President Trump’s attention on trade has largely been focused on China in recent weeks. But there’s a growing sense that he could soon turn his fight to Europe. The European trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, reportedly warned E.U. trade ministers that they “should brace” for U.S. tariffs on billions of euros worth of European goods over a dispute about Airbus subsidies. New York Times
The bond market is sending powerful signals that there’s economic trouble ahead for the United States economy. They’re powerful enough, in fact, that they’re even rattling the parts of Wall Street that people do talk about. New York Times
In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change. New York Times
On May 15th America’s Commerce Department said that companies would need a special licence to deal with Huawei, China’s hardware giant, which it deemed a threat to American interests (it later said the order would not take full effect for 90 days). The Economist
Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the IMF, told the annual meeting of the American Economic Association that there were many reasons to doubt the supposed costs of public debt. Since then Jason Furman and Larry Summers of Harvard University, both of whom advised Barack Obama on economics, have written in Foreign Affairs, a journal, that it is time to kill off the “debt obsession”. The Economist
It’s an incredible video. It was created at the end of July 2017, three months before Austria’s general election that October. The video shows Strache, leader of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), and fellow party member Johann Gudenus, deputy mayor of Vienna at the time, meeting with a woman in a luxurious holiday villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Süddeutsche Zeitung
A secretly filmed video that led Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s far-right vice chancellor, to step down on Saturday is filled with eyebrow-raising moments, according to excerpts published by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. New York Times
Austria’s chancellor called on Saturday for snap elections after the country’s far-right vice chancellor resigned over a secretly filmed video from 2017 that renewed questions about whether Russia had a direct line into a government at the heart of Europe. New York Times
More than 370 million people will be eligible to vote in the European elections. But as they enter the polling booth they will have very different issues on their mind, as this survey of the six biggest countries conducted by the Europa group of newspapers reveals. The Guardian
The carbon pricing initiatives have been classified in ETSs and carbon taxes according to how they operate technically. ETS does not only refer to cap-and-trade systems, but also baseline-and-credit systems such as in British Columbia and baseline-and-offset systems such as in Australia. Carbon pricing has evolved over the years and initiatives do not necessarily follow the two categories in a strict sense. The World Bank
© Stefan P. Schleicher 2024
