News

U.S. President Donald Trump says oil prices are too high and blames the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The 14 oil-producing nations in OPEC — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela among them — produce about 40 percent of the world’s oil, but about 60 percent of the oil traded on international markets. OPEC’s actions, whether to cut or increase production, often heavily influence the price of oil, and by extension the prices consumers and businesses pay for fuel.

OPEC’s oil chiefs struck a deal in 2016 to cut production by 1.8 million barrels a day to reduce the global glut of oil and shore up prices. Since then, oil prices have risen from below $30 a barrel to more than $70.

But that rollback in production is set to expire at the end of the year. OPEC has yet to set new production levels beyond that, but the cartel’s oil ministers are meeting again next week in Vienna.

Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said in April that the global market can absorb higher oil prices, a remark that drew a swift rebuke from Trump.

“With record amounts of oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!” the U.S. leader tweeted on April 20, although he has no control over what OPEC decides to do.

Early in the year, with gas prices at service stations still relatively low, Trump suggested raising the country’s gasoline tax that customers pay at service stations by 25 cents a gallon to fund road and highway repairs.

But the president has not mentioned the tax increase idea in months as gas prices have steadily risen because of higher oil prices on the world market, eating into higher take-home pay that millions of American workers gained when Congress late last year passed tax-cut legislation supported by Trump.

The average gallon of gas in the United States now costs $2.92, far more than in such oil-producing countries as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and far less than in other countries around the world, including Europe.
…

For many years, Ivory Coast has been the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Most of it leaves the country in bulk and ends up in Europe, where it gets turned into fine and expensive chocolate, fetching up to 50 times the price of the raw cocoa.

Chocolate is the world’s favorite comfort food. Two-thirds of all that sweet stuff comes out of factories in the United States and Western Europe. It is where most people consume it, too. Almost completely left out of this feast for the palate are the countries that produce the raw material for chocolate: cocoa.

A few years ago, a Dutch-Ivorian television crew went to one of Ivory Coast’s many cocoa farms and recorded the surprise on the planters’ faces when tasting chocolate for the first time: so THIS is what they do with our cocoa beans?

Very little chocolate is consumed in Africa, but this Ivorian entrepreneur is planning to change that. 

Axel Emmanuel Gbaou says he worked at a commercial bank until 2010 before he decided to go into the business of making chocolate. The taste for the sweet bars came from his mother, who had been living among Swiss missionaries, great chocolate lovers. His conviction came from doing some basic arithmetic.

Eighty percent of next year’s cocoa beans, he explains, have already been bought up by the big multinational companies that transport them raw to the chocolate factories in other parts of the world. One kilo of chocolate fetches up to 50 times more than one kilo of unprocessed cocoa beans. Axel wants some of that money to stay in Ivory Coast.

In this nondescript building close to the market in Abidjan’s Cocody district, you will find the production unit, the packaging center and sales office. Axel’s company sells its products to an ever expanding circle of customers, including the global airline Air France.

Back in the cocoa producing fields, the situation is dire. World market prices have been falling for two years. In response, the government of Ivory Coast has lowered the standard price per kilo. 

Agronomist N’dourou M’beo is quality control manager at Axel’s company. He says current cocoa prices stand at around $1.40 per kilo. That is the raw harvest that gets shipped out of the country. But after some basic treatment — roasting and winnowing — those beans fetch three times as much and they can be stored for months. This is one model the company has adopted. As a result, more work and money stay on the farm and the company has a reliable supply of quality beans.

The world is the market, but Axel’s biggest challenge lies right here in Africa. 

In the next two years, he says he wants to sell 100 million bars of chocolate on the African continent. 

That sounds like a lot, but in fact with well more than one billion inhabitants and a fast growing middle class that can afford buying a few bars at $3 each, he thinks it is perfectly doable.

 

 
…

Fueled by a surging stock market and huge gifts from billionaires, charitable giving in the United States in 2017 topped the $400 billion mark for the first time, according to the latest comprehensive report on Americans’ giving patterns.

