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ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/european-stocks-hit-near-six-month-low-us-recession-fears-2024-08-05/\n\nAug 5 (Reuters) - European shares tumbled to a near six-month low at the start of the week amid a global sell-off in equities on fears of a slowdown in U.S. economic growth.\n\nThe pan-European STOXX 600 index (.STOXX), opens new tab was down 3.1% to 482.42 points by 0711 GMT, hitting its lowest since Feb. 13. The benchmark is also set for its worst day in 2-1/2 years.\n\nThe index saw its worst week in nearly 10 months on Friday and fell below the 500-mark for the first time since April 15.\nFears that the U.S. could be heading towards a recession have sent investors dashing away from risk assets.\nAll major European bourses opened in the red.\n\nFinancial sectors were hit the most on the day. Banks (.SX7P), opens new tab lost 4.2%, financials services (.SXFP), opens new tab shed 3.6% while and the tech sector (.SX8P), opens new tab slipped 5%.\n\nAmong individual stocks, Galderma (GALD.S), opens new tab gained 2.2% after L'Oreal (OREP.PA), opens new tab said it would acquire a 10% stake in the Swiss skincare firm from a group of major shareholders.\n\nOCI Global (OCI.AS), opens new tab jumped 7.3% after Woodside Energy (WDS.AX), opens new tab said it would acquire the Dutch chemicals maker's clean ammonia project in Texas for $2.35 billion."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/germany-is-losing-its-mojo-finding-it-again-wont-be-easy-c4b46761\n\n>*Germany Is Losing Its Mojo. Finding It Again Won’t Be Easy.*\n\n>*BERLIN—Two decades ago, Germany revived its moribund economy and became a manufacturing powerhouse of an era of globalization.*\n\n>*Times changed. Germany didn’t keep up. Now Europe’s biggest economy has to reinvent itself again. But its fractured political class is struggling to find answers to a dizzying conjunction of long-term headaches and short-term crises, leading to a growing sense of malaise.*\n\n>*Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund.*\n\nGermany’s reliance on manufacturing and world trade has made it particularly vulnerable to recent global turbulence: supply-chain disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, surging energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the rise in inflation and interest rates that have led to a global slowdown.\n\nAt Germany’s biggest carmaker Volkswagen, top executives shared a dire assessment on an internal conference call in July, according to people familiar with the event. Exploding costs, falling demand and new rivals such as Tesla and Chinese electric-car makers are making for a “perfect storm,” a divisional chief told his colleagues, adding: “The roof is on fire.”\n\nThe problems aren’t new. Germany’s manufacturing output and its gross domestic product have stagnated since 2018, suggesting that its long-successful model has lost its mojo.\n\nChina was for years a major driver of Germany’s export boom. A rapidly industrializing China bought up all the capital goods that Germany could make. But China’s investment-heavy growth model has been approaching its limits for years. Growth and demand for imports have faltered.\n\nInstead of Germany’s best customers, Chinese industries have become aggressive competitors. Upstart Chinese carmakers are competing with German incumbents such as VW that are lagging in the electric-vehicle revolution.\n\nMore broadly, the world has become less favorable to the kind of open trade that benefited Germany. The shift was expressed most clearly in then-President Donald Trump imposing tariffs not only on imports from China but also those of U.S. allies in Europe. The U.K.’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, leading to EU sanctions, also signaled a shift toward a more hostile environment for big exporters.\n\nGermany’s long industrial boom led to complacency about its domestic weaknesses, from an aging labor force to sclerotic services sectors and mounting bureaucracy. The country was doing better at supporting old industries such as cars, machinery and chemicals than at fostering new ones, such as digital technology. Germany’s only major software company, SAP, was founded in 1975.\n\nYears of skimping on public investment have led to fraying infrastructure, an increasingly mediocre education system and poor high-speed internet and mobile-phone connectivity compared with other advanced economies.\n\nGermany’s once-efficient trains have become a byword for lateness. The public administration’s continued reliance on fax machines became a national joke. Even the national soccer teams are being routinely beaten.\n\n“We’ve kind of slept through a decade or so of challenges,” said Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.\n\nIn March, one of Germany’s most storied companies, multinational industrial-gas group Linde, delisted from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in favor of maintaining a sole listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The decision was driven in part by the growing burden of financial regulation in Germany. But also, Linde, whose roots go back to 1879, said it no longer wanted to be perceived just as German—an association that it believed was depressing its appeal to investors.\n\nGermany today is in the midst of another cycle of success, stagnation and pressure for reforms, said Josef Joffe, a longtime newspaper publisher and a fellow at Stanford University.\n\n“Germany will bounce back, but it suffers from two longer-term ailments: above all its failure to transform an old-industry system into a knowledge economy, and an irrational energy policy,” Joffe said.\n\n“I think it’s important to remember that Germany is still a global leader,” German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in an interview. “We’re the world’s fourth-largest economy. We have the economic know-how and I’m proud of our skilled workforce. But at the moment, we are not as competitive as we could be,” he said.\n\nGermany still has many strengths. Its deep reservoir of technical and engineering know-how and its specialty in capital goods still put it in a position to profit from future growth in many emerging economies. Its labor-market reforms have greatly improved the share of the population that has a job. The national debt is lower than that of most of its peers and financial markets view its bonds as among the world’s safest assets.\n\nThe country’s challenges now are less severe than they were in the 1990s, after German reunification, said Holger Schmieding, economist at Berenberg Bank in Hamburg.\n\nBack then, Germany was struggling with the massive costs of integrating the former Communist east. Rising global competition and rigid labor laws were contributing to high unemployment. Spending on social benefits ballooned. Too many people depended on welfare, while too few workers paid for it. German reliance on manufacturing was seen as old-fashioned at a time when other countries were betting on e-commerce and financial services.\n\nAfter a period of national angst, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pared back welfare entitlements, deregulated parts of the labor market and pressured the unemployed to take available jobs. The controversial reforms split Schröder’s Social Democrats, and he fell from power.