Two back-to-back storms will have a significant impact on U.S. growth and productivity, according to economists tracking the impact of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas, and Irma — expected to make landfall in Florida this weekend. Despite the potential catastrophic loss in lives and capital, economists who spoke with VOA say the damage to the U.S. economy is likely to be short-lived. Mil Arcega has more.
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Month: September 2017
China’s producer price inflation accelerated more than expected to a four-month high in August, fueled by strong gains in raw materials prices and pointing to strong, sustained growth for both factory profits and the economy.
The producer price index (PPI) rose 6.3 percent in August from a year earlier, from 5.5 percent in July, the National Bureau of Statistics said Saturday.
Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the August producer price inflation rate would edge up to 5.6 percent, its first pickup in six months.
Strong industrial profits
China’s industrial firms have been posting their strongest profits in years thanks to a government-led construction boom that has fueled demand and prices for everything from cement to steel.
The country’s strong appetite for resources such as iron ore has helped fuel a reflationary pulse in the manufacturing sector worldwide.
But analysts continue to maintain that factory-gate prices will lose steam eventually as the government continues to clamp down on riskier types of financing, which is slowly pushing consumer and corporate borrowing costs higher.
China’s commodities futures markets have rallied hard this year and continued to surge through in August. Strong restocking demand and government pledges to shut inefficient and highly polluting mines and plants have underscored concerns over tight supply heading into winter.
Steel industry expands
Activity in China’s steel industry expanded in August at the fastest pace since April 2016, reflecting high levels of production and low inventory.
With the industrial sector in high gear, China’s economy grew by a faster-than-expected 6.9 percent in the first half of this year, turbo-charged by heavy government spending and massive bank lending last year.
That momentum plus strong August readings so far should allow Beijing to easily meet or beat its full-year growth target of 6.5 percent.
Indeed, relatively steady growth through the rest of the year would see the world’s second-largest economy accelerate for the first time in seven years. Last’s years pace of 6.7 percent was the slowest in 26 years.
China’s consumer inflation rate also rose more than expected to a seven-month high of 1.8 percent in August, the bureau said, the first time it has accelerated in three months.
The consumer price index (CPI) had been expected to rise 1.6 percent on-year compared with an increase of 1.4 percent in July.
Food prices, the biggest component of the consumer price index (CPI), fell 0.2 percent from a year earlier.
Nonfood price inflation quickened to 2.3 percent in August from 2 percent in July. Analysts had expected the CPI to rise 1.6 percent from 1.4 percent in July but remain well within the central bank’s comfort zone.
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The U.S. credit monitoring company Equifax is facing a storm of criticism, lawsuits and investigations after a data breach that may have compromised personal data for about 143 million Americans.
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Friday that his office would formally investigate the data breach, saying that more than 8 million New Yorkers had been affected by the hack.
“The Equifax breach has potentially exposed sensitive personal information of nearly everyone with a credit report, and my office intends to get to the bottom of how and why this massive hack occurred,” Schneiderman said in a statement.
Illinois’ attorney general also opened an investigation into the data breach, and more states are likely to follow suit.
Also Friday, U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he would call for congressional hearings on the Equifax breach.
Two proposed class-action lawsuits, one filed in Portland, Oregon, and another in Atlanta, Georgia, alleged that Equifax had been negligent in protecting consumer data.
Stock price slides
Investors were also showing their displeasure about the hack by dropping their stock in the company. Equifax’s share price fell more than 13 percent in trading Friday, to $123.32. The decline equates to more than $2 billion in lost market value.
The Atlanta company said Thursday that the hackers had obtained names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses of more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.
“Based on the company’s investigation, the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July 2017,” the company said in a statement.
The company said credit card numbers were also compromised for 209,000 U.S. consumers, as were credit dispute accounts for 182,000 people.
Equifax discovered the hack July 29 but waited until Thursday to warn consumers.
Although other cyberattacks have been bigger than this one, such as a data breach at Yahoo last year that affected more than 500 million accounts, this one could be the most damaging because of the type of data collected.
Equifax is one the largest credit-reporting companies in the United States.
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Country music singer Don Williams, one of the biggest stars of the 1970s and 1980s, died on Friday at the age of 78, his publicist said.
