Merz's Domestic Stumbles Show His Power Base Is Under Strain
The latest blow was the failure to elect three new judges to Germany's top court. Votes in the lower house of parliament — which should have been procedural since the ruling parties agreed on the justices in advance — were pulled at the last minute on Friday after it became clear that Merz's conservatives weren't going to fully support a candidate proposed by the co-ruling Social Democrats.
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Forbes
40 minutes ago
- Forbes
Stuttgart Turn Down Bayern Offer For Nick Woltemade. What Happens Next?
Bayern Munich has seen a first offer for Nick Woltemade turned down by league competitors VfB ... More Stuttgart. (Photo by) Could Bayern Munich miss out on yet another transfer target? On Monday, multiple reports in Germany indicated that Bayern had an offer for Nick Woltemade turned down by Bundesliga competitors VfB Stuttgart. A report by Zeitungsverlag Waiblingen indicated that officials at VfB Stuttgart considered Bayern's offer laughable. According to the report, Bayern offered €40 million ($46.7 million) plus €5 million ($5.8 million) in bonuses. The initial fee was going to be paid in four installments. The report then adds that there have been no further negotiations between the two camps. While the talks between Bayern director of sport Max Eberl and the VfB bosses have been considered positive, some of the outside noise has been considered an obstacle to getting a deal done. Not for the first time, the main issue at Bayern appears to be the fact that the club isn't speaking in one voice. Public statements by Bayern CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen and former Bayern boss Uli Hoeneß were received negatively in Stuttgart. Indeed, Dreesen and Hoeneß have delivered very different messages to the public. "There's only one thing to say about that—Nick Woltemade is a VfB Stuttgart player,' Dreesen said to Sky Germany on Jul. 4, 2025, while the club was in the United States at the FIFA Club World Cup. 'And it's not appropriate to stir up any discussions or make comments." Then, one day later, in Bavaria, Hoeneß offered his remarks on the Woltemade situation. 'We still have time until the end of August,' Hoeneß said to the Bayerische Rundfunk. 'I consider him a very, very good player who would fit in perfectly with us, and I would be very pleased if that happens this year—and if not, then next year.' In other words, while one club official tried to calm down the situation in the United States, Hoeneß opted to pour further gasoline into the fire. It isn't the first time that Hoeneß publicly commented on the ongoing negotiations between his club and a player under contract at another team. Nick Woltemade led Stuttgart to the DFB Pokal title this spring. (Photo by JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via ... More Getty Images) Back in 2023, when Bayern was in talks with Tottenham to sign Harry Kane, Hoeneß also publicly weighed in; those comments angered Spurs boss Daniel Levy at the time and ultimately meant that Bayern had to pay a significantly higher transfer fee to get the deal done. The same could happen here as well. "We signed a long-term contract with Nick a year and a half ago,' Stuttgart sporting director Fabian Wolgemuth said to ZVW earlier in the month when asked about Bayern's interest. 'It's still valid, and therefore we expect Nick to continue playing football with us next season. I believe he'll stay here next season. Nick Woltemade is a VfB player.' What will Woltemade cost? Stuttgart will be emboldened by the fact that Eintracht Frankfurt sold Randal Kolo Muani for over $100 million to PSG in 2023 and then Omar Marmoush for €75 million ($88 million) to Man City this January. Per a report by Transfermarkt, Frankfurt has also set a price tag of over €75 million for striker Hugo Ekitiké. According to a report by Gegenpressing, the three forwards are seen as comparable players by industry insiders to Woltemade. As a result, the Swabians aren't interested in starting talks unless Bayern Munich makes an offer in the €60 million ($70 million) range. That figure is considered a starting point in transfer talks. For Bayern, however, those kinds of fees for Bundesliga players are unheard of. The Rekordmeister still lives in a world in which they could sign players from competitors for relatively little money. The rest of the league is now aware of Bayern's finances and, as a result, essentially demands Premier League money for transfers. It is a difficult situation for the Bayern bosses. On the one hand, Bayern wants to improve the roster. On the other hand, the club also intends to bring salaries and fees down to a more sustainable level. The situation might require some out-of-the-box thinking. It could also mean that Woltemade won't join Bayern after all this summer. By the way, Stuttgart signed Woltemade on a free transfer last summer from Werder Bremen.