\n\nPrivate-sector changes were as important as government measures. German companies cooperated with employees to make working practices more flexible. Unions agreed to forgo pay raises in return for keeping factories and jobs in Germany.\n\nGermany Inc. grew leaner. Meanwhile, the world was demanding more of what Germans were good at making, including capital goods and luxury cars.\n\nChina’s sweeping investments in industrial capacity powered the sales of machine-tool makers in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. VW invested heavily in China, tapping newly affluent consumers’ appetite for German cars.\n\nSchröder’s successor, longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel, presided over years of growth with little pressure for further unpopular overhauls. Booming exports to developing countries helped Germany bounce back from the 2008 global financial crisis better than many other Western countries.\n\nComplacency crept in. Service sectors, which made up the bulk of gross domestic product and jobs, were less dynamic than export-oriented manufacturers. Wage restraint sapped consumer demand. German companies saved rather than invested much of their profits.\n\nSuccessful exporters became reluctant to change. German suppliers of automotive components were so confident of their strength that many dismissed warnings that electric vehicles would soon challenge the internal combustion engine. After failing to invest in batteries and other technology for new-generation cars, many now find themselves overtaken by Chinese upstarts.\n\nA recent study by PwC found that German auto suppliers, partly through reluctance to change, have suffered a loss of global market share since 2019 as big as their gains in the previous two decades.\n\nMore German businesses are complaining of the growing density of red tape.\n\nBioNTech, a lauded biotech firm that developed the Covid-19 vaccine produced in partnership with Pfizer, recently decided to move some research and clinical-trial activities to the U.K. because of Germany’s restrictive rules on data protection.\n\nGerman privacy laws made it impossible to run key studies for cancer cures, BioNTech’s co-founder Ugur Sahin said recently. German approvals processes for new treatments, which were accelerated during the pandemic, have reverted to their sluggish pace, he said.\n\nGermany ought to be among the nations winning from advances in medical science, said Hans Georg Näder, chairman of Ottobock, a leading maker of high-tech artificial limbs. Instead, operating in Germany is getting evermore difficult thanks to new regulations, he said.\n\nOne recent law required all German manufacturers to vouch for the environment, legal and ethical credentials of every component’s supplier, requiring even smaller companies to perform due diligence on many foreign firms, often based overseas, such as in China.\n\nNäder said his company must now scrutinize thousands of business partners, from software developers to makers of tiny metal screws, to comply with regulation. Ottobock decided to open its latest factory in Bulgaria instead of Germany.\n\nEnergy costs are posing an existential challenge to sectors such as chemicals. Russia’s war on Ukraine has exposed Germany’s costly bet on Russian gas to help fill a gap left by the decision to shut down nuclear power plants.\n\nGerman politicians dismissed warnings that Russian President Vladimir Putin used gas for geopolitical leverage, saying Moscow had always been a reliable supplier. After Putin invaded Ukraine, he throttled gas deliveries to Germany in an attempt to deter European support for Kyiv.\n\nEnergy prices in Europe have declined from last year’s peak as EU countries scrambled to replace Russian gas, but German industry still faces higher costs than competitors in the U.S. and Asia.\n\nGerman executives’ other complaints include a lack of skilled workers, complex immigration rules that make it hard to bring qualified workers from abroad and spotty telecommunications and digital infrastructure.\n\n“Our home market fills us with more and more concern,” Martin Brudermüller, chief executive of chemicals giant BASF, said at his annual shareholders’ meeting in April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it should be,” he said.\n\nOne problem Germany can’t fix quickly is demographics. A shrinking labor force has left an estimated two million jobs unfilled. Some 43% of German businesses are struggling to find workers, with the average time for hiring someone approaching six months.\n\nGermany’s fragmented political landscape makes it harder to enact far-reaching changes like the country did 20 years ago. In common with much of Europe, established center-right and center-left parties have lost their electoral dominance. The number of parties in Germany’s parliament has risen steadily.\n\nChancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats lead an unwieldy governing coalition whose members often have diametrically opposed views on the way forward. The Free Democrats want to cut taxes, while the Greens would like to raise them. Left-leaning ministers want to greatly raise public investment spending, financed by borrowing if needed, but finance chief Lindner rejects that. “We need fiscal prudence,” Lindner said.\n\nSenior government members accept the need to cut red tape, as well as for an overhaul of Germany’s energy supply and infrastructure. But party differences often hold up even modest changes. This month the Greens lifted a veto of Lindner’s proposal to reduce business taxes only after they extracted consent for more welfare spending. As part of the deal, the government agreed to pass another law drafted by one of Lindner’s allies, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, to trim regulation for businesses.\n\nScholz recently rejected gloomy predictions about Germany. Changes are needed but not a fundamental overhaul of the export-led model that has served Germany well throughout the post-World War II era, he said in an interview on national TV recently.\n\nHe cited the inflow of foreign investment into the microchips sector by companies such as Intel, helped by generous government subsidies. Scholz said planned changes to immigration rules, including making it easier to qualify for German citizenship, would help attract more skilled workers.\n\nBut Scholz has struggled to stop the infighting in his coalition. The government’s approval ratings have tanked, and the far-right populist Alternative for Germany party has overtaken Scholz’s Social Democrats in opinion polls.\n\n“The country is being led by a bunch of Keystone Kops, a motley coalition that can’t get its act together,” Joffe said."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.wsj.com/articles/government-officials-invest-in-companies-their-agencies-oversee-11665489653\n\nHidden records show thousands of senior executive branch employees owned shares of companies whose fates were directly affected by their employers’ actions, a Wall Street Journal investigation found\n\nThousands of officials across the government’s executive branch reported owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.