The Giving USA report, released Tuesday, said giving from individuals, estates, foundations and corporations reached an estimated $410 billion in 2017 — more than the gross domestic product of countries such as Israel and Ireland. The total was up 5.2 percent in current dollars (3 percent adjusted for inflation) from the estimate of $389.64 billion for 2016.

“Americans’ record-breaking charitable giving in 2017 demonstrates that even in divisive times our commitment to philanthropy is solid,” said Aggie Sweeney, chair of Giving USA Foundation, which publishes the annual report. It is researched and written by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Giving increased to eight of the nine charitable sectors identified by Giving USA. The only decline was for areas related to international affairs.

The biggest increase was in giving to foundations — up 15.5 percent. That surge was driven by large gifts from major philanthropists to their own foundations — including $1 billion from Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, and $2 billion from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Other sectors with increases of more than 6 percent included education, health, arts and culture, environment and animal welfare, and public-society benefit organizations — groups which work on such issues as voter education, civil rights, civil liberties and consumer rights.

Despite the record-setting total, Americans’ level of generosity is no higher than it was decades ago. For 2017, giving by individuals represented 2 percent of total disposable income — down from 2.4 percent in 2000 and the same as the rate in 1978. Similarly, total charitable donations have hovered around 2 percent of the gross domestic product for many years; for 2017, that figure was 2.1 percent.

Una Osili, a dean and economics professor at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, says the school’s research shows that the percentage of U.S. households making charitable donations has declined steadily in recent years, from about 67 percent in 2000 to 56.6 percent in 2015 — the latest year for which data is available.

She said giving rates for lower- and middle-class families had dropped significantly since the 2008 recession, while the giving rate for the wealthiest 20 percent of households was relatively steady.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said many fundraisers in the U.S. — while pleased with the recent increase in gifts — are unsure what lies ahead.

If trade wars break out, she said, that could weaken the economy to the point at which it deters some donors. She said fundraisers also worry that some middle-class donors may cut back on giving if changes in the new tax law no longer give them a deduction for their charitable donations.

Alluding to the surge of mega-gifts by the wealthy, Palmer added, “Some people feel they don’t need to give any more.”
…

AT&T won approval from a U.S. court on Tuesday to buy Time Warner for $85 billion, without conditions, allowing AT&T to compete with internet companies that dominate digital advertising and providing new sources of revenue.

The planned deal is seen as a turning point for a media industry that has been upended by companies like Netflix and Google which produce content and sell it online directly to consumers, without requiring a pricey cable subscription. Distributors including cable, satellite and wireless carriers all see buying content companies as a way to add revenue.

The ruling could also prompt a cascade of pay TV companies buying television and movie makers, with Comcast’s bid for some Twenty-First Century Fox assets potentially the first out of the gate.

The merger, including debt, would be the fourth largest deal ever attempted in the global telecom, media and entertainment space, according to Thomson Reuters data. It would also be the 12th largest deal in any sector, the data showed.

“I conclude that the government has failed to meet its burden of proof,” District Court Judge Richard Leon told the court. He called one of the government’s arguments against the deal “gossamer thin.”

The judge in a scathing opinion urged the U.S. government not to seek a stay of his ruling, saying it would be “manifestly unjust” to do so and not likely to succeed.

Shares of AT&T were about flat in after-hours trade following the decision, while Time Warner rose more than 5 percent.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit to stop the deal in November 2017, saying that AT&T’s ownership of both DirecTV and Time Warner would give AT&T unfair leverage against rival cable providers that relied on Time Warner’s content, such as CNN and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

AT&T in a six-week trial argued that the purchase of Time Warner would allow it to gain information about viewers needed to target digital advertising, much like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google already do.

AT&T and other wireless carriers need to find new sources of revenue as the mobile phone market stagnates and more customers abandon pricey cable and satellite packages for streaming services they can watch on their phones or televisions.

