Russia Fuel Crisis and Global Markets

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I'm Luke Fargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News The top headlines and business stories moving your world President Trump's forays into cryptocurrency have delivered him a windfall of more than a billion dollars last year, according to his latest financial disclosures It's an unprecedented surge in income that came alongside earnings from royalty deals, real estate, and legal settlements For more, I'm joined by journal F finance editor Alex Franos Alex, it seems like the bulk of this income has come from cryptocurrency, no? Yeah, it's really qu quite astonishing. Trump and his family started these businesses In the months before he was elected while promising to make America the capital of crypto. and the ventures really brought in a huge amount of real cash over billion dollars. And what's notable is while the Trump family did really well, the investors in those coins, some of them didn't. the value of those coins dropped quite a bit after that In addition to crypto, we should note there's been a wealth of other deals here with other companies involving real estate and even Trump branded products. Yeah, sure. He's always had those. Trump stakes, Trump watches brought in four point seven million. I'm quite envious of a six thousand four hundred eighty four dollars a month pension from the sccreen Actors' guild from his time hosting the apprentice It's the crypto stuff that has dwarfed everything else. I mean this is a guy who is known. for building condos and building hotels. And that is now a small much smaller part of his business. And you look at the money that was brought in from, you know Mar a Lago and the Trump Dural, which you know, obviously got a lot of extra business after he came into office, pulling in seventy seven million dollars last year at Mar aago, but that's peanuts compared to Trump coin or the World Liberty Financial tooken, which both brought in over five hundred million dollars. Just pulling back, Alex, I appreciate that perspective, but how just unprecedented is it for a president to be making this amount of money while in office. Totally unprecedented. There have been rich presidents, not quite any who have so many things going on while they're in office H and his sons and daughters' attitude in this term, especially is we're not going to stop doing business. We're going to go out and do deals even if they are in areas that overlap with the administration's policies like on crypto or foreign real estate projects with countries in which we have diplomatic business. But we should be very clear here, Alex. The White House says that neither the president nor his family have ever engaged or will engage in conflicts of interest and that all of his actions and the actions of his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people. Yeah, absolutely. they say that. And there's also critics who say, well, they can say that, but in fact You know, if you look at these deals and the overlaps, they are concerning. Another unusual element of the wealth report here are these legal settlements that Trump struck with major companies, Meta, Paramount, which was the owner of CBS, Disney, the owner of ABC, over legal cases that he threatened against those companies over in some cases the way that he was portrayed And critics will say that those settlements were made in order to prevent him from using the apparatus of the government to squeeze those companies. So it's a huge amount of money, eighty six point a fiveal million dollars from those legal settlements. certainly a lucrative line of business for anyone. As Gournal fininance editor, Alex Francos, talent agents, take note. this man wants to be in syndication. Let's see what we can about that, Alex, thanks as always. Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to it. Thank you. Panthropic has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore access to fable version of the company's Mythos model that's capable of carrying out powerful cyber attacks part of the deal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Anthropic had agreed to address the workarounds that researchers at Amazon had used to evade guardrails for fable, which are critical for making it public. more than two week shutdown, and efforts to resolve it is likely to shape future AI development and government oversight Anthropics said it's working with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. develop a consensus framework for gauging the severity of so called jail brereaks that bypass safety measures and how AI developers should respond said it was probably impossible to make any model jailbreak proof Democratic socialists are continuing to notch upsets in midterm primaries. The latest to do so, twenty nine year old May La Kiros, who bested incumbent Democrat Diana Dagette for a Denver Cgressional seat Kuros addressing a rackous victory party, courtesy of Denver Seven. Jet cororporate Hos was backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who tapped his list of supporters to fundraise on her behalf Meanwhile, centrist Colorado Senator Michael Bennett lost his bid to represent Democrats in a race for governor. usting him was Attorney General Pil Weiser, who you heard from in the introduction to the podcast, who'd criticized Bennett's votes to confirm some of President Trump's nominees and to boost funding for IC Fellllow Democratic Senator John Hicken Looper, however, did manage to hold off a progressive challenger in his favord to win reelection in November. President Trump has announced Republicans will hold a national convention in Dallas on september ninth and tenth. boost voter turnout for the midterm elections The unusual event is aimed at helping the party protect its slim majorities in Congress and stopping Democrats from blocking Trump's agenda The United Nations has staved off a financial collapse, even as the US refuses to fork over some four billion dollars in dues, and China is late in paying some four hundred million buy a more fiscal breathing room. meemmbers agreed yesterday to ditch a rule that would have seen the UN refund unspent money to countries even if they were late in paying their dues or didn't pay at all move was originally designed to limit financial bloat, but had lately become counterproductive as major donors withheld support