Aurelia Butler

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker said on Sunday they both tested positive for COVID-19 and were experiencing mild symptoms amid a nationwide surge in coronavirus cases.Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, 72, said on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) she is vaccinated and boosted and regularly tested for COVID-19, and “while I tested negative earlier this week, today I tested positive with a breakthrough case.”Booker, 52, a New Jersey Democrat, said on Twitter he had learned Sunday of his positive test “after first feeling symptoms on Saturday.” He added he had “relatively mild” symptoms and recently had received a vaccine booster. “I’m certain that without them I would be doing much worse,” he said.There were long lines at a Capitol Hill COVID-19 testing location last week. The Senate adjourned early Saturday until Jan. 3.Warren’s diagnosis comes amid a surge of U.S. COVID-19 cases.Earlier Sunday, Warren tweeted: “As cases increase across the country, I urge everyone who has not already done so to get the vaccine and the booster as soon as possible – together, we can save lives.”On Friday, Southwest Airlines (NYSE:LUV) said its Chief Executive Gary Kelly tested positive for COVID-19 after appearing at a U.S. Senate Commerce hearing on Wednesday alongside other airline industry executives. Southwest said Kelly was vaccinated and recovering at home.Warren and Booker are not members of the Commerce Committee.In August, three other U.S. senators – Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Democrat John Hickenlooper of Colorado and independent Angus King of Maine all tested positive for COVID-19. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (NYSE:GHM) of South Carolina also said in August he had tested positive. All four were vaccinated and subsequently recovered.Other senators who previously tested positive and recovered include Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. More

LONDON (Reuters) – The number of finance jobs shifting from Britain to the European Union due to Brexit is less than initially expected despite billions of euros in share trading moving to the bloc and London losing most of its access to EU capital markets, consultants EY said on Monday.After Britain voted in 2016 to exit the EU, analysts like Oliver Wyman estimated that up to 35,000 financial services jobs or more would leave Britain.Britain fully left the EU last December, ending the City of London’s unfettered access to what had been its biggest single export customer.”However, over the last year, a number of the largest investment banks located in the UK have revised down the number of staff that will be relocated to the EU, taking the current number of Brexit-related job move announcements to just under 7,400, down from 7,600 in December 2020,” EY said in its latest Brexit tracker.This is a fraction of the 1.1 million people working in finance.There have been around 2,800 new hires in the EU due to Brexit, which avoid the need to relocate some staff from London, with 2,200 finance jobs also created in the UK, EY said.But EU regulators are maintaining pressure on financial firms to complete headcount and operational moves to the EU that have been delayed by the pandemic, EY added.The European Central Bank wants to avoid ending up with hubs run from London.EY said Dublin and Luxembourg remain the most popular post-Brexit destinations for new EU hubs, though Paris has received the highest number of staff relocations.Assets worth 1.3 trillion pounds have shifted across the Channel to the hubs.”For many financial services firms, we are still far from being fully ‘post-Brexit’,” said Omar Ali, EMEIA’s financial services leader at EY.Brussels has yet to sign off on a new discussion forum for financial regulators agreed in principle last December, seen by industry as key to rebuilding cross-Channel trust, although there has been some progress on euro clearing.Miles Celic, chief executive of TheCityUK, which promotes Britain’s financial centre abroad, said it was time to focus on long-term competitive factors.Britain has begun overhauling UK rules to make London more attractive for international investors and compete better with EU centres like Amsterdam, which overtook the UK capital in January to become Europe’s biggest share trading centre.($1 = 0.7524 pounds) More

