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ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-22/trump-plans-his-tariff-liberation-day-with-more-targeted-push?srnd=homepage-americas\n\nPresident Donald Trump’s coming wave of tariffs is poised to be more targeted than the barrage he has occasionally threatened, aides and allies say, a potential relief for markets gripped by anxiety about an all-out tariff war.\n\nTrump is preparing a “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2, unveiling so-called reciprocal tariffs he sees as retribution for tariffs and other barriers from other countries, including longtime US allies. While the announcement would remain a very significant expansion of US tariffs, it’s shaping up as more focused than the sprawling, fully global effort Trump has otherwise mused about, officials familiar with the matter say.\n\nTrump will announce widespread reciprocal tariffs on nations or blocs but is set to exclude some, and — as of now — the administration is not planning separate, sectoral-specific tariffs to be unveiled at the same event, as Trump had once teased, officials said.\n\nStill, Trump is looking for immediate impact with his tariffs, planning announced rates that would take effect right away, one of the officials said. And the measures are likely to further strain ties with allied nations and provoke at least some retaliation, threatening a spiraling escalation. Only countries that don’t have tariffs on the US, and with whom the US has a trade surplus, will not be tariffed under the reciprocal plan, an official said.\n\nAs with many policy processes under Trump, the situation remains fluid and no decision is final until the president announces it. One aide last week referred repeatedly to internal “negotiations” over how to implement the tariff program — and some of the most regularly hawkish signals come from Trump himself, underscoring his avowed interest in sharply raising import taxes as a revenue stream.\n“April 2nd is going to be liberation day for America. We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world, friend and foe,” Trump said in the Oval Office Friday. It would bring in “tens of billions,” he added, while another aide said recently the tariffs could bring in trillions of dollars over a decade.\n\nBut the market reaction to initial tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico, and China — as well as certain metals — has hung heavy over a West Wing serving a president who has long used major indexes as a measuring stick of his success.\n\nTrump officials publicly acknowledged in recent days the list of target countries may not be universal, and that other existing tariffs, like on steel, may not necessarily be cumulative, which would substantially lower the tariff hit to those sectors. That includes comments from Trump himself, who has increasingly focused his remarks on the reciprocal measures.\n\nIt’s already a retreat from his original plans for a global across-the-board tariff at a flat rate, which later morphed into his “reciprocal” proposal that would incorporate tariffs and non-tariff barriers. It’s not clear which countries Trump will include under his more targeted approach. He has cited the European Union, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada, India and China as trade abusers when discussing the matter, an official said.\n\nWhile narrower in scope, Trump’s plan is still a much broader push than in his first term and will test the appetite of markets for uncertainty and a raft of import taxes.\n\n“There will be big tariffs that will be going into effect, and the president will be announcing those himself,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.\n\nMarkets Overestimating\n\nKevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Council director, said markets are overestimating the scope.\n“One of the things we see from markets is they’re expecting they’re going to be these really large tariffs on every single country,” he told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, who held Hassett’s job during Trump’s first term.\n\n“I think markets need to change their expectations, because it’s not everybody that cheats us on trade, it’s just a few countries and those countries are going to be seeing some tariffs.”\n\n\nTrump has also pledged to pair those with sectoral tariffs on autos, semiconductor chips, pharmaceutical drugs and lumber. The auto tariffs, specifically, he said would come in the same batch. “We’re going to do it on April 2nd, I think,” he said in a February Oval Office event.\n\nBut plans for those remain unclear and, as of now, they aren’t set to be launched at the same “liberation day” event, officials said.\n\nAn auto tariff is still being considered and Trump has not ruled it out at another time, officials said. But excluding the measure from the April 2 announcement would be welcome news to the auto sector, which faced the prospect of as many as three separate tariff streams straining supply chains.