#Janet L Yellen

[telugutimesdigimedia]

US Finance Minister met Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman

US Treasury Secretary Janet L Yellen has revealed that she intends to further tighten the sanctions imposed by Russia, which went to war against Ukraine. They said that their aim is to damage Russia's military and industrial systems. She came to Bengaluru to participate in the ongoing G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCG) meeting. Met Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

[mebwalker]

The American Debt Ceiling "Ritual"

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden in the Oval Office at the White House on May 22. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) (R-Calif. means Republican California) I reported on the debt-ceiling crisis in 2021, noting, essentially, that it is a “dangerous and idiotic ritual.” (See Opinion by Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post.) However, I would now suggest that this…

[frenchbulletin]

États-Unis : Janet Yellen demandera des éclaircissements à la Chine sur l'assouplissement des restrictions de Covid

États-Unis : Janet Yellen demandera des éclaircissements à la Chine sur l’assouplissement des restrictions de Covid

La secrétaire américaine au Trésor, Janet Yellen, demandera des éclaircissements sur les plans de la Chine pour assouplir les restrictions liées au COVID-19 et résoudre les problèmes de son secteur immobilier lorsqu’elle rencontrera demain le chef de la banque centrale chinoise, ont déclaré aujourd’hui des responsables du département américain du Trésor. Des responsables ont déclaré aux…

[ravenkings]

Mr. Trump once claimed to be “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” but he has a history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes. During the 2016 campaign, he tweeted a photo of Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of $100 bills and a Star of David. His closing campaign ad featured Mr. Soros — along with Janet L. Yellen, then chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, and Lloyd Blankfein, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” enriching themselves on the backs of working Americans. In 2018, he helped popularize the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Soros was financing a caravan of Central American migrants, a view shared by the gunman who killed 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Mr. Trump’s targeting of Mr. Soros escalated in the run-up to his indictment last April in Manhattan on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn star who claimed they had had a sexual encounter. Mr. Trump said the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, had been “handpicked and funded by George Soros,” an allegation then amplified by Trump acolytes. In fact, Mr. Soros’s involvement was indirect: In 2021, the political arm of a racial-justice organization called Color of Change pledged $1 million to the Bragg campaign; shortly afterward, the group received $1 million from Mr. Soros, one of several donations, totaling about $4 million, since 2016. Color of Change eventually spent about $425,000 in support of Mr. Bragg; a spokesman for Mr. Soros said none of his contributions had been earmarked for the candidate. Since then, Mr. Trump’s attacks have only intensified and widened — blaming Mr. Soros or globalists, for example, for letting “violent criminals” go free, “buying the White House” and turning America into a “Marxist Third World nation.”

– Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, and Alex Lemonides, "How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel," The New York Times, May 9, 2024

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Max Gustafson

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 12, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

At 6:15 this evening, Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg announced that Secretary Yellen has signed off on measures to enable the FDIC to fully protect everyone who had money in Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, and Signature Bank, New York. They will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. None of the losses associated with this resolution, the statement said, “will be borne by the taxpayer.”

But, it continued, “Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”

The statement ended by assuring Americans that “the U.S. banking system remains resilient and on a solid foundation, in large part due to reforms that were made after the financial crisis that ensured better safeguards for the banking industry. Those reforms combined with today's actions demonstrate our commitment to take the necessary steps to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe.”

It’s been quite a weekend.

On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed in the largest bank failure since 2008. At the end of December 2022, SVB appears to have had about $209 billion in total assets and about $175 billion in deposits. This made SVB the sixteenth largest bank in the U.S., big in its sector but small compared with the more than $3 trillion JPMorgan Chase. This is the first bank failure of the Biden presidency (while Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that he had not heard of any bank failures during his father’s presidency, there were sixteen, eight of which happened before the pandemic). In fact, generally, a few banks fail every year; it is an oddity that none failed in 2021 or 2022.

The failure of SVB created shock waves for three reasons. First, SVB was the major bank for technology start-ups, so it involved much of a single sector of the economy. Second, only about $8 billion of the $173 billion worth of deposits in SVB were less than the $250,000 that the FDIC insures, meaning that the companies who had made those deposits might not get their money back quickly and thus might not be able to make payrolls, sparking a larger crisis. Third, there was concern that the problems that plagued SVB might cause other banks to fail, as well.

