Economy

TORONTO (Reuters) -Four of Canada’s biggest lenders said on Friday they were withdrawing from a global banking sector climate coalition, joining six major U.S. banks.The departures from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance began with Goldman Sachs’ announcement on Dec. 6 and come ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House next week. Trump has been critical of efforts by governments to prescribe climate-change policies.The four Canadian banks are TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, National Bank of Canada (OTC:NTIOF) and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (NYSE:CM) ( CIBC (TSX:CM)).The other big U.S. banks that have withdrawn are Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) and JPMorgan.The Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a UN-sponsored initiative set up by former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, was launched in 2021 to encourage financial institutions to limit the effects of climate change and push toward achieving net-zero emissions.The Canadian banks said in separate statements that they were equipped to work outside the alliance and develop their climate strategies.”The NZBA was formed at a time when the global industry was scaling up efforts to take action on climate, and served a valuable role in galvanizing these efforts and establishing momentum,” CIBC said in a statement.”As this space has evolved and matured, and having made significant progress alongside our clients in these areas, we are now well-positioned to further this work outside of the formal structure of the NZBA,” it said.Canadian banks have faced mounting pressure to address climate-related risks arising from their funding activities in the past few years. The country’s banking regulator has also introduced guidelines for financial institutions to manage their climate-related risks.Separately, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced it had withdrawn from a global body of central banks and regulators devoted to exploring ways to police climate risk in the financial system. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Federal prosecutors on Friday dropped their corruption case against former New York Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin, following the death of a key witness.Benjamin, 48, had been expected to face trial in Manhattan federal court after being accused of funneling a $50,000 state grant to a real estate developer in exchange for campaign contributions.But the developer, Gerald Migdol, who pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud charges and was cooperating with the government, died last February.In a court filing, prosecutors said that based on a review of the evidence and in light of Migdol’s death, “the government has determined that it can no longer prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the charges in the indictment.”U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken approved the dismissal request late Friday afternoon.Benjamin, a Democrat, had faced charges including bribery, honest services wire fraud and conspiracy.”Today’s vindication of Brian Benjamin is a timely reminder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s famous words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,'” Benjamin’s lawyers Barry Berke, Dani James and Darren LaVerne said in a joint statement. “We always believed this day would come.”Migdol had been a real estate developer in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, where Benjamin was once a state senator.Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, tapped Benjamin in August 2021 for the state’s No. 2 job, which she had held before succeeding Andrew Cuomo as governor. Benjamin resigned in April 2022 when the criminal charges were announced. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The outgoing head of the Federal Communications Commission said a massive Chinese-linked cyber-espionage operation against U.S. telecoms firms known as “Salt Typhoon” is a “clarion call” to address significant telecommunications security issues.”Salt Typhoon is a clarion call that reminds us that the security of our networks is absolutely vital for our national and economic security,” FCC (BME:FCC) Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, who steps down on Monday, said in a Reuters interview.”We’ve got to make some changes … We have to figure out how it happened. We have to figure out the extent of the incursion, and then, most importantly, we have to take action to make sure it never happens again.”Senator Ben Ray Lujan, the top Democrat on a telecom subcommittee, said China’s alleged efforts likely represent “the largest telecommunications hack in our nation’s history.”Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and AT&T (NYSE:T) have said they were impacted by Salt Typhoon but said last month their networks are now secure. The FCC voted on Thursday to require telecommunications to have cybersecurity risk management plans. Rosenworcel predicted there would be other threats from malicious actors and nation states in the future, and called for more to be done to make the networks more resilient.Incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the Salt Typhoon attack “represents an unacceptable risk to our national security” but criticized the commission action.”We should be taking a series of actions that will restore America’s deterrence and harden our networks going forward,” Carr added. Under Rosenworcel, the FCC has taken steps to crackdown on Chinese telecoms including seeking to boost security of information transmitted across the internet after Washington said a Chinese carrier misrouted traffic. The FCC is also reviewing rules governing undersea cables that carry most internet traffic.The FCC voted in 2022 to prevent Huawei, ZTE (HK:0763) and other Chinese companies from winning approvals for new telecommunications equipment. Congress in December approved $3.1 billion for U.S. telecom companies to remove equipment made by Huawei and ZTE from American wireless networks. More