Williams, known as “the Gentle Giant” because of his 6-foot, 1-inch frame, mellow voice and low-key profile, had hits with Tulsa Time, I Believe in You and It Must Be Love over the course of a 50-year career.
He died on the same day as Troy Gentry, one half of the country music duo Montgomery Gentry, who was killed in a helicopter crash in New Jersey.
“2 legends lost at once. Troy Gentry and Don Williams will be missed so much. Praying for their families and may they rest in peace,” country-pop band Big & Rich wrote on Twitter.
The statement announcing his passing said Williams died of an undisclosed illness but gave no further details.
Williams was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010 and released his last studio album, “Reflections,” in 2014.
Two years later, he announced his retirement from touring, saying it was “time to hang up my hat and enjoy some quiet time at home.”
Williams was a big influence on other musicians, spanning country to rock. Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend were among those who have recorded his music.
In 2016, a tribute album, “Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams,” was released featuring performances by Alison Krauss, Trisha Yearwood, Garth Brooks and many others.
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Troy Gentry, one half of the award-winning country music duo Montgomery Gentry, died Friday in a helicopter crash just hours before a concert, according to a statement from the band’s website. He was 50.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the helicopter crashed into a wooded area near the Flying W Airport in Medford hours before Montgomery Gentry was due to perform at a resort that is also housed at the airport.
The band’s website called Gentry’s death “tragic” and said details of the crash are unknown.
“Troy Gentry’s family wishes to acknowledge all of the kind thoughts and prayers, and asks for privacy at this time,” the website said.
Medford Township Police Chief Richard Meder told NJ.com that police got a call at around 1 p.m. about a helicopter that was “distressed.”
He said crews were able to remove the passenger from the wreckage, but he died on the way to a hospital. The pilot died at the scene and crews were working to remove his body, Meder said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Gentry was the pilot or the passenger.
Gentry was born on April 5, 1967, in Lexington, Kentucky, where he met bandmate Eddie Montgomery and formed a group based off their last names.
Montgomery Gentry had success on the country charts and country radio in the 2000s, scoring No. 1 hits with Roll With Me, Back When I Knew It All, Lucky Man, Something to Be Proud Of and If You Ever Stop Loving Me. Some of the songs even cracked the Top 40 on the pop charts.
The band mixed country music with Southern rock. It was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2009. The group released their debut album, “Tattoos & Scars,” in 1999.
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Hugh Jackman, Lupita Nyong’o, Aaron Paul and Demi Lovato will co-host this year’s Global Citizen Festival, an annual free event held in New York’s Central Park.
Performers at the Sept. 23 event include Stevie Wonder, Green Day, The Killers, The Lumineers, The Chainsmokers, Pharrell Williams, Big Sean, Andra Day and Alessia Cara.
The organization announced Friday that Frieda Pinto, Connie Britton, Deborra-lee Furness, Joan Smalls, Kal Penn, Malin Akerman, Mark Cuban and others will also co-host the multi-hour event. It will air live on MSNBC and Comcast NBCUniversal.
Fans can earn their free tickets for admission by joining the movement at globalcitizenfestival.com.
Last year, Jackman co-hosted the event with Neil Patrick Harris, Chelsea Handler and others. Performers at the 2016 concert included Rihanna, Eddie Vedder, Kendrick Lamar and Metallica.
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Television is one of the few screens that has Apple hasn’t conquered, but that may soon change. The world’s richest company appears ready to aim for its own Emmy-worthy programming along the lines of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Apple lured longtime TV executives Jaime Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg away from Sony Corp. in June and has given them $1 billion to spend on original shows during the next year, according to a Wall Street Journal report quoting unnamed people.
The programming would be available only on a subscription channel, most likely bundled with the company’s existing Apple Music streaming service. Apple declined to comment.
While $1 billion is a lot of money, it’s a drop in the bucket for Apple and its $262 billion cash hoard. But it’s still enough to vault Apple into the top tier of tech-industry outsiders producing their own slates of television shows.
iTunes came first
Hollywood has long shuddered at the thought of Apple training its sights on TV the way it once did on the music business.
Almost 15 years ago, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs convinced record labels to let the company sell digital music on its iTunes store for 99 cents a single, a deal the music industry was happy to take in the face of growing music piracy enabled by Napster. Over time, though, Apple’s dominance in digital music chafed music executives, who saw the company siphoning off a chunk of their profits.