SHANGHAI/HONG KONG (Reuters) -As a long-running Sino-U.S. diplomatic spat threatens to force Chinese companies off American stock exchanges, global equity investors are assessing ways to retain or add exposure to the world’s second-biggest economy. Fund managers are planning or accelerating a shift out of Chinese American Depository Receipts (ADRs) into their Hong Kong-listed counterparts, or buying more shares listed on the mainland. Some activist investors are going as far as pressing U.S.-listed Chinese companies not yet listed in Hong Kong to do so as soon as possible.Meanwhile, retail U.S. investors with no access to Hong Kong’s markets have begun dumping Chinese ADRs after the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission https://www.reuters.com/business/us-sec-mandates-foreign-companies-spell-out-ownership-structure-disclose-2021-12-02(SEC) this month finalised rules to kick non-compliant Chinese companies off American exchanges in three years. “It looks like we’re going down the track where these companies will be delisted from the United States,” said Thomas Masi, New York-based partner and equity portfolio manager at GW&K, citing lingering tensions https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-builds-new-software-tool-predict-actions-that-could-draw-chinas-ire-2021-12-15 between the world’s two biggest economies. Washington is demanding complete access to the books of U.S-listed Chinese companies, but Beijing bars foreign inspection of working papers from local accounting firms – an auditing dispute that puts hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. investments at stake. Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) estimates a quarter of the $1 trillion market value of China ADRs is with American investors.The rules are forcing a rethink. GW&K’s Masi said the asset manager is reviewing its retail-focused ADR strategy “to see if they do have long term viability.” Individual U.S. investors flocked out https://www.reuters.com/markets/stocks/retail-investors-added-didi-selloff-after-delisting-news-2021-12-06 of Didi Global after the Chinese ride-hailing company unveiled plans on Dec.3 to withdraw from the New York Stock Exchange and pursue a Hong Kong listing. SHARE SWAP The uncertainty has also caused a near halving of the market capitalisation of Chinese ADRs over the year, to about $828 billion, Refinitiv Eikon data showed.The strategy for GW&K’s emerging market fund, which owns shares in Chinese companies including Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Trip.com Group, is to swap out of ADRs into their Hong Kong-traded shares, but only when liquidity in the latter improves, Masi said.Brendan Ahern, chief investment officer of KraneShares, said he is also ready to make the shift when the time is ripe. “We’ve got our finger on the trigger to make that migration,” Ahern told investors in a webinar, held after the SEC rules and the Didi delisting announcement sent Chinese tech shares tumbling. “We’re not going to stand idle and watch these companies go away.”The New York-based, China-focused asset manager, which runs a $7.5 billion exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking China internet stocks including U.S.-traded JD (NASDAQ:JD).com, has tested conversions into Hong Kong listings and found them operationally simple. “You simply tell your custodian, you want to make that conversion. The ADR custodian bank charges like 4 cents a share to make that conversion … overnight, your U.S. names become the Hong Kong share class.” DUAL LISTINGAccording to accounting firm EY, five of the top 10 Hong Kong listings in 2021 were secondary listings of U.S-listed Chinese companies including Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) and Bilibili (NASDAQ:BILI) Inc.”U.S-listed companies coming home is the big trend,” said Lawrence Lau, EY Greater China Financial Accounting Advisory Services leader. “If one day, their shares cannot change hands in the U.S., Hong Kong can serve as a safety net platform where their shares can still trade normally.”A lot of companies have already done that, making life easier for investors. Aaron Costello, Beijing-based regional head for Asia at investment consulting firm Cambridge Associates, notes that 12 of the 15 largest U.S.-listed Chinese companies already have a secondary Hong Kong listing and these companies comprise roughly 85% of the market value of China ADRs in the MSCI China index.Nuno Fernandes, partner and portfolio manager at GW&K, said he is pressing companies which are lagging. “We’re having active conversations with the management of those companies, and we are sending them a clear message: it’s your obligation to pursue all the opportunities to dual-list in Hong Kong as soon as possible,” he said.Many companies have done so, so those that have not “better have a very good explanation why they’re not dual-listed yet. And how they plan to solve it.”Philip Li, investor director at Wellington Management Co, concurred: “the worst case scenario would be that an ADR would be delisted and have nowhere else to go.” GO TO SOURCE Some investors are going directly to China’s increasingly deregulated domestic market. Catherine Hickey, vice-president at consultancy Segal Marco Advisors, said most of the emerging market managers it uses now tend to invest directly into Chinese companies through the A-share market, which is increasingly open and liquid. So if there were fewer ADRs “it doesn’t make that much of a difference.” Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) also recommends exposure to China-listed A-shares, while expressing caution towards the MSCI China index, which has roughly one-fourth of its weightings in ADRs.”In the next three years, we’re going to see very few IPOs of Chinese companies in the U.S., if any,” said GW&K’s Fernandes. “So by definition, the focus is going to be more on the mainland Chinese market, because that’s where the IPOs are going to come from.” More

