During a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki expressed the Biden administration's reaction to a World Health Organization report on the origins of COVID-19, saying the report is still being reviewed, but that it lacks access and transparency and gives no greater understanding of the origins of the virus.
Cecilia Vega reports from Washington, D.C., as President Joe Biden travels to Pittsburgh to unveil his new infrastructure plan.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Biden is “absolutely” committed to nominating a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
The Florida congressman insisted he’s done nothing wrong and is the victim of an extortion attempt after new reports that the Justice Department was investigating the alleged relationship.
Mar.31 -- White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese says President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan is an investment in America and will create millions of jobs. He speaks on "Bloomberg Surveillance."
The letter, obtained by Yahoo Finance, stated that Navient and other servicers "have the ability of offer a unique perspective on this crisis. Navient is one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers."
The documents also detail how senior White House officials tried to warn then-President Donald Trump of the danger of Covid-19 last March.
Major Biden is back in the dog house. The president’s adopted German shepherd was involved in another biting incident on Monday afternoon, just a few weeks after reportedly nipping a White House security guard. “Yes, Major nipped someone on a walk,” first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary Michael LaRosa told CNN.
In South Texas over 4,000 migrants are crammed into one facility, four times its capacity before the global health crisis.Most are unaccompanied minors.The Biden administration allowed reporters to tour this processing facility in Donna on Tuesday.Acting executive officer for U.S border patrol in the region, Oscar Escamilla, said many of the children have gone through long and harrowing journeys on their own."These kids cross by themselves. Obviously, the parent pays a fee to the smuggler, the cartel member or the smuggler at this point will bring the kid over... will place them in a raft and say, 'OK, go.When you get to the other side, they'll explain to them there's going to be an officer, they'll explain what we wear and tell them, turn yourselves into them."A top U.S. official said on Tuesday he expects more than a million migrants to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border this year, a growing humanitarian challenge for President Joe Biden, as more people are driven to the border by poor economic conditions, natural disasters, and hope to stay in the U.S. under his administration.The Donna facility footage shared with Reuters showed young children sitting inside a playpen, some as young as 3 years old.More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been held here for longer than a legal limit of 72 hours.Escamilla said these kids slip through the cracks of the immigration system."There's a little girl that I talked to a little while ago. She said that she had lost her mom and that she doesn't have a father... I asked her, 'What state are you going to? What's your final destination?' She said, 'I don't know. All I know is it snows there. It's all I know.'"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement they were "working around the clock" to quickly move children out of the packed border facilities.The government Health and Human Services refugee office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When fast-food restaurants started springing up on every street corner in the middle of the 20th century, almost every menu featured burgers, hot dogs, fries, sodas and shakes. But fast-forward a few...
On a flight Tuesday from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, Ind., two leaders in the House Republican conference discussed a memo that argues that their party's future demands they "embrace our new coalition" because "President Trump's gift didn’t come with a receipt."Why it matters: The document, titled "Cementing GOP as the Working Class Party," leaves no doubt that Republicans — at least in the House of Representatives — will be doubling down on Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeBehind the scenes: On the afternoon flight between fundraisers, home state Rep. Jim Banks, who leads the largest bloc of House conservatives, the Republican Study Committee, handed his memo to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.Banks argues in the memo that "both parties are undergoing coalitional transformations" and that Republicans shouldn't fight the trend of corporate donors pulling back from the GOP."Our electoral success in the 2022 midterm election will be determined by our willingness to embrace our new coalition," the memo says. "House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class.""There is an embittered and loud minority in the GOP that finds our new coalition distasteful, but President Trump's gift didn’t come with a receipt," he adds.What's next: Banks offered McCarthy ideas for how Republicans could make further inroads with working class voters. On the messaging front, he recommends:Contrasting the GOP's immigration policies against "Biden's border crisis"Hammering the Chinese Communist Party's "predatory trade practices" and arguing that "Democrats' coziness with China results from their coziness with Wall Street"Attacking Democrats for COVID lockdowns, hammering "wokeness and identity politics" and going after Big Tech.He suggests Republicans hold "working class roundtables" and create a "working families task force."When it comes to fundraising, Banks argues that members should effectively embrace their pariah status in corporate America and