Aurelia Butler

Kim called for the modernisation of regional manufacturing facilities, improvements in agriculture, and “to come up with clear results every year, regardless of conditions”. Kim was speaking on Friday at a ceremony for new production facilities in Songchon County, northeast of Pyongyang, in which he participated in ribbon-cutting and toured manufacturing rooms for products such as soy sauce and bean paste, KCNA said. Last year, North Korea’s nominal GDP stood at 40.2 trillion won ($27.86 billion), or just 1.7% that of South Korea’s 2,401.2 trillion won, South Korea’s statistics agency said on Friday. North Korea’s GDP had shrunk for three straight years since 2020 during the pandemic when the country shut its borders, and only rebounded last year, the agency said. ($1 = 1,443.1400 won) More

OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday looked set to lose power early next year after a key ally said he would move to bring down the minority Liberal government and trigger an election.New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, who has been helping keep Trudeau in office, said he would present a formal motion of no-confidence after the House of Commons elected chamber returns from a winter break on Jan. 27.If all the opposition parties back the motion, Trudeau will be out of office after more than nine years as prime minister and an election will take place.A string of polls over the last 18 months show the Liberals, suffering from voter fatigue and anger over high prices and a housing crisis, would be badly defeated by the official opposition right-of-center Conservatives.The New Democrats, who like the Liberals aim to attract the support of center-left voters, complain Trudeau is too beholden to big business.”No matter who is leading the Liberal Party, this government’s time is up. We will put forward a clear motion of non-confidence in the next sitting of the House of Commons,” said Singh.The leader of the Bloc Quebecois, a larger opposition party, promised to back the motion and said there was no scenario where Trudeau survived. The Conservatives said they would ask Governor General Mary Simon – the personal representative of King Charles, Canada’s head of state – to recall Parliament to hold a no-confidence vote before the end of the year. Constitutional experts say Simon would reject such a move. “We cannot have a chaotic clown show running our government into the ground. What is clear is that Justin Trudeau does not have the confidence of Parliament,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre told reporters.Shortly after Singh issued his letter a smiling Trudeau, under growing pressure to quit after the shock resignation of his finance minister this week, presided over a cabinet shuffle.Trudeau’s office was not immediately available for comment.Trudeau, who has not publicly spoken about Freeland’s exit, usually addresses reporters after cabinet shuffles but left without saying a word. Major domestic media organizations said his office had canceled traditional end-of-year interviews.Votes on budgets and other spending are considered confidence measures. Additionally, the government must allocate a few days each session to opposition parties when they can unveil motions on any matter, including non-confidence.Singh’s move is a political risk, since the polls showing a bad defeat for the Liberals also have bad news for the NDP.Darrell Bricker, CEO of polling firm Ipsos-Reid, said Singh saw a chance to replace the Liberals as the first choice for voters who opposed the Conservatives.”Waiting to give the Liberals and even Trudeau a chance to get off the mat is ill-advised,” he said by email. Before Singh made his announcement, a source close to Trudeau said the prime minister would take the Christmas break to ponder his future and was unlikely to make any announcement before January.Liberal leaders are elected by special conventions of party members, which take months to arrange. Singh’s promise to act quickly means that even if Trudeau were to resign now, the Liberals could not find a new permanent leader in time for the next election. The party would then have to contest the vote with an interim leader, which has never happened before in Canada.So far around 20 Liberal legislators are openly calling for Trudeau to step down but his cabinet has stayed loyal.The timing of the crisis comes at a critical time, since U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is due to take office on Jan. 20 and is promising to impose a 25% tariff on all imports from Canada, which would badly hurt the economy.The premiers of the 10 provinces, seeking to create a united approach to the tariffs, are complaining about what they call the chaos in Ottawa. More