\n\nThe “liberation day” event might also include some tariff rollbacks, though that’s uncertain. Trump imposed, then heavily clawed back, tariffs on Canada and Mexico for what the US said was a failure to slow shipments of fentanyl destined for the US. The fate of those remains deeply unclear: a Trump pause on swathes of those tariffs is due to expire, but the tariffs could be lifted entirely and replaced with the reciprocal number, officials said.\n‘Dirty 15’\n\nTreasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that steel and aluminum tariffs may not necessarily add on to the country-by-country rates. “I will have a better sense as we get closer to April 2nd. So, they could be stacked,” he told Fox Business last week.\n\nIn the same interview, he said it’s roughly 15% of countries that are the worst offenders.\n\n“It’s 15% of the countries, but it’s a huge amount of our trading volume,” he said, referring to it as the “dirty 15” and signaling they are the target. “And they have substantial tariffs, and as important as the tariff or some of these non-tariff barriers, where they have domestic content production, where they do testing on our — whether it’s our food, our products, that bear no resemblance to safety or anything that we do to their products,” he said.\nTrump aides considered, before abandoning, a three-tiered option for global tariffs, where countries were grouped in based on how severe the administration considered their own barriers, people familiar with the plans said. That option was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.\nTrump sees tariffs as a key tool both to steer new investment to the US and to tap new sources of revenue, which he hopes to offset tax cuts Republicans are considering.\n\n“Tariffs will make America more competitive. They will incentivize investment into America,” Stephen Miran, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers chairman, said in an interview, declining to detail the steps.\n\nThe White House has also argued that trillions of dollars in pledged announcements by foreign countries and companies provides evidence Trump’s plans are working. Miran told Fox Business last week that talks are ongoing ahead of April 2nd deadline.\n\n“I do think that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that we could raise trillions of dollars from tariffs over a 10-year budget window and like I said before, using those revenues to finance lower rates on American workers, on American businesses,” he said.\n\nStill, economists have questioned whether the tariffs would meaningfully impact the deficit, particularly considering the risk of inflation or an economic slowdown.\n\nCompanies could also adapt, especially if not all countries are subject to the levies. US customs revenues from China surged after the tariffs were imposed in 2018, according a survey last year by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, but then peaked in 2022 and dropped sharply in 2023.\n\n"

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/stagflation-fears-haunt-us-markets-despite-trumps-pro-growth-agenda-2025-02-20/\n\nFeb 20 (Reuters) - Stubborn inflation and President Donald Trump's hard-line trade policies have rekindled fears of stagflation, a worrying mix of sluggish growth and relentless inflation that haunted the U.S. in the 1970s, even as markets remain upbeat on his pro-growth agenda.\n\nThe potential return of stagflation, which would pressure a range of assets, has been flagged periodically over the past 50 years but not materialized as a real threat to investor portfolios. While economists and portfolio managers are not ready to say that this time is different, the dreaded scenario has crept back as a key risk for investors in recent weeks, as the prospect of trade wars and punitive tariffs cast a shadow over U.S. growth.\n\n\"Stagflation has definitely re-emerged as a possibility because we have these policies that could hurt consumer demand even while persistent inflation limits the Federal Reserve's ability to maneuver,\" said Jack McIntyre, portfolio manager for Brandywine Global's fixed income strategies. \"It's not a zero-possibility scenario any more, by a long shot.\"\n\nA key piece of the stagflation puzzle - inflation that refuses to cool down - lodged more firmly into place earlier this month, when government data showed consumer prices rose in January at their fastest monthly pace since August 2023, bringing the annual rate of inflation to 3%.\n\nThe other piece of the puzzle, U.S. economic growth, hangs in the balance, with Trump's tariffs threatening to add inflationary pressure that could tip the scale.\n\n\"What continues to concern us more than the risk of inflation is stagflation,\" said Tim Urbanowicz, chief investment strategist at Innovator Capital Management. \"There is that sticky base of inflation to contend with but on top of that, tariffs have the potential to slow down the economy by becoming a tax on consumers and weighing on profits and economic growth.