campaign against corporate fundraising. "Members should use corporations' preference for the Democrat [sic] Party to drive individual donations," he writes. "It worked for me.""When Eli Lilly and several other corporate PACs blacklisted me" for objecting to the certification of President Biden's victory on Jan. 6, "I reached out to individual donors, explained the situation, and asked for their support.""Once my supporters learned that liberal corporations blacklisted me because I refused to cave to their demands on January 6th, they were happy to make up the difference," he writes. "That's how, in the first quarter of this year, I regained every penny of the $241,000 I lost in corporate money through individual donations."Every Republican Member in a competitive district should know exactly how much corporate cash their opponent received in 2020, and they should relay those numbers to their constituents," he adds. "The NRCC should arm Members with that information and commission advertisements that contrast Republican challengers with corporate-backed Democrat incumbents."Read the full memo. More from Axios: Sign up to get the latest market trends with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free
Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne and her team recorded on March 29 footage showing what she described as “profoundly inadequate” conditions inside a migrant facility in Donna, Texas.Van Duyne said thousands of children were crammed in at the center as a “direct result” of what she called President Joe Biden’s “reckless actions.”Van Duyne tweeted: “Border Patrol warned Biden what would happen if he chose to open the borders. They pleaded with him to stop a crisis before it started & he refused.”Questioned regarding the situation at the US-Mexico border on March 25, Biden said officials were “sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming.”Biden said that there was a seasonal variation to migrant movement: “There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”NBC said the Donna center had a pandemic capacity of 250. However, 4,100 people were there on March 30. Over 3,400 of them were children, NBC said. Credit: Beth Van Duyne via Storyful
Police arrested Brandon Elliot, 38, on charges of felony assault as a hate crime after they say surveillance video shows him repeatedly kicking an Asian woman to the ground and in the head.
A longtime bond bull tells Barron's that Democrats' huge spending programs could push 10-year Treasury yields to 2%.
Joe Biden is expected to announce tax increases targeting the wealthy on Wednesday, when he unveils his ambitious nearly $3trillion (£2.1trn) infrastructure package aimed at keeping the US competitive with China. The president will announce the first part of his "Build Back Better" programme in the former steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, outlining spending proposals forecast over the next 10 years devoted to fixing the country's crumbling roads, transport, sewage systems and other essential works. Mr Biden’s proposal will reportedly impose a global minimum tax on profits from foreign organisations, increase capital gains taxes for the rich, corporate tax rate to 28 per cent from 21 per cent and see a return to the George W. Bush-era individual rate of 39.6 per cent for those making over $400,000 (£292,000). The rest of the money could be made up by borrowing. The project revolves around a pledge the Democrat made on the campaign trail to modernise ageing infrastructure, to meet the challenge of competing against an industrious Beijing, and to tackle the key issue of climate change.
The Education Department's (ED) announced plans to cancel about $1.3 billion in student loan debt for 41,000 borrowers who had previously qualified for discharge but failed to receive it because of incomplete paperwork.
The admonition from the judge came after her replies to a defense attorney for Derek Chauvin, the officer on trial in George Floyd's death.
FOX News national correspondent William La Jeunesse has the details from Otay Mesa, California on 'America Reports'
(Bloomberg) -- From his perch high above Midtown Manhattan, just across from Carnegie Hall, Bill Hwang was quietly building one of the world’s greatest fortunes.Even on Wall Street, few ever noticed him -- until suddenly, everyone did.Hwang and his private investment firm, Archegos Capital Management, are now at the center of one of the biggest margin calls of all time -- a multibillion-dollar fiasco involving secretive market bets that were dangerously leveraged and unwound in a blink.Hwang’s most recent ascent can be pieced together from stocks dumped by banks in recent days -- ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc. GSX Techedu Inc., Baidu Inc. -- all of which had soared this year, sometimes confounding traders who couldn’t fathom why.One part of Hwang’s portfolio, which has been traded in blocks since Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co., was worth almost $40 billion last week. Bankers reckon that Archegos’s net capital -- essentially Hwang’s wealth -- had reached north of $10 billion. And as disposals keep emerging, estimates of his firm’s total positions keep climbing: tens of billions, $50 billion, even more than $100 billion.It evaporated in mere days.“I’ve never seen anything like this -- how quiet it was, how concentrated, and how fast it disappeared,” said Mike Novogratz, a career macro investor and former partner at Goldman Sachs who’s been trading since 1994. “This has to be one of the single greatest losses of personal wealth in history.”Late Monday in New York, Archegos broke days of silence on the episode.