\n\nMore than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. That amounts to more than one in five senior federal employees across 50 federal agencies reviewed by the Journal.\n\nA top official at the Environmental Protection Agency reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.\n\nThe Journal obtained and analyzed more than 31,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees. The review spans 2016 through 2021 and includes data on about 850,000 financial assets and more than 315,000 trades reported in stocks, bonds and funds by the officials, their spouses or dependent children.\n\nThe vast majority of the disclosure forms aren’t available online or readily accessible. The review amounts to the most comprehensive analysis of investments held by executive-branch officials, who have wide but largely unseen influence over public policy.\n\n\nAmong the Journal’s findings:\n\n• While the government was ramping up scrutiny of big technology companies, more than 1,800 federal officials reported owning or trading at least one of four major tech stocks: Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.\n\n• More than five dozen officials at five agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, reported trading stock in companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions, such as charges and settlements, against those companies.\n\n• More than 200 senior EPA officials, nearly one in three, reported investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. EPA employees and their family members collectively owned between $400,000 and nearly $2 million in shares of oil and gas companies on average each year between 2016 and 2021.\n\n• At the Defense Department, officials in the office of the secretary reported collectively owning between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies on average each year examined by the Journal. Some held stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. was considering blacklisting the companies.\n\n• About 70 federal officials reported using riskier financial techniques such as short selling and options trading, with some individual trades valued at between $5 million and $25 million. In all, the forms revealed more than 90,000 trades of stocks during the six-year period reviewed.\n\n• When financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules. In most instances identified by the Journal, ethics officials certified that the employees had complied with the rules, which have several exemptions that allow officials to hold stock that conflicts with their agency’s work.\nNumber of federal officials who reported owning specific tech stocks, 2016-21\n\nFederal agency officials, many of them unknown to the public, wield “immense power and influence over things that impact the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans, such as public health and food safety, diplomatic relations and regulating trade,” said Don Fox, an ethics lawyer and former general counsel at the U.S. agency that oversees conflict-of-interest rules.\n\nHe said many of the examples in the Journal analysis “clearly violate the spirit behind the law, which is to maintain the public’s confidence in the integrity of the government.”\n\nSome federal officials use investment advisers who direct their stock trading, but such trades still can create conflicts under the law. “The buck stops with the official,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and former ethics lawyer for the Washington, D.C., government. “It’s the official who could benefit or be harmed…. That can occur regardless of who made the trade.”\n\nInvesting by federal agency officials has drawn far less public attention than that of lawmakers. Congress has long faced criticism for not prohibiting lawmakers from working on matters in which they have a financial interest. The rules were tightened in 2012 by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, passed following a series of Journal articles on congressional trading abuses.\n\nJournal reporting last year on federal judges, revealing that more than 130 jurists heard cases in which they had a financial interest, led to a law passed this May requiring judges to promptly post online any stock trades they make.\n\nThis article launches a Journal series on the financial holdings of senior executive-branch employees and, in some instances, conflicts of interest hidden in their disclosure forms.\n\nU.S. law prohibits federal officials from working on any matters that could affect their personal finances. Additional regulations adopted in 1992 direct federal employees to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest.\n\nThe 1978 Ethics in Government Act requires senior federal employees above a certain pay level to file annual financial disclosures listing their income, assets and loans. The financial figures are reported in broad dollar ranges.\nimage\nA view of Washington, D.C.\n\nMost officials’ financial disclosures are public only upon request. The Journal obtained disclosure forms by filing written requests with each federal agency.\n\nSome made it difficult to obtain the forms, and several agencies haven’t turned over all of them. The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t provided any financial records. (See an accompanying article on methodology.)\n\nUnder federal regulations, investments of $15,000 or less in individual stocks aren’t considered potential conflicts, nor are holdings of $50,000 or less in mutual funds that focus on a specific industry. The law doesn’t restrict investing in diversified funds.\n\nSome federal officials, especially those at the most senior levels, sell all their individual stocks when they enter the government to avoid the appearance of a conflict.\n\nThe Office of Government Ethics, which oversees the conflict-of-interest rules across the executive branch, is “committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government,” said a spokeswoman. She said the agency publishes financial disclosures of the most senior officials on its website, along with instructions for getting disclosures from other agencies.\n\nAt the EPA, an official named Michael Molina and his husband owned oil and gas stocks while Mr. Molina was serving as senior adviser to the deputy EPA administrator, according to agency records. Such companies stood to benefit from former President Donald Trump’s pledge to promote energy production by rolling back environmental regulations and speeding up projects.\n\nMr. Molina’s job gave him a front-row seat to deliberations about environmental regulations relating to energy. He “reviews and coordinates sensitive reports, documents and other materials,” said his job description, provided by the EPA in response to a public-records request. He served as a “personal and confidential representative” of the EPA deputy administrator in communications with the White House and Congress, according to the job description.\n\nIn the month he started the job, May 2018, Mr. Molina reported purchases totaling between $16,002 and $65,000 of stock in Cheniere Energy Inc., a leading producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. He reported adding Cheniere stock five additional times over the next year. At the time, senior EPA officials were encouraging the production of natural gas in the U.S.