Trump signs signature tax-cut and spending bill into law
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law a massive package of tax and spending cuts in a ceremony at the White House on Friday, one day after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives narrowly approved the signature legislation of Trump's second term.
The bill, which will fund Trump's immigration crackdown, make his 2017 tax cuts permanent and is expected to knock millions of Americans off health insurance, was passed with a 218-214 vote after an emotional debate on the House floor.
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Nikkei Asia
20 minutes ago
- Nikkei Asia
South Korea considers playing US tech card as tariff deadline nears
U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. The latter wants more time for tariff negotiations. (Nikkei montage/Source photos by Reuters) KIM JAEWON SEOUL -- South Korea is trying to fend off U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff pressure and buy more time ahead of a key deadline by suggesting Seoul could soften plans to regulate U.S. tech companies. Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo, Seoul's point man for negotiations, said the export-driven economy would take a "flexible" approach to U.S. tech companies in ongoing tariff talks in a bid to protect its own manufacturers.
Japan Times
an hour ago
- Japan Times
The U.S. bombing of Iran was a win for Putin
The consensus after Israel's 12-day war with Iran seems to be that it ended in humiliation — not just for the Islamic Republic, but also Russia, which failed to lift a finger for a loyal ally and lost a supplier of critical drones. But that profoundly misreads both President Vladimir Putin's priorities and the timescale on which he conducts foreign policy. There's no doubt that Putin's ambition to reassert Russia as a force in the Middle East has been set back. The fall of President Bashar Assad in Syria was a significant loss. His failure to come to the aid of Iran, with whom he'd just signed a 20-year strategic partnership was embarrassing. A year ago, that would indeed have hurt Moscow's war effort in Ukraine, but Russia now makes its own version of the Iranian Shahed drones. Much more important is to understand where all this fits into Putin's worldview and priorities. Destroying the Ukrainian state ranks much higher for the Russian president than any other foreign policy goal, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere. And on that score, the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran was a net positive. In a broad sense, the outbreak of another war in the Middle East has sucked attention, energy and resources away from Ukraine, leaving Putin with a free hand. Even at the recent NATO summit, the core deliverable of a pledge to boost defense spending — to levels only justifiable by the threat from Russia — was shunted to the corner. Nobody wanted to anger U.S. President Donald Trump during his victory lap. More concretely, Israel was able to blunt the impact of the Islamic Republic's missile barrages only by consuming a significant part of its air-defense stockpiles, as well as some from the U.S., which lent a hand using shipborne air defense systems. Equally, the U.S. could only involve itself once it was confident it had enough Patriot batteries in place to protect its military bases around the threat may have receded for now, but planners at the Pentagon are obliged to assume the war restarts and more air defense will be needed, making less available for Ukraine. They went further, confirming recently they were halting already planned military aid for Ukraine, including air defense supplies. A Pentagon statement said the decision put American interests first and that "the strength of the United States Armed Forces remains unquestioned — just ask Iran.' The Trump slogan used was false. The Department of Defense has put Russian interests first; the U.S. cannot benefit from a rout of Ukrainian forces and the wider destabilization of Europe that would bring. The recent dramatic boost in Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine was well timed. Overnight on June 30, Russia launched its biggest single barrage since the start of the war, including 477 drones and decoys, as well as 60 ballistic missiles that require high-level interceptors, such as Patriots. Since then, Russia has launched even heavier aerial assaults. The fact that Ukraine lost an F-16 and its pilot trying to shoot down some of the barrage is a clear indication of the strain on the country's air defense systems. The attacks in previous days had been only a little smaller, so there was an air of desperation around President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's ask for more Patriot interceptors when he met with his U.S. counterpart at NATO. There was also truth to Trump's comments afterward. He said he'd told Zelenskyy that he'd see what the U.S. could do, but that the Patriots were hard to get, because: "We need them too. We were supplying them to Israel.' Meanwhile, the Pentagon was cutting off even planned supplies. This is what matters to Putin, far more than the optics abroad of his failure to come to Iran's aid. For this war will define a legacy that he sees in the context of the Russian Empire's construction over centuries. Or as his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly quipped in 2022, his boss has just three advisers: "Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.' Nothing that has happened in the last three years has dented this vision of Great Russian restoration. To Putin, not only is the very existence of Ukraine an affront, but the reabsorption of its resources — human, economic and military — into mother Russia is the sine qua non for Moscow's ability to remain at the top of the multipolar world order he sees replacing Western dominance. This is the reason for which Ukraine's plan to sign a trade treaty with the European Union so enraged him in 2013; it meant Kyiv would not join his own rival group, the Eurasian Union. "All of Ukraine is ours,' Putin told an enthusiastic domestic audience at the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum, on June 20. He wasn't shy about adding a new city, Sumy, as a new public target for occupation, either. Make no mistake, Odesa and Kharkiv would be next on the list, whose extent and end will be determined solely by what the Kremlin deems possible at acceptable cost. Ukraine is at a critical juncture. Until Trump came to office, it was evenly balanced as to whether Putin would be able to continue to exchange swathes of his armed forces for small increments of Ukrainian land long enough for Kyiv's defenses to collapse. With Trump's withdrawal of U.S. military support, those calculations have shifted and the long-range missile and drone war forms an essential part of Russia's path to victory. From the moment Ukraine runs out of air defense interceptors, Russia's air force — still menacing in its scale and capabilities — would for the first time be able to impose air superiority across the country. The impunity that Israeli jets enjoyed over Iran should serve as a timely reminder of exactly what this could mean for Ukraine: A catastrophic collapse of defensive lines as its troops were bombed into submission from the air. Trump recently switched from the moral obscenity of blaming Ukraine for being invaded, to complaining about Putin's disinterest in peace talks. But he needs to do a lot better than that. He needs to recognize, at least to himself, that Putin has played him. The intelligence operative running the Kremlin has leveraged Trump's desperation for a ceasefire to further Russia's war aims, and at a time when he too has growing vulnerabilities, including a looming credit crisis. It may be years before anyone can say with certainty that the U.S. military intervention in Iran was a success or failure. But if there is one conclusion Trump can draw from its success in imposing a ceasefire on Israel and Iran, it's that for peace-through-strength to work, you need to first show the strength. That's something he has woefully failed to do in his dealings with the Kremlin. Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.