What seems to have happened, though, appears to be specific to SVB. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine explained it most clearly:

As the bank for start-ups, which have a lot of cash from investors and the initial public offering of stock, SVB had lots of deposits. But start-up companies don’t need much in the way of loans because they’ve just gotten so much cash and they don’t yet have fixed assets. So, rather than balancing deposits with loans that fluctuate with interest rates and thus keep a bank on an even keel, SVB’s directors took a gamble that the Federal Reserve would not raise interest rates. They invested in long-term Treasury bonds that paid better interest rates than short-term securities. But when, in fact, interest rates went up, the value of those long-term bonds sank.  

For most banks, higher interest rates are good news because they can charge more for loans. But for SVB, they hurt.

Then, because SVB concentrated on start-ups, they had another problem. Start-ups are also hurt by rising interest rates because they tend to promise to deliver returns in the long term, which is fine so long as interest rates stay steadily low, as they have been now for years. But as interest rates go up, investors tend to like faster returns than most start-ups can deliver. They take their money to places that are going to see returns sooner. For SVB, that meant their depositors began to need some of that money they had dumped into the bank and started to withdraw their deposits.

So SVB sold securities at a loss to cover those deposits. Other investors panicked as they saw SVB selling at a loss and losing deposits, and they, too, started yanking their money out of the bank, collapsing it. Banks that have a more diverse client base are less likely to lose everyone all at once.

The FDIC took control of the bank on Friday. On Sunday, regulators also shut down Signature Bank, based in New York, which was a major bank for the cryptocurrency industry. Another crypto-friendly bank, Silvergate, failed last week.

Congress created the FDIC under the Banking Act of 1933 to restore trust in the American banking system after more than a third of U.S. banks failed after the Great Crash of 1929, sparking runs on banks as depositors rushed to take out their money whenever rumors suggested a bank was in trouble, thus causing more failures. The FDIC is an independent agency that insures deposits, examines and supervises banks to make sure they’re healthy, and manages the fallout when they’re not. The FDIC is backed by the full faith and credit of the government, but it is not funded by the government. Member banks pay insurance dues to cover bank failures, and when that isn’t enough money, the FDIC can borrow from the federal government or issue debt.

Over the weekend, the crisis at SVB became a larger argument over the role of government in the protection of the economy. Tech leaders took to social media to insist that the government must cover all the deposits in the failed bank, not just the ones covered under FDIC. They warned that the companies whose deposits were uninsured would fail, taking down the rest of the economy with them.

Others noted that the very men who were arguing the government should protect all the depositors’ money, not just that protected under the FDIC, have been vocal in opposing both government regulation of their industry and government relief for student loan debt, suggesting that they hate government action…except for themselves. They also pointed out that in 2018, under Trump, Congress weakened government regulations for banks like SVB and that SVB’s president had been a leading advocate for weakening those regulations. Had those regulations been in place, they argue, SVB would have remained solvent.

It appears that Yellen, Powell, and Gruenberg, in consultation with the president (as required), concluded that the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank was a systemic threat to the nation’s whole financial system, or perhaps they concluded that the panic over that collapse—which is a different thing than the collapse itself—was a threat to the nation’s financial system. They apparently decided to backstop the banks to prevent more damage. But they are eager to remind people that they are not using taxpayer money to shore up a poorly managed bank.

Right now, this appears to leave us with two takeaways. The Biden administration had been considering tightening the banking regulations that were loosened under Trump, and it seems likely that the need for the federal government to step in to protect the depositors at SVB and Signature Bank will make it much harder for those opposed to regulation to keep that from happening. There will likely be increased pressure on the Biden administration to guard against helping out the wealthy and corporations rather than ordinary Americans.

And, perhaps even more important, the weekend of panic and fear over the collapse of just one major bank should make it clear that the Republicans’ threat to default on the U.S. debt, thus pulling the rug out from under the entire U.S. economy unless they get their way, is simply unthinkable.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[theculturedmarxist]

George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is mostly remembered, for good reason, as a debacle. But as the American military risks being drawn into the Middle East once again, it is worth noting the contrast between the initial phase of the Iraq war and the situation now unfolding in the Middle East. When Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off on March 20, 2003, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was isolated diplomatically and had been under harsh economic sanctions for years. Saddam had few allies to call upon, and his military was no match for that of the American hyperpower. Prior to the invasion, the United States had spent more than half a year simply building up forces, shipping over ammunition and fuel and preparing lines of supply. American diplomats had secured permission to stage troops and base aircraft in neighboring countries, such that the coalition had forces both to the south and to the north. The invasion was meticulously prepared, America was on the offense, and brought a massive preponderance of force down on the hapless Iraqi army.

