- United States President Donald Trump says Harvard University could lose its tax exempt status and be taxed as a political entity after the Ivy League school rejected demands from his administration.
- China has accused the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States of launching “advanced” cyberattacks during the Asian Winter Games in February.
- It comes as the US government launches investigations into imports of computer chips, chip-making gear and pharmaceuticals as it takes further steps towards imposing more tariffs.
- Meanwhile, Trump hints at a temporary exemption on the auto industry from previously imposed levies.
Trump says Harvard should lose its tax exempt status
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?,” the US president said in a post on Truth Social.
“Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” he added.
His message came after the school, one of the US’s Ivy League, rejected demands from the Trump’s administration. These included dropping diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punishing student protesters.
What is recession and how is it determined?
Officially,, the arbiter of recessions in the US is the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. The publicity-shy committee has been marking the start and end points of recessions for decades. It currently includes economists from Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.
The committee deliberates privately, and it takes a holistic approach, rather than a checklist. But it is open about what factors it uses to determine the start of a recession, namely “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months”.
The most recent recession – the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – was arguably the most unusual, because it was brief, lasting from February 2020 to April 2020, but was deep and widely diffused among most sectors of the economy.
In media coverage, a common yardstick for determining whether a recession is under way is two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product, which refers to the total of all economic activity.
But the committee officially weighs factors such as inflation-adjusted personal income, nonfarm payrolls, household employment data, inflation-adjusted personal expenditures, inflation-adjusted manufacturing and trade sales, and industrial production.
Notably, stock market declines are not included on this list.
No clear US-Russia deal on Ukraine, but ‘political will is there’
This is the message Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov delivered to reporters in a call earlier today.
Contacts with the US have been positive and useful, but Russia would not give a possible timeline for a peace settlement, Peskov said.
“There are no clear outlines of any agreement yet, but there is political will to move towards an agreement. And I repeat once again, we highly rate the constructive and meaningful contacts that we have had [with the US],” he added.
“Nevertheless, of course we would like to hope for the best, that the work will have positive results. We would not say exactly what the timeframe is here.”
Ukraine and its allies are sceptical over Russia’s stated intention to end the war and have repeatedly accused Moscow of dragging out the talks with the US.
Russia says the issue is a complex one and that it is therefore not surprising that it would take time to find a long-lasting solution.
Energy watchdog lowers forecast for global oil demand amid US tariffs
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says global oil demand will be lower than previously forecast this year due to rising trade tensions.
The IEA found that while US imports of oil, gas, and refined products have been exempted from Trump’s tariffs, the president’s other levies have spiked financial markets and pushed crude prices to four-year lows.
“After a period of relative calm, global oil markets were roiled by a barrage of trade tariff announcements in early April,” the watchdog said in a monthly report.
“With arduous trade negotiations expected to take place during the coming 90-day reprieve on tariffs and possibly beyond, oil markets are in for a bumpy ride and considerable uncertainties hang over our forecasts for this year and next,” it added.
The IEA lowered its forecast for growth in oil demand by 300,000 barrels per day (bpd), down from just over one million bpd in its March report to 730,000.
Wall Street’s main indexes make slight gains at opening bell
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 3.0 points, or 0.01 percent, to 40,527.82.
- The S&P 500 gained 6.0 points, or 0.11 percent, to 5,411.99.
- The Nasdaq Composite rose 10.9 points, or 0.06 percent, to 16,842.393.
US import prices fell in March, report shows
New US labour statistics show import prices dropped 0.1 percent last month after a downwardly revised 0.2 percent gain in February.
The report by the US Department of Labor, along with weak consumer and producer price data, suggested that inflation was subsiding before Trump’s broad tariffs on imports took effect.
The tariffs have stoked fears of high inflation and even a recession.
In March, imported fuel prices declined 2.3 percent after increasing by 1.6 percent in February. Moreover, food prices increased by 0.1 percent after being unchanged the month prior.
Excluding fuel and food, import prices gained 0.1 percent for the second month in a row.