Aurelia Butler

U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled steep tariff increases this month on an array of Chinese imports including electric vehicle (EV) batteries, computer chips and medical products.Biden will keep tariffs put in place by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump while ratcheting up others, including a quadrupling of duties on electric vehicles to over 100% and doubling the duties on semiconductor tariffs to 50%.”Much higher tariffs against Chinese products are inevitable if we do not want the European industry to be wiped out,” said Urso, who is a member of right-wing party Brothers of Italy, speaking at a business conference.Speaking about the automotive sector in particular, Urso said that the steep increase in U.S. tariffs could result in China steering its exports toward Europe, harming the bloc’s industry.Urso called for a stronger industrial policy by the European Union as the bloc approaches European Parliament elections next month. More

STRESA, Italy (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Friday that she believes the White House will move as quickly as possible to nominate a new Federal Deposit Insurance Corp chair to replace Martin Gruenberg, who tendered his resignation amid a sexual harassment scandal.Gruenberg, a Democrat, is staying on until a new chair is confirmed by Congress to avoid a partisan deadlock on the FDIC board that would hold back the Biden administration’s regulatory objective.Yellen told reporters at the end of a G7 finance leaders meeting in northern Italy that the nomination decision was up to the White House, “but I believe they’re going to want to move this as quickly as they can.”Reuters reported separately on Friday that a nomination decision could be made as early as next week.Yellen told Reuters in an interview on Friday that FDIC’s next chair needs to be “committed to cleaning up the problem” after an independent probe found widespread sexual harassment problems that prompted current chair Martin Gruenberg to resign this week. She said the agency needed someone “who can come in from the outside, is credible in terms of their own past actions” on similar issues.On Saturday she walked back those comments slightly, telling reporters that while the “most likely” nominee would come from outside FDIC, she would not rule a qualified candidate from within the agency. More

STRESA, Italy (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Reuters that European banks face growing risks operating in Russia and the U.S. is looking at strengthening its secondary sanctions on banks found to be aiding transactions for Russia’s war effort.”We are looking at potentially a tougher stepping-up of our sanctions on banks that do business in Russia,” Yellen told Reuters in an interview, declining to provide specifics and not identifying any banks at which they could be aimed.Speaking on the sidelines of a G7 finance leaders meeting in northern Italy, Yellen said that sanctions related to banks’ dealings in Russia would only be imposed “if there was a reason to do so, but operating in Russia creates an awful lot of risk,” she added. Asked whether she would like to see Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International and Italian bank UniCredit pull out of Russia, Yellen said: “I believe their supervisors have advised them to be extremely careful about what they do there.”‘GET OUT’European Central Bank policymaker Fabio Panetta had clear instructions for Italian banks on Saturday telling reporters that lenders must “get out” of Russia because staying in the country brings a “reputational problem.”Raiffeisen is the largest European lender doing business in Russia, followed by UniCredit. Another large Italian lender, Intesa Sanpaolo (OTC:ISNPY) is working to dispose of its Russian business.U.S. President Joe Biden’s new secondary sanctions authority gives the Treasury the power to cut off banks from the U.S. financial system if they are found to be assisting the circumvention of primary sanctions against Russian and other entities over Moscow’s war in Ukraine.Yellen and other U.S. Treasury officials have said that Russia’s economy is increasingly a “war economy” making it more difficult to distinguish between civilian and military or dual-use transactions.The existence of the secondary sanctions has already chilled banks’ engagement with Russia, but Yellen has expressed concern that Russia is managing to find avenues to acquire goods needed to boost its military production, citing transactions through China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.WARNING LETTEREarlier this month, the Treasury warned Raiffeisen in writing that its access to the dollar-denominated financial system could be cut off because of its Russia dealings, citing a proposed 1.5 billion euro ($1.6 billion) deal with a sanctioned Russian tycoon, a person who has seen this correspondence told Reuters.After the warning, Raiffeisen dropped plans for the industrial stake linked to tycoon Oleg Deripaska, marking a setback for the lender more than two years after the invasion of Ukraine.The pressure underscored Washington’s willingness to take European banks to task over their Russian ties.In Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt on Tuesday, Yellen warned bank CEOs to step up efforts to comply with sanctions against Russia and shut down circumvention efforts to avoid the potential for severe penalties. More

