President Joe Biden’s plans to raise tax rates on corporate America and wealthy households have been thrown into doubt by resistance from Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema.
According to people familiar with the talks, senior Biden administration officials met with top Democrats on Capitol Hill yesterday to recast their planned measures to finance their $3.5tn spending package.
If the corporate income tax rate increase were to be scrapped, it would mark a big win for large US businesses and their lobbyists who had been pushing to preserve the current tax rates.
Top tax-writing lawmakers in Congress met with Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, and Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, yesterday to discuss possible alternatives to raising corporation tax.
According to people familiar with the talks they discussed a surtax on share buybacks, a minimum tax on book profits and — on the individual side — a possible tax on the wealth of billionaires. Sinema’s office declined to comment.
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Democratic infighting and poor messaging are hampering the push to spend trillions of dollars on popular policies, Washington correspondents James Politi and Lauren Fedor report.
Thanks for reading FirstFT Americas. Here is the rest of today’s news — Gordon
Five more stories in the news
1. Donald Trump to launch social media platform The new platform, called TRUTH Social, will be controlled by the Trump Media & Technology Group that will go public via a merger with a blank-cheque company named Digital World Acquisition. Digital World will merge with TMTG in a deal that values special purpose acquisition company at $875m.
Go deeper: This is the ultimate test for blank-cheque companies says our Lex investment column.
2. Bitcoin rallies to a fresh peak Bitcoin rallied to a record high of $67,016 a day after a bitcoin exchange traded fund launched on Wall Street for the first time. The approval of the ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which holds futures tracking the price of bitcoin, opened the floodgates to other filings.
Read more: Investors are dumping gold for cryptocurrencies as inflation picks up, report Joe Rennison in New York and Eva Szalay and Henry Sanderson in London.
3. Evergrande’s plan to sell property division collapses The Chinese real estate developer said a potential sale of its property services unit has collapsed, deepening the pressure on the group, which has just days to avoid an official default on its debt.
4. PayPal in talks with Pinterest on $45bn takeover The online payments company is in talks to acquire the social media group in what could result in one of the largest corporate takeover deals of the year, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
5. End of an era as Bundesbank chief steps down Jens Weidmann has decided to step down as head of Germany’s central bank, weeks after the country’s general election and shortly before a decision on the future of eurozone monetary policy. Who will succeed him? Here are some potential successors.
Keep the questions coming on COP26 for Leslie Hook. Our environment correspondent will be in Glasgow next month and if you have any questions that you would like her to answer, please email firstft@ft.com and we will publish the responses.
Coronavirus digest
The Food and Drug Administration yesterday announced it was authorising Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to supply booster shots of their vaccines to people aged 65 and over. The news comes as the US grapples with a critical shortage of rapid Covid-19 antigen tests.
A damning report by a Brazilian senate committee has recommended President Jair Bolsonaro face criminal indictment over his role in the coronavirus pandemic.
More than a fifth of India’s 1.3bn citizens are now fully vaccinated after the country today administered its billionth Covid vaccine.
For the latest data on the spread of the virus go to our Covid tracker.
The day ahead
WeWork goes public The co-working space company will start trading on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange after two years of disputes.
Earnings Among the companies reporting results today are Blackstone, AT&T, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. In the technology sector IBM and Snap both report.
European Council summit Items on the agenda of the two-day summit will be the European energy crunch and the bloc’s relationship with China. For the latest on the summit, subscribe to our Europe Express newsletter.
What else we’re reading
How Netflix became ‘Hateflix’ There is a culture war raging at the world’s largest video streaming company. Activists are condemning Netflix for carrying programming they say could encourage discrimination against transgender people, resulting in one of the platform’s worst public relations crises.
The revenge of the old economy It is tempting to blame today’s shortages on temporary disruptions driven by the pandemic. But the roots of these bottlenecks can be traced back to the aftermath of the financial crisis, writes Jeff Currie, global head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs.
Is my teenager’s pay rise a sign of things to come? Some economists argue that current pay rises are merely a one-off Covid-linked blip, or perhaps a shift sparked by strange supply-demand dynamics that will reset wages at a slightly higher rate, but then stop. This theory, argues Gillian Tett, ignores the psychological impact they will have.
Europe after Angela Merkel The German chancellor will reprise the role of mediator as European leaders prepare for a showdown with Poland over the primacy of EU law. This time there is a difference: Merkel is on the way out. Will Germany’s new coalition take a tough approach on foreign policy?
Thanks to readers who took our poll yesterday. Seventy per cent of you said that Washington lawmakers, rather than Wall Street, had the right approach to US relations with China.
Meet our journalists: Robin Harding
Robin Harding took up the role of the FT’s Asia editor in mid-August. An economist by training, he has served in a variety of posts, from London to Washington to Tokyo, where he was bureau chief from 2015.
What story are you particularly interested in at the moment?
The potential default of Chinese property company Evergrande, less in itself than for what it says about the Chinese growth model. One of the big questions for this century is whether China can keep growing until it’s as rich as Japan, or even the United States. How China tackles Evergrande will offer clues to the answer.
You’ve lived in Japan for almost 12 years. What about the country continues to fascinate you?
Japan is different. I think one reason for Japan’s tourism boom, pre-Covid-19, is because it’s a rich, industrialised country that still feels alien to Europeans or Americans. I’m constantly learning from how Japan does things, and the comparison sheds light on the rest of the world, whether the subject is monetary policy, urban planning or railways.
What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?
I went back through my Kindle and I reread Pride and Prejudice this year, so that’s the real answer. The best newish non-fiction was The WEIRDest People in the World, which basically argues that the Catholic church created the modern world by banning cousin marriage in Europe. I’ll leave out the sci-fi and fantasy recommendations here but feel free to email!
Source: Economy - ft.com
