White House Criticizes Israeli Strike On Hamas In Qatar

James Whitman

Political

Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Middle East Situation

Summary:

The Trump administration on Tuesday criticized Israel's decision to launch a strike on senior Hamas officials in Qatar's capital city of Doha.

"Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally of the United States that is working very hard in bravely taking risks with us to broker peace, does not advance Israel or America's goals," press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to reporters at the White House.

"Eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal," however, she added.

The Trump administration was informed of the attack by the U.S. military, which learned of it just before it was carried out, Leavitt said.

She declined to say if the U.S. military, which maintains a major base in Qatar, had been alerted in advance by Israel of if it had learned of the impending strike through other means.

President Donald Trump "immediately" ordered Steve Witkoff, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, to tell Qatar of the forthcoming attack, "which he did," the press secretary said.

"The President views Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the United States and feels very badly about the location of this attack," and he assured Qatar's leaders that "such a thing will not again on their soil," she said.

Trump also spoke with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said "he wants to make peace and quickly" with Hamas.

But the strike on the capital of a foreign sovereign nation is a significant escalation of Tel Aviv's efforts to destroy the group that orchestrated the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion and massacre of Israelis.

On Tuesday morning, the Israel Defense Forces announced the "precise strike" in a social media post, accusing the targeted leaders of being "directly responsible" for Oct. 7.

The IDF's post did not identify the location of the strike. But a senior Israeli official confirmed to NBC News that it occurred in Doha.

The Trump administration was notified by Israel just before the attack, a White House official told CNBC.

Majed al Ansari, the spokesman for Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condemned "the cowardly Israeli attack that targeted residential headquarters housing several members of the political bureau of the movement in the Qatari capital, Doha."

"This criminal assault constitutes a flagrant violation of all international laws and norms, and a serious threat to the security and safety of Qataris and residents in Qatar," the spokesman said in a translated X post.

A leading Hamas source told Al Jazeera, the Qatari media network, that the strike targeted the group's negotiating delegation, NBC reported.

The delegation was attacked during a meeting to discuss President Donald Trump's proposal for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, according to NBC.

The U.S. embassy in Doha issued a shelter-in-place order at its facilities in response to reports of the strike, but lifted all restrictions later Tuesday.

Source: CNBC

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Manuel

Cryptocurrency

Metaplanet upsized its international share offering from 180 million to 385 million shares, raising approximately $1.4 billion to fund additional Bitcoin (BTC) purchases.

The company announced on Sept. 9 that it had increased the offering by 205 million shares in response to strong investor demand, pricing the shares at 553 yen ($3.75) each with a 9.93% discount from the reference price of 614 yen ($4.16).

The enlarged offering will increase Metaplanet’s total outstanding shares from 755.9 million to 1.14 billion shares. President Simon Gerovich confirmed the finalization on social media.

Metaplanet plans to allocate 183.7 billion yen ($1.25 billion) for Bitcoin purchases and 20.4 billion yen ($138.7 million) for its Bitcoin income generation business between September and December.

The funding supports Metaplanet’s plan to acquire 210,000 Bitcoin by 2027, representing approximately 1% of Bitcoin’s total supply.

Metaplanet currently holds 20,136 Bitcoin valued at over $2.24 billion, making it Asia’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder and the sixth-largest globally, surpassing Riot Platforms.

The company acquired 1,145 BTC in September for approximately $127.2 million.

Transitioning into a new business model

Metaplanet adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset to hedge against these risks while pursuing long-term capital appreciation.

The company disclosed its transition to Bitcoin treasury management in May 2024 as part of its “Strategic Treasury Transformation and Bitcoin Adoption” policy.

Metaplanet’s Bitcoin income generation business recorded 1.904 million yen (nearly $13 million) in sales revenue during the second quarter of the fiscal year 2025. The result represents the company’s efforts to generate yield from its Bitcoin holdings beyond simple appreciation.

The share offering structure includes underwriter purchase rights for up to 375 million shares, with an additional 180 million shares available through overallotment options. Final settlement and delivery are scheduled between Sept. 16 and 17.

The company’s aggressive Bitcoin accumulation strategy positions it among a growing number of corporations adopting BTC as a treasury asset, following the path established by Strategy and other institutional adopters in the cryptocurrency space.

Source: Cryptoslate

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Manuel

Economic

Political

The Supreme Court said Tuesday it would quickly review a high-stakes legal challenge to President Trump's tariffs, setting up a resolution as early as this fall.

In an order released Tuesday, the high court put the case on track for oral arguments in early November.

That puts the case on an unusually quick track to resolution, especially given its significant political and economic reverberations.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned in recent days that the US would have to refund around "half" the tariff revenue it has collected if the Supreme Court rules the president overstepped his authority, which has been the determination of a federal appeals court and the Court of International Trade.