The situation that Washington faces now is almost a photo negative of the one in March 2003. Today, US forces and assets are strewn across the region in military installations with a few thousand troops each. The United States isn’t facing one enemy, but a panoply of militias and terrorist groups, ranged across several countries, all aligned with Iran, which, in turn, has close ties to China and Russia.

America has done no preparation to, say, wage a concerted and effective air campaign against Iran, should the Iranians respond to an Israeli land invasion of Gaza with an all-out assault against the Jewish state. For one thing, Washington is increasingly diplomatically isolated due to Muslim anger over American support for the Israeli offensive in Gaza, but also because of inroads made by rival powers while its attention was elsewhere. This isolation was on display last week when President Biden’s planned summit with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority was canceled at the last minute. The West is mostly talking to itself and to the Israeli government. Meanwhile Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing are all engaged in their own diplomatic efforts across the region.

It’s possible that the snubs from America’s traditional Sunni allies are at least partly intended for domestic consumption, to pacify their own publics even as the likes of Riyadh and Amman continue to view Tehran as their No. 1 threat and Israel a useful bulwark against it. The problem is that America’s other interlocking dysfunctions leave scant room for hope that Washington can easily overcome these countervailing forces. The House of Representatives still has no speaker, the deficit is exploding, and the war in Ukraine is already a drain on the defense budget. But this is all just waved away; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gives an interview saying that waging two simultaneous wars is perfectly affordable. How will America avoid a severe fiscal crisis if interest rates and inflation continue to spike? Nobody knows; nobody really asks.

Should America be drawn into a regional war, which countries will it be fighting? For how long? What if Russia or China decide to intervene indirectly or directly? What if drones continue to rain down on US bases as its patriot missiles and other interceptors run out? What if another crisis breaks out over Taiwan?

“Turning Iraq into California was a stupid plan, but it was a plan.”

As foolish as George W. Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq looks in retrospect, the new war heating up in the Middle East threatens to be more catastrophic. Turning Iraq into California was a stupid plan, but it was a plan. Today, the plan is for Israel to defeat Hamas, but it is unclear how this will address the deeper crises that are feeding the current conflict—not just the grievances of Palestinians, but the fact that the US-led regional order is breaking down as other powers assert their interests and pursue their ambitions. Two decades ago, America’s leaders were deluded by visions of democratic transformation; today, it is unclear they have any vision beyond putting out the latest fire and waiting for the next one.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Less than a year ago, CubicPV, which manufactures components for solar panels, announced that it had secured more than $100 million in financing to build a $1.4 billion factory in the United States. The company planned to produce silicon wafers, a critical part of the technology that allows solar panels to turn sunlight into electrical energy.

The Massachusetts-based company called the investment a “direct result of the long-term industrial policy contained within the Inflation Reduction Act,” the 2022 law that directed billions of dollars to develop America’s domestic clean energy sectors. CubicPV was considering locations in Texas, where it would employ about 1,000 workers.

But a surge of cheap solar panels from China upended that project. In February, CubicPV canceled its plans to build the factory over concerns it would no longer be financially viable thanks to a flood of Chinese exports. As CubicPV was gearing up to make wafers in the United States, prices of those components were dropping by 70 percent.

The setback underscores the concerns rippling across the U.S. solar industry and within the Biden administration about whether President Biden’s industrial policy agenda can succeed. Top administration officials have begun warning that efforts to finance a domestic clean energy industry are being undermined by a surge of cheaper Chinese exports that are driving down prices and putting the United States at a competitive disadvantage.

The fate of the CubicPV factory is the type of outcome that Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has warned is likely if China does not stop dumping heavily subsidized green energy products into global markets at rock bottom prices. She took that message to China last week, warning that its industrial strategy was warping supply chains and threatening American workers.

China appeared to dismiss those concerns. Following Ms. Yellen’s meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, his office said, “The development of China’s new energy industry will make an important contribution to the worldwide green and low-carbon transition.”

Chinese overcapacity has been a central topic this week at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Ahead of talks with Chinese officials at the Treasury Department on Tuesday, Ms. Yellen said that China was not operating on a “level playing field” and warned that by producing more green energy products than the world can absorb, it was putting American firms and workers at risk.

