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China’s manufacturing activity fell for a third consecutive month in July, according to an official survey, increasing pressure on policymakers to speed up stimulus measures to boost the world’s second-biggest economy.

The country’s official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index came in at 49.4, in line with a Bloomberg poll of analysts’ forecasts and down from 49.5 in June. A reading above 50 marks an expansion compared with the previous month.

China’s politburo this week called for faster implementation of a stimulus programme, and the central bank has cut interest rates as the government tries to meet its economic growth target of 5 per cent for this year.

China’s economy is suffering from weak domestic consumption as a prolonged property slowdown and tighter government control over business undermine confidence.

At its recent five-yearly strategic policy meeting, Beijing emphasised high-end manufacturing and an upgraded industrial sector over property and household consumption.

The non-manufacturing PMI came in at 50.2 in July, still in growth territory and in line with analysts’ forecasts of 50.2 but down from a reading of 50.5 in June.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday that among the sub-indices, production was 50.1, down 0.5 from the previous month but still indicating a slight expansion.

The new order index, however, was 49.3, down 0.2 from the previous month and indicating that the demand in the manufacturing market had declined.

Employment in manufacturing and non-manufacturing was below the 50-mark, indicating weakness in the labour market.

Despite the struggling housing market, construction activity was in positive territory. Services were flat at 50, down from 50.2 the previous month, with some areas such as entertainment and sport booming while others such as retail and capital markets were in contraction territory.

“Lower commodity prices and steel production point to weakened growth momentum of manufacturing activity in July,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a report released ahead of the figures.

It attributed the lower services PMI to “the persistent weakness in property and financial services sectors”.

Morgan Stanley analysts said ahead of the figures that deleveraging among local government financing vehicles and in the housing sector were posing “gravitational drags on the economy”. Emerging industries — electric vehicles and green energy — were also suffering overcapacity.

They said policymakers were attempting to counter fiscal tightening by widening the use of the proceeds of long-term government bond issuance to support consumption and capital expenditure. But “policy pass-through may take time”, they wrote.

China’s government has issued Rmb1tn ($138bn) of ultra long-term special government bonds to fund infrastructure and other projects and provide a stimulus to the economy.

It has also announced schemes to revitalise the property market, including a Rmb300bn programme to buy unsold housing unveiled in May.

But the real estate measures have been seen as too little to have a large impact, and economists have said that more structural measures are needed to restore investor confidence and stimulate consumption.

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Nvidia shares sank by as much as 8 per cent on Tuesday as a heavy sell-off in chipmaking stocks reignited ahead of a number of closely watched earnings reports from Big Tech companies this week.

The Silicon Valley chipmaker, which is the dominant provider of the powerful processors needed for building artificial intelligence systems, has fallen more than 20 per cent, cutting its market capitalisation by almost $750bn, since it briefly became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company last month.

Other chip stocks followed. Arm, the semiconductor designer that has also been a big beneficiary of investors’ enthusiasm for AI-related stocks this year, was down about 7 per cent in late-afternoon trading in New York.

Both companies are still more than double their value this time last year, driven by a wave of capital spending by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta to build out the technical underpinnings of AI.

Ahead of Microsoft’s earnings report after Tuesday’s market close, traders were fretting that profit expectations for companies involved in AI are too high and that capital spending is running far ahead of returns.

“We’ve seen money flow out of Big Tech, mostly I think because they have had an incredible run-up, and that of course gave room for a little bit of a sell-off,” Daniel Newman, chief executive of The Futurum Group, told the Financial Times. “Sector rotation, continued economic uncertainty, elections, geopolitics, and concerns around China” had all contributed to Nvidia’s fall.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index was down 1.3 per cent while the benchmark S&P 500 was 0.6 per cent lower. Shares in chipmakers AMD and Intel — which report earnings this week — were also trading lower.

“There’s a lot of angst in the market ahead of reporting,” said Emmanuel Cau, head of European equity strategy at Barclays. Apple, Amazon and Meta will also be publishing their quarterly numbers later this week.

He added that investors were also cautious ahead of a busy few days for central banks, with interest rate decisions by the Bank of Japan, Federal Reserve and Bank of England all due.

Investors have been selling tech companies in recent weeks, pushing the Nasdaq down about 9 per cent from its peak in mid-July. The index suffered its worst day since 2022 last week after results from Alphabet and Tesla sparked investor worries about the size and timing of likely returns from the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies’ vast investments in AI.

AI-related stocks have driven the stock market rally this year. Despite recent pullbacks, the Nasdaq and the broader S&P 500 are still ahead by roughly 14 per cent.

“Market participants used this morning’s equity gains to unload stocks in the afternoon ahead of pivotal announcements from the Fed and Bank of Japan tomorrow — and four of the Mag Seven reporting this week,” said José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.

“Bullish players will be aiming for a bright picture on the future of AI in Mag Seven earnings calls.”

Washington
CNN
 — 

Secret Service acting Director Ronald Rowe provided new details about the assassination attempt of Donald Trump on Tuesday, delivering forceful testimony at a Senate hearing about the agency’s failures earlier this month in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But at the joint hearing of the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, Rowe also highlighted the missteps of local law enforcement on July 13, when the former president was shot.

Rowe testified that Secret Service agents on Trump’s security detail, as well as snipers on duty, were not told that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was positioned on a nearby roof with a rifle and only learned of his presence after he started shooting.

The hearing was the fourth such one held on Capitol Hill since the assassination attempt, and though it grew testy at times, especially during some exchanges with Republican senators, lawmakers appeared largely satisfied with the information provided by Rowe and Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate during their more than three hours of testimony.