This is in addition to $176 million awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last year to complete the late-stage development and testing of a pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccine against the H5N1 avian influenza.The award will also support the expansion of clinical studies for up to five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza, Moderna said on Friday.”Avian flu variants have proven to be particularly unpredictable and dangerous to humans in the past. Accelerating the development of new vaccines will allow us to stay ahead and ensure that Americans have the tools they need to stay safe,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. The drugmaker said it is preparing to advance its experimental shot, mRNA-1018, into late-stage trials based on preliminary data from an early-to-mid stage study and plans to present the data at an upcoming medical meeting.Shares of the company were up 5% at $35.8 in extended trading on Friday. The award was made through the Rapid Response Partnership Vehicle (RRPV) Consortium with funding from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Nearly 70 people in the U.S., most of them farmworkers, have contracted bird flu since April, as the virus has circulated among poultry flocks and dairy herds.Most infections in humans have been mild, but one fatality was reported in Louisiana last week.The risk to the general public from bird flu is low, and there has been no further evidence of person to person spread, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the government will reach its statutory borrowing limit on Tuesday and begin employing “extraordinary measures” to keep from breaching the cap and risking a potential catastrophic default.Yellen, in a letter on Friday to congressional leaders just three days before the Biden administration turns over U.S. government control to President-elect Donald Trump and his team, said the Treasury would begin using extraordinary measures on Jan. 21. “The period of time that extraordinary measures may last is subject to considerable uncertainty, including the challenges of forecasting the payments and receipts of the U.S. Government months into the future,” Yellen said in the letter.Yellen said the Treasury would suspend investments in two government employee benefit funds through March 14, to claw back borrowing capacity under the $36.1 trillion debt ceiling. As of Thursday, the Treasury reported borrowings of $36.08 trillion.The move will suspend new investments that are not immediately required to pay benefits from the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. Once the debt limit is increased or suspended, the funds are required to be made whole.Yellen said there was “considerable uncertainty” over how long the measures would last and urged Congress to raise or suspend the debt limit “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”TRUMP’S PROBLEMIn late December, Yellen had said that the debt cap would likely be reached between Jan. 14 and 23 after Congress opted against including an extension or permanent revocation of the limit in a last-minute budget deal near the end of the year.Trump himself had urged lawmakers to extend or repeal the debt ceiling and later blasted an earlier failure to do so in 2023 as “one of the dumbest political decisions made in years.”But many Republican lawmakers view the limit as an important leverage point in fiscal negotiations. The debt ceiling issue presents an early challenge to Yellen’s expected successor, Trump Treasury pick Scott Bessent. The hedge fund manager told a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday that the ceiling is a “nuanced convention” but if Trump wants to eliminate it, he would work with Congress and the White House to make that happen.The Treasury has a number of extraordinary balance sheet measures it can employ to avoid default, which budget analysts say could last several months, depending on the strength of tax revenues. Ultimately, failure to raise, suspend or eliminate the debt limit could prevent the Treasury from paying all of its obligations. A default on U.S. default would likely have severe economic consequences.A debt limit is a cap set by Congress on how much money the U.S. government can borrow. Because the government spends more money than it collects in tax revenue, lawmakers need to periodically tackle the issue – a politically difficult task, as many are reluctant to vote for more debt.The debt ceiling’s history dates back to 1917, when Congress gave the Treasury more borrowing flexibility to finance America’s entry into World War One but with certain limits.Lawmakers approved the first modern limit on aggregate debt in 1939 at $45 billion, and have approved 103 increases since as spending outran tax revenue. Publicly held debt was 98% of U.S. gross domestic product as of October, compared with 32% in October 2001. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has protected about 84%, or $96.7 billion in clean energy grants created by its signature climate law from any clawback by the next administration, a White House official said on Friday.WHY IT’S IMPORTANTThe 84% of the grants from the Inflation Reduction Act have been “obligated”, meaning contracts have been signed between U.S. agencies and recipients. The outgoing administration hopes this will help to continue the deployment of clean energy even after Monday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, a climate change skeptic who has pledged to rescind all unspent IRA funds.BY THE NUMBERSHere are examples of programs that have been obligated. About 94% of Department of Energy funding for state energy efficiency rebate programs for home retrofits and appliances, or about $8.8 billion, has been obligated. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program to help electric co-ops to procure more clean energy has been 97% obligated, or about $9.45 billion. At the Environmental Protection Agency, some $38 billion has been obligated, with 100% in a greenhouse gas reduction fund obligated and about 94% of all of its IRA grant programs obligated. Some $11 billion has been announced but not obligated. Much of that is for upcoming fiscal years and for USDA programs. KEY QUOTES“This is all big progress and ensures that these investments should actually flow to communities and recipients as intended,” Kristina Costa, a deputy assistant to Biden and director of the clean energy office at the White House, told Reuters.Even though some $11 billion in funds are not obligated, the fact that they have been announced publicly “creates some political pressure to not rescind those commitments, particularly in areas where those programs are going to Republican states and districts in rural areas and otherwise,” Costa said. More