“It seems to me that a fairly general consensus has emerged on the possibility of a rate cut,” Panetta, the Bank of Italy governor, said during the press conference after the end of the G7 finance meeting in Stresa, northern Italy.Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said on Friday the ECB should be in position to cut interest rates on June 6, as a pick up in negotiated wage growth across the 20 nation currency bloc was not particularly worrisome.Panetta has said inflation is showing a common underlying trend as it is declining in all major economic areas and that risks to financial stability have reduced.The G7 ministers and central bankers discussed a stress test in which the institutions of the major industrial democracies tested their performance in relation to cyber shocks, he said, adding the outcome was satisfactory. More

STRESA, Italy (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Saturday that a loan for Ukraine backed by the income from frozen Russian sovereign assets is the main option for G7 leaders to consider in June, but added that she doesn’t want to “take anything off the table as a future possibility.”Yellen told reporters at the end of a G7 finance meeting in northern Italy that the plan has broad support but there is “quite a bit of work to be done” to make it a reality. The 27-member European Union also needs to endorse it, she said.The G7 finance ministers and central bank governors agreed to explore ways of using the future income from some $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine, according to a draft statement expected to be issued on Saturday. The assets, mostly held in Europe, were immobilized in February 2022.Yellen has said a loan based on the income could give Kiev as much as $50 billion up front, demonstrating to Russia that combined with EU and U.S. funding, Ukraine has ample resources to defend itself.”It needs to be fleshed out within the EU so that it can become a proposal that the EU endorses, and that’s a lot of countries,” Yellen said of the loan plan. “It’s not a given, so I’m not saying this is a totally done deal.”G7 finance leaders will put a lot of work into the plan over the next several weeks to get it “fleshed out enough” for G7 leaders to consider at a summit in Italy’s southern Puglia region in June, she said.CHINA CONCERNSYellen also said G7 finance ministers voiced “broad-based concerns” about China’s vast subsidies for advanced manufacturing and the potential for harm to their own economies. They agreed to monitor the situation closely and noted that it may be appropriate for countries to take trade measures to counter China’s industrial policies.China also may retaliate against the U.S. for new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar products, semiconductors and other key products, but Yellen noted that the action targeting $18 billion worth of Chinese imports this was not a broad one.The U.S. imported $427 billion of goods from China last year and exported $148 billion worth to China. “We’ve tried to make this rather targeted,” Yellen said. “I would hope that the Chinese would be judicious in their choice on what to do.” More

STRESA, Italy (Reuters) – Italian banks must halt their business in Russia as staying in the country also brings a “reputational problem,” European Central Bank policymaker Fabio Panetta said on Saturday.After Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit is the European bank with the largest exposure to Russia, while Intesa Sanpaolo (OTC:ISNPY) is working to dispose of its business in the country.”From there (Russia) you have to get out,” Panetta told reporters during the press conference after the end of the G7 finance meeting in Stresa, northern Italy.”There are objective difficulties because getting out of Russia is complicated, you have to find a buyer knowing that you are being forced, it can be expensive, however you have to get out because there is a reputational problem,” added Panetta, the Bank of Italy governor.UniCredit’s Russian arm was this month hit by the seizure of assets worth 463 million euros ($502.12 million) in relation to an aborted gas project for which the banking group had provided guarantees.Both Intesa and UniCredit have repeatedly said Western sanctions have shrunken the number of potential buyers, making it increasingly hard to leave.Intesa last year secured the presidential decree which is necessary for a foreign bank to dispose of its Russian business.However, Italy’s biggest lender is still to finalise its exit, pending a green light from Russia’s central bank and Italian authorities.UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel has always said the bank’s goal was to reduce exposure to Russia while minimising the hit for the lender.Orcel has said it would not be “morally correct … writing off and gifting” the group’s Russian unit.Both European banking supervisors and U.S. authorities in charge of enforcing sanctions are monitoring closely the activity of Western banks in Russia and their progress on exit plans, a person close to the matter said.In addition to the green light needed from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s central bank, any transaction must be cleared by the ECB.To avoid the risk of sanctions following a deal, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control must also provide a comfort letter once informed of the identity of the prospective buyer, the person said. ($1 = 0.9221 euros) (Valentina Za reported from Milan; Editing by Keith Weir) More