[aunti-christ-ine]

Breaking News: An IRS plan to overhaul U.S. tax collection aims to improve customer service and crack down on tax evasion by corporations and the wealthy.

The Biden administration has been focused on highlighting improved taxpayer service and responsiveness, but the report indicates that more than half the money will be dedicated to cracking down on big companies and wealthy individuals that evade taxes.

In a memorandum to Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen that accompanied the report, Daniel I. Werfel, the new I.R.S. commissioner, said he would focus new enforcement resources on “hiring the accountants, attorneys, and data scientists needed to pursue high-income and high-wealth individuals, complex partnerships and large corporations that are not paying the taxes they owe.”

[meandmybigmouth]

WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen and White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda D. Young today released the final budget results for fiscal year (FY) 2022. During FY 2022, the deficit fell by $1.4 trillion—the largest one-year decrease in the Federal deficit in American history.

[onetwistedmiracle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/13/study-girls-raised-jewish-outperform-christian-girls-academically/

Religion

Study: Girls raised Jewish outperform Christian girls academically

By Yonat Shimron

May 13, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

If a Supreme Court justice, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the treasury secretary were not enough, Jewish girls can find plenty of other role models of professional success.

A new study suggests the examples of these Jewish women — Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and many others like them — have made a deep impression.

The study, published in the latest edition of the American Sociological Review, finds that girls with a Jewish upbringing are 23 percent more likely to graduate college, and to graduate from much more selective colleges, than girls with a Christian upbringing. (The study included comparisons with Protestants, mostly evangelicals.)

These girls, the study found, have ambitious career goals and prioritize their professional success over marriage and motherhood. The girls in the study were all reared in liberal Jewish movements that make up the vast majority of American Jewish life; none was Orthodox.

“Whereas Jewish upbringing promoted self-concepts centered on meaningful careers and public impact, non-Jewish upbringing promoted self-concepts centered on marriage and motherhood,” wrote the study’s four authors, led by Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz.

The study is based on an analysis of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, a 10-year longitudinal study of the religious lives of 3,290 American youth from adolescence into young adulthood. The NSYR included an oversample of 80 Jewish households, from which researchers based their study. (The NSYR did not include sufficient Muslim or Hindu participants for comparison.)

The researchers then matched the data with the National Student Clearinghouse, which provides educational reporting and verification.

The results were startling. The study estimates that boys and girls raised by at least one Jewish parent have a 73 percent probability of graduating from college, as opposed to 32 percent of young people raised by non-Jewish parents. In other words, they are at least 2.28 times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than children raised by non-Jewish parents.

When researchers looked at the elite schools attended by the Jewish NSYR participants, they found the school’s average SAT scores were higher, too.

Students raised by at least one Jewish parent attended colleges with a mean SAT score of 1201, whereas participants raised by non-Jewish parents attended colleges with a mean SAT score of 1102 (99 points lower).

And girls raised by Jewish parents were even more likely to graduate from college than boys raised with Jewish parents.

“I’d like to make a mark,” said a Jewish girl named Debbie who was interviewed by NSYR researchers. “I’m not the type of person who’s okay not being in the limelight.”

“I’m thinking about Ivy Leagues,” a Jewish girl named Jessica told researchers. “My parents both went to Cornell. I’ve been there a few times, I like it there a lot and it’s the kind of place where I would want to go.”

By contrast, some of the Christian girls in the study had other priorities.

“I think the biggest thing that a mother can do is to be with her kids,” said a girl named Mandy. “That’s the greatest thing over her career.”

The study suggests it was not any innate genetic factors that made the Jewish girls stand out. Rather it was a set of cultural, historical, political and religious factors that contributed to an environment in which parents and other Jewish elders imbued the girls with educational and professional expectations of success.

One key attribute shared by the Jewish girls: They grew up in Jewish communities that were egalitarian, believing men and women are equal in roles and responsibilities, in the home and in society at large.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine and the author of “Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America,” a 1991 book that addressed Jewish feminism, said she was not surprised by the findings.

“I think there has been a gradual accumulation of knowledge that explains women feeling that, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.’ As long as we can have a postgraduate degree we can mark our lives and we don’t have to marry achievement,” she said. “We can achieve our own.”