\"\n\nA Bank of America survey of global fund managers on Tuesday showed the proportion of investors expecting stagflation - defined by the bank as below-trend growth and above-trend inflation - over the next year stood at a seven-month high. At the same time, investors remained bullish on stocks, with a trade war seen as a low-probability risk, the survey showed.\n\nWhile Trump postponed imposing new tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico for a month at the beginning of February, he has rolled out a new 10% levy on all Chinese imports and announced tariffs on global steel and aluminum imports.\n\nHe has also tasked his economics team with devising plans for reciprocal tariffs on every country that taxes U.S. imports, and this week said he plans to introduce 25% tariffs on autos, semiconductors and pharmaceutical imports.\n\nSome investors believe any hit to growth from tariffs would be temporary.\nOver a longer-term horizon, tariffs could even promote growth, said Maddi Dessner, head of asset class services at Capital Group, boosting industries that will benefit from less competition globally. On the other hand, their initial impact could increase price pressures.\n\n\"The truth is it's probably going to be somewhere in between those two things,\" she said, adding tariffs were partly why Capital Group now forecasts 10-year Treasury yields at 3.9% over a 20-year horizon, up from a 3.7% forecast last year.\n\n'NOT THERE YET'\n\nStagflation emerged as a source of anxiety as recently as 2022, when inflation rates spiked and stock and bond prices plummeted, but that scenario did not materialize as inflation eventually eased and growth remained resilient.\nMany believe that the U.S. economy will once again steer clear of stagflation.\nSo-called core inflation at about 3% remains well below the levels hit in the 1970s, when the annual rate of core inflation averaged about 7%. This time around inflation expectations remain \"anchored\", meaning the long-term inflation picture is not fluctuating wildly with each fresh piece of economic data, said Evercore ISI in a recent note.\n\nStill, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, warned the market may be underestimating stagflation risks. The prospect of large-scale deportations of workers without visas or other work documents, another Trump campaign pledge, also would fuel inflation, he noted.\n\"Tariffs and deportations are a recipe for inflation and hurt growth; both are negative supply shocks,\" he said, adding that negative supply shocks such as a crude oil price surge contributed to 1970s stagflation.\n\nGuneet Dhingra, head of US rates strategy at BNP Paribas, said the market has been \"complacent\" over the past six months, focusing on Trump's pro-growth policies. He said stagflation-wary investors could sell two-year Treasuries, likely to lose value due to higher inflation, and buy 10-year Treasuries that would benefit in a low-growth scenario.\n\nSurging interest in gold , which hit another all-time high on Wednesday, suggests some investors are worried, as gold is one of a handful of assets that hold their value in a stagflationary environment, said Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas Research at State Street Global Advisors.\n\nThe other big winner would be cash, said Brandywine's McIntyre, but he added that for now he was holding back from making big shifts to cash-like fixed income instruments.\n\n\"I'm not there yet,\" McIntyre said.\n\nhttps://www.reuters.com/markets/us/stagflation-fears-haunt-us-markets-despite-trumps-pro-growth-agenda-2025-02-20/\n"

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-2023-stock-market-rally-got-a-lot-healthier-in-june-and-july-210139678.html\n\nJuly has come and gone for investors, bringing with it a continuation and a new twist on the blistering stock market gains seen in the first half of this year.\n\nThe Tech sector (XLK), along with some of last year's biggest losers like Communication Services (XLC) and Consumer Discretionary (XLY), powered the market's rally through May.\n\nJuly has come and gone for investors, bringing with it a continuation and a new twist on the blistering stock market gains seen in the first half of this year.\n\nThe Tech sector (XLK), along with some of last year's biggest losers like Communication Services (XLC) and Consumer Discretionary (XLY), powered the market's rally through May.\n[Money doesn't grow on trees]\n\nBut over the last two months, one of the biggest concerns among market bears — that the rally had become too concentrated — has been addressed with all 11 sectors in the S&P 500 (^GSPC) logging gains between June and July.\n\nAnd while the aforementioned stars of this year's rally are still playing a leading role, a surge in oil prices has brought Energy (XLE) into the fold with cyclical sectors like Materials (XLB) and Industrials (XLI) also sitting on gains north of 14% since June as optimism about the economy abounds.\n\nThis has left all sectors with the exception of Health Care (XLV) and Utilities (XLU) sitting on year-to-date gains through July.