Bloomberg Intelligence: GM Suspends Guidance, Carney Wins Canada Election
Watch Alix and Paul LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF. Bloomberg Intelligence hosted by Paul Sweeney and Alix Steel Today's Podcast Features are: David Welch, Bloomberg Detroit Bureau Chief, recaps GM earnings. General Motors is pulling earnings guidance for 2025 and putting $4 billion in share buybacks on hold until it has more clarity on the impact of US tariffs. David Gura, Correspondent for Bloomberg, and Host of 'The Big Take' podcast" discusses Canada's election. Canada's Liberal Party won a fourth straight election, as voters chose former central banker Mark Carney to manage the country's response to US President Donald Trump's trade war. Ted Swimmer, Head of Capital Markets and Advisory at Citizens Bank, discusses the latest on capital markets, the IPO market, and private markets. He discusses the evolution of the private credit space -- where traditional banks are increasingly partnering with private lenders. David also talks about how lenders are protecting themselves from private credit deals going bad through the use of unique covenants. Ben Miller, Co-Founder and CEO at Fundrise, discusses the state of commercial real estate. In the longer term, starting with the naming of a new Fed chair in May of 2026, Ben expects rates to come down significantly and quickly. He thinks even in a low rates/low growth environment (like the 2010's), this would be a gift to real estate owners/investors.
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Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia's campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.' (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker's Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia's slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound's deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we'd be unwise to forget. Baker's approach to her material is distinct in two ways. One is that, like Schulman but unlike many authors of researched nonfiction, she's not a reporter, and shows no deference to the norm of representing both sides. She did not interview any of the white supremacists that came to—or came from—Charlottesville. Baker saw them as tricking 'conscientious journalists into following them down rabbit holes,' or taking advantage of those who 'couldn't imagine they believed what they said they believed. [The media] thought it was a game, not a calculated strategy to spread their message.' Nor does she show a journalist's inclination to suppress her judgment. Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem 'a bit sentimental and slanted' toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, '[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.' Any Confederate who thought he was defending 'individual liberty and freedom' was risking his life for its opposite. Baker isn't caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she's intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn't care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia's white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville's own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of 'fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, 'for here the ideals of the nation were born.'' Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for 'patriotic education' in reaction to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America's founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning 'anti-American ideology,' which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn't structural inequality but what they call 'wokeness'; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini's to Richard Spencer's, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same. In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, 'We're in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.' In 2025, he's more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation's better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city's sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn't a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist's instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin's murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a 'protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.' In high school, she called the city's vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues' white defenders 'believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee's side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.' Many of the city's longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, 'Silence was the only power [they] had.' And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks' blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that 'these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.' But not all the statues' defenders prevaricated in this way. In fact, as the commission stalled, local white supremacists—whose presence, Baker notes, was widely known, though rarely acknowledged—came out of the woodwork, so that instead of parks without Confederate statues, Charlottesville now had ones full of Confederate flag-wavers 'protecting' the bronze generals. One of Charlottesville's most impressive qualities is Baker's subtle insistence on keeping her eye on guns. She links gun culture to video game culture, to whiteness, to the Civil War. She summons the writer Tony Horwitz's argument that just as 'Americans had once appeased and abetted the Slave Power, they were now appeasing and abetting the spread of guns.' Baker excoriates a dominant culture that accepts mass shootings and armed vigilantism as part of life, that tolerates a gun lobby that bullies and railroads anyone who considers 'the proliferations of guns unsettling' or sees 'freedoms curtailed by the shadow guns cast over our lives.' In Charlottesville, after the statue debate and, of course, on the weekend of Unite the Right, this shadow was overwhelming. Baker describes armed white supremacists telling injured, unarmed counterprotesters that 'this is what you get when you get in the street,' as if their weapons gave them the right to hurt anyone in their way. Of course, those white supremacists weren't only local. The statue debate got Spencer's attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' She wasn't alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews. I can relate. I'm Jewish, and a branch of my family settled in Richmond, Virginia, not long before the Civil War. One of my ancestors was conscripted into the Confederate Army, a shameful bit of family history that is part of a greater legacy of Jewish complicity with slavery: Consider the Lehman brothers, who built their fortune on plantation cotton. In my estimation, the involvement of many Jews in one of America's great sins binds us to the nation; it's proof of Jews' Americanness. We're obligated to do what we can to remediate slavery's harms. Unite the Right didn't change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right's belief that Jews aren't American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that 'Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.' She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia's sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson's vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini's, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and 'give fascism an all-American face.' Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same. Baker writes that fascists like Pound, Kasper, and Spencer, looking to Hitler, argue that the 'liberal elite driving the conversations in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy.' This conspiracy theory allows them to reject the idea that Black Americans might achieve something on their own: Really, the Jews are behind them. It also allows them to foment grievance. Baker describes the Nazi Andrew Anglin whipping up his followers' emotions by listing their humiliations—student debt, addiction, trauma and injuries from fighting in meaningless wars—and then, to 'relieve them of their shame, [directing] their attention to the root cause of their tribulations: Jews.' Immediately after, he led them into the streets of Charlottesville. There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed. Charlottesville's counterprotesters and the anti-fascists from around the region who helped them are Charlottesville's heroes. One of Baker's central subjects is Emily Gorcenski, a local data scientist who went from monitoring fascist chatter on the internet to confronting Spencer and his cronies face-to-face, bearing a storm of physical violence and anti-trans abuse. Others are members of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of Christian faith leaders who learned the techniques of nonviolent resistance in order to stand up to Unite the Right. She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.