Trump has suggested that the US may have to "unwind" existing trade deals, including with the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, if the Supreme Court doesn't uphold his tariffs. In social media posts, he has made clear he is banking on the high court's conservative majority to uphold his signature trade policy.

The tariffs at stake are the sweeping "reciprocal," country-specific duties Trump has outlined in various steps this year (which you can see in the graphic below). Those duties range from 10% to 50%. Trump has used a 1977 law known as "IEEPA" — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — to justify imposing the tariffs.

The appeals court allowed the tariffs to stay in place while the case moves through the legal process.

Elsewhere, postal traffic to the US dropped more than 80% after the Trump administration ended the de minimis tariff exemption for low-cost imports, the United Nations postal agency said Saturday. And on Friday Trump signed an executive order exempting gold, tungsten, and uranium from global tariffs.

Source: Yahoo Finance

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Manuel

Cryptocurrency

CBOE Global Markets announced plans to launch Bitcoin and Ethereum continuous futures contracts on Nov. 10, pending regulatory review.

According to a Sept. 9 announcement, the new product suite debuts on CBOE Futures Exchange with contracts structured as single, long-dated instruments featuring 10-year expirations.

This design eliminates periodic rolling requirements that characterize traditional futures contracts, simplifying position management for traders seeking long-term digital asset exposure.

The continuous futures will be cash-settled and aligned to real-time spot market prices through daily cash adjustments using a transparent funding rate methodology.

CBOE Clear US, a derivatives clearing organization regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), will clear the contracts within the exchange’s regulated framework.

Global head of derivatives at CBOE, Catherine Clay, said the launch brings perpetual-style utility that gained adoption in offshore markets to US traders.

She noted that the products target institutional participants, existing Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE) customers, and retail traders seeking access to crypto derivatives.

Regulatory opening

The announcement coincides with increased regulatory coordination between the SEC and CFTC, which will hold a joint roundtable on Sept. 29 to advance digital asset oversight harmonization.

The agencies acknowledged in a Sept. 5 statement that fragmented regulation had discouraged innovation and driven crypto activity overseas.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Acting Chairman Caroline Pham emphasized that coordination failures created uncertainty, hindering economic activity even for legally permissible products.

The regulators stressed that harmonization can lower barriers, improve efficiency, and reaffirm US leadership in financial markets.

The Sept. 29 roundtable will examine measures to align US markets with the global economy, including expanded trading hours, frameworks for perpetual contracts, and portfolio margining coordination.

The agencies plan to review exemptions providing safe harbors for decentralized finance projects while maintaining investor protection standards.

CBOE’s continuous futures launch builds on the exchange’s expanding CFE product suite, which includes VIX futures and products based on equity volatility, crypto, and global fixed income.

The introduction represents a step toward onshoring compliant perpetual swap trading that currently operates primarily on offshore platforms.

CBOE’s Options Institute will host public educational courses on continuous futures on Oct. 30 and Nov. 20 to prepare market participants for the new contracts.

Source: Cryptoslate

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Manuel

Economic

U.S. consumers remain in good financial health and there are little signs of credit quality deterioration, according to the nation's top banking executives, despite data showing the job market is cooling off.

Leaders from Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo told investors this week that consumers were continuing to spend money and mostly pay their debts on time.

"Despite what you may read in terms of softening, we are seeing activity levels still to be quite strong and credit performance to still be quite good on the consumer side," Wells Fargo CFO Mike Santomassimo told investors at a conference on Tuesday.

Citigroup's CFO Mark Mason said consumer spending is up and delinquencies, especially on the credit card portfolio, are under control.

"On the consumer side, we continue to see spend up particularly in our branded card portfolio," he said. "We aren't seeing any abnormal signs around delinquencies with our card customers."

Even mid-sized banks reported strong credit quality for consumers.

"We still see credit quality as being quite strong, said Brantley Standridge, Senior Vice President, Consumer and Regional Banking at Huntington.

"A number of our consumer-focused businesses like our auto finance business have had very strong summer months. We also see payments data that would say that our payments activity through debit has slowed slightly but is still looking very good."

The comments came a day after Bank of America's Chief Financial Officer Alastair Borthwick said at the same conference that consumer finances remain healthy as credit card spending accelerates and fewer borrowers have longer-term delinquencies.

"The consumer at this point appears to be ... resilient, doing well and in a good position, and that's reflected in our asset quality numbers," he said.

BofA's consumer net charge-offs of $1.1 billion decreased $60 million in the second quarter versus the first quarter, driven by lower credit card losses.

Banks will start reporting their third-quarter earnings in October.

The optimistic forecasts from bankers came as latest data showed the U.S. economy likely created 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated, suggesting job growth was already stalling before President Donald Trump's aggressive import tariffs.

Americans grew notably less sanguine about the job market in August amid a notable rise in concerns about the ability to get new employment in the event of a job loss, New York Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Expectations showed.