The government estimated costs to industry rivals, such as Charter Communications, would increase by $580 million a year if AT&T owned Time Warner.

To assuage the Trump administration’s criticisms, AT&T offered to submit pricing disagreements with other pay TV companies over Turner’s channels to third-party arbitration. The companies further offered not to black out programming during arbitration for seven years.

Announced in October 2016, the deal was quickly denounced by Donald Trump, who as a candidate and later as president has been critical of Time Warner’s CNN and its coverage.

Before the trial started, AT&T lawyers said the Time Warner deal may have been singled out for government enforcement but Judge Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected their bid to force the disclosure of White House communications that might have shed light on the matter.

The deal cost AT&T’s top lobbyist, Bob Quinn, his job in May after it became public that AT&T had paid Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen $600,000 for advice on winning approval.

The ruling could also have implications for CBS’s potential tie-up with Viacom, which is already uncertain because of a lawsuit between CBS’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, and its board.
…

The Turkish and Azerbaijani presidents on Tuesday inaugurated a key pipeline carrying natural gas from Azerbaijan’s gas fields to Turkish markets and eventually to Europe, part of a wider Southern Gas Corridor project that aims to diversify gas supplies and reduce countries’ dependence on Russia.

 

The Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline, or TANAP, is also part of Turkey’s ambition of becoming a major energy hub.

 

“We are taking a historic step,” Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a ceremony in central Eskisehir province with Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev marking the delivery of the first gas. “We are inaugurating a project that is the ‘Silk Road’ of energy.”

 

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic also attended.

 

Erdogan said the pipeline would not only ensure energy security but also increase the “welfare of the people on its route.” It will deliver 6 billion cubic meters of gas per year to Turkey and 10 billion cubic meters to Europe.

 

Although it has no financial involvement, the United States has strongly supported TANAP, said Sandra Oudkirk, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy, who also attended the ceremony.

 

“We take energy security for ourselves and allies and partners really seriously and we see this as an important component of the bigger energy diversification and energy security picture,” she told a group of journalists in Ankara earlier.

 

The pipeline will eventually be connected to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP, at the Turkey-Greece border. Erdogan said that could take place in June 2019.
…

The separatist campaign in Indian-administered Kashmir broke out into major violence in 1989. More than 60,000 people are estimated to have died and 10,000 to have disappeared in the disputed Himalayan region. That has pushed their families into poverty. For the region’s youth, earning a living has been a challenge, especially educated young women. However, one group of young entrepreneurs is taking matters into their own hands. Yusuf Jameel has more, in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
…

The new generation of global entrepreneurs is going into business motivated by purpose rather than just profit, according to research by the HSBC banking group released on Tuesday.

One in four entrepreneurs aged under 35 said they were more motivated by social impact than by moneymaking, compared to just over one in 10 of those aged over 55, according the results of the HSBC survey.

“Our research suggests this is a generational shift,” Stuart Parkinson, global chief investment officer of HSBC, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Younger entrepreneurs are focused on environmental and social concerns and that’s because they see these values as being their own.”

The bank surveyed 3,700 entrepreneurs in 11 countries. One in five said their priority as a business owner was to deliver solutions to environmental and social challenges.

Parkinson said social media had brought greater scrutiny of businesses, while awareness of the social and environmental impacts of business practices had also increased.

“Social enterprise has taken off as this new formula for success, which is this combination of capitalism and doing good, and younger entrepreneurs are clearly leading this,” he said.

Social enterprises are businesses with a mission to benefit society or the environment as well as turn a profit and Britain is seen as a global leader in the innovative sector.

Last year it had about 70,000 employing nearly 1 million people last year, according to membership organization Social Enterprise UK, up from 55,000 businesses in 2007.

Zakia Moulaoui runs the social enterprise Invisible Cities, which employs homeless people as city guides in Edinburgh, and plans to expand the business to Manchester and Glasgow by the end of the year.