(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled against TikTok’s bid to avoid a ban that could shut the app down in just two days and impact millions of users who rely on the platform for entertainment, ecommerce and ad dollars. The looming ban is the end result of 2024 legislation passed on national security concerns that called for TikTok parent ByteDance to sell the popular short-video app or see it shut in the United States on Jan. 19.It remained unclear how long a potential ban would stay in place as President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Monday, has said he would try to find a “political resolution” of the issue to keep the app operating in the United States. On Friday, Trump said he spoke with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on several topics, including TikTok. Here’s what could happen on Sunday.WHAT HAPPENS TO THE APP?New users will not be able to download TikTok from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) app stores and existing users will not be able to update the app, because the law prohibits any entity from facilitating the download or maintenance of the TikTok application.Cloud service provider Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) could see some disruption to its work with TikTok. Oracle hosts TikTok’s U.S. user data on its servers, reviews the app’s source code and delivers it to app stores.TikTok plans to keep paying its 7,000 employees in the U.S., the company’s leadership has said in an internal memo. HOW WILL USERS BE AFFECTED?TikTok’s about 170 million users in the U.S. will likely still be able to use the app because it is already downloaded on their phones, experts say. But over time, without software and security updates, the app will become redundant.At best, a web-based version of the service might be accessible that has fewer features than the app, and even that might not work, experts have said.Some users could try to access TikTok through virtual private networks, or VPNs, which can conceal the internet protocol, or IP, address of a user and thereby their location.Other Chinese social media apps such as RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu, are expected to continue gaining traction among U.S. users. Content creators who have built businesses from their TikTok followings are preparing for the app’s potential shutdown and redirecting their followers to alternatives such as Instagram and YouTube. WHAT WILL ADVERTISERS DO?Advertisers have rushed to prepare contingency plans this week as the ban will jeopardize their campaigns on the platforms. One marketing executive described it as a “hair on fire” moment for the ad world, after months of conventional wisdom saying that a solution would materialize to keep the short-video app up and running.TikTok has continued to pitch advertisers on new features, like a tool launching in test form that would make it easier to create, modify and add advertisements in bulk.If a ban does occur, more than $11 billion in annual U.S. ad investment would be up for grabs, according to a forecast from marketing group WARC Media.”Wall Street will be watching the results of Meta (NASDAQ:META), Snap, and others to see who benefits from this rapid spend shift,” said Craig Atkinson, CEO of digital marketing agency Code3.Some advertisers may continue spending beyond Jan. 19 on TikTok and reevaluate if the app sees declining usage or performance, said Jason Lee, executive vice president of brand safety at media agency Horizon Media.WHAT HAPPENS TO U.S.-CHINA TRADE RELATIONS?A TikTok ban could worsen trade tensions between the U.S. and China that were already strained after export curbs on advanced American semiconductor technology to Beijing. However, “such a ban would be no surprise as it has been under discussion for five years,” said Sean Ennis (NYSE:EBF), professor from the University of East Anglia.Trump could try to use an executive action to protect TikTok for his four years in office, but he could use the risk of him changing his position to extract something meaningful from China, analysts at LightShed Partners have said.Reversing the ban could give Trump some bargaining power with China, analysts say.WHO ARE THE POTENTIAL BUYERS?TikTok has repeatedly said it cannot be sold from ByteDance.That hasn’t deterred billionaire businessman Frank McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. His consortium values the app without its algorithm at around $20 billion.Other media have reported that Chinese officials are in talks about potentially selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to billionaire Elon Musk, a big financial backer of Trump. TikTok called the report “fiction”. More

The East African nation struck the four-year, $3.4 billion program deal last July, after it undertook far-reaching reforms including the floatation of its birr currency, to enable it to try to put its debt restructuring back on track.”The authorities continue their efforts to restore debt sustainability and are taking steps to secure a debt treatment. The progress made on debt restructuring negotiations under the Common Framework is welcome,” the IMF said in a statement. “The financing assurances received, and adjustment efforts made are consistent with IMF policy requirements and program parameters.”The Fund’s staff and the government reached agreement on the second review in late November.The IMF has assessed that Ethiopia’s economy has fared better than expected under the reform program, with projected surge in inflationary pressure failing to materialise and hard currency reserves rising faster than the envisaged rate.After unusually fast reviews of Ethiopia’s programme that were aimed at closely monitoring the impact of the reforms, the IMF said in November it would switch to the conventional six-month review schedule.The IMF’s role in Ethiopia’s debt overhaul has come under criticism from some quarters, including from World Bank staff, who questioned the conclusions reached by the Fund’s debt sustainability assessment in an internal document last year. More