The International Monetary Fund released a report that shows the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency is fast shrinking, especially in the last 20 years. The shrinkage is not coming from the rise of other world currencies like the yuan but from the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
In the report, IMF economists Serkan Arslanalp, Barry Eichengreen and Chima Simpson-Bell claimed “Strikingly, the reduced role of the U.S. dollar over the last two decades has not been matched by increases in the shares of the other ‘big four’ currencies—the euro, yen, and pound. Rather, it has been accompanied by a rise in the share of what we have called nontraditional reserve currencies, including the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi, South Korean won, Singaporean dollar, and the Nordic currencies.”
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The U.S. dollar is suffering “stealth erosion,” according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) … [+] as the Federal Reserve is gearing up for a new global liquidity cycle that could boost the bitcoin price, ethereum, XRP and other cryptocurrencies.
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“Strikingly, the reduced role of the U.S. dollar over the last two decades has not been matched by increases in the shares of the other ‘big four’ currencies—the euro, yen, and pound,” IMF economists Serkan Arslanalp, Barry Eichengreen and Chima Simpson-Bell wrote in a report.
“Rather, it has been accompanied by a rise in the share of what we have called nontraditional reserve currencies, including the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi, South Korean won, Singaporean dollar, and the Nordic currencies,” they wrote, pointing to “new digital financial technologies such as automatic market-making and automated liquidity management systems,” as powering that shift.
“This recent trend is all the more striking given the dollar’s strength, which indicates that private investors have moved into dollar-denominated assets,” the economists added.
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote a report outlining the narratives around “declining dollar shares in official reserves, and increasing roles for gold holdings by central banks,” which it says has been “inappropriately” generalized beyond “the actions of a small group of countries.”
“The Fed now admits some countries are moving to gold,” tech investor and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan posted to X, pointing to what the Fed says is a “small group” that “represents 3 billion people. So 37.5% of the world is moving away from dollars towards gold.”
The U.S. dollar decline comes as the Federal Reserve is gearing up to cut interest rates after a two-year war on inflation in the aftermath of historical Covid-era stimulus and money printing.
“Central banks around the world have already started to cut rates, which suggests a broader trend towards monetary easing,” analysts at the Bitfinex bitcoin and crypto exchange wrote in emailed comments.
Fed chair Jerome Powell this week indicated the Fed will cut rates at least once this year after the European Central Bank (ECB) moved to lower interests rates in the Eurozone earlier this month.
“It seems clear that the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve will follow suit in the coming months,” the Bitfinex analysts added. “The global liquidity cycle indicates that money supply is likely to increase, which can support asset prices, including cryptocurrencies.”
JPMorgan Chase has heard the concerns from its customers about its policies regarding debanking, a practice of closing accounts of clients based on their political and/or religious beliefs. The group leading the charge was Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who secured from JPMorgan a promise to stop the debanking policy and assure that, in the future, the company honors the 1st Amendment rights of its customers.
ADF responded to the pledge by stating “No American should have to worry that their bank will punish or cancel them for their views. We have a long way to go in our efforts to guard against this threat, but the win at Chase is a timely reminder that while we may attempt great things for God, we can also expect great things from God.”
CV NEWS FEED // JPMorgan Chase has committed to honoring the free speech rights and religious liberty of its customers after legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom spearheaded a campaign to protect bank accounts from religiously or politically motivated de-banking.
CatholicVote previously reported that over the last few years, Chase has on several occasions closed the bank accounts of religious organizations without warning. On at least one occasion, Chase demanded confidential internal information from a national religious organization in order to reopen the account.
To fight “de-banking,” Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) began a campaign that included developing the “Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index” to measure companies’ respect for free speech and religious freedom.
ADF also began meeting with Chase leadership, additionally gathering support from 19 state attorneys general and 14 state financial officers, who wrote to Chase expressing their concerns about de-banking.
“Our goal was to bring about meaningful change at Chase. And by God’s grace, we did,” ADF stated in a June 11 news release.
ADF continued:
By the fall of 2023, Chase’s payment processor WePay removed its problematic “social risk” policy, which had banned “hate” and “intolerance” and [had] been applied against conservative groups in the past.
If your local McDonald’s has been getting your order confidently wrong with an AI chatbot at the drive-thru, I have good news for you: The company is ending the program for now. The company told franchisees that it’s winding down an AI drive-thru ordering partnership with IBM “no later than July 26th, 2024,” according to trade publication Restaurant Business.
