Russia's Putin To Hold Summit Talks With India's Modi In Delhi

Florida's entire U.S. congressional delegation on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to leave their state out of a plan by his administration to expand oil and gas drilling to new coastal areas, saying it would threaten the state's military and tourism industries.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

The letter to Trump from Florida Senators Rick Scott and Ashley Moody and the state's 28 members of the House of Representatives was a rare bipartisan pushback against the Republican president's policies. Most of Florida's members of Congress are Republicans.

KEY QUOTE

"The risks posed by new offshore drilling far outweigh any short-term gains," the lawmakers said in their letter.

BY THE NUMBERS

More than 50,000 jobs in the Florida Panhandle are tied to operations at military facilities connected to the Gulf Test Range, a vast area over the Gulf of Mexico where advanced weapons and air combat tactics are tested, the letter said, noting that drilling would result in encroachment of the Gulf Test Range.

Florida beaches generate $127.7 billion a year in tourism spending and support 2.1 million jobs.

CONTEXT

The Interior Department last month unveiled a proposal that opened the door to future leasing in the eastern portion of the Gulf of Mexico, which has long been protected from energy development because it is used for military testing and training. Florida officials, including Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, have opposed changes to that policy.

Trump's Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, is on the eastern side of the state.

THE REPLY

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source: Investing

A 2025 refrain many of us likely have heard would be: "You're buying that? You're doing that? In this economy?"

But this problem does not seem to extend to the world's most valuable company Nvidia, which is sitting on a problem most of us would like to have: having too much cash.

At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments. That's up from $13.3 billion in January 2023, just after OpenAI released ChatGPT.

And this is even after splashing out billions of dollars on stakes in companies: $1 billion for Nokia, $5 billion for Intel, $10 billion for Anthropic—and a jaw-dropping $100 billion commitment to OpenAI still under discussion.

To add to this, Nvidia announced it would invest $2 billion in Synopsys this week.

Nvidia, which has gone from a niche maker of graphic cards to the world's most valuable company, has also made $37 billion in buybacks and dividends, with a further $60 billion authorised.

When your biggest challenge is figuring out how to spend $60 billion, you're living the ultimate corporate luxury.

To take a line from ABBA: "Money money money, must be funny, in Nvidia's world."

What you need to know today

Microsoft Office price hikes. Microsoft said Thursday that it will increase the prices of Office productivity software subscriptions for commercial and government clients on July 1. The company has been facing increased competition in recent years from Google.

Bitcoin falls, but it's normal. Bitcoin's more than 30% drop from its record high underscores volatility, but history shows that price swings are all part of bitcoin's normal operating pattern and may often precede a rally.

More departures from Apple. The firm's general counsel, Kate Adams, and Vice President for environment, policy, and social initiatives Lisa Jackson, are retiring from the company. This comes after the departure of its AI chief, and its chief operating officer's retirement.

Markets little changed. U.S. markets traded mixed Thursday stateside as investors assessed a report showing announced job cuts in November from U.S. employers surpassed 1 million for the year. The pan-European Stoxx 600 closed 0.5% higher.

[PRO] AI stocks at a reasonable price? Investors should turn to less explored pockets of the market to find stocks that are a play on the artificial intelligence boom but also offer growth at a reasonable price, Citigroup analysts say.

Ukraine, trade, pandas: What China's Xi and France's Macron discussed in Beijing

China said it was open to importing more goods from France in exchange for a "fair, conducive environment" for Chinese businesses in the European nation, President Xi Jinping told his counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Thursday as they met in Beijing.

The French president kicked off a 3-day visit to China on Wednesday — his first trip to Beijing in more than two years — on the heels of growing frictions over a range of topics including trade imbalance and the long-running war in Ukraine.

In a separate readout from the French government, Macron told Xi that the two countries must work together based on "a balanced relationship," while urging Beijing to help end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Source: CNBC

Japan's households unexpectedly cut spending for the first time in six months, in a sign of the fragility of domestic demand as the Bank of Japan prepares to consider raising borrowing costs later this month.

Outlays by households adjusted for inflation fell 3% in October from a year earlier, led by spending declines in transport and housing, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications reported Friday. Economists had expected a 1% gain.

