Business

Monday – Friday, 6:00 – 7:00 PM ET

It’s that time again! “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer rings the lightning round bell, which means he’s giving his answers to callers’ stock questions at rapid speed.

Loading chart…

Loading chart…

Loading chart…

Loading chart…

Nucor Corp: “I personally think that Nucor has moved up too much. … I have my eye on $160 to $165 and not before that.”

Loading chart…

C3.ai Inc: “This stock has run up as part of the almost meme-like interest in [artificial intelligence]. … Ring the register.”

Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing

Click here to download Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing at no cost to help you build long-term wealth and invest smarter.

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

When the HBO black comedy “The White Lotus” premiered in the summer of 2021, it took viewers to Hawaii’s sunny Maui. It was a perfectly timed pandemic escape full of intrigue, satire, sex and bloodshed.
The second season featured a mostly new cast — save for Jennifer Coolidge and her character’s quietly sinister husband, played by Jon Gries — and a new location, Taormina, on the rugged southern Italian island of Sicily. 

Both seasons put the spotlight on so-called “screen tourism” — the growing tendency of travelers to flock to locations they see in television shows and movies.
U.S. Google searches about visiting Italy spiked nearly 20% between October — after the second season premiered — and December of 2022, according to the online research company Semrush.
Travel bookings by Americans to Italy nearly doubled during this time too, according to Jim Corridore, insights manager at the market research firm Similarweb.
Since the beautifully shot settings are as much a character as the cast, viewers are now clamoring to find out where the third season will be filmed.

A not-so-subtle hint

Many viewers caught a not-so-subtle hint in the final show, when Daphne (played by actress Meghann Fahy), toasting at dinner, said, “Next year, the Maldives.”

But we’re not so sure.

The Maldives was named-dropped near the end of season two of “The White Lotus,” leading fans to speculate it would be the next filming location.
Levente Bodo | Moment | Getty Images

HBO has not announced where the next season will be set.
However, in October 2022, show creator Mike White implied it could be Asia, when he told the entertainment news website Deadline: “I think it’d be fun to maybe go to a whole different continent. You know, we did Europe — and maybe Asia, something crazy like that, that would be fun.”

A second theory

There’s so much excitement generated by the show — and its borderline fanatical fanbase — that any statement made by White is quickly pounced upon.
That’s what happened when he made a brief video message for writer Evan Katz Ross while purportedly on a beach in Thailand last month.
Ross posted the video to his Twitter account, which has some 1.5 million views. Cue the theories that “The White Lotus” is heading to the Southeast Asian nation known as “The Land of Smiles.”

The front-runner: Japan

But the smart money is on Japan — specifically, the historical former capital of Kyoto.
In season one, Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea played host to the show. In season two, it was the San Domenico Palace Taormina Four Seasons Hotel.
Like Maui and Taormina, Kyoto also has a Four Seasons hotel. The Zen-like five-star hotel is built around an ancient pond where a famed warlord lived during the 12th century.

Japan has three Four Seasons hotels — two in Tokyo and one in Kyoto (pictured).
Source: Four Seasons Kyoto

The location plays into hints that spirituality will be the focus of season three too.
“The first season highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White told Deadline. “I think the third season will be a satirical and funny look at death and eastern religion and spirituality.”
He even let slip that “Jennifer [Coolidge] is my friend and everybody loved her in the first season, and I was like, ‘I can’t go to Italy without Jennifer.’ And maybe that’s still the case. Like, maybe you can’t go to Japan without Jennifer either.”
Indeed, in Japanese culture the lotus flower is revered for being able to emerge beautiful and pristine from dirty water, symbolizing enlightenment. 
“Enlightened” is the name of another HBO series, created by Mike White, which ran for two seasons and starred Laura Dern.
We asked Four Seasons Kyoto whether plans to shoot there are indeed afoot — but representatives declined to comment.
If Kyoto is indeed the location, the hotel and city can expect a substantial uptick to its global profile once the show airs.