Overall, it stood in stark contrast with a House hearing held last week in which lawmakers grilled then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over what went wrong earlier this month, with several members demanding she resign over the lapses. A day later, she did just that.

Here are the takeaways from Tuesday’s joint hearing:

During Tuesday’s hearing, Rowe highlighted the failures of communications during the rally, in Butler, saying that information about Crooks was “siloed” and “stuck” in local law enforcement channels.

“The only thing we had was that locals were working an issue at the three o’clock – which would have been the former president’s right-hand side – which is where the shot came,” Rowe said. “Nothing about man on the roof, nothing about man with a gun. None of that information ever made it over our net.”

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters said that local law enforcement has claimed they were “only able to call in to a state command center” and not able to easily communicate threats to the Secret Service.

But Peters also noted that Abbate testified during the hearing that “there was about 30 seconds between when the local law enforcement reported that there was a man on the roof with a gun” and when the shooter began firing.

“If it’s communicated directly to a counter-sniper team, would that be enough time to react prior to the firing of those shots?” Peters asked.

“If we’d had that information, they would have been able to address it more quickly,” Rowe replied. “It appears that that information was stuck or siloed in that local channel.”

“It is troubling to me that we did not get that information as quickly as we should have,” he said. “We didn’t know that there was this incident going on.”

Crooks was killed within 15.5 seconds of the first shot, Rowe said.

Rowe confirmed that the reason a counter-drone system was not deployed at the Butler rally earlier in the day was because of connectivity issues.

“On this day in particular, because of the connectivity challenge … there was a delay,” he said. Crooks flew his own drone around the area two hours before Trump took the stage.

The issue has “cost me a lot of sleep,” Rowe said. “What if we would have geolocated him because that counter (unmanned aircraft system) platform would have been up.”

Rowe said that had the system been up, law enforcement may have been able to see Crooks’ use of his own drone and approached him well before the shooting.

Moving forward, Rowe said, his agency will use drones to help better secure future events.

“It is clear to me that other protective enhancements could have strengthened our security at the Butler event,” he told lawmakers. “As such, I have directed the expanded use of unmanned aerial systems at protective sites to help detect threats on roofs and other elevated threats.”

The acting director also said that the Secret Service will now work with the Department of Homeland Security to set up their own, private connection and not rely on public domain connections.

As lawmakers pressed Rowe for answers on what went wrong earlier this month, the interim Secret Service director sought to shirk some of the responsibility for the security lapses, partially blaming the issues on the local law enforcement officers with whom they were working.

Moving forward, Rowe told the committees, his agency will avoid assuming local law enforcement agencies are fully capable of fulfilling their role in protecting an event.

“We assumed that the state and locals had it,” Rowe said of the area where Crooks climbed up the side of a building near the rally with his rifle.

“We made an assumption,” he said, explaining that the Secret Service believed there would be sufficient eyes to cover the area and that local law enforcement would have a counter sniper in the AGR building where Crooks took his position.

Rowe told the lawmakers that local law enforcement was positioned in a nearby building and should have had a clear line of sight of Crooks on the roof.

“I cannot understand why there was not better coverage or at least somebody looking at that roofline when that’s where they were posted,” Rowe said, noting that a local sniper team could have looked from their post and seen the would-be assassin.

“Looking left, why was the assailant not seen?” Rowe asked of the local team, as he showed lawmakers photographs of the roofs snipers were positioned on.

“I’m not saying that they should have neutralized him, but if they’d have held their post and looked left maybe…” Rowe said later, though he was quickly cut off by an unrelated comment.

Shouting matches over firings and Biden v. Trump resources

Several senators lambasted Rowe for not firing any members in his agency and over the amount of security provided to former President Trump compared to President Joe Biden.

In one such exchange, Rowe loudly objected to Sen. Josh Hawley’s persistent questions about why individuals weren’t fired in recent weeks.

“I will not rush to judgment. People will be held accountable,” Rowe said, adding that investigations into the failures that day are ongoing.

The Missouri Republican responded: “Is it not prima facie that somebody has failed? The former president was shot.”

“Sir, this could have been our Texas School Book Depository,” Rowe responded, referring to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. “I have lost sleep over that for the last 17 days, just like you have.”

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‘Stop interrupting me’: Cruz gets in heated exchange with Secret Service official

“Then fire somebody,” Hawley shouted, to which Rowe replied: “We have to be able to have a proper investigation into this.”

At another point during Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz repeatedly pressed Rowe on why Trump doesn’t receive the same security level as Biden.

“There is a difference between the sitting president of the United States,” Rowe said.

“Then what’s the difference,” Cruz yelled, cutting Rowe off.

“The difference – national command authority to launch a nuclear strike, sir,” Rowe responded. “There are other assets that travel with the president that the former president will not get.”

Investigators have uncovered a social media account with posts espousing political violence that may be connected to the would-be Donald Trump assassin, Abbate said.

Officials have repeatedly said that they have struggled to understand what the 20-year-old shooter’s motive was, and that they are combing his online presence for more information.

“Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with this with the shooter – in about the 2019, 2020 timeframe,” Abbate said.

On that account, “there were over 700 comments,” Abbate said, which, “if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and are described as extreme in nature.”

A separate account on the platform Gab – which was made years earlier – appears to have “differing points of view,” Abbate added. 
 
Gab CEO Andrew Tobra revealed last week that the would-be assassin may have had an account on the site, which is an alternative social media network popular with conservatives, the alt-right and some extremists. Tobra claimed that the account in question was “pro-Biden.”

The Gab account has also not been conclusively connected to Crooks.