Private spending is a key component in the BOJ's goal of achieving a virtuous economic cycle in which wage gains help fuel demand-led price increases. Domestic consumption has expanded for three straight quarters, albeit at a subdued pace.

The BOJ said in its October outlook report that private consumption will likely stay more or less flat for now before gradually returning to "a moderate increasing trend, with a continued rise in employee income." The negative number Friday will add an element of complexity as the BOJ moves toward its next rate hike, but isn't expected to derail that trajectory.

BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda gave a signal Monday that the board is moving toward a hike as soon as Dec. 19, by explicitly mentioning the fact that the bank will consider a rate hike. Overnight index swaps point to about a 90% probability of a December rate increase.

Consumption makes up more than half of Japan's gross domestic product and will be crucial to whether the economy returns to a growth path after recording the first contraction in six quarters during the summer.

Looking ahead, the strength of consumption will depend largely on the interplay between prices and wages. The nation's inflation gauge has stayed at or above the BOJ's 2% target for 43 months, the longest stretch since 1992. Data Monday may show that real wages fell for a 10th month in October, underscoring how steady gains in nominal pay aren't keeping up with price growth.

Source: Bloomberg Europe

Oil held a two-day advance as investors weighed the next steps for talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine, and signs of a swelling surplus.

West Texas Intermediate traded near $60 a barrel after closing 1.2% higher on Thursday. Brent settled above $63. Ukrainian negotiators will join a new round of discussions in Florida, while Russian President Vladimir Putin said some of the points in a US-backed peace plan were unacceptable to him.

The market is watching for progress on a deal, which could potentially lead to sanctions being lifted on Russia and more oil exports, though reaching an actual agreement appears distant at this stage. Additional supply would likely weigh on prices, which are already on track for a hefty annual loss on glut concerns.

Oversupply is putting pressure on prices globally: Saudi Aramco will reduce the price of its flagship Arab Light crude grade to the lowest level since 2021 for January, while Canadian oil has tumbled.

The "bearish trend is likely to resume, because fundamentally, crude is in a state of oversupply," said Zhou Mi, an analyst at a research institute affiliated with Chaos Ternary Futures Co. The talks on Ukraine and US rhetoric against Venezuela are "market noise," he added.

Source: Bloomberg Europe

In the high-frequency churn of President Donald Trump's first term, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's repeated missteps would have fueled guessing games about his imminent firing. In the second, he has maintained White House support — at least for now.

On Thursday, a Pentagon inspector general found that Hegseth risked endangering US pilots, troops and attack plans with his decision to send sensitive information in Signal texts. Days earlier, he was on the defensive over his handling of an attack on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea that raised accusations of war crimes.

They were the latest in a string of mishaps and controversies that have pushed Hegseth into the spotlight since well before he even won confirmation running the Department of Defense.

Yet Trump has so far stood by the 45-year-old former infantry officer and Fox News host, publicly voicing his support.

Hegseth was seated right next to Trump at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a clear sign of support even before the president said, "Pete's doing a great job." In April, after the initial reports of the Signal chats first emerged, Trump said: "Everybody is happy with him."

And last year, when Hegseth's nomination appeared in jeopardy over a series of allegations of alcohol abuse and sexual assault, Trump wrote that "Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that." Hegseth denied the allegations, which he said were part of a smear campaign, while acknowledging, "I'm not a perfect person."

Hegseth's staying power breaks with the precedent of Trump's first term in office, when he went through two confirmed defense secretaries and two acting ones, along with his four national security advisers and four chiefs of staff.

But it's very much in keeping with the second term, where Trump has mostly resisted firing his staff — with "Signalgate" merely resulting in his national security advisor Mike Waltz being shuffled to a new role at the United Nations.

Rather than surrounding himself with highly experienced executives and former officers, the emphasis this time has been more on loyalty and staff who, in the words of his son Donald Trump Jr., "don't think they know better."

With Hegseth, "there are White House people who don't like him but it's really Trump himself who likes his attitude," former Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican, said in an interview. "The more obnoxious he is, the more Trump-like he is — that's what Trump likes."