Stephen Vaisey, a professor of sociology at Duke University who was an interviewer for the NSYR when he was in graduate school, said he thought the study of Jewish girls was well designed and comprehensive. But it contrasted two very different groups: liberal Jews and often conservative Protestants. Had it included nonreligious as a comparison group, he said, the results may have looked different.

“If you took people with the same level of education and the same level of occupational prestige and compare Jewish and secular I wonder if you’d see a difference,” Vaisey said. “How much of this is about Judaism and how much about Christianity and traditional gender roles?”

All the girls in the NSYR study had what researchers described as a “moderate” level of Jewish engagement. They attended Hebrew school or perhaps a Jewish day school. They went to synagogue occasionally. Some belonged to a Jewish youth group.

But it was not Jewish teachings or any particular set of beliefs that necessarily contributed to their success so much as the stories they may have absorbed from their parents and grandparents at Shabbat dinners or bat mitzvah parties or at the Passover Seder about the accomplishments of their Jewish women ancestors, Horwitz said.

“Part of the narrative that Jewish adults convey to their children is that education helped Jews survive in Europe and eventually thrive in the United States,” according to the study.

Women are now much more likely to enroll in college than men. In 2020, just 41 percent of students enrolled in a postsecondary institution were men, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

But Horwitz argues there is something about liberal Judaism that socializes girls to succeed academically and professionally.

“There’s an egalitarianism in Judaism where families teach their girls they can be anything they want to be,” Horwitz said. “They don’t want to do it by altruism, they want to do it by being prominent within. They want to be in the spotlight and make a difference in a loud way.”

— Religion News Service

[joieavousmesamis]

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen sent a letter to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Charles P. Rettig in support of the much needed funding to the IRS to improve taxpayer service, modernize outdated technological infrastructure, and increase equity in the tax system by enforcing the tax laws against those high-earners, large corporations, and complex partnerships who today do not pay what they owe. Secretary Yellen also reaffirmed the Administration’s commitment to not increasing audit rates relative to recent years on Americans making under $400,000 a year, noting that they will actually see a lower likelihood of audit due to improved technology and customer service.   “Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels. This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”   The full text of the letter is also available below.   August 10, 2022 Charles P. Rettig Commissioner Internal Revenue Service Washington, DC 20224 Dear Commissioner:   The Inflation Reduction Act includes much-needed funding for the IRS to...

[kp777]

By Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley

The New York Times

July 18, 2022

WASHINGTON — In June, months after reluctantly signing on to a global tax agreement brokered by the United States, Ireland’s finance minister met privately with Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, seeking reassurances that the Biden administration would hold up its end of the deal.

Ms. Yellen assured the minister, Paschal Donohoe, that the administration would be able to secure enough votes in Congress to ensure that the United States was in compliance with the pact, which was aimed at cracking down on companies evading taxes by shifting jobs and profits around the world.

It turns out that Ms. Yellen was overly optimistic. Late last week, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively scuttled the Biden administration’s tax agenda in Congress — at least for now — by saying he could not immediately support a climate, energy and tax package he had spent months negotiating with the Democratic leadership. He expressed deep misgivings about the international tax deal, which he had previously indicated he could support, saying it would put American companies at a disadvantage.

“I said we’re not going to go down that path overseas right now because the rest of the countries won’t follow, and we’ll put all of our international companies in jeopardy, which harms the American economy,” Mr. Manchin told a West Virginia radio station on Friday. “So we took that off the table.”

Mr. Manchin’s reversal, couched in the language used by Republican opponents of the deal, is a blow to Ms. Yellen, who spent months getting more than 130 countries on board. It is also a defeat for President Biden and Democratic leaders in the Senate, who pushed hard to raise tax rates on many multinational corporations in hopes of leading the world in an effort to stop companies from shifting jobs and income to minimize their tax bills.

The agreement would have ushered in the most sweeping changes to global taxation in decades, including raising taxes on many large corporations and changing how technology companies are taxed. The two-pronged approach would entail countries enacting a 15 percent minimum tax so that companies pay a rate of at least that much on their global profits no matter where they set up shop. It would also allow governments to tax the world’s largest and most profitable companies based on where their goods and services were sold, not where their headquarters were.

Failure to get agreement at home creates a mess both for the Biden administration and for multinational corporations. Many other countries are likely to press ahead to ratify the deal, but some may now be emboldened to hold out, fracturing the coalition and potentially opening the door for some countries to continue marketing themselves as corporate tax havens.

Read more.

