Aurelia Butler

(Reuters) -Google will invest $1 billion on building a data centre just outside of London, the U.S. technology giant said on Thursday, in its latest investment in Britain as it meets growing demand for internet services in the region.The data centre, located on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site bought by Google in 2020, will be located in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 miles north of central London, the Alphabet-owned company said in a statement.The British government, which is pushing for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence, described Google’s investment as a “huge vote of confidence” in the UK.”Google’s $1 billion investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement.The investment follows Google’s $1 billion purchase of a central London office building in 2022, close to Covent Garden, and another site in nearby King’s Cross, where it is building a new office and where its AI company DeepMind is also based.It also comes weeks after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) unveiled plans to pump 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) into Britain over three years, including in growing its data centre capacity, to underpin future AI services.”This new data centre will help meet growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs,” Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in the statement.Google, which employs over 7,000 people in Britain, also said that waste heat generated from the data centre would be an opportunity for energy conservation that can benefit the local community. ($1 = 0.7881 pound) More

(Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday announced student debt cancellation of nearly $5 billion for an additional 74,000 borrowers, including more than half who earned forgiveness after 10 years of public service as teachers, nurses and firefighters.The White House announcement brings the total loan forgiveness approved by the Biden-Harris administration to $136.6 billion for more than 3.7 million Americans.Nearly 44,000 of the borrowers approved for relief are those with a decade of public service, with close to 30,000 are people who have been repaying their loans for at least 20 years but never got the relief through income-driven repayment plans.Biden vowed to continue working to deliver student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling blocking his plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. “I won’t back down from using every tool at our disposal to get student loan borrowers the relief they need to reach their dreams,” he said in a statement.Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the department was moving “full speed ahead” with efforts to deliver even greater debt relief for more borrowers and to help them get on a faster track to loan forgiveness under a new SAVE repayment plan.As of June 2023, approximately 43.4 million student loan recipients had $1.63 trillion in outstanding loans, according to the Federal Student Aid website. The figure represents an increase of nearly $17 billion in the outstanding loan balance and almost 600,000 in the number of student loan recipients since last year, it said.Progressive voters, who are part of the coalition that helped elect Biden in 2020, long pressed the White House to address student loan debt, and the issue remains high on the agenda of younger voters, many of whom have concerns about Biden’s foreign policy on the war in Gaza and fault him for not achieving greater debt forgiveness. More

BRASILIA (Reuters) -Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday welcomed Brazil’s recent support for Beijing’s “One China policy” that states Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, in a sign of stronger bilateral ties with South America’s largest country. At the end of a two-day visit to Brazil, Wang made a stop in the northeastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza to meet Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at an air force base before departing to Jamaica by the late afternoon. There were no details of their meeting.In Brasilia earlier, Wang said their two countries, both members of the BRICS group of leading emerging economies, must work together to build a multi-polar world based on peace and security.Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said he and Wang discussed the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and how they can be resolved, with China’s top diplomat saying the two trade partners need to build closer levels of confidence.China-Brazil relations were ruffled during the far-right government of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and have improved under Lula, a popular leftist leader in his third term.Wang and Vieira signed a visa agreement between the two nations extending their validity from five to 10 years, aimed at spurring business travel and tourism.Wang stopped in Fortaleza en route to Jamaica, the last stop of his tour that began in African nations.Lula was traveling in northeast Brazil, his main political bastion, eyeing municipal elections this year.Brazil’s position on Taiwan was established in April in a foreign ministry statement that expressed Brazil’s “firm support to the One China Principle” and said China was “the sole legitimate government of the whole of China, and Taiwan being an inseparable part of the Chinese territory.”China is Brazil’s largest export market, mainly for soy and iron ore. Chinese companies are planning to increase their investments in Brazil, in power transmission, oil and electric vehicles, businessmen said at a Brazil-China meeting last week in Shenzhen with major Chinese corporations.Marcos Caramuru, a China watcher and former Brazilian ambassador in Beijing, said he is seeing growing interest of Chinese companies in investments in electric vehicles and in infrastructure in Brazil, as well as new investments in areas where China has been investing for a while, such as the electricity sector and e-commerce.”Lula as president has helped to increase the level of mutual confidence in Brazil-China relations,” Caramuru said. More