The UN's controller welcomome the rule change. We have a leaking boat Almost on the verge of sinking And what you've done is plugged some of those holes to give us a chance to get to a shore and begin to fix the boat gradually American officials didn't immediate respond to a request for comment on the U. S.'s continued non payment of UN dues. Previously conditioned future support on deeper UN job and budget cuts, including less business class travel and a greater use of machine translators. For the first time in decades, Russia says it's planning to begin importing fuel As we mentioned on yesterday's podcast, that comes as Ukraine's relentless drone campaign has resulted in fuel shortages that are now rippling across the country So every night there are now hundreds and hundreds of drones crossing the Russian airspace and hitting various targets, including the energy infrastructure, including refineries and knocking them off one by one and the refining capacity was higher than the consumption, but not that much higher. And so now all of a sudden, you have a crisis. That's our chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofomov. It's the first time since this war began four and a half years ago that every single ordinary Russian is feeling the impact of the conflict in Ukraine because every single person either needs to feel up their car or is taking public transportation? So for the last couple of weeks, moder is in Moscow. Either Rome looking for an open gas station and if they found one, they would spend one or two or three hours waiting in line. The situation is much worse in other parts of Russia In parts of Siberia, morists are reporting that they're spending you one or two nights waiting to fill up. And across Russia, there are no limits on how much gasoline you can put into your car And at the same time, the black market is now springing up across the country. Naro says the deepening political crisis now has the Kremlin considering what was once unthinkable. So for the first time since the nineteen nineties, Russia is now planning to import gasoline It has already banned the export of gasoline, and it's also planning to ban the export of diesel fuel. Russia produces much more diesel than gasoline. So the shortage of diesel is not as acute, but it's also starting to be felt And that's a remarkable thing. The late Senator John McCain used to call Russia a gas station masquerading as a country. guess what Russia because of this war has run out of gas So that's a huge blow to the image of the government. In remarks over the weekend, Putin showed no intention of seeking a ceasefire with Ukraine rejected the idea of limiting Russia' own long range strikes. Kremlin spokesman that Moscow is negotiating with several nations on imports, though he declined to name them Coming up, we've got the day's top market stories, as Ukraine inks a deal with sob for new fighter jets and Chinese competition tests Western businesses across retail and mining. And more after the break AI isn't just changing how we do business, it involves a new kind of leadership On the season one finale of Tech pluential, we trace the through lines across episodes, revisiting powerful insights from executives who are helping redefine technology leadership for the age of AI Learn why tech is now a shared enterprise agenda and how you can drive real, durable value for your organization. Where technology and influence converge new opportunities can emerge. That's Tech Ffluential, a podcast from Deloitte and Custom Content from WSJ In Markets News, the European Union is limiting tariff free steel imports in order to protect its domestic industry from oversupply from countries like China To do that, it's instead setting aside half of its eighteen plus million ton quota for free trade partners like Turkey, India, South Korea, and the UK Chinese competition is also weighing on U. S. aluminum giant Alcooa bid to counter Beijing's dominance, it's buying Australia based South thirty two's Bauxite, alumina and aluminum assets, in a deal valued at up to five point six billion dollars Shares of Nike are down off hours after the company reported another quarterly sales decline with weakness in China offsetting some recovery in North America. CEO Elliott Hill, who was brought in to execute a turnaround plan in twenty twenty four, said he was moving with urgency to rethink Nike's strategy in China promised a reimagined approach that was centered around deep local partnerships We have hired and our resource and our Greater China local product creation team They will be delivering locally designed, developed and manufactured product in China in holiday twenty seven Nike's struggles in China come as a number of Western brands, especially car makers battle eroding market share in the country Consulting firm Alex Partners, American automakers held just five percent market share in China last year, down from twelve percent in twenty fourteen Meanwhile, demand for memory chips sent South Korea's exports surging more than seventy percent in June to a record one hundred two billion dollars, the country's fastest growth in nearly fifty years It's hit a historic high of nearly forty five billion dollars, tripling on insatiable demand from the AI buildout And finally, drum roll two seat Grippen was created in true collaboration for the new battlespace where military operations occur simultaneously across all domains. That's Swedish defense company Soab touting the benefits of its Gripp in fighter jet, which it will eventually be delivering to Ukraine deal signed yesterday for sixteen of the jets is valued at around two and a fivealf billion dollars and is part of a prior agreement that could see the export of up to one hundred fifty of the planes. Ukraine will need to defend its own skies for several more years until then deliies of an older round of donated grippin ins from Sweden isn't due to start until twenty twenty seven. the newer models d to arrive between twenty twenty nine and twenty thirty And that's it for What's News For this Wednesday Morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Mooyer and Daniel Bach, our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff and I'm Luke Faras for the Wall Street Journal We will be back tonight with the new show. until then Thank for listen Isn't home where we all wantna be? 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