Finance

It is Malawi’s rainy season and smartly dressed worshippers are spilling out from church. Couples, arm-in-arm, dodge potholes as they progress down the street. The migration moves past clothes shops and bars, losing stragglers to afternoon drinking, until it meets a plane of dirt, where thousands await a football match. A thin film of dust kicked up by the players settles on the churchgoers’ pale dress shirts and floral skirts. The scene looks like a typical Sunday. But in Dzaleka, a camp that has held refugees from central African wars since 1994, there is a difference: people are not resting after a hard week of work. More

The metal has been used since ancient times. From the Bronze Age until the 18th century, when it was supplanted by porcelain, tin was the main ingredient in alloys used for kitchenware. Yet it is also extremely modern. Its conductive properties mean that its main use today is as a solder in the construction of electric cars, electronic circuits and solar panels—all central to automation and the energy transition. Lately the market for tin has caught fire. At nearly $38,000 a tonne (see chart), its price on the London Metal Exchange (LME) is up by almost a third since the start of the year. It has been the best-performing metal this year—shinier even than gold. More

Javier Milei can barely contain his excitement. Since December, when the IMF’s last agreement with Argentina ran out, the country’s president has sought a fresh bail-out. Indeed, his efforts include an executive order to remove the need for Congress to approve the deal. On March 30th Argentina’s finance minister said that the government hoped for 40% of the money, which may amount to $20bn, up front. Three days later, Mr Milei hopped on a plane to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump and, he hoped, help close the deal. More

Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region.
“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”
Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion Hong Kong dollars ($2.27 billion) — the best start to a year since 2021, according to KPMG.

The Exchange Square Complex, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on Feb. 26, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region, following the news of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence breakthrough in late January.
It’s a level of excitement that has not been felt for more than three years, despite the overhang of U.S. trade tensions. Initial public offerings are a lucrative way for early investors in startups to exit and reap a return.

“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”
“The U.S. long-term fund has returned. It shows investors are getting more confident [about] China,” he said, adding that post-IPO performance has also been encouraging.
Chinese bubble tea giant Mixue went public on March 3 in a highly oversubscribed Hong Kong listing. And in a sign of more to come, Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) filed in February for what could be Hong Kong’s largest IPO since 2021, when short-video company Kuaishou listed.

News of China-based DeepSeek’s claims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in reasoning capabilities at a lower cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips for training AI models — hit global tech stocks in late January, while spurring a rally in China. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged to three-year highs.
Chinese President Xi Jinping also held a rare meeting with tech entrepreneurs in February, and Beijing has signaled greater support for the private sector, after taking a more restrictive stance in recent years.

Six initial public offerings in Hong Kong raised more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in the first quarter — a jump from just one listing of that size in the year-ago period — according to KPMG.
In all, the consultancy said, Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion HKD — the best start to a year since 2021.
There’s still a long way to go before recovering to that level. Hong Kong saw 32 IPOs in the first quarter of 2021 that raised a whopping 132.7 billion HKD, according to KPMG.
The Hong Kong stock exchange has adjusted its listing rules in the interim, including ones that support companies already listed in mainland China to offer shares in Hong Kong.
In addition to CATL, other companies listed in mainland China — Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Mabwell, Haitian Flavoring and Food, Fortior Tech and Sanhua Intelligent Controls — are “actively seeking Hong Kong listings,” said Tiger Brokers, an underwriter of many Chinese companies’ IPOs in the U.S. and Hong Kong.
“Chinese regulators are encouraging companies to list in Hong Kong to broaden financing channels and support the outbound merger and acquisition needs of Chinese enterprises,” the firm said.

Still not out of the woods

Back in the summer of 2021, the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing company Didi’s IPO in the U.S. prompted both countries’ regulators to scrutinize what was then a wave of Chinese companies listing in New York.
The major issues have since been resolved and Beijing has clarified rules for Chinese companies wanting to list outside the mainland. But the Trump administration indicated in its “America First Investment Policy” that it could increase scrutiny on U.S. capital flowing to China, on top of heightened tariffs.
The U.S. and China have yet to indicate when their two leaders might meet in an attempt to forge a deal. A surge of interest in AI and tech are also not yet enough to speed up a recovery in China’s economy.
“At this point in time, all we can see is the good indicators,” EY’s Chan said. But “there could be one single incident happening which could pretty much reverse the trend.”
“Things tend to have a pattern,” he said. “If things can keep on for three months, four months, it will likely continue for the rest of the year.” More

Few expected him to go so far. In a stunning shift in American economic policy, Donald Trump has yanked up tariffs across the board. On April 2nd, speaking from the Rose Garden of the White House, he declared that America would impose levies of 10% on all imports plus higher “reciprocal” rates—much higher in some cases—to get back at countries which, in his view, have treated America unfairly. Coming on top of other tariffs announced since his return to the White House, the result is that, in the space of ten weeks, he has erected a wall of protection around the American economy akin to that of the late 1800s (see chart). More

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.
“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.” More

Apollo has borrowed over $15bn from the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Des Moines, one of 11 privately owned but government-sponsored banks. On March 25th the private-markets giant made its first appearance in an annual league table of institutions receiving FHLB loans, coming in at number seven. (JPMorgan Chase was top; five smaller banks made up the balance.) More

A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association annual convention in Houston, Texas, on May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 77.5%, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion, surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies such as Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

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Newsmax was listed on the New York Stock Exchange via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional initial public offering. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors. In this case, it was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans, although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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