\n\nReported trades in energy and mining firms;\n\nmade by spouse through a financial adviser\n\nThe trades were made through a financial adviser in his husband’s account, according to emails and disclosure forms reviewed by the Journal. Mr. Molina was required to enter the trades into the EPA’s electronic-disclosure system within 30 days of receiving notice of the transactions, under the 2012 STOCK Act.\n\nOfficials are responsible for ensuring that their holdings don’t conflict with their work, regardless of whether they use a financial adviser. The Journal’s review of disclosures shows that many federal officials tell their financial advisers to avoid investing in certain industries or to shed specific stocks.\n\nIn an interview on Sept. 28, Mr. Molina indicated that he didn’t know much about the energy trades. “I can say this on the record: I didn’t even know what Cheniere was until 36 hours ago,” he said.\n\nIn February 2019, Mr. Molina was promoted to EPA deputy chief of staff. He attended scores of meetings on environmental issues, reviewed matters for the then-head of the agency, Andrew Wheeler, and was sometimes asked his opinions in meetings, according to records reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter.\n\nIn about 2½ years at the EPA, Mr. Molina reported more than 100 trades in energy and mining companies including Duke Energy Corp., NextEra Energy Inc. and BP PLC. About 20 of the transactions were for between $15,001 and $50,000 each, according to Mr. Molina’s disclosures. Those trades also were made for his husband by his financial adviser.\n\nIn the month he was promoted, February 2019, his husband made several stock purchases through the adviser in Cheniere and Williams Cos., which builds and operates natural-gas pipelines.\n\nTwo months later, Mr. Trump said the EPA would propose new rules to help the gas industry.\n\nAfter publication of this article, Mr. Molina said in a written statement: “Neither I nor my husband knew about or directed any of these trades. Our financial advisor had complete discretion to trade in the account, and these same trades were made on behalf of a ‘pool’ of several dozen clients—not for us individually.”\n\nMr. Molina left the EPA in January 2021. An EPA spokeswoman said the agency’s ethics office “counseled Mr. Molina on his ethics and financial disclosure obligations.” EPA officials signed Mr. Molina’s financial-disclosure statement in each year he worked at the agency, an indication they believed he was in compliance with the conflict-of-interest rules.\n\nU.S. law leaves it to individual agencies to decide whether they need rules to beef up the federal conflict-of-interest law. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission explicitly bars its officials from investing in natural gas, interstate oil pipeline, utility and other energy firms.\n\nThe EPA doesn’t have additional agencywide rules. A spokeswoman for the EPA said its officials may invest in energy companies so long as they aren’t working on policies that could affect their investments. Mr. Molina’s boss told ethics officials that he had no influence over public policy matters.\n\nGreg Zacharias was the chief scientist for the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation until last fall. He repeatedly bought stock in a defense contractor in the weeks before the Pentagon announced it would pay the company $1 billion to deliver more F-35 combat jets, while his division was overseeing testing of those planes.\n\nMr. Zacharias made five purchases of Lockheed Martin Corp. stock, collectively worth $20,700, in August and September 2021, according to figures he provided. On Sept. 24, 2021, the Defense Department said it was buying 16 F-35 jets from Lockheed for the Air Force and Marine Corps. Lockheed shares closed up 1.1% the next trading day. The stock made up a small part of Mr. Zacharias’s portfolio.\n\nMr. Zacharias’s office had been involved for years in overseeing testing of combat jets, and testing officials regularly met with the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office and with Lockheed directly, according to former defense officials. Mr. Zacharias, who provided scientific and technical expertise on how to assess the effectiveness of weapons systems, didn’t attend those meetings.\n\nIn an interview, Mr. Zacharias said he wasn’t involved in decisions on contracting and had no inside knowledge ahead of the contract, beyond the public information that the Pentagon remained committed to the F-35 program. He acknowledged that his role could have allowed him to access information about specific weapons systems. “I could always walk downstairs and ask them how it’s going. But that really wasn’t an interest of mine,” he said, adding that his focus was emerging technologies.\n\nMr. Zacharias said he wanted to buy stock in defense contractors, including Lockheed, because of their dominance of the defense market. He said he didn’t pay much attention to the timing of trades, adding: “I’m just the pipe-smoking science guy.”\n\nThe Lockheed investments were among more than 50 trades Mr. Zacharias reported in about a half-dozen defense contractors in 2020 and 2021, according to the Journal’s analysis.\n\n“I apologize that things don’t look good on the buy side,” Mr. Zacharias added. Of the trades in defense contractors, he said: “I just decided that would be a good investment at the time.”\n\nHe said ethics officials didn’t raise concerns about his trades in Lockheed or any of the other defense contractors he reported investments in, beyond periodically sending a letter reminding him not to take part in contract negotiations involving the companies. He said ethics rules could be “a little tighter.”\n\nA Pentagon spokeswoman said Mr. Zacharias “worked with his supervisor and ethics officials to implement appropriate disqualifications.” She said the department requires supervisors to screen their employees’ disclosures for conflicts in addition to the review conducted by ethics officials. Ethics officials certified that he complied with the law.\n\nSome conflicts of interest stemmed from agencies’ misunderstanding of their own rules.\n\nThe FDA prohibits employees, their spouses and their minor children from investing in companies that are “significantly regulated” by the agency. The FDA maintains an online list of the prohibited companies for officials to check.\n\nAn FDA official named Malcolm Bertoni disclosed that he and his wife owned stock in about 70 pharmaceutical, diagnostics, medical device and food companies regulated by the agency in 2018 and 2019, including drug giants Pfizer Inc. and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. All were on the prohibited list.\n\nMr. Bertoni, a career executive, ran the FDA’s planning office from 2008 to 2019, researching and analyzing agency programs. Most of the investments he reported were in the range of $1,001 to $15,000, but his 2019 disclosure showed he and his wife owned between $15,001 and $50,000 in each of Allergan PLC, Sanofi SA, Takeda and Zoetis Inc.\n\nMr. Bertoni’s lawyer, Charles Borden, said Mr. Bertoni and his wife held these stocks despite the bans because they got bad advice from the FDA ethics office.