E&E News
23 minutes ago
- E&E News
GM slow-rolls its all-EV aspirations
General Motors quietly closed the door this week on a goal to make only electric vehicles by 2035. The automaker announced Tuesday that it would spend $4 billion on mostly gasoline-powered vehicles. While GM is not retreating from EVs, the investment means the company is 'giving up any hope of achieving that [2035] goal,' said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry, a Detroit-area research firm. Asked Wednesday whether the goal still exists, GM said in a statement, 'We still believe in an all-EV future.' Advertisement GM's move away from the 2035 goal is less a singular failure and more a symptom of flagging support among many actors, including government, other automakers, charging companies and car buyers, analysts said. Much has changed since GM set the EV target, just after President Joe Biden took office and amid a surge of confidence in the auto industry about widespread EV adoption. Four years later, the Trump administration is dismantling Biden-era federal support for EVs and implementing high tariffs, upsetting automakers' production plans. Those federal moves, combined with a cooling desire for EVs among car buyers, has moved the sunset date for the internal combustion engine to a vague someday. GM is still ramping up EV production. Earlier this week, it trumpeted the fact that it sold 37,000 EVs in the first quarter of the year, making it the number two EV maker in the U.S. behind Tesla. The company's 2035 goal 'was aspirational. It was more an idea than a strategy,' said Alan Baum, an independent Detroit auto analyst. 'GM's doing a better job than many of their competitors, but there's obviously a relatively low ceiling because of the lack of supportive policy.' GM's all-EV goal back in 2021 was one of the earliest and most prominent of a wave of automaker commitments to electric vehicles. At the time, GM CEO Mary Barra encouraged others to 'follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole.' Others did follow — and all of those promises have been tempered by new realities. Last year, European automakers Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen and Mercedes all dropped earlier goals that would have seen them producing all or mostly EVs by the early 2030s. Back in 2021, GM also put an asterisk on its 2035 target. 'We say it as an aspirational goal, because to actually make that timing, we need some external things to come together also,' spokesperson Jessica James said at the time. Barra reiterated last month that the company still wants an 'all-EV future.' 'EVs are fundamentally better,' she said at a Wall Street Journal event late last month. 'We have work to do to continue to get battery technology to give us greater density, so we have farther range. We need to have a robust charging infrastructure.' Automakers, including GM, have been mostly mum in public as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress seek to kill tax incentives that make it cheaper for manufacturers to produce batteries and consumers to buy EVs. But through the main U.S. automotive lobby, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, automakers have vociferously opposed California's plans to require all-electric auto sales by 2035. The Republican-controlled Congress voted to kill that California 2035 all-EV sales goal — the same one that GM first set for itself — through the Congressional Review Act. The move came after the Senate parliamentarian told lawmakers they couldn't repeal the goal through the CRA. The bill awaits a signature by Trump, after which the California attorney general has pledged to sue. What GM is doing GM's announcement that it would invest $4 billion in domestic manufacturing essentially shuffles production among factories in ways that will help the company dodge Trump's tariffs. It is moving production of about a half-million gasoline-powered vehicles from Mexico to factories in the U.S., according to an analysis by Abuelsamid of Telemetry. Doing so will enable GM to avoid 25 percent tariffs that the Trump administration has placed on vehicles imported from Mexico. For example, the production of several full-size SUVs and pickup trucks will transfer to GM's Orion plant, north of Detroit. The gas-powered Equinox, a strong U.S. seller, will move to the Fairfax plant in Kansas City. The gas-running Blazer will go to the company's Spring Hill plant in Tennessee. Meanwhile, more EV production will move to GM's Factory Zero, a dedicated EV plant in metro Detroit that is running far below capacity. Electric versions of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks will now get made in the plant, alongside other large EVs made in low volumes, including the Cadillac Escalade IQ and the Hummer. Other EVs will be made elsewhere. Other electric Cadillacs, for example, will be made at the