The company will reportedly remove the tech from the over 100 restaurants it’s been testing the system in after partnering with IBM in 2021. It’s not clear why the company is ending the IBM deal, though. It told Restaurant Business it was testing whether the voice ordering chatbot could speed up service and that the test left it confident “that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurants’ future.”
Fast food companies in general are hungry for AI. White Castle has been testing AI provided by speech recognition company SoundHound. And Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, and others use an AI drive-through chatbot that an SEC filing revealed was underpinned by remote human workers in the Philippines most of the time.
REDMOND, Wash. — New laptops equipped with Microsoft Windows start shipping to customers next week without a flagship feature called Recall that drew concerns about privacy and cybersecurity.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella touted the new Recall feature at a showcase event last month, describing it as a step toward artificial intelligence machines that “instantly see us, hear, reason about our intent and our surroundings.”
Recall works by periodically taking snapshots of a computer screen to give Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot a “photographic memory” of a person’s virtual activity, ostensibly to help someone remember what they did earlier.
Apple has finally logged into the AI arms race, announcing a set of strikingly familiar machine learning tools during its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week.
But even for Apple, a company with a market cap of $3.3 trillion — over 30 times that of OpenAI — the well-documented shortcomings of AI tech will likely persist.
In a new Washington Post interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted outright that he’s not entirely sure his tech empire’s latest “Apple Intelligence” won’t come up with lies and confidently distort the truth, a problematic and likely intrinsic tendency that has plagued pretty much all AI chatbots released to date.
With that phrase, David Limp, at the time Amazon’s head of devices and services, showed off a new generative AI-powered version of the company’s signature Alexa voice assistant in September 2023.
At a packed event at the Seattle-based tech giant’s lavish second headquarters in the Washington DC suburbs, Limp demonstrated the new Alexa for a room full of reporters and cheering employees. He showed how in response to the new trigger phrase, “Alexa, let’s chat,” the digital assistant responded in a far more natural and conversational voice than the friendly-but-robotic one that hundreds of millions have become accustomed to communicating with for weather updates, reminders, timers and music requests. Limp asked Alexa how his favorite football team—Vanderbilt University—was doing. Alexa showed how it could respond in a joyful voice, and how it could write a message to his friends to remind them to watch the upcoming Vanderbilt football game and send it to his phone.
The Department of Defense has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX and, for the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to compete for national security space mission contracts over the next five years. Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint venture United Launch Alliance (ULA) was also selected.
Where did Cool Ranch Doritos come from?
The three companies will have the opportunity to fight for contracts from the Pentagon as part of the third phase of its National Security Space Launch program. Space Force, the military’s branch for space established in 2019, said it has so far picked a small number of companies, but will look to more rocket manufacturers in the future.
“As we anticipated, the pool of awardees is small this year because many companies are still maturing their launch capabilities,” Space Force’s Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen said in an interview with the space product marketing company Satellite Evolution Group. “Our strategy accounted for this by allowing on-ramp opportunities every year, and we expect increasing competition and diversity as new providers and systems complete development.”
Pritzker could sign mandate prioritizing diversity in nonprofit leadership
The governor could soon sign a law mandating nonprofits disclose the demographic data of their board members.
The measure, according to the bill’s sponsor State Sen. Adriane Johnson, would only apply to larger nonprofits, those that provide $1 million or more in grants. Johnson said the goal is to give nonprofits an opportunity to have more diverse leadership.
“[With this bill] we will build upon the General Assembly’s previous efforts to highlight and elevate leadership, diversity, equity and inclusion in Illinois,” said Johnson. “This bill requires non profit organizations that provide $1 million in grants each year to report the demographic data on their public-facing website.”
State Sen Jil Tracy opposed Senate Bill 2930 on the floor and said this would be a burden on nonprofit organizations especially considering most board members are volunteers.
New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, trustee of the $260 billion New York Common Retirement Fund, is prodding portfolio companies about their level of support for LGBTQ+ employees in the workplace.
DiNapoli has sent letters to 17 companies seeking LGBTQ+ information, including Aflac, Agilent Technologies, Albertsons, American Financial Group, Archer Daniels Midland, Baker Hughes, Caterpillar, Cintas, First Horizon, Jabil, Liberty Media, Marathon Oil, NextEra Energy, Reliance, Ryder System, Universal Health Services and WR Berkley. The pension fund owns shares in each of the companies.