\n\nCombine this broad strength with the bullish year-to-date seasonality stats we've been compiling and the final five months of the year have some powerful tailwinds. Notably, however, Tuesday brings us into August, which has been the weakest month of the year over the last 25 years.\n\n[**Broadening of the market.**](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/Cj8RJI9cSQHXtbHDpHlEqQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNQ--/https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2023-07/134ad610-2fe2-11ee-bf6f-1ffefac75b64)\n\nIn the table above, we can see that the three leading sectors until May were those that house the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks, as well as the growthier names that tend to be less cyclical.\n\nThe Tech sector is home to much of the artificial intelligence trade, including Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA). Apple (AAPL), which is up some 50% so far this year, is also a member of the Tech sector.\n\nAlphabet (GOOGL, GOOG), along with Meta Technologies (META), is a member of the Communication Services sector.\n\nAnd even with the rally broadening in recent months, we can see Tech is still doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It may not be a surprise, then, to learn that both Apple and Meta have been positive each month this year. (For Meta, the streak of monthly wins extends all the way back to November 2022.)\n\nThrough May, Amazon (AMZN) and other e-commerce plays were primarily responsible for boosting gains in the Consumer Discretionary sector.\n\nIn the two months since, brick and mortar stalwarts like Kohl's (KSS) and Nordstrom (JWN) have joined the rally, with each up over 50% since the end of May.\n\nCyclical names — whose fortunes vary more alongside the state of the economy — dominate the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI).\n\nAnd inside the index we can also see the game of catch-up taking place.\n\nThe latest returns from June to July are reflected on the x-axis in the chart below, while prior gains through May are expressed vertically on the y-axis.\n\nIndustrial giant Caterpillar (CAT) is alone at the right edge of the chart — up 29% the last two months after sinking 14% earlier this year. Caterpillar will report earnings on Tuesday.\n\n3M (MMM) and Boeing (BA) are also among top recent returns, while rounding out the top five are banking giant JPMorgan (JPM) and retail leader Home Depot (HD).\n\nAlso noteworthy are the few laggards that haven't mustered much the entire year and are camping out in the lower left of the chart.\n\nConsumer Staples (XLP) company Walgreens (WBA) happens to be dead last on the year-to-date list, down 20%. Telecom company Verizon (VZ) and pharmaceutical giant Merck (MRK) are also toward the bottom."

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://hindenburgresearch.com/block/\n\nHighlights:\n\n>Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The “magic” behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.\n\n>Our research indicates, however, that Block has wildly overstated its genuine user counts and has understated its customer acquisition costs. Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.\n\n>Core to the issue is that Block has embraced one traditionally very “underbanked” segment of the population: criminals. The company’s “Wild West” approach to compliance made it easy for bad actors to mass-create accounts for identity fraud and other scams, then extract stolen funds quickly.\n\n>In an apparent effort to preserve its growth engine, Cash App ignored internal employee concerns, along with warnings from the Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Labor OIG, FinCEN, and State Regulators which all specifically flagged the issue of multiple COVID relief payments going to the same account as an obvious sign of fraud.\n\n>Congress passed a law that legally caps “interchange fees” charged by large banks that have over $10 billion in assets. Despite having $31 billion in assets, Block avoids these regulations by routing payments through a small bank and gouging merchants with elevated fees.\n\n>Block includes only a single vague reference in its filings acknowledging it earns revenue from “interchange fees”. It has never revealed the full economics of this category, yet over one-third of Cash App’s revenue came from this opaque source, according to a 2022 Credit Suisse research report.\n\n>Competitor PayPal has disclosed it is under investigation by both the SEC and the CFPB over its similar use of a small bank to avoid “interchange fee” caps. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed with the SEC indicates that Block may be part of a similar investigation.\n\n>In sum, we think Block has misled investors on key metrics, and embraced predatory offerings and compliance worst-practices in order to fuel growth and profit from facilitation of fraud against consumers and the government."

ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-and-amazon-earnings-a-federal-reserve-decision-january-jobs-data-and-more-for-investors-to-watch-this-week-51675022417\n\nIt will be another major week of fourth-quarter earnings, with about 100 S&P 500SPX +0.25% companies scheduled to report. There will also be a highly anticipated Federal Reserve interest-rate decision on Wednesday and the latest job-market data on Thursday and Friday.\n\nEarnings highlights will include GE HealthCare Technologies GEHC +1.24% and NXP Semiconductors on Monday, then Advanced Micro Devices AMD +0.32% , Caterpillar , Exxon Mobil XOM –1.83% , General Motors , McDonald’s, Pfizer , and United Parcel Service on Tuesday.\n\nWednesday will bring results from Meta Platforms , Thermo Fisher Scientific , and T-Mobile US , followed by a busy Thursday: Alphabet , Amazon AMZN +3.04% . com, Apple , Eli Lilly , Ford Motor , Merck, Qualcomm , and Starbucks all report. Cigna , LyondellBasell Industries , and Sanofi will close the week on Friday.\n\nThe main event on this week’s economic calendar will be Wednesday’s conclusion of a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. The central bank is widely expected to raise the federal-funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to a target range of 4.50% to 4.75%. As always, the post-meeting press conference with Chairman Jerome Powell will be closely watched for hints to the Fed’s next moves.\n\nThe economic-data highlight of the week will be Friday’s jobs report for January. Economist consensus calls for a 190,000-strong rise in nonfarm payrolls, following a gain of 223,000 in December. The unemployment rate is expected to tick up a tenth of a point, to 3.6%.\n\nOther data out this week will include S&P CoreLogic’s Case-Shiller National Home Price Index for November on Tuesday and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for December on Thursday.\n\nMonday 1/30\n\nFranklin Resources , GE HealthCare Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors report quarterly results.\n\nTuesday 1/31\n\nAdvanced Micro Devices, Amgen , Caterpillar, Chubb , Edwards Lifesciences , Electronic Arts , Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Marathon Petroleum , McDonald’s, Mondelez International , Moody’s, MSCI, Pfizer, Phillips 66 , Stryker , Sysco , and United Parcel Service announce earnings.\n\nThe Institute for Supply Management releases the Chicago Business Barometer for January. Consensus estimate is for a 45.5 reading, roughly even with December. The index has had four consecutive readings below 50, indicating a contracting economy.\n\nS&P CoreLogic releases the Case-Shiller National Home Price Index for November. Economists forecast a 7% year-over-year rise, compared with 9.2% increase previously.\n\nWednesday 2/1\n\nAllstate , Altria Group , Boston Scientific , Corteva , GSK , Johnson Controls International , Humana , Meta Platforms, MetLife , Novartis , Novo Nordisk , Old Dominion Freight Line , Thermo Fisher Scientific, T-Mobile US, and Waste Management release quarterly results.\n\nThe Federal Open Market Committee announces its monetary-policy decision. The central bank is widely expected to raise the federal-funds rate by 25 basis points to 4.5%-4.75%. Wall Street is eager to hear from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and glean any hints as to when the FOMC might pause its interest-rate hiking campaign.\n\nADP releases its National Employment Report for January. Expectations are for the economy to add 170,000 jobs after an increase of 235,000 in December.\n\nThe Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The consensus call is for 10.3 million job openings on the last business day of December, 158,000 fewer than in November.\n\nThursday 2/2\n\nBig Tech headlines a big day for earnings. Three of the four largest U.S. companies by market value, Alphabet, Amazon.com, and Apple, all release results after the market close.\n\nBecton Dickinson , Bristol Myers Squibb , ConocoPhillips , Eli Lilly, Estée Lauder , Ford Motor, Gilead Sciences , Hershey, Honeywell International , Intercontinental Exchange , Merck, Qualcomm, Shell, and Starbucks hold conference calls to discuss earnings.\n\nFriday 2/3\n\nAon , Cboe Global Markets , Cigna, LyondellBasell Industries, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals , and Sanofi report quarterly results.\n\nThe BLS releases the jobs report for January. Economists forecast a 190,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls, after a 223,000 gain in December. The unemployment rate is expected to edge up to 3.6% from 3.5%."