The impact of ‘screen tourism’

For the premiere and finale of both seasons of “The White Lotus,” the Four Seasons hotels in Maui and Taormina experienced some of their highest search traffic ever, said Marc Speichert, the chief commercial officer at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.
“In Maui, for example, during the first season, we experienced a 425% year-over-year increase in website visits and a 386% increase in availability checks,” he said.
San Domenico Palace Taormina, which has the iconic steep slopes of smoldering Mt. Etna as its backdrop, is closed for the season until mid-March, but then fully booked until May — so hopes of skipping down the corridors like Mia and Lucia will have to wait.

Two characters spent the night in Villa Tasca in the second season of “The White Lotus.” To do the same, prepare to pay around $6,000 per night.
Camillo Balossini | Mondadori Portfolio | Getty Images

But other filming locations in Sicily have also become popular, such as Villa Tasca in the Sicilian capital city of Palermo.
The 16th-century estate, which has four bedrooms and 20 acres of gardens, is listed on Airbnb for around $6,000 per night.
Beyond “The White Lotus,” the broader trend of traveling to visit iconic TV and movie locations continues to grow.

Netflix shows like “Bridgerton” and “Emily in Paris” are said to have increased travel interest to Bath, England (pictured) and France, respectively.
Bento Fotography | Moment | Getty Images

Jon Gieselman, president of Expedia Brands, said, “We’re seeing a surge in trips to culture capitals and TV shows playing a role in tourism.”
It’s very much a global phenomenon too. When polled, two-thirds of global travelers have considered — and nearly 40% have booked — trips to destinations after seeing them in films or television, according to an Expedia report published in November 2022. More