DiNapoli said he wants the companies to disclose the equity and inclusion efforts being used in their workforce management strategy, particularly how they support LGBTQ+ employees through nondiscrimination policies, equal and inclusive health and other benefits, and employee resource groups.
The word abortion was left out of a G7 summit statement agreed on Friday, reflecting a rift on the issue between the host, Italy’s far-right premier Giorgia Meloni, and her allies.
Leaders of the Group of Seven rich democracies last year committed to addressing “access to safe and legal abortion”, in a statement after a summit in Hiroshima in Japan.
But that reference did not appear in the final statement agreed at this year’s summit in Puglia — with diplomats blaming Prime Minister Meloni.
The statement read: “We reiterate our commitments in the Hiroshima leaders’ communique to universal access to adequate, affordable, and quality health services for women, including comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights for all.”
Deadlines are coming up between now and July 5 in five states where advocates are trying to gather enough voters’ signatures to put abortion-related questions on ballots in November’s elections.
Measures that would enshrine the right to abortion in state constitutions are already on the ballot in four states, and officials in two more are checking whether the petitions submitted there are valid. Additionally, New York’s attorney general is trying to get a question reinstated after a court removed it.
The push continues after the Supreme Court’s June 13 abortion ruling denying on technical grounds an effort to roll back the federal approval for mifepristone, a drug used for medication abortions. But abortion rights supporters are cautioning against that ruling instilling too much confidence because it’s possible a similar lawsuit brought by someone else could succeed.
SAO PAULO (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Sao Paulo on Saturday as protests sweep across Brazil in opposition to a bill that would further criminalize abortions. If passed, the law would equate the termination of a pregnancy after 22 weeks with homicide.
The bill, proposed by conservative lawmakers and heading for a vote in the lower house, would also apply in cases of rape. Critics say those who seek an abortion so late are mostly child rape victims, as their pregnancies tend to be detected later.
BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s new home prices fell at the fastest pace in more than 9-1/2 years in May, official data showed on Monday, with the property sector struggling to find a bottom despite government efforts to rein in oversupply and support debt-laden developers.
Prices were down 0.7% in May from the previous month, marking the 11th straight month-on-month decline and steepest drop since October 2014, according to Reuters calculations based on National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data.
In annual terms, new home prices were down 3.9% from a year earlier, compared with a 3.1% slide in April.
The United Kingdom (UK) has overtaken China to become India’s fourth-largest export market in May, commerce department data showed. The UK was India’s sixth-largest export destination in May last year.
While exports to the UK grew by a third to $1.37 billion in May, the shipments to China saw 3 per cent growth at $1.33 billion last month.
The disaggregated data for May wasn’t immediately available, but trends over the past few months showed that exports to the UK were dominated by items such as machinery, food items, pharmaceutical products, textiles, jewellery, iron, and steel, among other items.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled on Friday that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) adequately evaluated emission impacts when it approved a gas pipeline expansion in Pennsylvania and New York, allowing the project to move forward.
The environmental group Food & Water Watch argued that the FERC did not properly assess the pipeline’s impact on ozone pollution. The court disagreed on the grounds that while FERC admitted that burning natural gas can release chemicals that form ozone, predicting exact ozone levels is tough due to various factors like weather and existing pollution. The court found this explanation reasonable, noting that complex modeling would still leave many uncertainties.
There’s a fake petrodollar news story doing the rounds that Saudi Arabia and the U.S. had a 50-year contract in which Saudi agreed to settle all its oil sales in U.S. dollars. Supposedly, this is meant to foreshadow the end of dollar dominance and is good for cryptocurrency prices. Except there was no such deal.
It’s tricky to check something that doesn’t exist. However, David Wight, an academic who wrote a book on the Petrodollar, told us that the deal did not exist. He trolled through declassified records to write his book.
Like all effective fake news stories, some aspects have slivers of truth. For example, Saudi Arabia has indeed joined mBridge, the cross border central bank digital currency project involving the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE. And mBridge does not plan to support dollar payments for now.
Boeing received orders for only four new planes in May — and for the second straight month, none for its best-selling 737 Max, as fallout continues from the blowout of a side panel on a Max during a flight in January.
The results released Tuesday compared unfavorably with Europe’s Airbus, which reported net orders for 15 planes in May — 27 sales but 12 cancellations.