\n\nThe stocks were in accounts managed by professionals who had discretion to trade without the knowledge of Mr. Bertoni or his wife, the attorney said. He said that years ago, Mr. Bertoni asked the ethics office how he should treat the accounts and was told they fell into an exception to the rules for mutual funds.\n\nThey did not. The ethics office discovered its error in a routine review of Mr. Bertoni’s forms in early 2019, Mr. Borden said. “The FDA’s Office of Ethics and Integrity took full responsibility for the inaccurate guidance given to Mr. Bertoni,” the attorney said in an email.\n\nAfter considering the tax and retirement-planning consequences of having to sell the stocks, and other personal factors, Mr. Bertoni chose to retire instead, his lawyer said.\n\nAn FDA spokesman said Mr. Bertoni was recused from matters involving the companies once he reported his family’s holdings in them. The spokesman declined to comment on the events leading up to his departure.\n\n“The FDA takes seriously its obligation to help ensure that decisions made, and actions taken, by the agency and its employees, are not, nor appear to be, tainted by any question of conflict of interest,” said the spokesman.\n\nWhen federal officials are found to have violated conflicts rules and are referred to criminal authorities, they often receive light punishment if any, according to records reviewed by the Journal.\n\nValerie Hardy-Mahoney, a lawyer who runs the National Labor Relations Board’s Oakland, Calif.-based regional office, held Tesla Inc. shares as her office pursued complaints against the auto maker and Chief Executive Elon Musk and considered whether to file more.\n\nMembers of the labor relations board, appointed by the president, review decisions made by agency administrative courts. Ms. Hardy-Mahoney acts as a prosecutor in those courts. She is a career employee who joined the NLRB in the 1980s.\n\nMs. Hardy-Mahoney’s office filed complaints against Tesla in 2017 and 2018. She reported holding Tesla shares worth $1,001 to $15,000 in 2019 while those cases were ongoing. The next year, her disclosure form shows, she owned Tesla shares valued at between $30,002 and $100,000 in E*Trade accounts. She purchased two chunks of Tesla stock in August 2020, each valued at between $1,001 and $15,000, according to her disclosure form.\n\nThe NLRB ruled in March 2021 that Tesla had illegally fired an employee involved in union organizing and that Mr. Musk, in a tweet, had coerced employees by threatening them with the loss of stock options if they unionized. It ordered Tesla to reinstate the employee and Mr. Musk to delete the tweet. Tesla has disputed the findings and has appealed the decision to a federal appeals court.\n\nMs. Hardy-Mahoney’s office has in other cases rejected charges against Tesla filed by employees, including allegations her office received in 2020, after she bought more Tesla stock, according to an NLRB case docket. An employee who worked at the Tesla Gigafactory alleged that the company interfered with workers’ rights. Ms. Hardy-Mahoney’s office dismissed the charge in January 2021.\n\nLast November, an NLRB ethics official declined to certify that Ms. Hardy-Mahoney was in compliance with ethics laws and regulations, according to her disclosure form.\n\nThe NLRB’s inspector general said in a report that his office had substantiated an allegation of violating federal law by participating in a matter in which an employee had a financial interest. An agency spokeswoman confirmed that the report involved Ms. Hardy-Mahoney.\n\nThe report said that the matter was referred to the local U.S. attorney’s office, but that federal prosecutors declined to take it. The report said the subject of the report—Ms. Hardy-Mahoney—received additional training regarding financial conflicts of interest and the case was closed.\n\nMs. Hardy-Mahoney declined to comment. She recused herself from Tesla cases last year and now is in compliance with conflict-of-interest rules, the NLRB spokeswoman said.\n\nAt the Federal Reserve, an economist named Min Wei reported trades in stock of a marijuana company after the Fed sought clarity about whether banks could serve cannabis businesses. A Fed spokeswoman said the trades were made by Ms. Wei’s husband.\n\nIn June 2018, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said publicly that the issue put the central bank “in a very, very difficult position.” Even though its mandate has nothing to do with marijuana, Mr. Powell said, he “just would love to see” a clear policy on the matter.\n\nBecause Mr. Powell didn’t dismiss the idea, investors saw the comment as bullish for cannabis companies such as Tilray Brands Inc., a leading producer. Tilray went public the following month, and its stock skyrocketed.\n\nIn early September 2018, Ms. Wei’s husband bought between $480,005 and $1.1 million of Tilray shares, according to her disclosure form and the Fed. The stock continued to surge.\n\nIt then became clear that neither the Fed nor the Treasury would take action; it would be up to Congress, with no quick fix in sight. In October, shares of cannabis companies began to fall.\n\nMs. Wei’s husband sold his Tilray stake in five sales in early October. By then, the shares had nearly doubled, worth between $800,005 and $1.75 million, according to Ms. Wei’s disclosure.\n\nThe Fed imposed new restrictions this year on investing by bank presidents, Fed board governors and senior staff after the Journal reported questionable trading by presidents of two Fed banks, who subsequently resigned. The new rules prohibit trading individual stocks and bonds and require that trades, even in mutual funds, be preapproved and prescheduled.\n\nThe new Fed rules for top people don’t apply to Ms. Wei because she isn’t senior enough. The trades were “permissible then and are permissible now,” said the Fed spokeswoman.\n\nMs. Wei referred questions to the Fed. The spokeswoman said Ms. Wei had “no responsibility or involvement with policy decisions related to bank supervision or the provision of banking services.” She said the Fed “did not assert any interest at the time in the Federal Reserve resolving the conflict between federal and state law in the area of cannabis companies and their access to banking services, but rather pointed out that the appropriate resolution of those issues should come from the Congress.”\n\nEthics lawyers said trading such large amounts of an individual stock while the Fed is publicly addressing an issue creates an appearance problem, even if Ms. Wei’s trades didn’t violate conflicts rules.\nimage\nThe Federal Reserve building in Washington.\n\nRoughly seven dozen federal officials reported more than 500 financial transactions apiece over the six-year period analyzed by the Journal. Some traded a single stock frequently, while others reported hundreds or even thousands of trades across a broad array of stocks, bonds and funds.\n\nIn one instance, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission permitted short sales contrary to one of the CFTC’s own rules.\n\nThe financial disclosure of Lihong McPhail, an economist at the CFTC, showed the most trading reported by any federal official in the Journal’s review. Her husband made more than 9,500 trades in 2020—an average of about 38 each trading day, according to her disclosure form and the CFTC.