The US celebrated profitable the inaugural United Cup Sunday with a complete victory over Italy within the last in Sydney, Australia.
Taylor Fritz, the world No.9, secured victory, defeating large hitting Matteo Berrettini 7-6 (7-4) 7-6 (8-6) in a tense two-hour-plus match.
When Berrettini despatched a forehand lengthy on championship level, the US group ran onto the court docket to engulf Fritz in jubilant celebration.
Jessica Pegula and Frances Tiafoe had earlier additionally earned some extent for the People to offer the US an insurmountable 3-0 lead within the best-of-five last. Madison Keys made it 4-0 with a 6-3 6-2 win over Lucia Bronzetti.
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“It’s nice. It’s wonderful for the group to win this occasion. We got here in with actually excessive hopes, or at the very least I did, for the occasion,” Fritz mentioned, based on the official web site. “I used to be actually pleased to be in that place to clinch the match.”
It had been a dominant show by the People within the competitors, with the group dropping simply two matches to complete with a 22-2 file.
The brand new competitors concerned 18 international locations taking part in round-robin matches within the Australian cities of Perth, Brisbane and Sydney.
When enormous wildfires began to menace Los Angeles, the incoming president did not use his social media site to pledge support to emergency responders or offer words of compassion to a city where thousands of people have lost everything.
Instead, President-elect Donald Trump used his megaphone to tell the world who was at fault.
It wasn’t the Santa Ana winds, nor was it the rising temperatures that have dried out vegetation and made fires harder to extinguish.
The culprit, he wrote, was “Gavin Newscum.”
The Los Angeles fires have killed at least 11 people, reduced thousands of structures to ash and burned more than 36,000 acres, an area larger than the footprint of San Francisco. It’s the kind of devastation that, in a bygone era, might have prompted at least a temporary political cease-fire and pledges to work across the aisle to rebuild, even as the authorities face legitimate questions about their handling of the crisis.
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Instead, with 10 days until Trump’s second inauguration, he offered a reminder of how he has long used disasters to damage political opponents like Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California — even when they’re still going on.
“What this feels like is, the man hasn’t changed an inch,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, whom Trump described as “nasty” when they tangled over the federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria on the island in 2017.
But it’s not just about hurting his political foes. Trump has always been a master of tapping into people’s angst and projecting it far and wide for his benefit — and there is a lot of angst in Los Angeles right now.
‘Why is he doing this?’
Residents in Los Angeles are angry that water systems never designed to fight so many threatening fires have run dry. They are mystified that Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor, wasn’t in the city when the blazes began. They are scared for their lives and fearful that the institutions they have come to rely on, like insurance, won’t make them whole on the other side of this.
This week, Trump has called for Newsom to resign, blamed other Democrats like President Biden and Mayor Bass and said incorrectly that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had no money to respond to the disaster because of the “Green New Scam.”
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It’s a revival of a tendency he displayed during his first presidency, when he injected his personal politics into once-sacrosanct concepts like providing federal disaster aid to areas no matter whether they were blue or red. He told aides he wanted to stop money from reaching Puerto Rico after Maria, claiming that the island’s leadership was corrupt, and publicly insulted Cruz.
“At the beginning, I thought, ‘Why is he doing this?’” Cruz told me in an interview today. She suspected, she said, that it was because she was a Latina and a woman who had challenged his federal response to the disaster in her city. “It can be distracting, but it wasn’t distracting because I very clearly saw that it gave me an opportunity to talk about what was really going on in Puerto Rico.”
(He also struggled to manage the optics of his own response, like when he traveled to the island and hucked paper towels into the crowd.)
He also fought extensively with California. After the state’s devastating wildfire season of 2018, he tweeted that he had ordered FEMA to “send no more money” unless the state changed its approach to forest management. He has clashed on and off with Newsom over issues like water management and federal aid ever since.
In a text message last fall, Newsom told my colleagues that Trump often seemed to expect personal treatment before the state could receive aid, saying he was “publicly threatening, playing his politics — looking tough … forcing a call, a ‘transaction’ in his mind — reminding you in process who’s in control, why he matters.”