[stoweboyd]

Yes, Europe Should Buy Russian Oil

Discussions at the G7 summit this week have included what appears to be a counterintuitive proposal to relax the sanctions against buying Russian oil, here reported by Katrin Bennhold and Jim Tankersley in 

Ukraine War’s Latest Victim? The Fight Against Climate Change. 

Another proposal that has gained steam in recent days and is expected to feature at the summit is a price cap on Russian oil, allowing European countries to import it, but only at an artificially low price. That could help lower oil and gasoline prices worldwide and reduce the energy revenues underwriting President Vladimir V. Putin’s war efforts in Ukraine. It could also encourage more Russian oil production.

An architect of the idea, Janet L. Yellen, the U.S. Treasury secretary, has privately been telling foreign leaders that imposing the so-called price cap on Russian oil sales to Europe would be the single best thing those leaders could do right now to minimize the chances of a global recession, according to people familiar with the conversations.

[...]

In the United States, the idea of a price cap on Russian oil is seen as a way to reduce oil and gasoline prices and put a dent in the Kremlin’s finances. To date, Russia has found a way around sanctions and embargoes in the West by selling to China and India, which are gobbling up its oil at discounted — but still lucrative — prices.

The proposal would effectively allow Russia to sell more oil to Europe, but only at a steep discount on the current price of more than $100 a barrel. Ms. Yellen, as well as top economic officials in Ukraine, say it would serve two key purposes: increasing the global supply of oil to put downward pressure on oil and gasoline prices, while reducing Russia’s oil revenue.[1]

Proponents say it is likely that Russia would continue to produce and sell oil even at a discount because it would be easier and more economical than capping wells to cut production. Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates that it could be in Russia’s economic interest to continue selling oil with a price cap as low as $10 a barrel.

This idea is sound economics. And the ecological impacts would be far lower to continue to source oil from Russia rather than expanding other oil production elsewhere, or -- worst of all -- increasing the use of coal.

Will Russia play along? They need the money -- they have apparently just defaulted on loan payments -- but may rather beggar their neighbors.

[frenchbulletin]

Yellen : Les investissements dans les puces et la recherche stimuleront la capacité de fabrication aux États-Unis

Yellen : Les investissements dans les puces et la recherche stimuleront la capacité de fabrication aux États-Unis

La secrétaire américaine au Trésor, Janet Yellen, a déclaré vendredi que les investissements nationaux dans les semi-conducteurs et la recherche stimuleraient la capacité de production de l’économie américaine. Yellen, s’exprimant dans un discours à Washington, a déclaré que l’avance américaine en matière d’innovation technologique est de plus en plus menacée par la Chine et d’autres…

[realcleverissues]

This story is a bit old but I don’t think there’s been an update. Basically, Manchin is stopping us from reaching a global minimum tax rate which would basically help everyone but the super rich.

“I said we’re not going to go down that path overseas right now because the rest of the countries won’t follow, and we’ll put all of our international companies in jeopardy, which harms the American economy,” Mr. Manchin told a West Virginia radio station on Friday. “So we took that off the table.”

Mr. Manchin’s reversal, couched in the language used by Republican opponents of the deal, is a blow to Ms. Yellen, who spent months getting more than 130 countries on board. It is also a defeat for President Biden and Democratic leaders in the Senate, who pushed hard to raise tax rates on many multinational corporations in hopes of leading the world in an effort to stop companies from shifting jobs and income to minimize their tax bills.

The agreement would have ushered in the most sweeping changes to global taxation in decades, including raising taxes on many large corporations and changing how technology companies are taxed. The two-pronged approach would entail countries enacting a 15 percent minimum tax so that companies pay a rate of at least that much on their global profits no matter where they set up shop. It would also allow governments to tax the world’s largest and most profitable companies based on where their goods and services were sold, not where their headquarters were.

Failure to get agreement at home creates a mess both for the Biden administration and for multinational corporations. Many other countries are likely to press ahead to ratify the deal, but some may now be emboldened to hold out, fracturing the coalition and potentially opening the door for some countries to continue marketing themselves as corporate tax havens.

[nationallawreview]

Biden Administration Announces Voluntary Carbon Market Principles

The recent Joint Policy Statement and Principles (Principles) released by the Biden Administration, and related remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen, mark a significant milestone in the development of the voluntary carbon market (VCM). Our views on this announcement and a brief summary of these Principles are set out below. This is a very encouraging, and intriguing, governmental…