"The consumer in aggregate is resilient but spending is increasingly concentrated among the higher income groups and though delinquencies improved, the improvement was very minor," said Christopher Hodge, chief U.S. economist for Natixis.

"What is helping to prevent a steep fall is the low level of layoffs and stable wage gains. So there are pockets of weakness, but overall spending should be held up by the wealthy and the fact that although wages are not rising fast, the workers have had job stability."

Source: Reuters

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Adam

Economic

Central Bank

The Federal Reserve will likely resume cutting short-term rates next week and continue on for the rest of the year to shore up a labor market that may have begun cooling well before President Donald Trump began imposing sharply higher tariffs, traders bet on Tuesday.

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics' preliminary annual revision to its payrolls data showed the U.S. economy likely created 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated, suggesting average monthly payrolls gains were likely less than half of the 147,000 that had been reported.

Coupled with recent labor market data that shows monthly employment gains have slowed even further, the report "gives the Fed another reason to lower rates next week," BMO economist Sal Guatieri wrote, and likely cements the case for more rate cuts by year-end than the two that Fed policymakers had projected back in June.

After the data, traders stuck to their overwhelming bets that the Fed will reduce the policy rate from its current 4.25%-4.50% by a quarter of a percentage point at the central bank's September 16-17 meeting, and for a same-sized reduction at the Fed's following meeting in October.

While traders continue to see a third rate cut in December as far more likely than a pause, they pared their bets slightly on that meeting and further for 2026, slicing the probability of a fourth rate cut by January to less than 40% from nearly 50-50 before the revised data was released.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last month that rising downside risks to the job market may warrant some cautious policy easing, but central bankers remain wary of easing too much while inflation remains above their 2% goal and upside risks from Trump's tariff policy remain.

The Fed gets a pair of inflation reports later this week expected to reflect ongoing upward price pressures.

Source: reuters

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Manuel

Economic

Forex

The US economy employed 911,000 fewer people than originally reported as of March 2025, providing stark new evidence that the labor market was downshifting long before this summer.

The data covers the period from April 2024 to March 2025 and trims the average monthly jobs gains seen during this period (roughly the last 10 months of Joe Biden's presidency and the first two months of Trump's) from a monthly average of 147,000 to about 71,000.

Data had previously suggested the economy added about 1.76 million jobs in that 12-month span.

The new total is less than half that, marking another larger-than-average downward revision that immediately provided fuel for critics of the government's data collection process.

The White House and allies of President Trump quickly seized upon the revisions as showing that the president inherited a weaker economy than previously thought and that, as Vice President JD Vance put it, "It's difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become."

The revisions also increased political pressure on Jerome Powell, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying the central banker "has officially run out of excuses and must cut the rates now."

These job revisions are evidence that job growth was "not as strong as the Fed thought," added PNC Financial Services Group chief economist Gus Faucher on Yahoo Finance, adding it was evidence that interest rates are currently too high and "the Fed may need to cut interest rates in the near term in order to support the labor market."

The report showed that the largest downward revisions were in leisure and hospitality, which saw 176,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. The professional and business services industry was second, with a downward revision of 158,000 jobs.

The revisions are almost entirely in the private sector, showing 880,000 fewer jobs there, as well as 31,000 fewer government jobs.

The backward-facing data also came in well above the expectations of many economists, who had estimated that these revisions would be hundreds of thousands of jobs lower.

A final revised number for this period is not set to be released until February 2026.

A transition to harder sources of jobs data

Jobs revisions are a routine practice in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and other government agencies update their estimates of job levels as more concrete data sources — such as quarterly insurance tax filings — become available.

The revisions unveiled Tuesday are an adjustment to previous estimates that were largely based on surveys.

But job revisions have been consistently above average in recent years as response rates to surveys have declined and have also become a political flash point.

This has been especially true since last year's preliminary annual revisions landed in the middle of the presidential campaign and showed the US economy employed 818,000 fewer people than previously thought.

And the political heat has only increased in recent months after Trump reacted to a monthly jobs report by accusing the BLS, without evidence, of having "phony" numbers and then firing the agency's commissioner.

Trump's pick for a new BLS commissioner, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, is expected to have a confirmation hearing before the Senate's labor-focused panel in the coming months.

Antoni has proved to be a polarizing pick as Trump aims to put one of the agency's fiercest critics in charge of data collection going forward. Both Antoni and various Trump aides have seized upon larger-than-normal revisions seen in recent years to argue that new approaches to data are needed, especially a rethinking of surveys.

Tuesday's release is likely to increase those calls.

The data is also being used as fodder by the White House to try to shift blame for the current slowdown toward Biden or Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump for months has said is "too late."

Trump has repeatedly lobbed the "too late" charge, including Tuesday morning in a social media post before the number was released.

The president quoted a market analyst who said Powell should have begun cuts in 2021 and that the 2% inflation target is "too rigid."