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Beyond withholding aid, Trump has used disasters as political ammunition on the campaign trail. After a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, in early 2023, he used the site as a backdrop to hammer the Biden administration, helping his presidential campaign pick up steam.
And last fall, when Hurricane Helene slammed into Georgia and North Carolina, he made a series of false claims about the federal disaster response as he sought to depict the Biden administration as hapless and even biased against Republicans who were in harm’s way.
Unavoidable politics
Trump’s defenders say there is no reason he shouldn’t bring up politics in a moment irrevocably shaped by them.
“We will have a fire, and there will be winds to blow the fire, but what determines the flow of the fire and the infrastructure capability of the fire department to fight, it is on them,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, referring to the Democratic leadership of the city and the state.
He added: “In a time of crisis, people look at their electeds for leadership. How do you think they’re doing? They’re blaming somebody else. They say you can’t ask these questions. They’re not in town — they can’t answer why something happened.”
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James Gallagher, who serves as the Republican leader in the State Assembly and represents Paradise, a Northern California community that was devastated by the Camp Fire in 2018, said there was deep frustration that more hadn’t been done to reduce wildfire fuel in the state.
Climate change exacerbates conditions that can lead to wildfires, he said, but he blamed Democrats’ leadership for inadequate management of the dry brush that can fuel fires. (Trump has discussed this in the past, although his recent posts have focused more on his dispute with Newsom over water management, which California officials say would not have changed the circumstances around the fires.)
“The politics are wrapped up in some very substantive policy,” Gallagher said.
“We’ve been saying this for a long time — maybe we don’t have as big of a megaphone” as Trump, he added.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The US economy blew past expectations to create 256,000 jobs in December, sending yields on US government debt lurching higher as traders and banks trimmed their forecasts for Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.
The figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday exceeded the consensus forecast from economists polled by Reuters of 160,000 and was above the downwardly revised 212,000 positions added in November.
Treasury yields climbed as investors bet the Fed will be slower to cut interest rates this year. Futures markets pushed back the expected timing of the first quarter-point rate cut to September from June before the data release. The odds of a second cut this year fell to about 20 per cent from roughly 60 per cent.
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Bank of America went further on Friday, saying the “gangbusters” jobs reports suggests “the cutting cycle is over”.
The Wall Street bank added “the conversation should move to hikes, which could be in play” if inflation picks up significantly. Goldman Sachs on Friday also scaled back its forecasts for 2025 rate cuts from three quarter-point reductions to two.
The robust jobs figures sent US government bond yields rising across the spectrum. The benchmark 10-year yield climbed 0.08 percentage points to 4.76 per cent — the highest level since November 2023. The policy-sensitive two-year yield soared 0.12 percentage points to 4.38 per cent.
Wall Street stocks dropped, with the broad S&P 500 closing down 1.5 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite losing 1.6 per cent. The S&P 500 fell to its lowest since the November 5 US election.
Eric Winograd, chief economist at AllianceBernstein, said: “[December’s jobs] number emphasises that the Fed does not need to rush . . . it validates to a significant degree that they should be on hold for a few months.”
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The bond market was already “on edge”, he added.
Friday’s jobs data was hotly anticipated on both sides of the Atlantic amid a sell-off in government bond markets, fuelled in part by growing expectations that the Fed will cut interest rates only slightly in 2025.
UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has come under increasing pressure this week after government borrowing costs soared, leaving her with little scope to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules.
UK bond yields climbed after the publication of the US jobs figures. The 10-year gilt yield rose to 4.85 per cent, 0.02 percentage points higher on the day, but below the 16-year high of 4.93 per cent hit earlier this week.
US president-elect Donald Trump’s plans to cut taxes, impose tariffs and curb immigration have also led the Fed to signal it will be more cautious in 2025.
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The central bank in December forecast just two quarter-point rate cuts this year, compared with a projection of four in September, partly because of persistent strength in the jobs market.
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Jeff Schmid, a top Fed official, on Thursday said the US central bank was “pretty close” to meeting its objectives on inflation and employment, underscoring expectations that policymakers will refrain from sharp interest rate cuts this year.