Movies and television have proven much harder for Apple to crack. The company’s interest in transforming television has been an open secret for years, but Hollywood has so far spurned Apple’s efforts to make itself an indispensable digital middleman for video.
In a way, Netflix beat Apple to the punch with its groundbreaking video streaming service. Launched in 2007, that service pioneered “binge watching” of entire TV seasons on any device with an internet connection. That gave new life to existing shows such as Breaking Bad, whose creator credits Netflix with its survival , and spawned the creation of other series tailor-made for bingeing.
Netflix also helped unleash a crescendo of creativity in Hollywood. Follow-on rivals Amazon and Hulu also boast popular video streaming services, and mainstream broadcasters such as CBS and Walt Disney Co. — the owner of ABC and ESPN, among other networks — are also jumping in.
Pressure to act
All of that has increased the pressure on Apple to step up its game in TV — not least because the increasing popularity of streaming is hurting its business of renting and selling video from iTunes.
Apple “doesn’t want to be left behind,” said Debby Ruth, senior vice president of consumer research firm Magid. “This is a way for them to put a stake in the ground.”
This year, the company released its first two original series, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, on its Apple Music service, which has 27 million subscribers. But neither show has generated much buzz or critical acclaim.
The recent hiring of Erlicht and Van Amburg signaled Apple’s intent to make bigger splash. The executives have helped orchestrate several TV hits, including AMC’s Breaking Bad, and more recently branched out into video streaming with The Crown, which landed on Netflix last year and is up for 13 Emmy nominations in this Sunday’s ceremony.
Apple also has a not-so-secret weapon: hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads already in the hands of faithful fans. It could easily transform those into a marketing platform to lure users to its TV service.
But the company has a steep hill to climb.
Bigger players
Netflix has more than 100 million worldwide subscribers and a video library that will add 1,000 hours of original programming this year alone. And HBO has become the Emmys’ pacesetter since branching into original programming 20 years ago.
Both companies vastly outspend Apple’s reported $1 billion production budget. HBO spends about $2 billion annually on its programming, which garnered 111 nominations in this year’s Emmy Awards, more than any other network. Netflix, which boasts the second most Emmy nominations with 91, expects to spend $6 billion on programming this year.
Apple is still experimenting in TV, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher and managing partner with the research and venture capital firm Loup Ventures.
“In five years, I bet Apple will either be investing $10 billion a year in content or zero,” said Munster. “It’s going to be one or the other.”
Jobs’ legacy
Jobs discussed his ambitions to shake up TV with his biographer, Walter Issacson, shortly before his death in 2011.
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players and phones: Make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote.
But no Apple television ever materialized. Instead, Apple has periodically upgraded its Apple TV, which isn’t a television, just a video streaming player that connects to TVs. That device has been losing market share to other streaming players made by Roku, Amazon and Google, according to the research firm Park Associates.
Building a successful programming lineup could give Apple more leverage to license shows from other Hollywood production houses. It might even embolden the company to finally release its own streaming TV set.
Apple will presumably also want to emulate Netflix’s ability to exploit usage data to determine what it thinks audiences want to watch. Netflix’s data analysis has helped it attract 25.5 million more subscribers in the U.S. alone since the February 2013 debut of its first original series, House of Cards.
But if Apple decides it needs a little more help in video streaming, Munster thinks there’s in 1-in-3 chance that it will buy Netflix to instantly gain the cachet and expertise in TV programming that it craves.
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In Rwanda, less than 15 percent of the population has access to electricity. In rural areas, it can be as low as one percent.
In order to increase Rwanda’s energy capacity, a 17-hectare solar field with 28,000 panels was constructed in six months in 2014 by private power companies.
It is East Africa’s first large-scale commercial solar field, bringing in 8.5 megawatts of power at its peak — four percent of the country’s total power capacity. The project has brought power to more than 15,000 homes.
“We are living in the world and we have to contribute or to eradicate or eliminate polluting the atmosphere,” said Twaha Twagirimana, plant supervisor for Scatec Solar, which operates the project. “We need energy, and we need clean energy.”
Twagirimana said this investment in solar power is a step toward reducing global warming. Rwanda’s power grid relies heavily on diesel fuel, which is expensive and bad for the environment.
According to Scatec Solar, the solar field reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 8,000 tons per year.
