After months of legal twists and turns, Donald Trump’s most active criminal case is finally reaching a conclusion.

The former and future president is scheduled to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday for his sentencing on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment to an adult film star.

Trump on Thursday exhausted his last legal maneuver to stop the sentencing, after a narrow majority of Supreme Court justices declined to intervene.

The hearing comes just 10 days before Trump is expected to be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. He had argued the sentencing would interfere with his ability to govern.

In light of that, New York state Judge Juan Merchan has indicated he does not plan on sentencing Trump to prison or even probation, and is instead likely to offer an “unconditional discharge,” meaning the president-elect must do nothing, but the conviction will remain on his record.

Prosecutors have signaled the hearing could be short — less than an hour — and that Trump is expected to attend the hearing virtually.

“There’s nothing else that the defendant has to do, and therefore it’s the least restrictive in terms of how it could impede in any way on the president-elect as he takes office,” Anna Cominsky, director of the criminal defense clinic at New York Law School, said about the expected sentence of an unconditional discharge.

“It certainly makes sense that there be some finality to this case because as a nation, we should want to move on, in particular as he assumes the role of president, and be able to look forward to the next four years without this sentence pending,” Cominsky said. “There has to be an end.”

Of course, Trump’s legal team is likely to appeal the conviction and sentence again — as they have done throughout the legal proceeding. Appeals could stretch on for years.

Since Trump’s conviction in May, Merchan has postponed the sentencing several times, including to avoid any perception of political bias ahead of Election Day, and then to allow Trump to argue he had immunity in the case, based on a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

Merchan ultimately denied the immunity claims, and the dismissal, paving the way for the hearing on Friday.

Fundraising haul

In May, Trump became the first former or sitting U.S. president to be tried on criminal charges and be convicted.

The jury in Manhattan state court heard from 22 witnesses during about a month of testimony in Manhattan’s criminal court. Jurors also weighed other evidence — mostly documents like phone records, invoices and checks to Michael Cohen, Trump’s once loyal “fixer,” who paid adult-film star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her story of an alleged affair with the former president.

After about a day-and-a-half of deliberations, the 12 jurors said they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.

But the conviction appeared to have little impact on Trump’s popularity — and ultimate electoral victory during the 2024 presidential election. He has used the legal drama to mobilize donations for his campaign and mounting legal fees.

Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, Trump’s campaign boasted of raising millions of dollars.

And 49% of the nation’s voters in November’s election ultimately chose to bring Trump back to the White House.

More than 5,000 structures have been destroyed by the Palisades fire, California officials said on Thursday. An analysis of satellite images by Microsoft offered a glimpse of the devastation in one section of Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood between Malibu and Santa Monica.

In this one area alone, there appeared to be more than 2,000 buildings that were damaged or destroyed, according to the analysis.

The results of the analysis are estimates, and they are limited by the presence of wildfire smoke partially obscuring satellites.

As firefighters continued on Thursday to battle the Palisades and major wildfires burning across the Los Angeles area, the full scope of the damage remained unclear. But officials said the Palisades and the Eaton fire, burning to the east near Pasadena, were likely among the most devastating fires in the state’s recorded history. Officials suggested that 5,000 buildings may have also burned because of the Eaton fire.

The Palisades fire began on Tuesday and quickly grew. By Thursday, it had charred more than 20,000 acres, and remained out of control.

Aerial photographs of Pacific Palisades showed that the fire leveled whole swaths of the neighborhood near the Palisades Village shopping mall, north of Sunset Boulevard.

Widespread damage was also visible in this section of the Pacific Palisades south of Sunset Boulevard, bordered by the Pacific Coast Highway to the south. Only a few houses appeared to be standing amid the destruction.

Across the city, the Eaton fire continued to burn uncontrollably as well. It encompassed more than 13,000 acres by Thursday evening, forcing nearby residents to evacuate.

