U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with BlackRock Inc executive Rick Rieder in New York on Friday, as the Trump administration continued its search for a new chair for the Federal Reserve, a source familiar with the matter said. Bessent has now spoken with four of the 11 candidates on the administration's list of candidates to replace Fed chair Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May, the source said. Bloomberg first reported Bessent's meeting with Rieder, BlackRock's CIO of fixed income, and called him a rising contender for the post. The two met for two hours and discussed...
Price increases subsided in March, going by the Federal Reserve's preferred metric, bringing annualized inflation closer to the central bank's target in the month before the brunt of President Trump's new tariffs took effect. The personal-consumption-expenditures price index was flat last month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. After stripping out variable food and energy costs, core prices also were flat. Analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal thought prices would be flat month over month, or up 0.1% on the core reading. The cooler price increases pulled the 12-month PCE...
The U.S. economy contracted at an annualized rate of 0.3% in the first quarter of 2025, marking the first decline since the first quarter of 2022. This was a sharp reversal from 2.4% growth in the previous quarter and came in below market expectations of 0.3% growth, according to an advance estimate. A 41.3% surge in imports contributed to the slowdown, as businesses and consumers rushed to stockpile goods in anticipation of higher costs following a series of tariff announcements by the Trump administration. Consumer spending growth also cooled to 1.8%, the slowest pace since Q2 2023,...
Private business in the US added 62k workers to their payrolls in April of 2025, less than half of the downwardly revised 147k payrolls in the previous month and well below market expectations of 115k. It was the softest increase since July of last year, underscoring the impact of tariffs by the US government on businesses' intake of new labor. New employment rose by 34k in service providing industries, with increase in trade/transportation/utilities (21K) and financial activities (20K) offsetting the sharp declines in education/health services (-23K), and information (-8K). In turn,...
China has created a list of U.S.-made products that would be exempted from its 125% tariffs and is quietly notifying companies about the policy, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing seeks to ease the impact of its trade war with Washington. China has already granted tariff exemptions on select products including select pharmaceuticals, microchips and aircraft engines and was asking firms to identify critical goods they need levy-free, Reuters reported on Friday. However, the existence of a so-called 'whitelist' had not been previously reported. The quiet approach allows...
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday approved additional relief for domestic automakers from his 25% vehicle and auto parts tariffs set in motion less than a month ago, saying it would help the industry to move more production back to the U.S. Trump's latest orders mark the latest softening of his multi-layered tariff assault on trading partners as he seeks to negotiate deals aimed at lowering other countries' trade barriers to U.S. exports. Earlier this month, Trump's administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics largely made in China from triple digit tariffs at...
Asia-Pacific markets traded higher, tracking Wall Street gains overnight.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 rose 0.41% after hitting a fresh record high on Thursday, while the Topix added 0.61%. South...
Both the STOXX 50 and STOXX 600 hovered around the flatline on Friday, as investors adopted a cautious stance ahead of further developments in trade talks between US President Trump and Chinese...
Poland rejected on Friday a suggestion by Donald Trump that Russian drone incursions into its airspace could have been a mistake, a rare contradiction of the U.S. president from one of Washington's...