Orphanage land
Private homes aren’t the only ones to benefit from the project. The solar panels are on land owned by the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.
The choice of the site, about 60 kilometers from the capital, Kigali, was no accident. The rent paid for the land helps vulnerable children and young adults who were orphaned during or after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
About 500 young Rwandans live, study and play on the 144-acre residential community.
Mediatilice Kaytitesi, the community’s art center and theater coordinator, says she uses art to help youth cope with their losses.
“It’s something that can help open the mind of the kids,” she said. “Some draw tears, which means they have the tears in their hearts, their wounds. You can see their expressions.”
Pascal Atismani Claudien lost his father in 2006 and his mother in 2010. He said he doesn’t exactly know why they died — just that they were sick.
“When I have a problem, I take a paper and a pencil and draw and that problem goes away. When I have stress, I draw or paint,” said Claudien, who is starting his final year of high school at the village. “And when I am painting or drawing, I feel very happy.”
The Agahozo Shalom Youth Village was modeled after similar ones built for orphans in Israel after the Holocaust. In the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda, Agahozo means “tears are dried.” In Hebrew, Shalom means peace.
“The mission was really to help bring back all the children who have lost parents and siblings and everything in their lives, to try to recreate the next best family that these children should have had, had their parents been alive,” explained Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura, the youth village’s executive director.
Claudien said he considers it more of a family than a school. “That’s why we call each other brothers and sisters,” he said.
Learning engineering
During his time at the school, Claudien visited the nearby solar panels and learned from the staff about how Rwanda’s largest solar field is positively impacting the country. He, himself, is from a small village with limited access to electricity.
About 50 students also received technical training at the solar field on engineering and solar technology to encourage them to work in green jobs in the future.
The construction of the nearly $24 million solar field employed more than 350 Rwandan workers.
Gigawatt Global developed the project with early-stage funding from the U.S. government’s Power Africa initiative.
“Rwanda had the right leadership and the right conditions to be really the test case and the positive fruits of concept for the entire sub-Saharan Africa for commercial scale solar,” said Yosef Abramowitz, the CEO and founder of Gigawatt Global.
About 600 million Africans don’t have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
Rwanda’s government aspires to nearly triple its power capacity by the end of 2018, through renewable power sources like methane, hydro, mini-hydro, peat, thermal and more solar fields.
In 2016, Rwanda partnered with developer Ignite Power to provide rooftop solar to 250,000 houses by the end of next year. Users will pay about $5 per month for the solar power system in a rent-to-own model.
Efforts like this will go toward the Rwandan government’s goal of bringing power to 70 percent of households.
Abramowitz said he’s convinced “solar is the future of Africa.” His firm wants to replicate this model throughout sub-Saharan Africa, increasing energy capacity while also benefiting the social good.
“There’s every reason in the world — economic, social and political — that solar should be the main generation source of energy on the continent,” he said.
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Researchers have found genetic mutations that affect whether a woman is likely to have her baby early or carry it to full term.
Even late preterm babies, those born between 34 and 36 weeks of gestation, are more likely to die or experience problems, even if they are the size and weight of some full-term infants born after 37 to 41 weeks in the womb.
Preterm birth is the leading cause of death among children younger than 5 worldwide. These babies have higher death rates even into adolescence and beyond.
Several studies show health problems related to preterm birth persist through adult life, problems such as chronic lung disease, developmental handicaps, vision and hearing losses. The World Health Organization reports that every year, an estimated 15 million babies are born early, and this number is rising. Until now, little was known about the causes, but these findings could help solve the mystery.
Beginning of a journey
Dr. Louis Muglia coordinated the study of the DNA of more than 50,000 pregnant women. The study identified six gene regions, which influence the length of pregnancy and the timing of birth. While the study doesn’t provide information about how to prevent prematurity, Muglia says it could eventually do that.
“It’s just the beginning of the journey, but at least we know now, what the foundation is,” he says.
Muglia is co-director of the Perinatal Institute, which focuses on preterm babies, at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He’s also the principal investigator of one of the March of Dimes’ five prematurity research centers. The March of Dimes helped pay for the study along with the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other medical research institutes.
Muglia said scientists have known for a long time that preterm birth is a combination of genetic and environmental factors. This study showed the genes involved were from the mother.
