to shield secrets from quantum computers. (Reuters)
GM’s Cruise laying off 900 employees, or 24% of its workforce. (CNBC)
Nelson Peltz to Nominate Himself, Former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo to Disney’s Board. (Wall Street Journal)
TSMC-Sony venture calls for more chip suppliers to invest in Japan. (Nikkei Asia)
Intel intros first Meteor Lake chips with faster GPUs and worse single-core speed. (Ars Technica)
What Walmart Did to Make Stores Autism-Friendly. (Wall Street Journal)
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem. (MIT Technology Review)