It's all reminiscent of Trump's tactics almost exactly a year ago, even before his inauguration, when the administration stuck by Hegseth and pushed his nomination through Congress despite the assault and alcohol abuse claims.

At the time, Republicans close to Trump suggested there was a strategy behind that decision. Hegseth's nomination, they said, was a test case to see how much Trump could bend Congressional Republicans to his will. Hegseth had few obvious qualifications for the job and faced deep skepticism from Republicans in Congress.

In the end, Hegseth won confirmation by a single tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. And indeed, it served as a harbinger to Trump's expansion of executive branch authority with a virtual rubber stamp from the GOP. Meanwhile, Hegseth cemented his status in the administration as one of Trump's most vocal and aggressive champions. Rather than back down, he's delighted in trolling Democrats and taken up with fervor the MAGA penchant for meme-based online mockery.

He leaned harder into the military campaign in the Caribbean Sea, posting an image that showed the children's book character Franklin the turtle blasting a boat with a rocket-propelled grenade. "For your Christmas wish list," Hegseth wrote. He denied the Pentagon had done anything wrong with the boat strikes.

"As I've said, and I'll say it again, we've only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they've been poisoning the American people," Hegseth said at Trump's most recent Cabinet meeting.

Hegseth directed Pentagon resources to Trump's anti-immigration agenda, pushed to eradicate DEI and other so-called "woke" initiatives and, early in the administration, embraced Elon Musk's DOGE push. He kicked reporters out of their Pentagon offices and on Thursday oversaw a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony at the Pentagon, with a tribute to Trump thrown in.

"A couple of months ago, my wife said, 'Babe, President Trump brought Merry Christmas back, we're going to bring Christmas back to the Pentagon,'" he said in a social media video about the event.

And Hegseth does retain plenty of support from many of Trump's allies. Senator Eric Schmitt, the Missouri Republican, called the Pentagon inspector general's report about Hegseth's Signal use a "nothing burger" and part of a "neverending stream of efforts to undermine Pete Hegseth," according to the Wall Street Journal. "I think he's doing a great job, and it is what it is," Schmitt said.

The question now is how long that will last. A recent Fox News poll put Trump's approval rating at 41%, a sharp dip from two months ago and near the all-time low for Trump of 38% from his first term. And some of those who supported Hegseth then, such as Senator Thom Tillis, have expressed reservations now.

"I'm sure the Democrats are fine letting Hegseth twist in the wind and every day you drag him up there, every problem he has only exacerbates all the other problems," Comstock said. "That's a lot of capital you're expending in an area you're already underwater."

Source: Bloomberg

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates at its meeting next week and predicted a reduction of 25 basis points as speculation grows that President Donald Trump is readying his nomination to lead the central bank.

Hassett, speaking in an interview on Fox News, was asked if he believed the Federal Open Market Committee would cut rates.

"I think we should, and I think that we are likely to," Hassett said, pointing to recent communications from Fed governors and regional presidents. "They now seem much more like they're leaning in the direction of a rate cut."

Hassett said he wanted to "get to a much lower rate" over the long run.

"If there's consensus around 25 basis points, which it looks like there is, then I'll take it," he continued.

The presidential economic adviser demurred when asked how many additional cuts he might pursue if nominated and confirmed to lead the Fed, saying the chair's job was to be "very data responsive" and consider what adjusting the rates would do to inflation and employment.

Trumponomics: What If Kevin Hassett Becomes Fed Chair?

"The president has a number of candidates that he's been thinking about," Hassett said. "I'm honored to be on a list with some great people. And we'll see how it goes."

Trump said earlier this week he plans to announce his selection to lead the Federal Reserve in early 2026 and had settled on a finalist. He has repeatedly praised Hassett in recent days and teased his possible nomination.

"I guess a potential Fed chair is here too," Trump said during an event Tuesday at the White House. "I don't know who is allowed to say that — potential. He's a respected person that I can tell you. Thank you, Kevin."

Trump allies have been discussing the possibility of giving Hassett's current role leading the National Economic Council to Scott Bessent — in addition to his job as Treasury secretary — should the nomination move forward.

Source: Bloomberg