Japan, US Can Reach Good Trade Deal, Bessent Tells Ishiba
'A good deal is more important than a rushed deal,' Bessent said following a meeting with Ishiba in Tokyo. 'A mutually beneficial trade agreement between the United States and Japan remains within the realm of possibility.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
15 minutes ago
- Fox News
Coming up on ‘Fox News Sunday': July 27th, 2025
This week on 'Fox News Sunday,' Shannon Bream speaks with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about rising tariff tensions and more.
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Rising Fiscal Deficits Drive Billions Into Credit
(Bloomberg) -- Investors are showing signs of pulling money out of government bonds and plowing it into US and European company debt. Trump Awards $1.26 Billion Contract to Build Biggest Immigrant Detention Center in US The High Costs of Trump's 'Big Beautiful' New Car Loan Deduction Can This Bridge Ease the Troubled US-Canadian Relationship? Trump Administration Sues NYC Over Sanctuary City Policy If the moves persist, money managers could be shifting what for decades has been market orthodoxy: that nothing is safer than buying US government debt. But as US fiscal deficits climb, hurt by tax cuts and rising interest costs, the government may look to borrow more, and company debt may be the safer option. In June, money managers pulled $3.9 billion from Treasuries, while adding $10 billion to European and US investment-grade corporate debt, according to EPFR Global data. In July, investors have added another $13 billion to US high-grade corporates, the largest net client purchasing in data going back to 2015, according to a separate note from strategists at Barclays on Friday. Michaël Nizard, a portfolio manager at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management, started making the switch from government into corporate debt at the end of last year and is holding on to the position. And in a note in the latest week, BlackRock Inc. strategists wrote, 'Credit has become a clear choice for quality.' To the extent this shift is happening, it's a slow change. The US doesn't have foreign currency debt, and can print more dollars as it needs to. When money managers were alarmed about tariff wars in April, US Treasuries still performed better than corporate bonds, even if prices for both sectors broadly fell. And foreign demand for Treasuries has remained resilient, with holdings climbing in May. But tightening corporate bond spreads in recent months may be a function of government debt looking relatively weaker now. The US government lost its last triple A grade in May, when Moody's Ratings cut it to Aa1. The bond rater pointed to factors including the widening deficit and the rising burden of interest, noting that payments will likely absorb around 30% of revenue by 2035, compared with 18% in 2024 and 9% in 2021. And US President Donald Trump's sweeping tax cut bill could add about $3.4 trillion to US deficits over the next decade, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. At the same time, corporate profits remain relatively strong, and although there are some early reasons for caution, high-grade companies are generally generating enough earnings to easily pay their interest now. More US companies are topping earnings estimates this reporting season than the same period last year. Valuations for company debt have been high recently, reflecting investor demand for the debt. High-grade US corporate spreads have averaged below 0.8 percentage point, or 80 basis points, in July through Thursday. That's far below the mean for the decade of about 120 basis points, according to Bloomberg index data. Spreads for euro-denominated high-grade corporates have averaged about 85 basis points in July, compared with about 123 basis points for the decade. To some money managers, high valuations for corporate credit are cause to be wary. Gershon Distenfeld, a fund manager at AllianceBernstein Holding LP, pared back a position that favored credit risk to rates risk earlier this month. Dominique Braeuninger, a multi-asset fund manager at Schroders Investment Management Ltd., agrees that corporate bond spreads are too tight to make them attractive. And even if BlackRock is generally positive on corporate debt, it is underweight long-term high-grade notes because spreads are tight, while being overweight short-term credit. But to many market observers, the world appears to be shifting, and it makes sense to hold more corporate debt now. 'What we've seen on the government fiscal side is not great news,' said Jason Simpson, a senior fixed income SPDR ETF strategist at State Street Investment Management. 'Corporates seem to be chugging along nicely.' Week In Review The US leveraged loan market saw more than $83 billion of launches in the latest week, the second busiest on record, including a $7.57 billion two-part deal from Medline that is set to be the market's biggest pricing since 2015. Repricings were an important driver of volume, representing about two thirds of the tranches, as companies look to cut borrowing costs. Many of the loans that were repriced had already been repriced before The return of billion-dollar M&A deals was supposed to be a boon for Wall Street's leveraged finance desks. It's turning out to be anything but, as private equity cuts them out of many of the most coveted deals. Lenders are demanding higher pricing from two European leveraged-loan borrowers, a rare sign of difficulty these days in the buoyant market for sub-investment grade debt. Chinese developer Country Garden Holdings Co. has agreed to some key restructuring terms a group of bank creditors had demanded, potentially easing the path for an overall debt deal. PepsiCo Inc. sold $4.7 billion of bonds in a pair of offerings that included the longest-dated euro-denominated corporate new issue since February. FedEx Corp. followed Pepsi with a rare two-part euro debt sale as some of its existing notes in the single currency near maturity. Meanwhile, General Electric Co. sold $2 billion of investment-grade bonds, as did Lockheed Martin Corp. Saks Global Enterprises launched a debt exchange after weeks of negotiations with creditors as its $600 million fresh financing takes shape. Separately, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. launched a multi-currency debt tender. Banks led by UBS Group and Citigroup have offloaded about $2 billion of debt to support Patient Square Capital's acquisition of Patterson Cos., reviving a deal more than three months after the bonds and loans got stuck on their books due to tariff turmoil in the market. Patterson received about $1 billion of orders for the $500 million junk-bond part of the sale. Dog walking service Wag! Group Co. won court permission to try to slash debt and hand control to senior creditor Retriever LLC as early as next