“For the first time, we have an idea of what tissue in the mom is the one that is likely driving the one for preterm birth,” Muglia says.
Selenium
One of the genes identified is involved in how the body uses selenium, a common mineral provided in food or supplements, but not currently included in vitamins women commonly take while pregnant. Selenium supplements are low-cost, and if the results are confirmed, this supplement could save millions of lives. Supplements including folic acid have been shown to greatly reduce birth defects, so much so that food in many countries is fortified with this particular B vitamin.
Another gene indicated that cells that line the uterus play a larger-than-expected role in the length of pregnancy.
The researchers were from the U.S. and from Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. They only tested women of European descent, so more work needs to be done involving women of other races and ethnic origins.
But their study does open up areas for researching potential diagnostic tests, new medications, improved dietary supplements or other changes that could help more women have full-term pregnancies, all areas which will require several more years of study.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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An international team of researchers has identified — for the first time — six genes that determine the length of pregnancy and whether a baby is born preterm. Preterm birth is a major cause of infant death and disability. Now, as VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, scientists may have clues about preventing prematurity.
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There are smart cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, and now a biodegradable car. A group of technology students has built the first car with a biocomposite structure. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Washington, D.C., is home to nine species of bats. They play a vital role in the ecosystem, but biologists are worried that some may have contracted a deadly disease called white-nose syndrome. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias went on a so-called bat walk with the researchers on an island in the middle of Washington’s Anacostia River.
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Scientists have accused the liquor industry of misleading the public over the link between consuming alcohol and cancer. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine compare the actions with the tobacco industry’s attempts to dispute the link between smoking and lung cancer. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Asia-Pacific — home to more than half the world’s population and some of its fastest-growing economies — is a key battleground in the fight against pollution, one of the biggest threats to the planet and its people, the U.N. environment chief said.
An estimated 12 million people die prematurely each year because of unhealthy environments, 7 million of them due to air pollution alone, making pollution “the biggest killer of humanity,” Erik Solheim told the first Asia-Pacific Ministerial Summit on the Environment in Bangkok this week.
Humans have caused pollution and humans can fix it, said Solheim, executive director of UN Environment, in an interview with Reuters at the four-day summit.
“The struggle for a pollution-free planet will be won or lost in Asia — nowhere else,” said the former Norwegian minister for environment and international development.
The sheer size of Asia-Pacific, as well as its continued economic growth, put it at the heart of the challenge, he added.
The region’s development has been accompanied by worsening pollution of its air, water and soil. Its emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide doubled between 1990 and 2012, and the use of resources such as minerals, metals and biomass has tripled, according to the United Nations.
World Health Organization figures also show Asia has 25 of the world’s 30 most-polluted cities in terms of fine particles in the air that pose the greatest risks to human health. The pollution comes largely from the combustion of fossil fuels, mostly for transport and electricity generation.
Solheim said Asia is also a major contributor of plastic polluting the world’s oceans — and solutions can be found in the region. He pointed to a huge beach cleanup campaign in Mumbai that inspired Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to overhaul the country’s waste management system.
“There’s enormous environmental opportunity,” Solheim said. “Asia has by and large strong governments, and they have the ability to fix problems.”
Coal no longer king?
Solheim said fighting pollution by moving toward renewable energy sources such as wind and solar would also benefit efforts to curb climate change, which scientists say is stoking more deadly heatwaves, floods and sea-level rise around the world.
But environmentalists worry that Asia’s demand for coal, the most polluting of the major fossil fuels, is likely to grow for years to come.
Figures from a forum organized by the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Singapore earlier this year show that some 273 gigawatts of coal power are still being built, although much more has been put on hold.
In July, analysts told Reuters that Japan, China and South Korea are bank-rolling coal-fired power plants in Indonesia despite their pledges to reduce planet-warming emissions under the Paris climate deal.
The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to limit the rise in average world temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Experts say curbing or ending the use of coal is required if this goal is to be reached.
Globally, many countries — including China — are shutting down or suspending plans for coal-fired power plants as costs for wind and solar power plummet.
Solheim is optimistic, noting that the International Energy Agency significantly raised its five-year growth forecast for renewables led by China, India, the United States and Mexico.
“There are very, very few people in the world who believe that the future is coal,” he said. “I think we will see the shift [to renewables] happening much faster than people tend to believe.”