TOWARDS THE end of the second world war Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a fateful gathering of world leaders that helped determine the course of geopolitics for decades. No, not the Yalta summit. Immediately after FDR, Churchill and Stalin had carved up the world into spheres of influence, the American president slipped away onto an American naval vessel to meet quietly with Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia. In return for protection of the Sauds’ sovereignty in the Holy Land, the monarch agreed to grant American oil firms access to his country’s petroleum. Building on the long-standing exploitation of Persian reserves by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), the Saudi-American alliance formed the axis of oil that led Western majors to look longingly first to the Persian Gulf, then to other distant longitudes. For decades the world’s five biggest private-sector oil companies—America’s ExxonMobil and Chevron, Britain’s BP and Shell, and France’s TotalEnergies—have drilled from South America to Siberia. Now a swirl of geopolitical, economic and environmental factors is leading these “supermajors” to increasingly look not east and west but north and south.This realignment comes as big oil’s coffers are overflowing after two years of high energy prices (see chart 1). On February 2nd Britain’s Shell unveiled annual net profits for 2022 of nearly $40bn, more than double the figure a year earlier and its highest in over a century as a listed company. That came on the heels of America’s ExxonMobil announcing a record annual net profit of $59bn (excluding one-off charges). Its main domestic rival, Chevron, also reported that its net profit more than doubled, to $36bn. BP and TotalEnergies will add to the haul on February 7th and 8th, respectively. All told, reckons Amy Wong of Credit Suisse, a bank, those five supermajors may have raked in around $200bn in profits last year. A slug of this bounty will flow to shareholders; in January ExxonMobil said it would fork over a cool $35bn in total to its owners this year and next. Some will go to pay down debt. Much of the rest will, though, be reinvested.After several years of repressed investment in oil and gas, the result of pandemic-induced demand destruction and climate-related policy hostility, big oil is once again spending to find oil and dig it out of the ground. S&P Global, a research firm, estimates that worldwide upstream capital expenditure for the industry as a whole, including private-sector majors and national oil companies, was around $450bn last year, up from a 15-year low of $350bn or so in 2020. This year it may be higher still. All this new money is not flowing to the same old places. The West’s oil titans are experiencing “a fundamental shift in thinking”, says Edward Morse of Citigroup, a bank. American companies are beating a retreat from faraway “frontier” areas that are rich in political risk, lack the infrastructure to get hydrocarbons to market as cleanly as possible, or both. Their less risk-averse European rivals are shunning some of their own American projects in favour of Africa, with potential for climate-friendlier new developments. In both cases, the upshot is a realignment of the oil business along lines of longitude.A latitude shiftFor the American supermajors, this means less interest outside the Americas. ExxonMobil has, like most Western firms, left Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. It has also offloaded—or wants to offload—assets in countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria. Chevron has sold projects in Britain and Denmark (as well as Brazil) and has not renewed expiring concessions in Indonesia and Thailand. James West of Evercore, an investment bank, sees Chevron and ExxonMobil shifting a huge amount of capital spending to South America and the United States itself. ExxonMobil is investing heavily in newfound fields in Guyana. Chevron intends to funnel more than a third of its capital expenditure this year to American shale, and another 20% to the Gulf of Mexico. Last month it also, with President Joe Biden’s blessing, restarted trading some crude from Venezuela, a dictatorship that had long been on America’s naughty list.The European oil giants are also reducing their eastern and western exposure. BP and Shell are, like ExxonMobil, quitting Russia, leading to write-downs of as much as $25bn and $5bn, respectively. Shell has also got rid of its shale assets in Texas and reportedly put a few in the Gulf of Mexico up for sale. BP is divesting its Mexican oil assets, and is rumoured to be getting out of Angola, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. TotalEnergies is pulling out of Canada’s oil sands.Instead, the Europeans’ gaze is, as with their American rivals, turning south. In January Claudio Descalzi, boss of Eni, an Italian non-super major, called for Europe to look to Africa as it seeks to replace Russian energy. Such a “south-north axis”, he argued, would boost Europe’s access to traditional fossil fuels, as well as to cleaner alternatives like renewable energy and hydrogen (which could be shipped or piped north). On January 28th Eni announced it had signed an $8bn natural-gas deal with Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corporation (which includes a bit of money for carbon capture and storage). Shell and Equinor, Norway’s state oil firm, signed an agreement with Tanzania to build a $30bn liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the east African country. TotalEnergies is investing in gas projects in Mozambique and South Africa.There are two main reasons for this realignment. The first, a chief preoccupation of the Americans, has to do with risks and returns. In previous eras of high oil prices oil bosses spent, in the words of one, “like drunken sailors”. Too much investment and not enough cost control in the go-go years led to huge waste and overproduction. In the years before the covid-19 pandemic, oil projects from the Caspian Sea to the Permian basin lost billions of dollars. Tens of billions more in shareholder value went up in smoke. These days investors are demanding much greater capital discipline from oil bosses. And the bosses are listening. The industry’s combined capital spending, though up from its recent trough, is still down from a peak of nearly $800bn in 2014. As for the money that the supermajors are spending, it is being deployed more judiciously. Most of it is going into “short-cycle” investments, which generate a return within five years rather than ten or more. “I’ve been in this industry since the 1990s and I’ve never seen this much focus on efficiency,” marvels Julie Wilson of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy. This quest for efficiency means fewer risky bets in inhospitable places like the Arctic or the deep ocean floor and more projects in familiar jurisdictions with less daunting politics and geology. For the American firms, of course, nowhere is more familiar than the United States. They also understand South America. And parts of their backyard they know less well, like Guyana. That country, whose long-rumoured oil riches were only confirmed in 2015, may also be, counter-intuitively, less politically risky in important ways. Unlike their peers in many resource-cursed autocracies, who cannot imagine a future without oil, politicians in places with newly discovered resources are more cautious about their prospects. As a result, they tend to offer more favourable terms to oil companies in order to get hydrocarbons to market faster; in Guyana, ExxonMobil moved from first deepwater oil discovery to production in just a couple of years. For the Europeans, African countries, which often maintain reasonable relations with their former colonial powers, look appealing for a similar reason. As for their retreat from America, European firms are becoming uneasy about their association with America’s oil industry, with its unapologetically brown reputation. In 2021 TotalEnergies withdrew from the American Petroleum Institute because of the lobby group’s opposition to electric-vehicle subsidies, carbon pricing and tougher rules on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.In doing so, the European firms are responding to growing pressure from consumers, policymakers and investors to start decarbonising their portfolios—the Europeans’ big reason for the geographical sorting. They are looking for new places to invest because such investments, which use the latest technology, tend to be more efficient and less carbon-intensive than legacy assets that rely on leakier, ageing infrastructure. Moreover, oil companies, especially in Europe, are looking beyond fossil fuels. James Thompson of JPMorgan Chase, a bank, has found that the historical correlation between high oil prices and high capital spending on oil and gas has broken down for 11 big private-sector energy giants—a phenomenon he puts down in part to the majors pouring more money into low-carbon projects. Such projects are indeed mushrooming, particularly among the European firms—and in many of the same places as their new hydrocarbon ventures. Last May Eni struck a deal with Sonatrach, Algeria’s state oil firm, to develop green hydrogen from renewable sources. BP is doing the same in Mauritania and TotalEnergies has backed renewable-energy production in South Africa. Looking north, last year Shell paid nearly $2bn for Nature Energy, a Danish producer of “renewable” natural gas (RNG) made from things like agricultural waste. In December BP completed its $4.1bn acquisition of Archaea, which also makes RNG. Oswald Clint of Bernstein, a broker, predicts “an era of giga-mergers” in green energy led by the European giants. Last year the oil majors already signed 22 renewables deals, the five biggest of which added up to $12bn. Mr Clint reckons that in 2030 the European majors could, all told, be spending roughly half their capital expenditure on low-carbon initiatives. The supermajors’ north-south realignment is far from complete. bp is still making some investments in the Gulf of Mexico. Shell and TotalEnergies are betting on Qatari LNG. ExxonMobil is doubling down on a gas project in Mozambique. Chevron is expanding an oil project in Kazakhstan and, reportedly, reviving talks with Algeria’s government about the country’s shale reserves. But these increasingly look like exceptions rather than the rule. The future of energy exploration looks much leaner, a bit greener—and a lot more longitudinal. ■ More

