Qatar busts Trump's claims on Iran-Israel ceasefire; airbase attack main reason?
Qatar busts Trump's claims on Iran-Israel ceasefire; airbase attack main reason? | Janta Ka Reporter
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Qatar Tribune
4 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
Markets rally, Trump's policymaking stirs concerns
Agencies As Wall Street slowly puts April's tariff shakeout behind and indexes set record highs, investors remain on edge and wary of U.S. President Donald Trump's rapid-fire, sometimes chaotic policymaking process and see the rally as fragile. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite index advanced past their previous highs into uncharted territory on Friday. Yet traders and investors remain wary of what may lie ahead. Trump's April 2 reciprocal tariffs on major trading partners roiled global financial markets and put the S&P 500 on the threshold of a bear market designation when it ended down 19% from its Feb. 19 record-high close. This week's leg up came after a U.S.-brokered cease-fire between Israel and Iran brought an end to a 12-day air battle that had sparked a jump in crude prices and raised worries of higher inflation. But a relief rally started after Trump responded to the initial tariff panic that gripped financial markets by backing away from his most draconian plans. JPMorgan Chase, in the midyear outlook published on Wednesday by its global research team, said the environment was characterized by 'extreme policy uncertainty.' 'Nobody wants to end a week with a risk-on tilt to their portfolios,' said Art Hogan, market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. 'Everyone is aware that just as the market feels more certain and confident, a single wildcard policy announcement could change everything,' even if it does not ignite a firestorm of the kind seen in April. Part of this wariness from institutional investors may be due to the magnitude of the 6% S&P 500 rally that followed Trump's re-election last November and culminated in the last new high posted by the index in February, said Joseph Quinlan, market strategist at Bank of America. 'We were out ahead of our skis,' Quinlan said. A focus on deregulation, tax cuts and corporate deals brought out the 'animal spirits,' he said. Then came the tariff battles. Quinlan remains upbeat on the outlook for U.S. stocks and optimistic that a new global trade system could lead to U.S. companies opening new markets and posting higher revenues and he said he is still cautious. 'There will still be spikes of volatility around policy unknowns.' Overall, measures of market volatility are now well below where they stood at the height of the tariff turmoil in April, with the CBOE VIX index now at 16.3, down from a 52.3 peak on April 8. 'Our clients seem to have become somewhat desensitized to the headlines, but it's still an unhealthy market, with everyone aware that trading could happen based on the whims behind a bunch of' social media posts, said Jeff O'Connor, head of market structure, Americas, at Liquidnet, an institutional trading platform. Trading in the options market shows little sign of the kind of euphoria that characterized stock market rallies of the recent past.'On the institutional front, we do see a lot of hesitation in chasing the market rally,' Stefano Pascale, head of U.S. equity derivatives research at Barclays, said. Unlike past episodes of sharp market selloffs, institutional investors have largely stayed away from employing bullish call options to chase the market higher, Pascale said, referring to plain options that confer the right to buy at a specified future price and date. Bid/ask spreads on many stocks are well above levels O'Connor witnessed in late 2024, while market depth, a measure of the size and number of potential orders, remains at the lowest levels he can recall in the last 20 years. 'The best way to describe the markets in the last couple of months, even as they have recovered, is to say they are unstable,' said Liz Ann Sonders, market strategist at Charles Schwab. She said she is concerned that the market may be reaching 'another point of complacency' akin to that seen in March. 'There's a possibility that we'll be primed for another downside move,' Sonders added. Mark Spindel, chief investment officer at Potomac River Capital in Washington, said he came up with the term 'Snapchat presidency' to describe the whiplash effect on markets of the president's constantly changing policies on markets. 'He feels more like a day trader than a long-term institutional investor,' Spindel said, alluding to Trump's policy flip-flops. 'One minute he's not going to negotiate, and the next he negotiates.' To be sure, traders seem to view those rapid shifts in course as a positive in the current rally, signaling Trump's willingness to heed market signals. 'For now, at least, stocks are willing to overlook the risks that go along with this style and lack of consistent policies, and give the administration a break as being 'market friendly,'' said Steve Sosnick, market strategist at Interactive Brokers.