Boeing also saw Aerolineas Argentinas cancel an order for a single Max jet, bringing its net sales for the month to three.
Pixar and its parent company Disney are over the moon to report that Inside Out 2 has garnered the second-biggest animated opening of all time in North America, and the biggest ever worldwide when comparing like-for-like markets.
Pixar’s Inside Out 2 opened to a massive $155 million domestically over Father’s Day weekend, well ahead of an expected $90 million. It was the second-biggest animated launch of all time for a three-day weekend, not adjusted for inflation. Not only did the opening top expectations domestically, but it also did historic business overseas, opening to a record $140 million for a total of $295 million globally.
Another Pixar sequel Incredibles 2 previously held the honor of top animated domestic opening ($182.7 million), followed by Illumination and Universal’s The Super Marios Bros. Movie ($146.4 million), which Inside Out 2 has now surpassed. Pixar’s Finding Dory ($135.1 million) and Walt Disney Animation Frozen II ($130.3 million) also set the bar for animated openings.
Craig Morford, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for Exxon Mobil Corporation, has announced his retirement effective July 1, 2024. The Board of Directors has elected Jeff Taylor as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary for the company.
“Craig has been a valued member of our Corporate Leadership Team during his time as General Counsel providing his strong legal experience and counsel to advance our strategic priorities,” said Darren Woods, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Exxon Mobil Corporation. “He leaves our company well-positioned for the future, and we thank him for his contributions to ExxonMobil.”
“We also welcome Jeff to ExxonMobil. He brings the right blend of corporate governance and legal expertise, and I look forward to working with him.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
US bosses’ pay is increasing at the fastest rate for at least 14 years, according to new figures which critics say illustrate how ballooning reward packages such as Elon Musk’s risk exacerbating social inequality.
So far in 2024, median chief executive pay at S&P 500 companies has risen by 12 per cent, according to ISS Corporate, part of proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. That compares with a 4.1 per cent year-on-year increase in US wage growth, according to official figures.
The Food and Drug Administration expanded a previous recall of raw cookie dough sold at Costco and Sam’s Club in nearly two dozen states. The FDA said it is now a “Class II recall,” which is “a situation in which use of, or exposure to, a violative product may cause temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences or where the probability of serious adverse health consequences is remote.”
The recall covers 29,019 cases of cookie dough that could be contaminated with salmonella. The recalled products include:
Costco Chocolate Chunk Frozen Cookie Dough
Facebook-parent Meta is reportedly looking to cut short some of vice president-level staff as the company continues its cost-cutting measures to balance the books. A report has said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is continuing efforts to simplify the company’s reporting structure, which includes implementing a stack ranking system and stricter performance evaluations for some high-level executives.
Citing three people with knowledge of the situation, a report by Business Insider says that Meta is looking to reduce the number of VP-level executives.
The “year of efficiency” initiative – in which more than 20,000 Meta employees were laid off – includes implementing stricter performance evaluations for some high-level executives, leading to additional team cuts on top of the layoffs.
Tupperware is a great American company that, thanks to Bidenomics, is now moving to Mexico.
Thanks, Joe Biden.
Tupperware — which makes those amazing, innovative plastic storage devices of all sorts, was founded in Grafton, Massachusetts, in 1946 and first invented in 1942 by Earl Tupper.
Unfortunately, it will now be manufactured by Enrico Tupper.
Tupperware is permanently shutting down its last standing US production plant in Hemingway, SC. A total of 148 workers will be laid off in waves starting September 28, 2024, through Jan. 14, 2025, the company disclosed in its Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed on June 11. Production will shift to a Tupperware plant in Lerma, Mexico, which already produces most of the products for the US and Canadian markets, the company told media outlets.
A coalition of 14 state attorneys general have filed a petition in federal court challenging a recently implemented federal mining rule, arguing that it oversteps the bounds of federal authority and infringes upon states’ rights.
The attorneys general, representing a diverse group of states with significant mining interests, contend that the new rule expands federal oversight of mining operations and permitting processes, undermining the traditional role of states in regulating their own natural resources.
The petition specifically targets provisions of the rule that they claim grant excessive power to federal agencies in areas such as environmental impact assessment, permitting timelines, and enforcement actions. They argue that these provisions violate the principles of federalism enshrined in the Constitution and disrupt the delicate balance between federal and state authority.
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