ANKARA (Reuters) -President Tayyip Erdogan said he had lowered Turkey’s inflation to around 4% before and that he will achieve that again, as it topped 21% following a push for aggressive cuts in interest rates that he has engineered.Erdogan has said that policy, which has sent the country’s lira crashing, was part of a successful “economic independence war”. He says it will boost exports, employment, investments and growth, but most economists call it reckless and predict inflation will soar beyond 30% next year.The lira hit a record low beyond 17 against the dollar on Friday. Hit by fears of an inflationary spiral, the currency has lost 55% of its value this year and 37% in the last 30 days.In a meeting with African youth on Saturday that was broadcast on Sunday, Erdogan reiterated his unorthodox view that interest rates cause prices rises, adding that inflation would hopefully fall soon.”Sooner or later, just as we lowered inflation all the way to 4% when I came to power, we will lower it again. But, I will not let my citizens, my people, be crushed under interest rates,” Erdogan said.Annual inflation fell to around 4% in 2011, when Erdogan was prime minister. It has been edging upwards since 2017 and in November jumped 3.5% on the month and 21.3% on the year.Many Turks have said a 50% hike in the minimum wage announced by Erdogan on Thursday – and widely expected to boost consumer price inflation by 3.5 to 10 percentage points – will be insufficient. Speaking on Sunday, Erdogan said Turkey’s problems were due to “unreasonable attacks” on the economy and dismissed calls for capital controls as “ridiculous”.”The limited rate cuts we have done cannot be the cause of this picture,” he said.Exchanges rates were the “weapon of the game being played on Turkey”, and once they and prices were stabilised, “we will see the doors of a much bigger, modern Turkey open to us within months.”MOUNTING CRITICISMUnder pressure from Erdogan, the central bank has cut rates by 500 basis points since September. He says the model will boost exports, employment, investments and growth.On Saturday, Turkey’s largest business group TUSIAD called on the government to abandon the low rates policy and return to “rules of economic science”. Opposition parties want immediate elections but Erdogan, in power for 20 years, has dismissed this call. National elections are scheduled for mid-2023. On Sunday, he called TUSIAD’s statement an attack on the government.”Our government’s economic policy is advancing exactly as we determined, apart from temporary volatility in exchange rates,” he said. “I call on all my citizens to stand with their state and government more strongly over the economy.”Thousands protested in Istanbul and the southeastern city of Diyarbakir at the weekend over the surging cost of living.Some ferry lines operating from and in Istanbul were halted on Sunday over unsustainable costs stemming from the lira crash, operators said. More

US president Joe Biden suffered a blow to his efforts to pass his signature $1.75tn social spending bill when Joe Manchin, the pivotal Democratic senator from West Virginia, explicitly rejected the package.“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Manchin said on Fox News on Sunday, after weeks of intense negotiations with the White House and Democratic congressional leaders. “This is a no.” Biden conceded last week that the talks on the legislation — which commits to making large investments in childcare, education and the fight against climate change — could drag on for weeks, although he added that he still expected to “bridge our differences” with Manchin eventually. However, Manchin’s remarks suggested that the West Virginia senator would either crush the bill by opposing it completely, or was looking for much more fundamental changes and a shrinking of the legislation.Are you in favour of the US social spending bill? Email me at [email protected]. Thank you for reading FirstFT Asia. Here’s the rest of today’s news — EmilyFive more stories in the news1. Hong Kong awaits election results Turnout at Hong Kong’s first Legislative Council poll since its electoral overhaul hit a record low yesterday at just 30.2 per cent. Ballot counting is expected to continue into the morning today. KPMG was one of several big businesses in Hong Kong that encouraged staff to vote in what the government billed as a “patriots-only” election. (SCMP, FT) 2. Taiwan voters back government on US pork referendum Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen scored a political victory over the weekend as four referendums backed by the opposition against key policies of her government including allowing US pork imports failed to pass.

Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen emerged unscathed by a referendum that threatened to set back the country’s relationship with Washington © Bloomberg

3. Brussels urges reset in EU-UK relations Maros Sefcovic, the EU’s Brexit negotiator, has called for a strategic partnership with the UK to tackle key issues including climate change and European security, saying that a resolution of the dispute over Northern Ireland would “re-establish political trust”. 4. Pakistan seeks to calm protesters at Belt and Road port project Pakistan’s government has sought to defuse tensions linked to one of China’s showcase Belt and Road investments in the country, striking a deal with protesters who for weeks have demonstrated in the port city of Gwadar.5. EU to work with allies on possible Russia sanctions EU leaders agreed to co-ordinate with allies over sanctions in the event of an invasion of Ukraine and charged bloc officials with preparing measures that could include cutting Russian banks off from the international Swift network.Coronavirus digestEuropean countries are tightening restrictions to reduce the spread of the Omicron variant after the Netherlands reimposed a strict nationwide lockdown.President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser warned of mounting “stress” on US hospitals as new coronavirus cases tied to the Omicron variant start “raging”. UK health secretary Sajid Javid has failed to rule out tighter Covid-19 restrictions in England before Christmas.The Bank of Japan will scale back its emergency economic support programme, tapering its corporate debt purchases to pre-pandemic levels.After weeks of accusations of sleaze and reports of Covid rule-breaking parties, UK prime minister Boris Johnson suffered a huge blow after his Conservative party lost a parliamentary seat it has held for 200 years.The day aheadChina reviews loan prime rates The People’s Bank of China is set to review its loan prime rates, the de facto benchmark for new loans. Traders and economists predicted the rate will probably be cut, according to a Reuters poll. (Reuters) What else we’re reading and listening toHow China’s global ambitions almost unseated an IMF chief Beijing has an unusual strategy to influence the multilateral bodies that underpin western capitalism, including the IMF and World Bank. Distinctively, China pursues its ambitions by using its unusual dual status as both a developing economy and a superpower.What’s your financial New Year’s resolution? 2021, like 2020, was another turbulent year for most people’s finances, but the new year provides the perfect opportunity to set some goals. On this week’s Money Clinic podcast, Claer talks to a millennial couple looking for some “fin-spiration” to get their money to work harder.Afghanistan on the brink of famine Millions are facing starvation as the country slides into what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The crisis has been brewing for years: decades of fighting disrupted harvests and displaced rural communities and successive droughts have jeopardised food supplies.

Babies receiving treatment for malnutrition at a Médecins Sans Frontières nutrition centre in Herat © Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty

The lessons for the US from China’s ‘common prosperity’ push There are rightful doubts about whether an authoritarian government with a dicey human rights record, a history of debt-fuelled growth and a ruling class with its own vested interests can implement better policies. But China’s focus on quality over quantity in terms of growth is a lesson the US can learn from, writes Rana Foroohar. From IT sales to calling the shots in crypto land Tether’s rapid rise at the heart of the cryptocurrency industry has turned the spotlight on its publicity-shy chief executive Jean-Louis van der Velde and, in particular, his links to a Shenzhen-based company that makes products such as television receivers and amplifiers.Life & ArtsHow to give the perfect Christmas present The festive season used to be a riotous public bacchanal, more like Halloween. After two centuries of commercialisation, it seems pointless to resist the tradition. But we can at least aspire to become better gift givers. Tim Harford has some tips. More