Many people in China cheered the meeting Thursday between President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump, after months of escalating bilateral tensions. Every time the two leaders meet, it helps ease tensions and creates a "positive atmosphere," Alex Hongcai Xu, chair of Beijing Honglve Consulting, said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. "This atmosphere is beneficial for negotiations." "Each side lowering tariffs to below 10% would benefit capital flows and cooperation," Xu said. He noted that China can likely buy more U.S. soybeans and U.S.-made Boeing airplanes. Trump said Thursday...
Donald Trump's tariffs on China are likely to remain at levels that are expected to severely restrict Chinese exports to the U.S. after a 90-day truce, analysts and investors say, suggesting Beijing may have to endure further economic pain despite active talks. U.S. levies on Chinese goods imposed this year are likely to remain at 30% through the end of 2025, according to a Bloomberg survey. While much lower than before this week's thaw, the current tariffs are high enough to wipe out 70% of China's shipments to the world's largest economy in the medium term, according to Bloomberg...
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Thursday that longer-term interest rates are likely to be higher as the economy changes and policy is in flux. In remarks that focused on the central bank's policy framework review, last done in the summer of 2020, Powell noted that conditions have changed significantly over the past five years. During the period, the Fed witnessed a period of surging inflation, pushing it to historically aggressive interest rate hikes. Powell said that even with longer-term inflation expectations largely in line with the Fed's 2% target, the era of near-zero rates...
Staff from the Trump administration have been hard at work on Thursday, pushing a raft of announcements on a wide range of investment projects with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that President Trump has been pursuing hard since taking office in January. As is usual for announcements from several faces of the White House team, specific details remain thin, and it remains unclear what kind of timeline these announced projects are expected to take, or how they'll even be accomplished. According to the US Commerce Department, the United Arab Emirates and the US government have agreed on an "AI...
U.S. Federal Reserve officials feel they need to reconsider the key elements around both jobs and inflation in their current approach to monetary policy, given the inflation experience of the last few years and the possibility that supply shocks and the associated price increases may become more frequent in the years ahead, Fed chair Jerome Powell said Thursday. "We may be entering a period of more frequent, and potentially more persistent, supply shocks—a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks," Powell said in opening remarks at a two-day conference reconsidering the...
US producer prices fell by 0.5% in April 2025, following a revised flat reading in March and defying market expectations of a 0.2% increase. This was the first decline in the PPI since October 2023 and the sharpest drop since April 2020, during the early aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak. The decline was largely driven by a 0.7% fall in service costs, the largest since data collection began in December 2009, primarily due to a 1.6% decrease in margins for trade services, suggesting businesses may be absorbing some of the impact from higher tariffs. Prices for final demand services...
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...
US President Donald Trump said Thursday that he had agreed with President Xi Jinping to cut tariffs on China in exchange for Beijing cracking down on illegal fentanyl trade, resuming purchases of...