Qatar Tribune
4 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
Not planning to extend a pause on global tariffs beyond July 9: Trump
Agencies President Donald Trump says he is not planning to extend a 90-day pause on tariffs on most nations beyond July 9, when the negotiating period he set would expire, and his administration will notify countries that the trade penalties will take effect unless there are deals with the United States. Letters will start going out 'pretty soon' before the approaching deadline, he said. 'We'll look at how a country treats usare they good, are they not so good — some countries we don't care, we'll just send a high number out,' Trump told Fox News Channel's 'Sunday Morning Futures' during a wide-ranging interview taped Friday and broadcast Sunday. Those letters, he said, would say, 'Congratulations, we're allowing you to shop in the United States of America, you're going to pay a 25% tariff, or a 35% or a 50% or 10%.' Trump had played down the deadline at a White House news conference Friday by noting how difficult it would be to work out separate deals with each nation. The administration had set a goal of reaching 90 trade deals in 90 continue, but 'there's 200 countries, you can't talk to all of them,' he said in the also discussed a potential TikTok deal, relations with China, the strikes on Iran and his immigration crackdown. A group of wealthy investors will make an offer to buy TikTok, Trump said, hinting at a deal that could safeguard the future of the popular social media platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance. 'We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way. I think I'll need, probably, China approval, and I think President Xi (Jinping) will probably do it,' Trump said. Trump did not offer any details about the investors, calling them 'a group of very wealthy people.' 'I'll tell you in about two weeks,' he said when asked for specifics. It's a time frame Trump often cites, most recently about a decision on whether the U.S. military would get directly involved in the war between Israel and Iran. The U.S. struck Iranian nuclear sites just days this month, Trump signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the U.S. for 90 more days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership. It is the third time Trump extended the deadline. The first one was through an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when a national ban — approved by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court — took effect.U.S. strikes on Iran 'obliterated' its nuclear facilities, Trump insisted, and he said whoever leaked a preliminary intelligence assessment suggesting Tehran's nuclear program had been set back only a few months should be prosecuted. Trump said Iran was 'weeks away' from achieving a nuclear weapon before he ordered the strikes. 'It was obliterated like nobody's ever seen before,' Trump said. 'And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.' Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Sunday on X that Trump 'exaggerated to cover up and conceal the truth.' Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, told CBS' 'Face the Nation' that his country's nuclear program is peaceful and that uranium 'enrichment is our right, and an inalienable right and we want to implement this right' under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. 'I think that enrichment will not — never stop.' Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on CBS that 'it is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage.' Grossi also said the U.N. nuclear watchdog has faced pressure to report that Iran had a nuclear weapon or was close to one, but 'we simply didn't because this was not what we were seeing.' Of the leak of the intelligence assessment, Trump said anyone found to be responsible should be prosecuted. Journalists who received it should be asked who their source was, he said: 'You have to do that and I suspect we'll be doing things like that.' His press secretary said Thursday that the administration is investigating the he played up his immigration crackdown, Trump offered a more nuanced view when it comes to farm and hotel workers. 'I'm the strongest immigration guy that there's ever been, but I'm also the strongest farmer guy that there's ever been,' the Republican president said. He noted that he wants to deport criminals, but it's a problem when farmers lose their laborers and it destroys their businesses. Trump said his administration is working on 'some kind of a temporary pass' that could give farmers and hotel owners control over immigration raids at their facilities. Earlier this month, Trump had called for a pause on immigration raids disrupting the farming, hotel and restaurant industries, but a top Homeland Security official followed up with a seemingly contradictory statement. Tricia McLaughlin said there would be 'no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine' immigration enforcement praised a recent trade deal with Beijing over rare earth exports from China and said establishing a fairer relationship will require significant tariffs. 'I think getting along well with China is a very good thing,' Trump said. 'China's going to be paying a lot of tariffs, but we have a big (trade) deficit, they understand that.' Trump said he would be open to removing sanctions on Iranian oil shipments to China if Iran can show 'they can be peaceful and if they can show us they're not going to do any more harm.' But the president also indicated the U.S. isn't afraid to retaliate against Beijing. When Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo noted that China has tried to hack U.S. systems and steal intellectual property, Trump replied, 'You don't think we do that to them?'
Qatar Tribune
4 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
Republican Senate tax bill would add $3.3 tn to the US debt load
Agencies The changes made to President Donald Trump's big tax bill in the Senate would pile trillions onto the nation's debt load while resulting in even steeper losses in health care coverage, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new analysis, adding to the challenges for Republicans as they try to muscle the bill to passage. The CBO estimates the Senate bill would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion from 2025 to 2034, a nearly $1 trillion increase over the House-passed bill, which CBO has projected would add $2.4 to the debt over a decade. The analysis also found that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law, an increase over the scoring for the House-passed version of the bill, which predicts 10.9 million more people would be without health coverage. The stark numbers are yet another obstacle for Republican leaders as they labor to pass Trump's bill by his self-imposed July 4th before the CBO's estimate, Republicans were at odds over the contours of the legislation, with some resisting the cost-saving proposals to reduce spending on Medicaid and food aid programs even as other Republicans say those proposals don't go far enough. Republicans are slashing the programs as a way to help cover the cost of extending some $3.8 trillion in Trump tax breaks put in place during his first push-pull was on vivid display Saturday night as a routine procedural vote to take up the legislation in the Senate was held open for hours as Vice President JD Vance and Republican leaders met with several holdouts. The bill ultimately advanced in a 51-49 vote, but the path ahead is fraught, with voting on amendments still to come. Still, many Republicans are disputing the CBO estimates and the reliability of the office's work. To hoist the bill to passage, they are using a different budget baseline that assumes the Trump tax cuts expiring in December have already been extended, essentially making them cost-free in the CBO on Saturday released a separate analysis of the GOP's preferred approach that found the Senate bill would reduce deficits by about $500 billion. Democrats and economists decry the GOP's approach as 'magic math' that obscures the true costs of the GOP tax breaks. In addition, Democrats note that under the traditional scoring system, the Republican bill bill would violate the Senate's 'Byrd Rule' that forbids the legislation from increasing deficits after 10 years. In a Sunday letter to Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, CBO Director Phillip Swagel said the office estimates that the Finance Committee's portion of the bill, also known as Title VII, 'increases the deficits in years after 2034' under traditional scoring.