New York Times
40 minutes ago
- New York Times
Ukraine Greets Trump's Decision to Help Provide Patriot Systems With Cautious Optimism
President Trump's change of heart on Monday, announcing that the United States would help arm Ukraine with additional Patriot missile systems, a move that would aid that country's beleaguered air defense forces but that was greeted with only cautious optimism by military analysts and officers in Kyiv because of previous seesaws in U.S. policy. American fatigue with the war and the fickleness of the Trump administration remain a concern for Ukraine's leaders. The country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is seeking to reshape his government, and, hours before Mr. Trump's announcement, pointed to bolstering domestic weapons production as a priority for a new prime minister. 'Because Trump is in the mood today, he may not be tomorrow,' Anatoly Khrapchynsky, a Ukrainian aviation expert and former air force officer, said in an interview. 'Production must be localized in Ukraine, underground.' Ukraine's domestic industry now produces about 40 percent of the weaponry used on the battlefield and in air defense systems, but it must still rely on American and European weaponry in the foreseeable future. In a nightly video address to Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky thanked the United States as well as the European nations that committed to financing the Patriot transfers to Ukraine. 'I am grateful to our team, I am grateful to the United States, and I am grateful to Germany and Norway for preparing a new decision on Patriots,' Mr. Zelensky said. Working together, he added, 'we can achieve a great deal for the sake of security.' Bulking up on Patriots would have ripple effects beyond the guarding specific sites. Using them to protecting airfields, for example, would allow Ukraine greater freedom to put its American F-16 and French Mirage fighter jets to use near the front line and in an air defense role. The signal of continuing support could also shift Russia's calculous on the Trump administration-brokered cease-fire talks that Ukrainians had written off as a failure before Monday's announcement. 'Today's announcement is President Trump's strongest move toward peace in Ukraine yet,' Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy at the Razom center in Kyiv, a think tank, said in a statement. 'It will save countless Ukrainian lives.' Russia has been advancing in bloody but slow-moving offensives in eastern Ukraine, and pounding cities and other targets throughout the country. Those involve missiles, against which Patriots can effective, but also drones, fired by the hundreds in volleys once or twice a week. In a recent, typical large-scale aerial barrage on July 4, Russia fired 539 exploding drones and decoys and 11 missiles. Ukraine jammed or shot down 475 drones but only two missiles.
Bloomberg
41 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Data Spotlight: Measuring trade war exposure, news sentiment & more
1. Measuring funds' exposure to the trade war In a period of high geopolitical tensions, understanding how macro themes like trade war impact investment portfolios is critical. One powerful method is to analyze fund exposure by combining industry segment data and fund holdings to get an accurate exposure of a fund to various industries beyond the traditional reporting framework. Chart 1 provides a comparison for a fund of an industry breakdown using the traditional method and operating segment data: segment data provides a more granular view of the actual sector exposure of a fund. In this example, without segments (purple in the chart) the fund seems to have high exposure to Utilities versus Energy, whereas using segments (blue), the picture is much more balanced. The methodology we use begins with assigning tariff sensitivity scores to each industry based on prevailing trade policies. This provides us with a measure of revenue sensitivity for companies in that industry. Then, for each fund, we calculate a weighted-sum of the percentage of revenue derived from these industries. The weights are determined by the fund's market value allocation to each holding. This approach allows us to estimate how much of a fund's revenue base is exposed to industries most affected by tariffs. The result is a clear, quantifiable measure of trade war sensitivity. As illustrated in Table 1, this analysis highlights which funds are most vulnerable to trade-related disruptions. Investors can use this insight to rebalance portfolios, hedge exposures, or identify opportunities in funds that are relatively insulated. This study is utilizing Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) and using Bloomberg's extensive coverage, spanning nearly 10,000 ETPs and 55,000 companies categorized by industry segments, we can quantify exposure to trade war risks with a bottom-up methodology. Chart 2 showcases the breadth of ETP coverage that underpins this methodology. Theme: Macro and Fund Investing Roles: Portfolio Managers, Fund Analysts, Risk Managers, Strategists 2. Using OHLC bar timing to spot market opportunities OHLC bar data is a widely used format for representing prices change over time, offering a practical balance between simplicity and informativeness. It is used by a wide range of market participants including quantitative analysts, portfolio managers, algorithmic traders, and