Aurelia Butler

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The euro zone’s central bank cut interest rates for the fourth time this year on Thursday and kept the door open to more easing, although some analysts felt President Christine Lagarde’s signal in that direction was less clear than they had hoped for.French central bank governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau, his Spanish colleague Jose Luis Escriva, Austria’s Robert Holzmann and Luxembourg’s Gaston Reinesch appeared to sharpen the message on Friday. “There will be further rate cuts next year,” Villeroy told France’s BFM business radio.Speaking on Spanish TV, Escriva added it was “logical” that the ECB would “lower interest rates again at future meetings” if inflation continued to converge to target. It was 2.3% in November. The ECB lowered the rate it pays on banks’ reserves by 25 basis points to 3.0% on Thursday and investors expect at least another 100 basis points worth of cuts by June.Lagarde refused to speculate about the future path for rates, flagging risks ranging from possible U.S. tariffs to political uncertainty at home, where France is currently without a government and Germany faces new elections, as well as stubbornly high domestic inflation.Villeroy, a centrist who has become increasingly supportive of easier policy in recent months, threw his weight behind market pricing.”I note that we are collectively rather comfortable with the financial markets’ interest rate forecasts for next year,” he said.Even Austria’s central bank governor Robert Holzmann, a hawk who was once the lone dissenter against easing, backed the return of rates to a neutral level, which neither stimulates nor curbs the economy, of around 2%.”Interest rates will go in that direction,” he told reporters. “If the market assessments as they are at the moment come true, then they will match our forecasts. And if our forecasts match, then we will probably have to adjust our interest rates to be consistent.”Luxembourg’s Reinesch, who rarely discusses policy in public, told local media RTL that it would “not be unreasonable” for the deposit rate to “decrease to 2.5% by early spring”, likely implying back-to-back 25 bp cuts in January and March. Escriva played down the prospect of a larger 50 bp rate cut, an option has been raised by some of his colleagues and adopted by central banks in Switzerland and the United States. “In the discussions we had yesterday, the idea that prevailed is that we should keep having moves of 25 basis points downwards, which is the form that will allow us to keep evaluating the effects in terms of disinflation,” the recently appointed Spanish governor said. More

The statement issued by both companies on their Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) accounts came a day after videos and livestreams circulated on social media showing Ji Yue Auto’s CEO Xia Yiping surrounded at the company’s Shanghai headquarters by dozens of people, some wearing employee lanyards, demanding to know when they would be paid.Ji Yue said on Wednesday it would seek to raise new money and carry out some operational adjustments to cope with fierce market competition, becoming one of a number of smaller start-ups to admit to struggles amid a bruising price war in the world’s largest auto market.Media representatives for Ji Yue have declined to comment on the scenes at the headquarters or about workers not being paid.Baidu and Geely founded the company in early 2021 to develop smart EVs incorporated with Baidu’s autonomous driving technology and Geely’s expertise in vehicle hardware. Geely and Baidu will “ensure normal use, after-sales and maintenance services of users’ vehicles,” Friday’s statement said, adding that they will push for other issues to be dealt with in a reasonable and legitimate manner. More