On U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his nation out of the Paris Agreement, Solheim sees a silver lining.
“The surprising judgment of history may be that Donald Trump did a lot of service to this fight against climate change by withdrawing, because he galvanized the reaction of everyone else,” said Solheim.
“All the big, iconic companies of modern capitalism — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon — they immediately said, ‘We will move into the green economy.'”
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With Republicans in Congress under pressure to deliver on taxes, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday the GOP plan will aim to reduce the corporate tax rate to low- to mid-20 percent — a smaller cut than what President Donald Trump wants.
Ryan provided some specifics as the Republicans start to write legislation overhauling the tax system, with help for the middle class a main goal. He spoke as Congress was consumed with providing billions of dollars in relief for hurricane-ravaged Texas, and prospectively for Florida, and with addressing the plight of immigrants facing possible deportation as a result of Trump’s decision to end an Obama-era program for young immigrants.
Trump, who made overhauling taxes a pillar of his push for economic growth, has called for a 15 percent tax rate for corporations. The rate now ranges from 15 percent to 35 percent. The average tax rate paid by corporations is around 19 percent to 25 percent, according to the Treasury Department and congressional analysts.
Some experts say a 15 percent rate isn’t possible without blowing a hole in the deficit.
Ryan recognized that as he discussed a higher range during an appearance at a New York Times forum. “Numbers are hard to make that work,” he said.
A popular idea among lawmakers is to reduce tax rates for both individuals and corporations, and make up the lost revenue by eliminating special-interest loopholes. But even if Congress eliminated nearly every tax break enjoyed by corporations, it would raise only enough revenue to lower the corporate tax rate to 28.5 percent, according to an analysis by Scott Greenberg, a senior analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation.
Ryan expects tax legislation to pass Congress this year.
“This is our No. 1 priority this fall,” he said at a Capitol Hill news conference later Thursday. “It’s about growth. It’s about fairness. It’s about finally giving American families a tax break.”
Revising the nation’s tax system for the first time in three decades is a GOP priority in the wake of the collapse of efforts to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s health care law.
But Hurricane Harvey and Trump’s decision to rescind a program protecting some 800,000 immigrants from deportation have saddled Congress with new challenges. When Trump blocked the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, created by Obama through administrative action in 2012, he gave Congress six months to act.
To ensure money for hurricane relief, Trump overruled congressional Republicans and his own treasury secretary Wednesday to cut a deal with Democrats to keep the government operating and raise the U.S. debt limit.
The already compressed timetable for coming up with an overhaul of the tax system came under further pressure with Congress’ additional and urgent workload.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday he thinks “it’s still very viable to get it done this year.”
“We’ve made a lot of progress” in talks with GOP congressional leaders, Mnuchin said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.” “Our objective is to get this done.”
Asked whether he was worried about a revolt by Republicans in Congress if a tax overhaul isn’t achieved, Mnuchin said, “I’m not worried about any GOP revolt at all. You know we’ve been meeting with them on the tax plan. We have an understanding on this tax plan.”
The head of the House tax-writing committee also rejected suggestions that the tax overhaul could get sidelined by Congress’ pressing new priorities. “I don’t think it changes the trajectory or the timing,” Rep. Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, told reporters.
Brady declined to comment specifically on Ryan’s low- to mid-20 percent range for corporate taxes. “We’re trying to drive those rates as low as we can,” he said.
Not only will tax legislation pass by year end, but it will provide for retroactive tax cuts back to the start of 2017, predicted the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney.
“If you stop to think what the priorities are right now for the administration, No. 1 priority is Houston, No. 2 is Florida, and the No. 3 is the tax reform package,” Mulvaney said on Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto Coast to Coast.”
So “clearing the decks” first on hurricane aid with Trump’s debt limit deal was the right way to proceed, he said.
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About 143 million Americans could be affected by a cyberattack on the credit monitoring company Equifax.
The Atlanta-based company said Thursday the hackers obtained names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses of more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.
“Based on the company’s investigation, the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July 2017,” the company said in a statement.
The company said credit card numbers were also compromised for some 209,000 U.S. consumers, as were credit dispute accounts for 182,000 people.
Additionally, limited personal information was also compromised for some in Britain and Canada.