China’s government bond market has opened 2025 with a clear warning for policymakers: without more determined stimulus, investors expect deflationary pressures to become even more entrenched in the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s 10-year bond yield, a benchmark for economic growth and inflation expectations, fell to a record low of less than 1.6 per cent during trading last week and has since hovered close to that level.

Crucially, the whole yield curve has shifted downwards rather than steepening, suggesting investors are alarmed about the long-term outlook and not just anticipating short-term cuts to interest rates.

“For the long-term [bonds], yields have been trending down and I think that’s more about longer-term growth expectations and inflation expectations becoming more pessimistic. And I think that trend is likely to continue,” said Hui Shan, chief China economist at Goldman Sachs. 

Falling yields offer a stark contrast to volatile and rising yields in Europe and the US. For Beijing, the fall represents an ignominious start to the year after policymakers in September launched a stimulus drive designed to revive the Chinese economy’s animal spirits.

But data released on Thursday showed consumer prices remained close to flat in December, eking out growth of just 0.1 per cent on a year earlier, while factory prices declined 2.3 per cent, remaining in deflationary territory for more than two years.

China’s central bank last year unveiled policies to stimulate investment by institutions in equity markets and announced for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis that it was adopting a “moderately loose” monetary policy. 

On Friday, it announced a “shortage of supply” meant it would pause its programme that has seen it purchase a net Rmb1tn of government bonds on the open market.

An important Communist party meeting on the economy in December, presided over by President Xi Jinping, emphasised consumption for the first time over other previously more important strategic priorities such as building high-tech industries.

The change of emphasis reflects concern over household sentiment weakened by a three-year property crisis that has left the economy more dependent on a manufacturing and export boom for growth. Investors worry this run of strong exports will slow abruptly after US president-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20 with promises to levy up to 60 per cent tariffs on Chinese goods.

Citi economists estimated in a research note that a 15 percentage point increase in US tariffs would reduce China’s exports by 6 per cent, knocking a percentage point off GDP growth. Growth in China was estimated to be 5 per cent last year.

More insidious than the slower growth, however, are the deflationary pressures in China’s economy, said analysts. The Citi economists noted that the final quarter of last year was expected to be the seventh in a row in which the GDP deflator, a broad measure of price changes, was negative.

“This is unprecedented for China, with a similar episode only in 1998-99,” they said, pointing out that only Japan, parts of Europe and some commodity producers had experienced such an extended period of deflation.

Chinese regulators are aware of the parallels with Japan on deflation, said Robert Gilhooly, senior emerging markets economist at Abrdn, but “they don’t seem to act like it, and one thing that contributed to the Japan example was going small with piecemeal easing”.

Goldman’s Shan said the central bank had promised to ease monetary policy this year, but just as important would be a large increase in China’s fiscal deficit at the central and local government levels.

How that deficit is spent will also be important. Channelling it directly to low-income households, for example, might have a higher “multiplier effect” than giving it to other sectors, such as to banks for recapitalisation, she said.

Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC, said another reason government bond yields were at record lows was that the economy was awash with liquidity. High household savings and low demand for corporate and individual loans have left banks flush with cash that is finding its way into bond markets.

“It’s a little bit of a liquidity trap in the sense that there is money, it is available, it can be borrowed cheaply, but there’s just no demand for that,” said Neumann. “Monetary easing at the margin is becoming less and less of an effective driver of economic growth.”

Without a strong fiscal spending package, the deflationary cycle might continue, with interest rates dropping, wages and investment falling and consumers deferring purchases while they wait for prices to fall further.

“Some investors have lost a little bit of patience here in the past week,” he said, referring to the rush into bonds. “It’s still likely we’re going to get more stimulus coming through. But after all the fits and starts of the past couple of years, investors really want to see concrete numbers.”

Some economists warned that the slide in Chinese bond yields could have further to fall. Analysts at Standard Chartered said the 10-year yield could fall another 0.2 percentage points to 1.4 per cent by the end of 2025, especially if the market has to absorb higher net central government bond issuance for stimulus purposes.