\n\nAbout one-third of those reported 2020 trades—2,994—involved shorting stocks, or betting on a fall in their price. They ranged from Amazon to Ford Motor Co. to Zoom Video Communications Inc. The CFTC said all the short sales were made by her husband.\n\nOver the years, to safeguard the CFTC’s integrity, Congress imposed tighter restrictions than at other agencies on employees’ investing. In amending the Commodity Exchange Act, Congress also declared that any breach by a CFTC employee of an investment rule set by the commission could be punishable by up to a $500,000 fine and five years in prison. The CFTC’s role doesn’t include regulating stocks, but in 2002, the agency adopted a rule banning short selling by its employees and their families.\n\nNonetheless, a CFTC ethics official approved short selling by Ms. McPhail’s husband, Joseph McPhail, a CFTC spokesman said, fearing that the commission “could possibly be sued by the employee if we said no.” The spokesman said the ethics office believed the regulatory provision exceeded the commission’s statutory authority.\n\nMr. McPhail referred questions to the CFTC. The CFTC spokesman said he didn’t speak for the McPhails. Ms. McPhail didn’t respond to requests for comment.\n\nAt the CFTC, “employees are required by statute and by regulations to adhere to strict ethical standards and to disclose personal investments to ensure that the work of the CFTC to oversee markets is free from any conflict of interest,” said the agency spokesman. “In this instance, several years ago the employee sought advice regarding their spouse’s investments and received approval from career ethics counsel.”\n\nMr. McPhail was a senior policy analyst at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. until September 2021. In a written statement, that agency said: “The FDIC expects our employees, as public servants, to devote their time and efforts to our mission to maintain stability and public confidence in the nation’s banking system.”\n\nThe Defense Department was among the federal agencies with the most officials who invested in Chinese stocks, even as the Pentagon in recent years has shifted its focus to countering China.\n\nAcross the federal government, more than 400 officials owned or traded Chinese company stocks, including officials at the State Department and White House, the Journal found. Their investments amounted to between $1.9 million and $6.6 million on average a year.\n\nReed Werner, while serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense for south and southeast Asia, in December 2020 reported a purchase of between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.\n\nAt the time, discussions were under way at the Pentagon over whether to add the Chinese e-commerce giant to a list of companies in which Americans were barred from investing because of their alleged ties to the Chinese government.\n\nDefense and State officials pushed to add the company to the blacklist, while the Treasury feared this would have wide capital-markets ramifications. Mr. Werner had been involved over a period of months in some discussions about what companies to add to the blacklist, former defense officials said.\n\nNearly two weeks after the Alibaba purchase, the Treasury updated its list and didn’t include Alibaba. The company’s stock rose 4% that day.\n\nThree days later, Mr. Werner’s financial-disclosure form shows a sale of between $15,001 and $50,000 of Alibaba stock.\n\nThe sale came a day before a meeting where defense officials planned to press their case for adding Alibaba and two other companies to the blacklist. Then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ultimately blocked the effort.\n\nIn an interview, Mr. Werner acknowledged he was involved in discussions about adding Alibaba to the list, saying he attended a meeting in late 2020 and was on an email chain about the matter. He said that he wasn’t involved in blacklist discussions during the period the Alibaba trades were made, and that the trades resulted in a $1,556.51 gain. He declined to answer further questions.\n\nThe Pentagon spokeswoman said that the officials who formally compiled and approved the blacklist didn’t own stock in affected companies, and that supervisors and ethics officials review reports for holdings that could conflict with an employee’s duties. Ethics officials certified that Mr. Werner complied with the law.\n\nAt least 15 other defense officials in the office of the secretary reported that they or family members owned or traded Alibaba between 2016 and 2021, including Jack Wilmer, who served as senior cybersecurity adviser at the White House and then as the Pentagon’s top cybersecurity official.\n\nBetween 2018 and 2020, Mr. Wilmer reported at least six trades, which he said totaled around $10,000, in the Chinese companies Alibaba, search-engine giant Baidu Inc. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.\n\nMr. Wilmer said that a money manager handles his trades and that he didn’t direct any of those transactions. He said he wasn’t involved in policy-making decisions that would have affected those stocks and said he didn’t see a conflict between his job and investments. He left the government in July 2020, before Mr. Trump signed the executive order barring Americans from investing in certain Chinese companies.\n\nWithin federal agencies, ethics officials generally don’t consider it their job to investigate whether employees are making stock trades based on information they glean from their government jobs. Ethics officials’ ability to spot potential conflicts is limited because they usually don’t know what employees are working on.\n\nWhen ethics officials do see a potential violation, they can refer it to their agencies’ inspectors general, who refer cases on to the Justice Department if they find evidence of wrongdoing.\n\nA Journal review of inspector general reports showed that the offices rarely investigated financial conflicts. As more federal officials invest in the stock market, ethics officials say they have less time to look into possible wrongdoing. When findings have been referred to the Justice Department, prosecutors in most cases have declined to open an investigation.\n\nOne matter at the Securities and Exchange Commission involved an official who failed to report or clear his and his spouse’s financial holdings and trades for at least seven years. The trades included stocks that SEC employees and their families weren’t allowed to own, some of which the SEC inspector general determined posed a conflict with the official’s work, according to a report the inspector general provided to Congress.\n\nWhen a U.S. attorney declined to prosecute, the SEC’s inspector general reported the findings to SEC management. The unnamed official ultimately was suspended for seven days and gave up 16 hours of leave time.\n\nThe SEC declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on individual investigations but said: “We take all inspector general referrals seriously and bring charges when the facts and law support them, consistent with the principles of federal prosecution.”\nShare Your Thoughts\n\nAre stock trading rules for federal officials OK or should they be further restricted? Join the conversation below.