Asahi Shimbun
2 hours ago
- Asahi Shimbun
Stocks slip in Asia on U.S. tariff confusion, oil skids
SYDNEY--Stock markets slipped in Asia on Monday amid confusion as U.S. officials flagged a delay on tariffs but failed to provide much detail on the change, while oil prices slid as OPEC+ opened the supply spigots more than expected. The United States is close to finalizing several trade agreements in the coming days and will notify other countries of higher tariff rates by July 9, President Donald Trump said on Sunday, with the higher rates to take effect on August 1. 'President Trump's going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners saying that if you don't move things along, then on August 1 you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level,' U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN. Trump in April announced a 10% base tariff rate on most countries and higher 'reciprocal' rates ranging up to 50%, with an original deadline of this Wednesday. However, Trump also said levies could range in value from 'maybe 60% or 70%,' and threatened an extra 10% on countries aligning themselves with the 'Anti-American policies' of the BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, India and China. With very few actual trade deals done, analysts had always suspected the date would be pushed out, though it was still not clear if the new deadline applied to all trading partners or just some. 'This renewed escalation in trade tensions comes at a time when major trade partners, including the EU, India and Japan, are believed to be at crucial stages of bilateral negotiations,' analysts at ANZ said in a note. 'If reciprocal tariffs are implemented in their original form or even expanded, we believe it will intensify downside risks to U.S. growth and increase upside risks to inflation.' Investors have grown somewhat used to the uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policy and the initial market reaction was cautious. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq futures both eased 0.3%. EUROSTOXX 50 futures eased 0.1%, while FTSE futures fell 0.2% and DAX futures held steady. Japan's Nikkei lost 0.5%, while South Korean stocks went flat. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan eased 0.6%, as Chinese blue chips dropped 0.5%. DOLLAR MIXED Safe-haven bonds were better bid, with 10-year Treasury yields down almost 2 basis points at 4.326%. Major currencies were mixed as the dollar index nudged up to 97.071. The euro held at $1.1771, just off last week's top of $1.1830, while the dollar was a fraction firmer at 144.76 yen. The dollar has been undermined by investor concerns about Trump's often chaotic tariff policy and what that might do to economic growth and inflation. The same worries have kept the Federal Reserve from cutting rates and minutes of its last meeting should offer more color on when the majority of members might resume easing. It is a relatively quiet week for Fed speakers with only two district presidents on the docket, while economic data is also sparse. The Reserve Bank of Australia is widely expected to cut its rates by a quarter point to 3.60% at a meeting on Tuesday, the third easing this cycle, and markets imply an eventual destination for rates of 2.85% or 3.10%. New Zealand's central bank meets on Wednesday and is likely to hold rates at 3.25%, having already slashed by 225 basis points over the past year. In commodity markets, gold slipped 0.3% to $3,324 an ounce though it did gain almost 2% last week as the dollar fell. Oil prices slid anew after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies, a group known as OPEC+, agreed on Saturday to raise production by a larger-than-expected 548,000 barrels per day in August. The group also warned that it could hike by a similar amount in September, leaving analysts with the impression it was trying to squeeze lower margin producers and particularly those pulling oil from U.S. shale. 'We see OPEC+ targeting Brent oil futures around $US60-65/bbl as a result,' said Vivek Dhar, an analyst at CBA. 'This would challenge the economics of U.S. shale oil supply growth and prevent non-OPEC+ supply growth from taking market share in coming years.' Brent dropped 52 cents to $67.78 a barrel, while U.S. crude fell $1.01 to $65.99 per barrel.