Equifax said it doesn’t believe that any consumers from other countries were affected.
The company has established a website to enable consumers to determine if they are affected and will be offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection to customers.
Equifax is one the largest credit-reporting companies in the U.S.
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Germany’s BMW is gearing up to mass produce electric cars by 2020 and will to have 12 different models by 2025, it said on Thursday, as traditional manufacturers race to catch up with U.S. electric car pioneer Tesla.
Car buyers shunned electric vehicles because of their high cost and limited operating range until Tesla unveiled the Model S in 2012, a car that cracked the 200 mile (322 km) range barrier on a single charge.
Since then, big advances in battery technology and a global crackdown on pollution in the wake of Volkswagen’s diesel scandal have raised pressure on carmakers to speed up development of zero-emission alternatives.
BMW, which launched the i3 electric car in 2013, said it was now readying its factories to mass produce electric cars by 2020 if demand for battery driven vehicles takes off.
“By 2025, we will offer 25 electrified vehicles — 12 will be fully-electric,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told journalists in Munich, adding the electric cars would have a range of up to 700 km (435 miles).
It marks a significant foray by a major manufacturer into electrification. BMW, which includes the Mini and Rolls-Royce brands and sold 2.34 million cars last year, announced the move on the day smaller rival Jaguar said it would offer electric or hybrid variants of all its models by 2020.
On Wednesday, Nissan unveiled a new version of its Leaf electric vehicle in its latest move to take on Tesla, the U.S. firm co-founded by Elon Musk that sold 83,922 vehicles last year.
Rolls-Royce
Traditional carmakers have been slow to embrace the electric vehicle market because it remains unprofitable, largely due to the cost of batteries which make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of the cost of an electric vehicle.
A battery pack with 60 kWh capacity and 500 km range costs around $14,000 today, compared with a gasoline engine that costs around $5,000. Add to that the $2,000 for the electric motor and the inverter, and the gap is even wider.
But capacity investments into the battery sector may bring down costs of electric vehicles to a “tipping point” when they reach parity with combustion-engine equivalents some time between 2020 and 2030, according to analysts at Barclays.
With cities threatening to ban combustion-engine vehicles or to tax diesel cars more heavily, the total cost of ownership of electric cars could drop below their combustion-engine equivalents, and Europe could become a 100 percent pure battery electric vehicle market by 2035, according to analysts at ING.
The Frankfurt motor show, starting next week, will be used by BMW to unveil a new four-door electric car positioned between the i3 city car and the i8 hybrid sportscar, Krueger said.
“We will be increasing the share of electrified models across all brands and model series. And, yes, that also includes the Rolls-Royce brand and BMW M vehicles,” he said.
German rivals will also be showing electric cars, with Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz brand unveiling the EQA, a concept mass market electric car, Volkswagen taking the wraps off the ID Crozz.
Aside from vehicle cost, a key obstacle to making electric cars popular is the amount of time it takes to recharge, and a lack of charging stations.
London needs to spend 10 billion euros ($12 billion) to get charging infrastructure to a level where retail buyers can practically own an electric car, consultancy AlixPartners has said. Almost none of that spending has been earmarked so far.
($1 = 0.8331 euros)
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Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Conde Nast’s culture magazine “Vanity Fair,” will be stepping down in December after 25 years at the helm, the publication said on Thursday.
Carter, 68, who has steered Vanity Fair through the shifting journalism landscape and expanded it onto a successful digital platform as well as print edition, will oversee the magazine’s 2018 Hollywood issue, the publication said.
“I’ve loved every moment of my time here and I’ve pretty much accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Carter said in a statement, adding that he was “now eager to try out this ‘third act’ thing.”
Carter said in an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday that he wanted to “leave while the magazine is on top.”
“I want to leave while it’s in vibrant shape, both in the digital realm and the print realm. And I wanted to have a third act – and I thought, time is precious,” he told the Times.
The Times said no replacement has been named yet for Carter, who earns a “seven-figure salary” at the magazine, but suggested that New York magazine’s editor-in-chief, Adam Moss, and Janice Min, former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, are potential candidates.
Carter, appointed editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, and turned the magazine’s focus to crime, culture and celebrities. He nurtured revered writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Dominick Dunne, humorists Fran Lebowitz and James Wolcott, and photography great Annie Leibovitz.
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