It takes a foreign investor to cheer up the doom-laden Americans
A t the junk bond king Michael Milken's annual jamboree in Beverly Hills this week, the mood among billionaires and chief executives is sombre.
In ballrooms at the Beverly Hilton, asset managers, bankers and investors listening to doyens of Wall Street give their take on the investment climate heard Henry Kravis, co-founder of KKR, warn how the uncertainty caused by trade policy was causing investors to sit on their hands.
In a conference interview, Marc Rowan, chief executive of Apollo Global Management, said: 'We have done damage to the US brand — the brand for stability, predictability, regularity. I see us moving from what was hyper-exceptionalism to merely exceptional.'
The most optimistic chief executives are hoping that US leadership in technological advances around AI and quantum
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Reuters
28 minutes ago
- Reuters
US immigration raid of Omaha meat plant cuts staff, fuels food production worries
CHICAGO, June 11 (Reuters) - U.S. meat producer Glenn Valley Foods was operating an Omaha, Nebraska, facility with about 30% of its staff on Wednesday after federal agents detained workers in an immigration raid the previous day, slashing the output of products it sells to grocery stores and restaurants, the company's president said. In the wake of Tuesday's sweep by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, livestock traders and market analysts expressed concerns that the potential deportation of undocumented workers from such raids could disrupt U.S. food production at a time when beef prices have soared and meat processors report a labor shortage. ICE agents detained about 74 to 76 workers out of roughly 140 at the Glenn Valley Foods plant, President Chad Hartmann said. Other workers did not show up on Wednesday because they felt afraid or traumatized, he said, adding that the facility's production dropped to about 20% of normal. Glenn Valley Foods sells steak, chicken and corned beef products to restaurants and grocery stores, according to its website. Retail beef prices have set records as the size of the U.S. cattle herd has declined to its lowest level in 70 years after a years-long drought raised feed costs. Consumer demand for steaks and hamburgers has stayed strong nevertheless. Glenn Valley Foods is trying to determine how long it will take to hire new employees, Hartmann said. "The hole that got punched into our business is staffing," he said. Livestock traders worried that immigration raids could slow meat companies' demand to buy cattle from farmers to process into beef, if the companies do not have enough workers. Chicago Mercantile Exchange cattle futures came under pressure on Tuesday during the raid, after recently hitting records. "There's certainly going to be nervousness out there on where the labor situation goes, going forward," said Matt Wiegand, a commodity broker for risk management firm FuturesOne in Nebraska. Meatpackers still face an acute worker shortage, said Julie Anna Potts, president of the Meat Institute industry group. It worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when major companies such as Tyson Foods (TSN.N), opens new tab temporarily shut plants because of a lack of workers. Glenn Valley used E-Verify, a federal database used for checking employees' immigration status. Hartmann said Homeland Security told him on Wednesday that there was no better system. "We will have to continue to use it," he said. ICE said a criminal investigation was ongoing into what immigration officials called a large-scale employment of immigrants who are present in the U.S. illegally. Footage, opens new tab of the Glenn Valley raid released by ICE showed agents searching the plant, restraining workers' hands and ankles, and taking them into custody. ICE officers have been intensifying efforts in recent weeks to deliver on U.S. President Donald Trump's agenda of record-level deportations. Tensions boiled over in Los Angeles over the weekend when protesters took to the streets after ICE arrested migrants at Home Depot stores, a garment factory and a warehouse, according to rights advocates. On Tuesday night, demonstrators marched in New York, Atlanta and Chicago. More than half of all meatpacking workers in the U.S. are immigrants, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank. The Omaha World-Herald newspaper said on Tuesday that raids were also reported at local plants run by large meatpackers Tyson and JBS USA ( Tyson and JBS told Reuters their facilities were not raided.