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr has sought legal advice to explore his options against any attempts by President-elect Donald Trump to remove him, sources said, the latest sign that a conflict might be looming between the incoming administration and the central bank. Barr, who was tapped to serve as the Fed’s top regulatory official by President Joe Biden, has in recent weeks sought advice from law firm Arnold & Porter in his personal capacity, two of the sources said.The sources said he has sought counsel in a personal capacity because typically individual officials, not their agencies, have legal standing to fight in court attempts to remove them. The Fed declined to comment via a spokesperson. Representatives for Arnold & Porter and the Trump transition did not respond to requests for comment. Barr did not respond to a call or email requesting comment.Barr, whose term overseeing bank supervision expires in July 2026, has told Congress that he intends to serve it out. Reuters could not learn further details about Barr’s discussions with lawyers, including whether he would fight his removal or not. The sources requested anonymity to speak about Barr’s plans.Barr’s move comes after reports in recent months that Trump’s advisers were looking for ways to increase the incoming White House’s sway over the Fed, alarming officials and investors who argue that the central bank’s independence is necessary for it to be able to properly set monetary policy. Fed Chair Jerome Powell — who was appointed to the role by Trump only to be subsequently criticized for his decisions on interest rates — was seen as a target of the incoming president. But Powell said after the November presidential election that Trump would not have the authority to remove him. Trump subsequently said he does not intend to remove Powell.The law establishing the Fed says the president is only allowed to fire Fed governors for cause, but it is silent on whether Trump would have the power to demote Barr from his role as Vice Chair for Supervision. Powell has previously said demoting Fed officials is not permitted under the law. Barr has earned powerful critics on Wall Street and elsewhere for his tough approach to financial regulation. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page argued Trump should fire him for cause, citing the failures by bank supervisors to address problems ahead of Silicon Valley Bank’s abrupt failure in March 2023.Trump’s advisers and other Republicans have debated pursuing that approach with Barr, according to two of the sources, who were briefed on the matter. Barr’s decision to explore outside legal counsel underscores how seriously he is taking that threat. WALL STREET’S IRE Barr earned the ire of Republicans and the banking industry for his efforts to impose strict new capital rules on the industry via so-called “Basel III Endgame” and other projects.Barr said the sector needed more guardrails against future turmoil, but those efforts were met with intense pushback from banks, who argued they were unjustified and threatened to sue over what they claimed was improper procedure. Barr eventually agreed to pare back those efforts, but a rewritten proposal never advanced due to infighting among U.S. bank regulators.If Barr were to stay, he likely would not be able to advance tough new rules that would require buy-in from other agencies taken over by Trump appointees, but he could stand in the way of regulatory easing sought by big Wall Street banks. While Trump has said little on bank regulation, his campaign has promised to slash “burdensome” regulations. Barr also has a separate 14-year term as Fed governor that runs until 2032, but officials frequently step down from that post before serving the full allotment, particularly if they had previously served in a more senior role.There is no precedent for a president to try to remove a Fed official. But messy succession fights at regulatory agencies are not unfamiliar territory for Trump. In his first term, his administration was challenged in court over his attempts to name new leadership at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There, the agency’s deputy, Leandra English, resisted efforts to install an outside Republican official as leader of the agency, going so far as to challenge the move in court on a personal basis. She eventually dropped that suit and resigned. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The messy process of trying to avert a U.S. government shutdown offers investors a glimpse into challenges the incoming Trump administration will face in implementing its agenda, adding a market concern for the coming year.While the showdown has so far not rattled markets, investors said it helped feed into the volatility unleashed by the Federal Reserve’s projection on Wednesday for fewer U.S. interest rate cuts next year.”Granted, Trump isn’t president yet, but he will interject ideas at the last minute and there’s no guarantee every member of the Republican Party in Congress is going to go along with his ideas,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. “That is a formula for gridlock, uncertainty, and volatility.”The U.S. Congress was scrambling to avert a government shutdown on Friday, hours after more than three dozen Republicans joined Democrats to reject a demand by President-elect Donald Trump to use the spending bill to lift the nation’s debt ceiling.Republican hardliners who normally are ardent Trump supporters are resisting his push to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, sticking to their belief that government spending needs to be pruned and defying his warnings of revenge.A bipartisan deal negotiated with Democrats who now control the Senate and the White House collapsed on Wednesday after an online fusillade of criticism by Trump and Elon Musk. The failure to pass the bill offered investors a peek at how policy might take shape next year.   “This behavior … provides some insight into how Trump may approach governance. He is likely to lead with bold threats and leverage them to push negotiations in his favor,” said Joe Hoffman, CEO of Mesirow Currency Management.Prolonged government battles can upset equity investors, who have reaped the S&P 500’s roughly 25% gains for the year, its second straight year of 20% or more gains.The fighting may even hurt the so-called ‘Trump Trade’ which has lifted assets likely to benefit from Trump’s policies on tariffs and deregulation. Still, U.S. government shutdowns are fairly recurrent events that on average last nine days. The market generally takes them in stride, with stocks slipping more in the days ahead than during shutdowns, according to CFRA Research data.The S&P 500 has on average fallen 0.3% in the week before government shutdowns, compared with an average rise of 0.1%, for the duration the government remained shut, CFRA data showed.Indeed, on Friday, the S&P 500 was up 1.7%, as a cooler-than-expected inflation report eased some market concerns triggered by the Fed forecasting only two rate cuts for 2025.”Uncertainty surrounding whether a shutdown will occur is greater than when it actually occurs,” Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA, said.That may be why markets may be largely shrugging off the Friday midnight deadline for Congress to get a deal done.”(Investors) think it’s more likely than not that it’ll be resolved today, but that a shutdown, if it were to come, would be short and relatively non-impactful,” said Helen Given, associate director of trading at Monex USA, in Washington DC.Still, the difficulty of getting a deal to avert government shutdown bodes ill for Trump’s agenda.”It’s possible to interpret the current impasse as a sign that Donald Trump will struggle to get a big fiscal stimulus through Congress in 2025, given the resistance of fiscal hawks in his own party who would like to see plans for more spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit or extending its suspension,” said John Higgins, Capital Economics’ chief markets economist, in a note. More

The LNG producer plans to list its Class A common shares under the symbol “VG” on NYSE, the company’s filing showed.In November, Reuters reported that the Arlington, Virginia-based company was planning to raise about $3 billion from its IPO in New York.Cold storage giant Lineage’s $4.44 billion New York IPO in July and Hyundai Motor (OTC:HYMTF) India’s $3.33 billion Mumbai IPO last month were two of the largest listings this year, LSEG data showed.The company plans to use part of the proceeds for general business purposes, including funding its operations.After the IPO, Venture’s founders and co-chairmans, Robert Pender and Michael Sabel, will continue to hold more than 50% of voting power through their entity Venture Global Partners (NYSE:GLP) II, LLC, the company said in its filing. Sabel is also the company’s CEO.It said Goldman Sachs & Co (NYSE:GS)., J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, ING, RBC Capital Markets, Scotiabank (TSX:BNS) and Mizuho (NYSE:MFG) are among the underwriters for the IPO, according to the filing.Founded 11 years ago, Venture Global has already rocketed into the top ranks of U.S. natural gas exporters, competing against larger rivals Cheniere Energy (NYSE:LNG), Freeport LNG and Sempra.Venture Global has two operating plants in Louisiana, with its second facility at Plaquemines achieving its first LNG production just last week.The company reported revenues of $3.45 billion for the nine months ended Sep 30, compared with $6.27 billion, a year earlier. More