month. On the Move Carlyle Group Inc. recruited Alex Chi, who was most recently co-head of Americas private credit at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s asset management arm, to lead its direct lending business. Chi will join Carlyle in early 2026. BMO Capital Markets hired Nii Dodoo as head of private credit financing. Dodoo joins from BTIG, where he was a managing director. Christina Chan, BNP Paribas' regional head of loan sales and head of corporate loan syndicate, Asia Pacific, has left the bank. Toronto-Dominion Bank's US credit trading unit has re-hired Sarah Classen from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for its voice-trading business. Classen starts in mid-September as a director in TD Securities' global US dollar fixed income trading team, based in New York. Ares Management Corp. hired Sarah Cole as a partner and co-head of Ares Global Capital Solutions to bolster its partnerships with banks, insurance companies and across capital markets broadly. Hedge fund Squarepoint Capital LLP recruited Nathan Fabius, a former strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., to cover Latin American debt. Fabius joined Squarepoint this month and is based in New York. Jefferies Financial Group Inc. plans to double the number of people on its credit secondaries team by the end of 2025, as demand has surged from investors who want to buy and sell existing exposure amid a dearth of fresh deals. Ardagh Group SA creditors are set to pay billionaire owner Paul Coulson as much as $300 million as part of a deal to hand over the keys to the company. Burning Man Is Burning Through Cash Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea's Wild Remote Worker Scheme It's Not Just Tokyo and Kyoto: Tourists Descend on Rural Japan Elon Musk's Empire Is Creaking Under the Strain of Elon Musk A Rebel Army Is Building a Rare-Earth Empire on China's Border ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump says Japan will invest $550 billion in US at his direction. It may not be a sure thing
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is bragging that Japan has given him, as part of a new trade framework, $550 billion to invest in the United States. It's an astonishing figure, but still subject to negotiation and perhaps not the sure thing he's portraying. "Japan is putting up $550 billion in order to lower their tariffs a little bit," Trump said Thursday. 'They put up, as you could call it, seed money. Let's call it seed money.' He said 90% of any profits from the money invested would go to the U.S. even if Japan had put up the funds. 'It's not a loan or anything, it's a signing bonus,' the Republican president said, on the trade framework that lowered his threatened tariff from 25% to 15%, including on autos. A White House official said the terms are being negotiated and nothing has been formalized in writing. The official, who insisted on anonymity to detail the terms of the talks, suggested the goal was for the $550 billion fund to make investments at Trump's direction. The sum is significant: It would represent more than 10% of Japan's entire gross domestic product. The Japan External Trade Organization estimates that direct investment into the U.S. economy topped $780 billion in 2023. It is unclear the degree to which the $550 billion could represent new investment or flow into existing investment plans. What the trade framework announced Tuesday has achieved is a major talking point for the Trump administration. The president has claimed to have brought trillions of dollars in new investment into the U.S., though the impact of those commitments have yet to appear in the economic data for jobs, construction spending or manufacturing output. The framework also enabled Trump to say other countries are agreeing to have their goods taxed, even if some of the cost of those taxes are ultimately passed along to U.S. consumers. On the $550 billion, Japan's Cabinet Office said it involves the credit facility of state-affiliated financial institutions, such as Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Further details would be decided based on the progress of the investment deals. Japanese trade negotiator Ryosei Akazawa, upon returning to Japan, did not discuss the terms of the $550 billion investment. Akazawa said he believes a written joint statement is necessary, at least on working levels, to avoid differences. He is not thinking about a legally binding trade pact. The U.S. apparently released its version of the deal while Japanese officials were on their return flight home. 'If we find differences of understanding, we may have to point them out and say 'that's not what we discussed,'' Akazawa said. The U.S. administration said the fund would be invested in critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, computer chips and shipbuilding, among other industries. It has said Japan will also buy 100 airplanes from Boeing and rice from U.S. farmers as part of the framework, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said would be evaluated every three months. 'And if the president is unhappy, then they will boomerang back to the 25% tariff rates, both on cars and the rest of their products. And I can tell you that I think at 25, especially in cars, the Japanese economy doesn't work,' Bessent told Fox News' 'The Ingraham Angle.' Akazawa denied that Bessent's quarterly review was part of the negotiations. 'In my past eight trips to the United States during which I held talks with the president and the ministers," Akazawa said. 'I have no recollection of discussing how we ensure the implementation of the latest agreement between Japan and the United States.' He said it would cause major disruptions to the economy and administrative processes if the rates first rise to 25% as scheduled on Aug. 1 and then drop to 15%. 'We definitely want to avoid that and I believe that is the understanding shared by the U.S. side,' he said. On buying U.S. rice, Japanese officials have said they have no plans to raise the current 770,000-ton 'minimum access' cap to import more from America. Agricultural Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said Japan will decide whether to increase U.S. rice imports and that Japan is not committed to a fixed quota. Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has suggested that the Japanese agreement is putting pressure on other countries such as South Korea to strike deals with the U.S. Trump, who is traveling in Scotland, plans to meet on Sundayv with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to discuss trade. 'Whatever Donald Trump wants to build, the Japanese will finance it for him,' Lutnick said Thursday on CNBC. 'Pretty amazing.' ___ Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo. Josh Boak And Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press Sign in to access your portfolio