\n\nMost federal agencies don’t have protocols to verify that officials’ financial disclosures are complete. One Agriculture Department official disclosed wheat, corn and soybean futures and options trades. The Journal discovered that he had made additional large trades in corn and soybean futures in 2018 and 2019 and omitted them from his reports.\n\nThe official, Clare Carlson, who is no longer at the USDA, said that he tried to be scrupulous in his disclosures, and that the omissions were honest mistakes. The Agriculture Department declined to comment.\n\nAt the EPA, Mr. Molina’s financial-disclosure reporting caught the attention of ethics officials.\n\nThe conflict-of-interest rules say executive-branch employees may not “participate personally and substantially” in matters that have a “direct and predictable effect” on their investments and those of family members.\n\nWhen the ethics officials contacted Mr. Molina about energy stocks he reported on his forms, they were told he didn’t have any influence over environmental policy.\n\nHis “duties are administrative in nature,” his boss, the EPA’s chief of staff at the time, told the ethics officials. “He provides logistical support to the principal but does not participate personally and substantially in making any decisions, recommendations or advice that will have any direct or substantial effect” on his financial interests, the chief of staff said, according to Mr. Molina’s financial disclosure.\n\nIn his time at the EPA, Mr. Molina clashed with ethics officials. Many of his financial disclosure reports were inaccurate and tardy, according to EPA emails reviewed by the Journal. At one point, he didn’t file accurate monthly trading disclosures for 12 months, according to the EPA emails. Mr. Molina reported the stock trades on his annual financial reports, as required.\n\nEthics officials said they contacted Mr. Molina “scores” of times to press him to file timely reports, according to the emails reviewed by the Journal.\n\nIn one email, a senior ethics official said his office had “provided you with at least 3-5 times more personal assistance than for any other agency employee, yet the required ethics reports were still late.”\n\nMr. Molina told EPA officials that he initially didn’t know he was supposed to complete regular stock-trading reports. He later struggled to keep up with the EPA’s electronic-disclosure system, according to the emails reviewed by the Journal.\n\nIn September 2020, the EPA fined Mr. Molina $3,200 for numerous failures to disclose stock trades to the agency on time. Mr. Molina refused to pay.\n\n“We have never before had an employee refuse to pay the late fee,” wrote one ethics officer in an email to Mr. Molina on Oct. 21, 2020, “so I will have to inquire about how to commence garnishment proceedings.”\n\nThe next month, Mr. Molina accused ethics officials of discriminating against him. “I feel that I am being targeted and have been asked to report more than anyone else,” he wrote in a Nov. 3, 2020, email.\n\n“If the intent of these filings is to curb any corruption or misbehavior,” Mr. Molina wrote, the EPA should open an investigation. “I believe that paying such an outrageous fine would be an admission that I have done something wrong in this regard.”\n\nEthics officials didn’t investigate Mr. Molina’s trades or refer the matter to internal investigators.\n\nOn the evening of Jan. 19, 2021, Mr. Molina’s final day working for the government, EPA ethics officials offered to end the matter if he paid a discounted fine of $1,067.\n\nMr. Molina wrote out a personal check to “U.S. Treasury” and sent it to officials in the EPA’s ethics office, including to Justina Fugh, an official with whom he had clashed."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/31/california-requires-half-of-heavy-trucks-sales-to-be-electric-by-2035.html\n\nThe Environmental Protection Agency on Friday said it’s granting California the legal authority to require that half of all heavy-duty truck sales in the state be fully electric by 2035, an ambitious standard that will go beyond federal requirements.\n\nThe Biden administration’s approval of California’s Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) Regulation comes after the state last year banned the sale of new gasoline-powered cars starting in the same target year of 2035.\n\nThe two decisions make California, the country’s most populous state and center of U.S. car culture, a leader in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, which generates most of the country’s greenhouse gases.\n\nThe California Air Resources Board had sought waivers from the Clean Air Act to set stricter standards for heavy-duty vehicles such as garbage trucks, delivery vans and tractor-trailers. The approval of the new rule will likely have greater impacts beyond California and pave the way for other states to follow suit.\n\nCalifornia, which has committed to achieving 100% renewable energy by 2045, has considerable authority over the country’s auto industry. For instance, a federal waiver under the Clean Air Act gives the state authority to adopt stronger fuel economy standards than those of the federal government, which has set the precedent for the rest of the U.S. on how to address vehicle emissions.\n\nThe heavy-duty truck rule has already been adopted by six other states — New York, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts and Vermont — all of which were waiting for permission from the Biden administration to enact it.\n\n“Under the Clean Air Act, California has longstanding authority to address pollution from cars and trucks,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Today’s announcement allows the state to take additional steps in reducing their transportation emissions through these new regulatory actions.”\n\nThe state’s rule requires manufacturers to produce zero-emission trucks beginning in 2024 — three years ahead of the Biden administration’s most recent regulations — and raises production targets through 2035. The rule aims to put 300,000 zero-emission trucks on the road by 2035.\n\nThe requirement will curb climate pollution by nearly three million metric tons each year by 2040, according to estimates from the California Air Resources Board. Heavy-duty trucks represent nearly one third of the state’s nitrogen oxide and more than one quarter of its fine particle pollution from diesel fuel.\n\n“California has been hard at work passing landmark regulations to clean our air and protect our climate with zero emissions vehicles, so we’re heartened to see EPA stand with California today and grant this waiver,” Paul Cort, director of Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign, said in a statement.\n\nHowever, some of the country’s major truck manufacturers and their lobbying groups have argued that the requirements to sell a certain percentage of electric heavy-duty trucks are costly and difficult to implement.\n\nThe Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, an industry group that represents truck and bus manufacturers, has said that the standards would increase the cost of trucks and result in truck buyers delaying decisions to purchase new vehicles."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/12/saudi-oil-giant-aramco-posts-record-161point1-billion-profit-for-2022.html\n\nSaudi Arabia’s state-controlled oil giant Aramco on Sunday reported a record net income of $161.1 billion for 2022 — the largest annual profit ever achieved by an oil and gas company.