Daily Mail
37 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
KKR threat to NHS landlord: Don't give the barbarians a foothold in a sacred public service, says ALEX BRUMMER
Freed from the proposed £4billion rescue of Thames Water, private equity barons KKR have come fizzing back with an upgraded offer for NHS and private healthcare landlords Assura. KKR's latest and final bid of £1.7billion is only marginally better than that from listed rival Primary Health Properties (PHP) but is being recommended by Assura's board. The battle isn't necessarily over, with PHP still looking at options and claiming Chancellor Rachel Reeves's bonanza spending on the NHS as an ally. As has become customary when listed companies seek to vanish from the London stock market, there is extensive waffle from Assura about careful evaluation and fiduciary duty. The latter is investment banker-speak for running up the white flag. In cash terms, the KKR offer, at 52.1p a share, is barely better than the 51.7p bid from PHP. A 39 per cent premium may seem wonderful but given the depressed state of share valuations in London and a recent tech offer with a 96 per cent premium, the KKR deal is hardly effervescent. There is no obligation for Assura to accept either deal. A braver board would have told the private equity plunderers to get lost. Instead, it chose to disparage the alternative 'merger' with PHP, claiming financial and execution risk. The board also argues that the PHP offer would diminish Assura's efforts to support investment in the NHS estate. Who is Assura kidding? KKR fears too much exposure to regulated British assets and the political risk which comes with it as we learned when it pulled out of the near-complete Thames Water deal. Assura also needs to remind itself of how private equity works. Load up target companies with debt, squeeze costs, do some clever financial engineering with the leverage, raise prices or rents and head for the hills. A Government which better understood how highly indebted deals work might be cautious. A reading of the Competition & Markets Authority's work on veterinary services, revealing how the cost to pet owners and farmers has escalated, illustrates the dangers. More market-based private medicine in the UK eases pressure on the NHS. But allowing the barbarians a foothold in a sacred service is unacceptable even if it's wrapped up with tinsel and a bow. Sign of the Zodiac This week's pandemic of bids for Britain's tech crown jewels and skin care specialists rightly has been accompanied by much handwringing. How is it that companies born and bred in UK science and tech struggle to develop into national champions? After all, the City is second only to New York as a financial centre and is home to one of the world's biggest collection of banks and a strong venture capital industry. There ought to be no bars to start-ups or smaller listed firms accessing capital. Freeing up pension funds, allowing them to be more adventurous, ought to help. But swift market access to funding and liquidity is the key. That is why the launch of Pisces, the London Stock Exchange's platform for 'intermittent' capital, a place to come to raise funding and then vanish behind a privacy wall, is an important innovation. Stock exchange group boss David Schwimmer has been promoting the concept for years but freeing it from the weeds of regulatory bureaucracy is not easy. The insistence on broad-based disclosure rules threatened to sideline it. So it is good to learn that the Financial Conduct Authority, in keeping with the growth agenda, has dropped onerous transparency requirements on the environment, shareholder transactions and director pay. These threatened to strangle Pisces at birth. Let the fundraising begin before the rush to the door of UK tech and AI becomes a stampede. Peer pressure It has become something of a thing for Chancellors to name-check colleagues when delivering grand financial statements to the Commons. Rachel Reeves set a record with her pledges to spend, spend, spend in Labour constituencies in the North, Midlands, Scotland and Wales. Lonely Weymouth was the only southern town to receive much of a mention. Unlike Southport, it already has a serviceable pier.
Sky News
39 minutes ago
- Sky News
Is chancellor's spending review the start of a 'national renewal' - or too good to be true?
If you sat through the entire spending review speech delivered by Rachel Reeves in the House of Commons, you might have been lulled into a sense that the UK was awash with a wealth of riches as the chancellor sprinkled billions across the land. There were billions for social housing, nuclear power stations, rail lines and research and development to power the economy. There was money for schools, the police, the NHS, and defence spending, as the chancellor sketched out her roadmap for Britain for years to come, with an acknowledgement that the government - and particularly this chancellor - had endured a difficult first year. "We are renewing Britain. But I know that too many people in too many parts of our country are yet to feel it…the purpose of this spending review is to change that," she said. There was £113bn of borrowing to fund capital investment and an extra £190bn over the course of the parliament for public services, fuelled by those contentious tax rises in the budget last autumn. This was a Labour chancellor turning her back on austerity. "In place of decline, I choose investment. In place of retreat, I choose national renewal," she said. The chancellor deserves credit for the capital investment, which she hopes will unlock jobs and power economic growth. But when something sounds too good to be true, it normally is. For me, former shadow chancellor John McDonnell hit the nail on the head on Wednesday night as he remarked rather wryly to me that "the greater the applause on the day, the greater the disappointment by the weekend". 3:43 Could tax hikes be needed? Because, in talking up the prospect of national renewal, the chancellor glossed over what the "hard choices" mean for all of us. There are questions now swirling about where the cuts might fall in day-to-day budgets for those departments which are unprotected, with local government, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the Department for Environment all facing real-terms cuts. My colleague Ed Conway, analysing the government figures, found cuts in the schools budget for the last two years of this parliament - the chancellor's top line figure showed an overall rise of 0.6% over the five-year period of this Labour government. There are questions too over whether council tax bills might be increased in order to top up local government and police budgets. Ms Reeves told me in an interview after her speech that they won't, but she has predicated increases in police funding and local government funding coming locally, rather than from central government, so I will be watching how that will play out. 4:28 Even with the increase in health spending - the NHS is getting a 3% boost in its annual budget - there are questions from health experts whether it will be enough for the government to hit a routine operations target of treating 92% of patients within 18 weeks. My point is that this might not be - to again quote Mr McDonnell - "mathematical austerity", but after over a decade where public dissatisfaction in public services has grown, the squeeze of day-to-day spending could make it hard for the chancellor to persuade working people this is a government delivering the change for them. There is pressure to reverse some of the welfare cuts, and pressure to lift the two-child benefit cap, while the pressure to reverse the winter fuel allowance has already resulted in Reeves this week making a £1.25bn unfunded spending commitment (she will set out how she is paying for it at the next budget). 10:03 Will voters feel the 'renewal'? Reeves told me on Wednesday there was no need for tax rises in the autumn because the spending envelope had already been set, and the money now divvied out. It's a very live question as to whether that can hold if the economy weakens. She did not rule out further tax rises when I asked her last week, while Treasury minister Emma Reynolds told my colleague Ali Fortescue on Wednesday night: "I'm not ruling it in, I'm not ruling it out." The gamble is that, by investing in infrastructure and getting spades in the ground, and tilting limited public money into the NHS, the government can arrive at the next election with enough 'proof points' to persuade voters to stick with them for another five years. On Wednesday, the chancellor laid the foundations she hopes will turn the government's fortunes around. The risk is that voters won't feel the same by the time they are asked to choose.