The session’s gains were fueled by chipmakers surging on AI optimism and investor bets that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in 2024. The benchmark’s new record high close confirms that the S&P 500 ended a bear market when it closed on Oct. 12, 2022, and that it has been in a bull market since then, according to one measure. The S&P 500 had lost nearly 25% in a sell off between its last record high on Jan. 3 2022 and its low in October 2022.On Friday, S&P 500 climbed 1.2% on the day to end at 4,839.81 points, exceeding its previous record close of 4796.56 on Jan. 3, 2022.The S&P 500’s most recent downswing and recovery was in line with the median time of nearly two years between record highs since the 1920s, according to LSEG.The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which also hit a record closing high on Friday, had already confirmed on Dec 13, 2023 that it had been in a bull market since Sept. 30, 2022.Meanwhile, while the Nasdaq composite recovered 43% in 2023, it would need to rise another 4.8% to return to its record high close of 16,057.4437, reached on Nov. 19, 2021. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An International Monetary Fund team is currently in Cairo to discuss Egypt’s $3 billion IMF loan and reform program, an IMF spokesperson said on Friday amid discussions about additional funding to ease the country’s Gaza war-related stresses.The spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Reuters that the team, led by IMF Egypt Mission Chief Vladkova Hollar, would “continue discussions on the first and second reviews of Egypt’s reform program supported by the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility. We will communicate at the end of the visit.”The IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia director, Jihad Azour, also was in Cairo earlier this week on an annual retreat with the division’s regional offices, and met with Egyptian authorities and regional stakeholders, the spokesperson added.Egypt has been hit hard by Israel’s war against Hamas in neighboring Gaza, which has hurt tourism bookings and natural gas imports and prompted attacks on Red Sea shipping.IMF chief spokesperson Julie Kozack told reporters last week that additional financing was “critical” to the success of the Egypt program, but amounts and potential disbursements were under discussion. Also under discussion was the need for tighter fiscal and monetary policy. More

The debt forgiveness is particularly beneficial for public servants including teachers and nurses with ten years’ tenure, addressing long-term repayment challenges faced by these individuals. As part of revisions to the income-driven repayment (IDR) and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) programs, nearly 30,000 individuals will benefit from loan cancellations due to servicers’ failures in tracking payments correctly. In addition to this, the administration has enhanced the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan earlier this week. This plan expedites debt forgiveness for those consistently paying off initial loans up to $12,000 for over a decade, providing further relief for borrowers.This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C. More

“We have to calibrate very carefully to ensure that we continue to bring inflation down and we ensure that we do it gently, as gently as we possibly can” Daly said at the San Diego County Economic Roundtable. “We know that policy is in a good place, the economy is in a good place, and we can start to be more patient to see what we need, as a Fed, to do next…It takes patience. It takes gradualism.”The words calibration, patience and gradualism suggested Daly believes Fed rate cuts will arrive but are not imminent. Unlike last year, when the focus was on fighting inflation, Daly said this year there is more need for attention to the Fed’s other mandate, of achieving maximum employment. “The risks to the economy are balanced, and the risks to both sides of our mandate are balanced,” she said. Early Friday Daly said it would be “premature” to think interest-rate cuts are around the corner. Inflation has come down from its 2022 peak but is still too high, she said, noting the December reading on core consumer price inflation, of 3.9%. “There is a lot of work to do. There is no denying it,” she said. The Fed targets 2% inflation, though by a different yardstick than Daly cited. By that measure, the personal expenditures price index, year-over-year inflation measured 2.6% in November, the latest reading available. Other policymakers speaking recently, notably Fed Governor Christopher Waller this week, have sounded more optimistic on inflation’s trajectory.Daly is likely the last Fed policymaker to speak publicly ahead of the Fed’s Jan 30-31 policy meeting, due to an agreed-upon quiet period running up to each meeting. More