risk managers, who rely on OHLC data to monitor price movements, evaluate historical performance, and refine execution strategies. Bloomberg recently introduced an enhanced version of this data that includes timestamps for when the open, high, low, and close prices occurred within each bar, as well as over 40 additional fields (including VWAP), with historical data available back to 2008. In this piece, we explore how knowing the exact times when price points occur may be used to inform trading strategies. As a first step, we classify each OHLC bar into one of two categories based on the timing of their high and low prices: 'trending bars' or 'ranging bars'. Chart 1 illustrates the difference. A 'trending bar' is one in which the direction of the price move (from open to close) aligns with the ordering of the high and low timestamps: for example, in an upward-moving bar, the low occurs before the high. In contrast, a 'ranging bar' exhibits the opposite pattern: the high occurs before the low even though the price increased, or the low comes before the high despite a price decline. In these cases, the Open-to-Close and Low-to-High segments point in opposite directions. To explore the correlation between bar types and short-term price movements we measure how often the sign of a VWAP return persists across consecutive one-minute bars -separately for trending and ranging bars. In other words, we examine whether an upward (or downward) VWAP move is more or less likely to continue depending on the type of the previous bar. Chart 2 shows the transition matrices for each case. When the previous bar is a trending bar, the VWAP return is more likely to continue in the same direction: up is followed by up 60% of the time, and down is followed by down 59% of the time. In contrast, ranging bars exhibit the opposite behavior -returns tend to reverse. An up move is followed by a down move 52% of the time, and vice versa. These patterns suggest that bar type, as defined by high/low timing, offers a simple but effective signal of short-term trend persistence or reversal. This analysis shows that adding high and low timestamps to OHLC data can uncover meaningful patterns in short-term market behavior. A simple timing-based feature can help statistically distinguish between a trend that is more likely to continue versus one that may reverse. More broadly, simple, interpretable features derived from richer temporal context can enhance models built on conventional price data alone. Investors often look at news headlines as a potential driver of asset price movements. However, the sheer volume of news makes human analysis impractical. Instead, an effective approach for programmatically monitoring headlines is to quantify their sentiment and assess how it correlates to asset behavior. In this study, we apply this method to Crude Oil futures (CL1) using our proprietary News Headlines dataset, which includes both Bloomberg and Third-Party news headlines, and allows us to quickly filter headlines based on relevant topic codes. The methodology in this insight applies natural language processing (NLP) models to generate sentiment scores from headlines. The sentiment values are normalized using z-scores to detect outlier events over a 7-day period, defined as significantly more positive or negative sentiment than historical norms. We use two different models to get a more diversified opinion on the sentiment. (See Chart 1) We backtest the performance of trading CL1 contracts following these sentiment outliers by using Tick History data which allows users to directly use the generic ticker CL1 Comdty. Importantly, in the context of crude oil, negative sentiment often signals supply disruptions, such as geopolitical tensions or production outages, which historically lead to price increases. This inverse relationship is a nuance in interpreting sentiment signals for commodities. Our approach allows us to isolate periods where sentiment diverges sharply from the norm and evaluate the subsequent price action. Chart 2 shows pricing data as well as the results of this type of strategy for illustrative purposes, against Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP), a trading benchmark that represents the average price of oil contracts. This analysis draws exclusively from Bloomberg's News Headlines product, which offers extensive coverage – including from third-party sources – as illustrated in Chart 3 and is optimized for integration with NLP pipelines. How can we help? Bloomberg's Enterprise Investment Research Data product suite provides end-to-end solutions to power research workflows. Solutions include Company Financials, Estimates, Pricing and Point in Time Data, Operating Segment Fundamentals Data and Industry Specific Company KPIs and Estimates Data products, covering a broad universe of companies and providing deep actionable insights. This product suite also includes Quant Pricing with cross-asset Tick History and Bars. Additional solutions such as Geographic Segment Fundamentals Data, Company Segments and Deep Estimates Data and Pharma Products & Brands Data products will be available in 2025. All of these data solutions are interoperable and can be seamlessly connected with other datasets, including alternative data, and are available through a number of delivery mechanisms, including in the Cloud and via API. More information on these solutions can be found here.