\n\nAramco said net income increased 46.5 percent over the year, from $110 billion in 2021. Free cash flow also reached a record $148.5 billion in 2022, compared with $107.5 billion in 2021. \n\n“This is probably the highest net income ever recorded in the corporate world,” Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said on a Sunday earnings call. \n\nThe results are nearly triple the profit that oil major ExxonMobil posted for 2022, bolstered by soaring oil and gas prices through last year, along with higher sale volumes and improved margins for refined products. \n\nOil and gas prices surged at the start of 2022, with western sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine steadily tightening access to Moscow’s supplies, particularly seaborne crude and oil products.\n\nOil prices have since pulled back more than 25% year-on-year, with hot inflation and rising interest rates overshadowing a more bullish demand outlook from China. Brent and WTI prices fell 6% last week alone. Brent last traded at around $80 dollars per barrel. \n\n“We are cautiously optimistic,” Nasser said. “If you consider China opening up, the pickup in jet fuels and the very limited spare capacity, we are cautiously optimistic in the short to mid-term [that] markets will remain tightly balanced.”\n\nAramco raised its fourth-quarter dividend by 4% to $19.5 billion, to be paid in the first quarter of 2023. Aramco also said it would issue bonus shares to eligible shareholders as a result. \n\n“We’re aiming to sustain [the dividend] at this level,” Aramco Chief Financial Officer Ziad Al-Murshed told the earnings call. “We have the financial strength to go through the ups and downs of the cycle.”\n\nNasser also used the results release to repeat his warning about “persistent underinvestment” in the hydrocarbons sector. \n\n“Given that we anticipate oil and gas will remain essential for the foreseeable future, the risks of underinvestment in our industry are real, including contributing to higher energy prices,” Nasser said on Sunday, echoing comments made during a recent interview with CNBC.\n\nAt both a ministerial and Aramco level, Saudi Arabia has been a proponent of avoiding short-term fuel shortages through the dual funding of fossil fuel supplies and the green transition.\n\n“We don’t see enough investment getting into the markets right now,” he reiterated on the Sunday call. “We encourage the industry, policymakers, investors… to avail additional investment to really increase the amount in the sector, so that we can meet future demand.”\n\nAramco said average hydrocarbon production last year was 13.6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, including 11.5 million barrels per day of total liquids. Saudi Arabia most recently produced 10.39 million barrels per day of crude oil in January, the International Energy Agency found in the February issue of its Oil Market Report.\n\nAs chair of the influential OPEC+ producers’ alliance, Saudi Arabia has been leading by example the group’s efforts to collectively reduce their output targets by 2 million barrels per day, agreed in October and reaffirmed at technical and ministerial meetings since. The group’s move towards limiting supply availabilities has put OPEC+ at odds with some international consumers, sparking a war of words with Washington towards the end of the last year, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration stressed the need to easing the burden on households.\n\nLong-time rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran on Friday struck a China-brokered deal to resume diplomatic relations. Iran has previously been blamed for a major attack on Aramco’s facilities in 2019 that caused a dramatic spike in prices and undermined the stability of global supplies. Tehran has denied involvement.\n\n“The deal will hopefully result in less geopolitical tension and enhance regional stability, which will definitely have a positive impact on the global market,” Nasser said in response to a question about the Saudi-Iran development.\n\nThe company reaffirmed it would continue to invest to increase its maximum production capacity to 13 million barrels a day by 2027.\n\nCapital expenditure rose by 18% to $37.6 billion last year, and is expected to increase to $45 billion to $55 billion in the coming years, anticipating increases “until around the middle of the decade.”\n\n“Our focus is not only on expanding oil, gas and chemicals production, but also investing in new lower-carbon technologies with potential to achieve additional emission reductions in our own operations and for end users of our products,” Nasser said."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/24/key-fed-inflation-measure-rose-0point6percent-in-january-more-than-expected.html\n\nA measure the Federal Reserve watches closely to gauge inflation rose more than expected in January, indicating the central bank has more work to do to bring down prices.\n\nThe personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy increased 0.6% for the month, and was up 4.7% from a year ago, the Commerce Department reported Friday. Wall Street had been expecting respective readings of 0.5% and 4.4%.\n\nIncluding the volatile food and energy components, headline inflation increased 0.6% and 5.4% respectively.\n\nMarkets fell following the report, with futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average off more than 300 points.\n\nConsumer spending also rose more than expected as prices increased, jumping 1.8% for the month vs. the estimate for 1.4%. Personal income increased 1.4%, higher than the 1.2% estimate. The personal saving rate also was up, rising to 4.7%.\n\nAll of the numbers suggest inflation accelerated to start the new year, putting the Fed in a position where it likely will continue to raise interest rates. The central bank has pushed benchmark rates up by 4.5 percentage points since March 2022 as inflation hit its highest level in some 41 years.\n\nThe Fed follows the PCE measures more closely than it does some of the other inflation metrics because the index adjusts for consumer spending habits, such as substituting lower-priced goods for more expensive ones. That provides a more accurate view of the cost of living.\n\nPolicymakers tend to focus more on core inflation as they believe it provides a better long-run view of inflation, though the Fed officially tracks headline PCE.\n\nMuch of January’s inflation surge came from a 2% rise in energy prices, according to Friday’s report. Food prices increased 0.4%. Goods and services both rose 0.6%.\n\nOn an annual basis, food prices rose 11.1%, while energy was up 9.6%.\n\nEarlier Friday, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester noted in a CNBC interview that there has been some progress made but “the level of inflation is still too high.”\n\nA nonvoting member of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, Mester has been pushing for more aggressive increases. She said she’s not sure if she’ll again advocate for a half percentage point boost at the March FOMC meeting.\n\nIn the wake of Friday’s data, market pricing increased for the likelihood of a half-point, or 50 basis point, increase next month, to about 33%, according to CME Group data."