The Fed began cutting its main interest rate in September, reducing it by 1 full percentage point by the end of 2024.
At its next meeting later this month, the central bank is widely expected to keep interest rates steady at its target range between 4.25 per cent and 4.5 per cent.
Tom Porcelli, chief US economist at PGIM Fixed Income, said: “I think the Fed is feeling very good right now about taking a pass at the coming meeting — and obviously, if this kind of strength persists, they’ll take a pass at the next several meetings.”
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Friday’s figures showed the unemployment rate was 4.1 per cent, compared with 4.2 per cent in November. They marked the last monthly jobs numbers released under Joe Biden’s presidency, during which the US economy created 16.6mn jobs.
An exceptionally strong labour market that defied frequent predictions that a sharp slowdown or recession was looming was a defining feature of the economy under Biden’s watch.
But politically it did not help the Biden administration because those gains were undercut by the inflation surge that peaked in the summer of 2022, sharply raising the cost of living for households throughout his tenure.
The looming TikTok ban is barely a week away and the company is running out of time to do anything about it. On Friday, the Supreme Court heard last-minute arguments about the ban, with TikTok angling for an intervention or, at least, a temporary ruling to buy it a bit more time. They didn’t go especially well for TikTok — even justices who sounded sympathetic to the company’s arguments about free speech seemed satisfied by the government’s core national security argument.
As a matter of law, in other words, it’s looking like the ban is going to happen, and probably right before Donald Trump once again takes office. This is a completely unprecedented event — a massively popular app with a major cultural and economic footprint in the United States might just get switched off — but also something that the incoming president, who effectively originated the ban in the form of an executive order in 2020 but has since become aware that some people on the app actually like him and has also raised a bunch of money from one of its biggest American investors, now says he doesn’t want to happen.
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The court was concerned, mostly, with the substance of the law, which requires that TikTok either be sold to an American company or banned entirely, but the justices did briefly touch on the urgent question of what might practically happen next, in the real world. Congress passed a law. Trump can say he doesn’t support it, but it’s still on the books, and it passed with substantial bipartisan support. If he really wants to stop it he’ll have to do something about it, and the available options are all pretty messy.
According to the law he could, as President, temporarily pause the ban if the company demonstrates its intent to imminently sell, but TikTok parent company ByteDance has strongly suggested that this isn’t possible, not least because of tightening Chinese export controls around algorithms and AI. Should ByteDance agree to offload an algorithmically stripped-out version of TikTok — something at least one credible buyer has nonetheless expressed interest in — Trump, who would also be able to unpause the ban, would have a great deal of influence over the terms of the deal. But the app would almost certainly experience an interruption in service and return, eventually, as something fundamentally different.
Near the end of the hearing, though, Justice Kavanaugh floated the possibility that’s most aligned with how Trump is talking about this at the moment: “Could the president say we are not going to enforce this law?” Indeed, this is an approach he’s been implying, it certainly matches his mental model of how government should work — TikTok is unbanned if I say so — and it seems like something that he might at least attempt.
Kavanaugh helped answer his own question: Trump could do this, he noted, but it would create serious practical problems. One way the ban is intended to work is by making it illegal to provide “services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application,” meaning that Apple and Google, which between them maintain the app stores on virtually all of America’s smartphones, would be legally required to delist the app. A promise by Trump not to enforce a TikTok ban, or to unilaterally and/or counterfactually declare TikTok in compliance with the law, would leave Apple and Google in a risky position. They could relist an app that’s still technically illegal but which the President says is actually fine in support of a company to which they have no particular reason to help and which is in fact, in Google’s case, a direct competitor.
Or they could just say: Hey, hosting a service that has been declared a “FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION” by lawmakers isn’t worth the trouble even if the President says he’s personally totally cool with it. This would be prudent unless, of course, such an action would be interpreted as a slight against the President, and wielded against them publicly or privately, in which case two of American’s largest companies, each facing ongoing antitrust cases, might just have to hire a few dozen more lobbyists and OFAC attorneys and figure out how to make things work. Welcome to the new tech industry.