TOWARDS THE end of the second world war Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a fateful gathering of world leaders that helped determine the course of geopolitics for decades. No, not the Yalta summit. Immediately after FDR, Churchill and Stalin had carved up the world into spheres of influence, the American president slipped away onto an US Navy vessel to meet quietly with Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia. In return for protection of the Sauds’ sovereignty in the Holy Land, the monarch agreed to grant American oil firms access to his country’s petroleum. Building on the long-standing exploitation of Persian reserves by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), the Saudi-American alliance formed the axis of oil that led Western majors to look longingly first to the Persian Gulf, then to other distant longitudes. For decades the world’s five biggest private-sector oil companies—America’s ExxonMobil and Chevron, Britain’s BP and Shell, and France’s TotalEnergies—have drilled from South America to Siberia. Now a swirl of geopolitical, economic and environmental factors is leading these “supermajors” to increasingly look not east and west but north and south.This realignment comes as big oil’s coffers are overflowing after two years of sky-high energy prices (see chart). On February 2nd Shell unveiled annual net profits for 2022 of $42bn, more than double the figure a year earlier and its highest in over a century as a public company. That came on the heels of ExxonMobil’s announcement of a record annual net profit of $56bn. Its main domestic rival, Chevron, reported that its own net profit more than doubled, to $37bn. BP and TotalEnergies added to the haul on February 7th and 8th, respectively. All told, those five supermajors raked in around $150bn in profits last year and could make as much again in 2023. A slug of this bounty will flow to shareholders; in January ExxonMobil said it would fork over a cool $35bn in total to its owners this year and next. Some of the proceeds will go to paying down debt. Much of the rest will, though, be reinvested.After several years of repressed investment in oil and gas, the result of pandemic-induced demand destruction and climate-related policy hostility, big oil is once again spending to find oil and dig it out of the ground. S&P Global, a research firm, estimates that worldwide upstream capital expenditure for the industry as a whole, including private-sector majors and national oil companies, was around $450bn last year, up from a 15-year low of $350bn or so in 2020. This year it may be higher still. Latitude shiftAll this new money is not flowing to the same old places. The West’s oil titans are experiencing “a fundamental shift in thinking”, says Edward Morse of Citigroup, a bank. American companies are beating a retreat from faraway “frontier” areas that are rich in political risk, lack the infrastructure to get hydrocarbons to market as cleanly as possible, or both. Their less risk-averse European rivals are shunning some of their own American projects in favour of Africa, with potential for climate-friendlier new developments. In both cases, the upshot is a realignment of the oil business along lines of longitude.For the American supermajors, this means less interest outside the Americas. ExxonMobil has, like most Western firms, left Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. It has also offloaded—or wants to offload—assets in countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria. Chevron has sold projects in Britain and Denmark (as well as Brazil) and has not renewed expiring concessions in Indonesia and Thailand. James West of Evercore, an investment bank, sees Chevron and ExxonMobil shifting a huge amount of capital spending to South America and the United States itself. ExxonMobil is investing heavily in newfound fields in Guyana. Chevron intends to funnel more than a third of its capital expenditure this year to American shale, and another 20% to the Gulf of Mexico. Last month it also, with President Joe Biden’s blessing, restarted trading some crude from Venezuela, a dictatorship that had long been on America’s naughty list.The European oil giants are also reducing their eastern and western exposure. BP and Shell are, like ExxonMobil, quitting Russia, leading to write-downs of as much as $25bn and $5bn, respectively. Shell has also got rid of its shale assets in Texas and reportedly put a few in the Gulf of Mexico up for sale. BP is divesting its Mexican oil assets, and is expected to get out of Angola, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. TotalEnergies is pulling out of Canada’s oil sands.Instead, the Europeans’ gaze is, as with their American rivals, turning south. In January Claudio Descalzi, boss of Eni, an Italian non-super major, called for Europe to look to Africa as it seeks to replace Russian energy. Such a “south-north axis”, he argued, would boost Europe’s access to traditional fossil fuels, as well as to cleaner alternatives like renewable energy and hydrogen (which could be shipped or piped north). On January 28th Eni announced it had signed an $8bn natural-gas deal with Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corporation (which includes a bit of money for carbon capture and storage). Shell and Equinor, Norway’s state oil firm, signed an agreement with Tanzania to build a $30bn liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the east African country. TotalEnergies is investing in gas projects in Mozambique and South Africa.There are two main reasons for this realignment. The first, a chief preoccupation of the Americans, has to do with risks and returns. In previous eras of high oil prices oil bosses spent, in the words of one, “like drunken sailors”. Too much investment and not enough cost control in the go-go years led to huge waste and overproduction. In the years before the covid-19 pandemic, oil projects from the Caspian Sea to the Permian basin lost billions of dollars. Tens of billions more in shareholder value went up in smoke. These days investors are demanding much greater capital discipline from oil bosses. And the bosses are listening. The industry’s combined capital spending, though up from its recent trough, is still down from a peak of nearly $800bn in 2014. As for the money that the supermajors are spending, it is being deployed more judiciously. Most of it is going into “short-cycle” investments, which generate a return within five years rather than ten or more. “I’ve been in this industry since the 1990s and I’ve never seen this much focus on efficiency,” marvels Julie Wilson of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy. This quest for efficiency means fewer risky bets in inhospitable places like the Arctic or the deep ocean floor and more projects in familiar jurisdictions with less daunting politics and geology. For the American firms, of course, nowhere is more familiar than the United States. They also understand South America. And parts of their backyard they know less well, like Guyana, whose long-rumoured oil riches were only confirmed in 2015, may also be, counter-intuitively, less politically risky in important ways. Unlike their peers in many resource-cursed autocracies, who cannot imagine a future without oil, politicians in places with newly discovered resources are more cautious about their prospects. As a result, they tend to offer more favourable terms to oil companies in order to get hydrocarbons to market faster; in Guyana, ExxonMobil moved from first deepwater oil discovery to production in just a couple of years. For the Europeans, African countries, which often maintain reasonable relations with their former colonial powers, look appealing for a similar reason. As for their retreat from America, European firms are becoming uneasy about their association with America’s oil industry, with its unapologetically brown reputation. In 2021 TotalEnergies withdrew from the American Petroleum Institute because of the lobby group’s opposition to electric-vehicle subsidies, carbon pricing and tougher rules on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.In doing so, the European firms are responding to growing pressure from consumers, policymakers and investors to start decarbonising their portfolios—the Europeans’ big reason for the geographical sorting. They are looking for new places to invest because such investments, which use the latest technology, tend to be more efficient and less carbon-intensive than legacy assets that rely on leakier, ageing infrastructure. Moreover, oil companies, especially in Europe, are looking beyond fossil fuels. James Thompson of JPMorgan Chase, a bank, has found that the historical correlation between high oil prices and high capital spending on oil and gas has broken down for 11 big private-sector energy giants—a phenomenon he puts down in part to the majors pouring more money into low-carbon projects. Such projects are indeed mushrooming, particularly among the European firms—and in many of the same places as their new hydrocarbon ventures. Last May Eni struck a deal with Sonatrach, Algeria’s state oil firm, to develop green hydrogen from renewable sources. BP is doing the same in Mauritania and TotalEnergies has backed renewable-energy production in South Africa. Looking north, last year Shell paid nearly $2bn for Nature Energy, a Danish producer of “renewable” natural gas (RNG) made from things like agricultural waste. Oswald Clint of Bernstein, a broker, predicts “an era of giga-mergers” in green energy led by the European giants. Last year alone the oil majors signed 22 renewables deals, the five biggest of which added up to $12bn. Mr Clint reckons that in 2030 the European majors could, all told, be spending roughly half their capital expenditure on low-carbon initiatives. Vertical integrationThe supermajors’ north-south realignment is far from complete. bp is still making some investments in the Gulf of Mexico and in December completed its $4.1bn purchase of Archaea, an American maker of RNG. Shell and TotalEnergies are betting on Qatari LNG. ExxonMobil is doubling down on a gas project in Mozambique. Chevron is expanding an oil project in Kazakhstan and, reportedly, reviving talks with Algeria’s government about the country’s vast shale reserves. But these ventures increasingly look like exceptions rather than the rule. The future of energy exploration looks much leaner, a bit greener—and a lot more longitudinal. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