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(Reuters) – The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) , according to a document seen by Reuters, a move that could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems.Musk, the world’s richest person, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected president in November. Removing the crash-disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes – more than 1,500 – to federal safety regulators under the program. Tesla has been targeted in National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigations, including three stemming from the data.The recommendation to kill the crash-reporting rule came from a transition team tasked with producing a 100-day strategy for automotive policy. The group called the measure a mandate for “excessive” data collection, the document seen by Reuters shows.The Trump transition team, Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.Reuters could not determine what role, if any, Musk may have played in crafting the transition-team recommendations or the likelihood that the administration would enact them. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing most major automakers except Tesla, has also criticized the requirement as burdensome.A Reuters analysis of the NHTSA crash data shows Tesla accounted for 40 out of 45 fatal crashes reported to NHTSA through Oct. 15.Among the Tesla crashes NHTSA investigated under the provision were a 2023 fatal accident in Virginia where a driver using the car’s “Autopilot” feature slammed into a tractor-trailer and a California wreck the same year where an Autopiloted Tesla hit a firetruck, killing the driver and injuring four firefighters.NHTSA said in a statement that such data is crucial to evaluating the safety of emerging automated-driving technologies. Two former NHTSA employees said the crash-reporting requirements were pivotal to agency investigations into Tesla’s driver-assistance features that led to 2023 recalls. Without the data, they said, NHTSA cannot easily detect crash patterns that highlight safety problems.NHTSA said it has received and analyzed data on more than 2,700 crashes since the agency established the rule in 2021. The data has influenced 10 investigations into six companies, NHTSA said, as well as nine safety recalls involving four different companies.In one example, NHTSA fined Cruise, the self-driving startup owned by General Motors (NYSE:GM) , $1.5 million in September for failing to report a 2023 incident in which a vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian who had been struck by another car. GM this week said Cruise will stop development of self-driving technology.CRASH REPORTINGNHTSA’s so-called standing general order requires automakers to report crashes if advanced driver-assistance or autonomous-driving technologies were engaged within 30 seconds of impact, among other factors.In addition to ditching the reporting rule, the recommendations call for the administration to “liberalize” autonomous-vehicle regulation and to enact “basic regulations to enable development” of the industry.In an October Tesla earnings call, Musk called for “a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles,” rather than a patchwork of state laws he called “incredibly painful” to navigate. He said he would use his position as a government-efficiency czar, a post Trump had promised him, to push for such regulatory changes.After the election, Trump named Musk to co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency to advise from “outside government” on slashing federal staff, spending and regulations.MORE DATA, MORE CRASHESTesla is among the most prominent automakers developing advanced driver-assistance features, which can assist with lane changes, driving speed and steering.Tesla’s Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” systems, which are not fully autonomous, have come under intense scrutiny in lawsuits and a DOJ criminal probe examining whether Tesla exaggerated its vehicles’ self-driving capabilities, misleading investors and harming consumers.Tesla despises the crash-notification requirement, believing that NHTSA presents the data in ways that mislead consumers about the automaker’s safety, two sources familiar with Tesla executives’ thinking told Reuters.In recent years, Tesla executives discussed with Musk the need to push for scrapping the crash-reporting requirement, according to one of the sources. But because Biden officials expressed enthusiasm for the program, Tesla executives ultimately concluded that they would need a change in administration to get rid of the requirements, according to the source.Tesla finds the rules unfair because it believes it reports better data than other automakers, which makes it look like Tesla is responsible for an outsized number of crashes involving advanced driver-assistance systems, one of the sources said.NHTSA cautions that the data should not be used to compare one automaker’s safety to another because different companies collect information on crashes in different ways.Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who focuses on autonomous driving, said Tesla collects real-time crash data that other companies don’t and likely reports a “far greater proportion of their incidents” than other automakers.Tesla also likely has a greater frequency of crashes involving driver-assistance technologies because it has more vehicles on the road equipped with them and drivers engage the systems more often, Smith said. That means the vehicles may more often get into “situations that they aren’t capable of handling,” he said. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Investors view it as a near given that the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point at its Dec. 17-18 meeting, with more attention focused on policymakers’ new economic projections released alongside the decision.Those projections will include an updated look at how much further Fed officials think they will reduce rates in 2025 and perhaps into 2026, an exercise that will have to account for data in the meantime showing stickier-than-expected inflation, a healthy labor market, a U.S. election result that could shift the global trade and immigration landscape, and ongoing geopolitical risks.With so much to assess, a multitude of new risks, and a lot of uncertainty, many analysts expect the collective messaging from the central bank’s policy statement on Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s post-meeting press conference and the updated projections to be somewhat hawkish – with the Fed perhaps closer to a rate-cut stopping point, or at least very reluctant to commit to many more reductions in borrowing costs, than it was just a few months ago.Here are some of the data points Fed policymakers will consider: INFLATION’S STUBBORN DANCEThere hasn’t been much headline improvement in inflation since the Fed’s last economic projections in September or its Nov. 6-7 policy meeting. But some of the components have shifted around in ways that have left policymakers convinced a gradual easing of price pressures, known as disinflation, is underway. Housing cost increases have slowed and the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, which the Fed uses to gauge progress toward its 2% inflation goal, appears headed for a low reading when data for November is released next week. That won’t happen, however, until two days after the end of the Fed’s meeting.HIRING HAS HELD UP  The job market remains one of the central bank’s great surprises. The unemployment rate has risen modestly since the Fed began aggressively raising rates in March of 2022, but at 4.2% remains below the national long-run average and right at the level the median Fed official considers to roughly represent full employment. Absent a bad surprise in December, the jobless rate is likely to end the year below the 4.4% level policymakers had penciled into their September projections.Job creation, meanwhile, has slowed from the fever pitch of recent years, and has caused some policymakers to regard the labor market as running at a sustainable pace right now.Such resilience, though, is one of the reasons policymakers say they want to be careful about future rate cuts, out of concern the economy is actually operating close to potential right now. Cutting the policy rate, currently set in the 4.50%-4.75% range, too far could buoy demand, stretch the economy’s ability to fulfill it, and raise inflation. WAGES OFFSET BY PRODUCTIVITYAnother pleasant surprise in recent data: Workers continue to be more productive over time, and the improvements have been enough to take the edge off of wage increases that otherwise have been a bit too high for the Fed’s inflation comfort zone.Unit labor costs to business, one key to whether a tight job market is feeding into price pressures, have been rising at a more tempered rate as a result.DEMAND DOESN’T QUITAnother sign of economic resilience has been consumer spending, which doesn’t show much sign of cooling beyond its return from the elevated levels of the COVID-19 pandemic to something more like the pre-pandemic trend.As long as people are employed and earning, they will spend, one of the important conditions for the “soft landing” from elevated inflation that Fed officials feel they are close to achieving. More

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