The 31-year-old said there was a greater awareness amongst her generation that being able to address social issues and earn an income was possible.

“People who thought they couldn’t do that because they needed to make a living for themselves might have just worked in a regular business and volunteered at the weekend, but now people know they can reconcile the two,” Moulaoui said.

Britain’s Confederation of British Industry (CBI), an employers’ group, has found that two thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds think companies should put society’s interest first.

“This is a view shared by employees, customers and communities. CEOs of firms of all sizes are clearer than ever before — purpose and profit go hand in hand,” said Josh Hardie, deputy director-general of the CBI.
…

Financial disclosure forms released late Monday show that White House special adviser — and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law — Jared Kushner’s wealth and debt both appear to have risen over the year, an indication of the complex state of his finances and the potential conflicts that confront some of his investments.

 

Disclosures issued by the White House for Kushner and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, showed that Kushner held assets totaling at least $181 million. His previous 2017 disclosure had showed assets in at least the $140 million range. Kushner and Ivanka Trump, jointly held at least $240 million in assets last year.

 

The financial disclosures released by the White House and filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics routinely show both assets and debts compiled in broad ranges between low and high estimates, making it difficult to precisely chart the rise and fall of the financial portfolios of federal government officials.

 

The White House released the disclosures for Kushner and Ivanka Trump on a heavy news day, while the world’s media lavished attention on President Trump’s preparations to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un for talks over nuclear weapons. The White House had released the president’s own financial report last month.

 

A spokesman for the couple said Monday that the couple’s disclosure portrayed both assets and debts that have not changed much over the past year — and stressed that Kushner and Ivanka Trump have both complied with all federal ethics rules.

 

“Since joining the administration, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump have complied with the rules and restrictions as set out by the Office of Government Ethics,” said Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for the couple’s ethics lawyer, Abbe Lowell. “As to the current filing which OGE also reviews, their net worth remains largely the same, with changes reflecting more the way the form requires disclosure than any substantial difference in assets or liabilities.”

 

One of Kushner’s biggest holdings, a real estate tech startup called Cadre that he co-founded with his brother, Joshua, rose sharply in value. The latest disclosure shows it was worth at least $25 million at the end of last year, up from a minimum value of $5 million in his previous disclosure.

 

The bulk of Ivanka Trump’s assets — more than $50 million worth — was contained in a trust that holds her business and corporations. That trust generated over $5 million in revenue last year.

 

She reported a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., worth between $5 million and $25 million. The hotel has been a focus of lawsuits against the president and ethics watchdogs who say Trump is violating the Constitution by profiting from his office as diplomats spend big money there.

 

The disclosure also showed that Kushner has assumed growing debt over the past year, both expanding his use of revolving lines of credit and taking on additional debt of between $5 million and $25 million as part of his family company’s purchase last year of a New Jersey apartment complex.

 

A series of interim financial reports last year showed that Kushner had increased lines of credit with Bank of America, New York Community Bank and Signature Bank, each from at least $1 million to $5 million. Such moves do not mean that Kushner has yet accumulated that debt, but has the ability to do so.

 

The new disclosure shows that Kushner did take on a new debt last year with Bank of America worth between $5 million and $25 million — but jointly with other investors in Quail Ridge LLC, a company used for his family firm’s purchase of Quail Ridge, a 1,032-unit apartment community in Plainsboro, N.J., near Princeton. The disclosures also showed that Ivanka Trump owns an interest in that purchase through a family trust.

 

The disclosure showed that Kushner reported making at least $5 million in income from the development since Kushner Companies bought the complex in September. The family business has made a splash with high-profile deals for buildings in New York City in the past decade, but lately has been returning to its roots by buying garden apartments in the suburbs.

 

Under an ethics agreement he signed when he joined the administration in early 2017, Kushner withdrew from his position as CEO of Kushner Companies. But even as a passive investor, he retains many lucrative investments — which ethics critics have warned could raise conflicts of interest.
…