Monday – Friday, 6:00 – 7:00 PM ET

CNBC’s Jim Cramer told investors that he thinks the Federal Reserve will steer the economy to a soft landing.
Stocks fell on Monday as investors grew cautious of rising bond yields.
Cramer, who has said in recent weeks that the market is in bull mode, doubled down on his stance despite the worrying moves in bond yields.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday told investors that he thinks the Federal Reserve will steer the economy to a soft landing.
“The only outcome is a soft landing for the economy, which means it’s foolish to sell now since you’ll only end up buying back those same stocks at higher levels in order to get in ahead of the turn in 2024,” he said.

related investing news

8 hours ago

Stocks fell on Monday as investors grew cautious of rising bond yields. Treasury bond yields gained, with the 10-year yield up by nearly 11 basis points at 3.64% and the 2-year yield rising about 18 basis points to 4.48%. Yields and prices move inversely.
Cramer, who has said in recent weeks that the market is in bull mode, doubled down on his stance despite the worrying moves in bond yields.
“I’d even go as far as to say that the bond market’s wrong … long-term bond yields are lower than short[-term] ones, signaling a recession, and I think that’s simply incorrect,” he said.
Cramer added that a key reason he doesn’t expect a hard landing is the stronger-than-expected January jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 517,000 last month, far surpassing the Dow Jones estimate of 187,000 and December’s gain of 260,000.
“That number unequivocally supports the notion of a soft landing. You simply can’t get a hard landing when you’re seeing this much job creation,” he said.

Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing

Click here to download Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing at no cost to help you build long-term wealth and invest smarter.