“This is a challenging time for the family office of Archegos Capital Management, our partners and employees,” Karen Kessler, a spokesperson for the firm, said in an emailed statement. “All plans are being discussed as Mr. Hwang and the team determine the best path forward.”The cascade of trading losses has reverberated from New York to Zurich to Tokyo and beyond, and leaves myriad unanswered questions, including the big one: How could someone take such big risks, facilitated by so many banks, under the noses of regulators the world over?One part of the answer is that Hwang set up as a family office with limited oversight and then employed financial derivatives to amass big stakes in companies without ever having to disclose them. Another part is that global banks embraced him as a lucrative customer, despite a record of insider trading and attempted market manipulation that drove him out of the hedge fund business a decade ago.A disciple of hedge-fund legend Julian Robertson, Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang shuttered Tiger Asia Management and Tiger Asia Partners after settling an SEC civil lawsuit in 2012 accusing them of insider trading and manipulating Chinese banks stocks. Hwang and the firms paid $44 million, and he agreed to be barred from the investment advisory industry.He soon opened Archegos -- Greek for “one who leads the way” -- and structured it as a family office.Family offices that exclusively manage one fortune are generally exempt from registering as investment advisers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. So they don’t have to disclose their owners, executives or how much they manage -- rules designed to protect outsiders who invest in a fund. That approach makes sense for small family offices, but if they swell to the size of a hedge fund whale they can still pose risks, this time to outsiders in the broader market.“This does raise questions about the regulation of family offices once again,” said Tyler Gellasch, a former SEC aide who now runs the Healthy Markets trade group. “The question is if it’s just friends and family why do we care? The answer is that they can have significant market impacts, and the SEC’s regulatory regime even after Dodd-Frank doesn’t clearly reflect that.”Valuable CustomerArchegos established trading partnerships with firms including Nomura Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG. For a time after the SEC case, Goldman refused to do business with him on compliance grounds, but relented as rivals profited by meeting his needs.The full picture of his holdings is still emerging, and it’s not clear what positions derailed, or what hedges he had set up.One reason is that Hwang never filed a 13F report of his holdings, which every investment manager holding more than $100 million in U.S. equities must fill out at the end of each quarter. That’s because he appears to have structured his trades using total return swaps, essentially putting the positions on the banks’ balance sheets. Swaps also enable investors to add a lot of leverage to a portfolio.Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for instance, are listed as the largest holders of GSX Techedu, a Chinese online tutoring company that’s been repeatedly targeted by short sellers. Banks may own shares for a variety of reasons that include hedging swap exposures from trades with their customers.‘Unhappy Investors’Goldman increased its position 54% in January, according to regulatory filings. Overall, banks reported holding at least 68% of GSX’s outstanding shares, according to a Bloomberg analysis of filings. Banks held at least 40% of IQIYI Inc, a Chinese video entertainment company, and 29% of ViacomCBS -- all of which Archegos had bet on big.“I’m sure there are a number of really unhappy investors who have bought those names over the last couple of weeks,” and now regret it, Doug Cifu, chief executive officer of electronic-trading firm Virtu Financial Inc., said Monday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. He predicted regulators will examine whether “there should be more transparency and disclosure by a family office.”Without the need to market his fund to external investors, Hwang’s strategies and performance remained secret from the outside world. Even as his fortune swelled, the 50-something kept a low profile. Despite once working for Robertson’s Tiger Management, he wasn’t well-known on Wall Street or in New York social circles.Hwang is a trustee of the Fuller Theology Seminary, and co-founder of the Grace and Mercy Foundation, whose mission is to serve the poor and oppressed. The foundation had assets approaching $500 million at the end of 2018, according to its latest filing.“It’s not all about the money, you know,” he said in a rare interview with a Fuller Institute executive in 2018, in which he spoke about his calling as an investor and his Christian faith. “It’s about the long term, and God certainly has a long-term view.”His extraordinary run of fortune turned early last week as ViacomCBS Inc. announced a secondary offering of its shares. Its stock price plunged 9% the next day.The value of other securities believed to be in Archegos’ portfolio based on the positions that were block traded followed.By Thursday’s close, the value of the portfolio fell 27% -- more than enough to wipe out the equity of an investor who market participants estimate was six to eight times levered.It’s also hurt some of the banks that served Hwang. Nomura and Credit Suisse warned of “significant” losses in the wake of the selloff and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. has flagged a potential $300 million loss.“You have to wonder who else is out there with one of these invisible fortunes,” said Novogratz. “The psychology of all that leverage with no risk management, it’s almost nihilism.”(Updates with latest bank to detail exposure in penultimate paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for a sexual relationship he had with a 17-year-old girl, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Activists pressured Delta and other companies for stronger condemnations of Georgia's new voting law.