Spring Hill plant, while a rebooted version of the Chevy Volt will be produced at the Fairfax plant, which the company described as the site for the 'next generation of affordable EVs.' Those changes, combined with other recent moves, make it clear that GM is laying the groundwork to produce gas-powered vehicles well into the 2030s. In May, the Detroit automaker said it would ditch plans to make electric motors at its Towanda Production plant in Buffalo, New York, and instead spend $888 million to make V-8 engines. In 2023, GM put $579 million toward refurbishing an engine plant in Flint, Michigan. Electric vehicles don't have engines — they rely instead on batteries for propulsion. Engine factories are large, fixed investments that are meant to operate for 15 years or more, according to Neal Ganguli, a managing director and auto-manufacturing expert at the business advisory firm AlixPartners. Meanwhile, the manufacturing lines that make finished cars — like the ones GM unveiled this week — have shorter but still lengthy lives. 'When you put these [manufacturing lines] in, you are planning on a five- to seven-year time horizon,' Ganguli said. 'Maybe 10 years.' Analysts said General Motors' swerve back into the gasoline lane — and away from the path to all EVs by 2035 — is not a surprise, given the market and policy realities. 'It was always a long shot at best,' said Abuelsamid.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
'Not A Serious Analysis': Reeves' 'Baffling' Spending Plan Slammed By Leading Economists
Rachel Reeves' spending review has been slammed by leading economists who said it was not a 'serious department analysis'. The chancellor unveiled her plans to spend an extra £300 billion over the next three years on Wednesday, divvying out huge sums of cash to the NHS, net zero and defence – while also squeezing other Whitehall budgets. The government has said this is all an investment in Britain's renewal, and insisted that these decisions are fully-financed after Labour hiked taxes in last year's Budget. However, the director of think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Paul Johnson tore into her announcement on Thursday. 'If you were baffled by the chancellor's speech yesterday, so were we,' he said during the IFS's analysis livestream on YouTube. 'It did not appear to be a serious effort to provide useful information to anybody.' He also seemed to criticise the premise that the economy is now in better place than it was a year ago, hence Labour's decision to spend again – and reverse some cuts. 'Despite some of the rather odd recent claims, neither the economic forecasts nor the public finances have improved relative to the genuinely difficult situation we knew about a year ago,' Johnson said. 'Rather the reverse. Hence some difficult choices.' Large council tax hikes have been included in the government expectations for the review, which also 'assumes that council tax bills will rise by 5% a year', according to the IFS chief. That means bills will rise at their fastest rate 'over any parliament since 2001-05.' Johnson laid into the cuts Reeves is imposing on other Whitehall departments in order to boost the NHS, defence and net zero, too. He said: 'Every department is facing the same administrative costs, 10% for all of them over the three years, and then another 5% in 2029-30. 'All of that is irrespective of how much they've grown, irrespective of planned spending increases, irrespective of anything at all. 'That is not the result of a serious department analysis. 'I hesitate to accuse the Treasury of making numbers up but…' He noted that total departmental spending is set to grow at 2.3% a year above economy-wide inflation. That's lower growth than was recorded over the 2019-2024 parliament, when it increased at 3.6% per year. 'This is a long period during which spending will be growing faster than the economy,' he said. Johnson even questioned the suggestion that the NHS had fared particularly well, noting: 'Health spending nearly always gets topped up. Growth of 3% a year is below the historic average.' Mounting pressures on spending, including the U-turn on winter fuel allowance for pensioners and the backlash against disability benefit cuts, means Reeves is expected to either introduce more cuts or hike taxes in the autumn Budget to pay for it all. Johnson noted: 'Nobody should be in any doubt that the chancellor has had some incredibly tough decisions to take. 'With spending plans set, and 'ironclad' fiscal rules being met by gnat's whisker, any move in the wrong direction will almost certainly spark more tax rises.' Nick Ferrari Calls Rachel Reeves 'The Klarna Chancellor' After She Splashed The Cash In Spending Review Blow For Rachel Reeves As UK Economy Shrank By 0.3% After Trump Tariffs Rachel Reeves Takes Axe To Whitehall Departments To Pay For Health And Defence Cash Splurge