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

(The stream is slated to start at 5:30 p.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a video above at that time.)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will deliver an address Monday on the debt ceiling. His speech comes a day before President Joe Biden is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address.

Biden and McCarthy are engaged in the early phases of what is expected to be a months long negotiation on a debt ceiling vote.
The nation hit its statutory limit last month, forcing Treasury Secretary Janey Yellen to take several temporary measures to prevent the government from defaulting.
If Congress does not pass a bill to raise or suspend the nation’s debt limit by early June, it could wreak economic havoc around the world.
But House Republicans say they will not vote to raise the limit without massive spending cuts in return.
“I believe you have to lift the debt ceiling, but you do not lift the debt ceiling without changing your behavior. So it’s got to be both,” McCarthy said after his first meeting with Biden last week.

The White House has so far refused to “negotiate” on a debt limit hike, however. Instead, Biden has called on Congress to pass a so-called “clean” bill, meaning one with no legislative strings attached.
McCarthy recently told reporters that will “never happen.”

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested in a court order in a criminal case against a group of anti-abortion activists that the federal right to abortion might still be protected by the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
The Supreme Court last year, in a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, ruled there was no constitutional right to abortion, overturning the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
A number of states moved to sharply restrict or ban access to abortion on the heels of the high court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, asked lawyers to file briefs on the question of whether the Supreme Court’s decision is only limited to the 14th Amendment.

Agnes Scott College student Jordan Simi (C) participates in a chant during a pro-abortion rights march and rally held in reaction to the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito preparing for a majority of the court to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision later this year, in Atlanta, Georgia, May 3, 2022.
Alyssa Pointer | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday suggested in a court order in a criminal case against a group of anti-abortion activists that the federal right to abortion — which was overturned last year by the Supreme Court — might still be protected by the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly also asked federal prosecutors and lawyers for the defendants to file briefs on the questions of whether the Supreme Court’s ruling is only limited to the 14th Amendment, and whether any other provision in the Constitution “could confer a right to abortion.”

The order by Kollar-Kotelly potentially opens the door to a federal legal challenge on 13th Amendment grounds to state laws that have sharply restricted access to abortion in some states since the high court’s controversial ruling last summer overturning the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which established the federal right to abortion.
The 14th Amendment covers several rights, including citizenship rights and a prohibition against the government depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The amendment’s due process clause was a keystone of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade that established the federal right to abortion.
Kollar-Kotelly in her order, which was previously reported by Politico, wrote that the 13th Amendment “has received substantial attention among scholars and, briefly, in one federal Court of Appeals decision.”
A 1990 paper by a Northwestern University School of Law professor found that the 13th Amendment, with its prohibition against involuntary servitude, provides a textual basis for the right to abortion.

“When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to ‘involuntary servitude’ in violation” of that amendment,” wrote the paper’s author Andrew Koppelman, which was cited by Kollar-Kotelly in her order.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly
Charles Dharapak | AP

That order came in a case where Lauren Handy, a Virginia resident, and nine other anti-abortion activists were charged in an indictment last year with conspiring to obstruct access to a Washington abortion clinic on Oct. 22, 2020.
Handy and the other defendants have asked Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed to the district court in Washington by former President Bill Clinton, to dismiss the indictment for lack of jurisidiction.
Their argument is at least partially based on the grounds that the court’s majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito last year, in the case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” the judge noted in her order.
But Kollar-Kotelly wrote that argument “is predicated on the false legal premises that the “federal law cited in the indictment “only regulates access to abortion,” when in fact is also regulates access to a broad category of reproductive health services.

CNBC Politics

Read more of CNBC’s politics coverage:

Watch live: U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks on the debt ceiling
Failing to raise U.S. debt ceiling would lead to ‘economic and financial catastrophe,’ Yellen says
George Santos denies sexual harassment accusation from ex-prospective staffer
Neo-Nazi and woman charged with conspiring to attack Maryland power grid
Biden delivers State of the Union address amid high inflation, divided Congress that threaten to derail economy
Chinese spy balloon fallout roils Washington and Beijing
Trump appeals nearly $1 million in sanctions for ‘frivolous’ suit he filed against Hillary Clinton
Criminals use Telegram to recruit ‘walkers’ as America’s big banks see an 84% increase in check fraud
New York office of Rep. George Santos vandalized with graffiti, police say
Decades-low unemployment rate is welcome news for Biden ahead of State of the Union
China’s suspected spy balloon prompts Blinken to postpone Beijing trip as Congress seeks answers
Debt ceiling deal no closer as McCarthy, Biden vow to continue talks
Suspected Chinese spy balloon found over northern U.S.
Republicans vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema pulls in cash from Wall Street, real estate titans as she mulls reelection bid
Nancy Pelosi endorses Adam Schiff in California Senate race if Sen. Dianne Feinstein doesn’t run
Biden-McCarthy meeting yields no debt ceiling deal, but speaker says markets should be encouraged
Russia has committed more than 65,000 war crimes in Ukraine, prosecutor general says
2024 GOP presidential primary starts to take shape as Trump’s potential rivals Haley, Scott, Pence make moves

“Nevertheless, to the extent that Defendants seek resolution of this matter via a constitutional holding, the Court will require additional briefing,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
The judge wrote that the question before the high court in Dobbs “was not whether any provision of the Constitution provided a right to abortion.”
“Rather, the question before the Court in Dobbs was whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provided such a right,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
“That is why neither the majority nor the dissent in Dobbs analyzed anything but the Fourteenth Amendment,” she wrote. “In fact, on the Court’s initial review, not a single [friend-of-the-court] brief mentioned anything but the Fourteenth Amendment and the unratified Equal Rights Amendment.”
The 14th Amendment’s due process clause was cited by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, which established that there was a right to privacy contained in that clause and elsewhere in the Constitution which gave people the right to obtain an abortion until a fetus became viable.
In its ruling tossing out Roe, the Supreme Court wrote in its majority opinion that the 14th Amendment “clearly does not protect the right to an abortion.”
Kollar-Kotelly wrote that “it is entirely possible that the Court might have held in Dobbs that some other provision of the Constitution provided a right to access reproductive services had that issue been raised.”
“However, it was not raised,” she noted.
And she wrote that since last year, the court’s holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion “is often read as saying “the Supreme Court held that no provision of the Constitution extends any right to reproductive health services.”
Kollar-Ketelly wrote that for her part, she “is uncertain that this is the case.”

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

Canoo said it will sell new shares to institutional investors at a substantial discount.
The startup is low on cash as it works to get its EVs into full production.
The deal will dilute the value of existing shareholders’ positions, and it sent the stock sharply lower.

The Lifestyle Vehicle electric minivan from Canoo.
Source: Canoo

Shares of electric vehicle startup Canoo were sharply lower in early trading on Monday after the company said that it has agreed to sell discounted shares to raise $52.5 million.
Canoo’s shares closed at $1.09 on Monday, down over 12%. The stock has lost more than 80% of its value in the last 12 months.

Canoo said in a statement that it has entered into agreements with institutional investors to sell 50 million new shares, together with warrants that give the investors an option to buy up to 50 million more. The investors are paying $1.05 per share, and each share comes with one warrant that can be exercised at $1.30 per share.
Canoo didn’t name the institutional investors involved in the deal.
The deal price is a substantial discount, as Canoo’s shares closed at $1.25 on Friday. For current shareholders, the deal also means significant dilution of their holdings, as it will add between 50 million and 100 million shares to the company’s current outstanding share count of 356 million.
Canoo said in November that it was running low on cash and that it expected to raise funds by issuing new shares. It had just $6.8 million on hand as of the end of the third quarter.
Canoo said Monday that it will use the net proceeds of the offering for “general working capital purposes.” The company is expected to report its fourth-quarter results later this month.

Stock chart icon

A 5-day chart of Canoo stock.

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More