Global crude prices dropped for the week ending Sunday for the first time this year. The slide came amid reports of a US-Russia summit on Ukraine and hopes of reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran. Both Russia and Iran are major global energy suppliers.

However, the price drop was short-lived as global benchmark Brent crude gained on Monday to trade above $93 per barrel by 10:00 GMT, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was trading around $91 per barrel.

Both benchmarks reached multiple-year highs last week amid fears of possible supply constraints due to Russia-Ukraine tensions. Western nations have threatened Moscow, which has been conducting military exercises near the Ukrainian border, with sanctions if it attacks its neighbor. Russia has denied planning any such actions. In the most recent development, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden on Sunday agreed “in principle” to hold a summit to discuss the situation in the coming days. The oil market reacted to the news swiftly, with both benchmarks trading in the red before recovering on Monday.

READ MORE: Fears of disruption push oil prices to 7-year high

The oil rally started to subside late last week, following reports that a US-Iranian deal to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, also known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was close to being agreed upon. A senior EU official said on Friday that the deal is expected “in the coming two weeks or so,” but that success depended on the political will of the negotiating parties, as cited by Reuters.

On Sunday, Iranian lawmakers announced six conditions for the revival of the agreement in a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi. The letter stated, among other things, that the deal may come through if all sanctions on Iran are lifted and if Washington guarantees to introduce no more sanctions or other punitive steps against Tehran in the future, news agency IRNA reported. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Saturday that a statement by the leaders of the US Senate and House of Representatives to back the nuclear deal would be a sufficient “political guarantee.”

Media reports state that some steps regarding the deal have already been reached – Iran has to stop all nuclear enrichment above 5% purity and release political prisoners, then JCPOA members must unfreeze Iran’s assets.

If Iran goes through with the deal, the global market could gain a large influx of crude from the second half of 2022 onwards, experts say, which would calm worries of crude supply shortages.

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The US Federal Reserve has approved an amended regulation that bans its senior officials from trading stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies. The ban was formally announced on Friday.

Under the regulation, senior Fed officials won’t be able to buy, own, or sell assets, including individual stocks, bonds, agency securities, derivatives, foreign currencies, commodities, sector funds, and cryptocurrencies.

The rules were initially announced in October, but cryptocurrencies were not included at that time. According to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), most of the restrictions will become effective on May 1.

The ban covers FOMC members, regional bank presidents, and a number of other officials, including staff officers, bond desk managers, and Fed employees who attend board meetings. They also extend to employees’ spouses and children. While the regulations will apply only to senior Fed staff, the central bank said it expects them to eventually apply to all employees.

READ MORE: Federal Reserve bans stock trading, other investments for top officials after controversies

“The Federal Reserve expects that additional staff will become subject to all or parts of these rules after the completion of further review and analysis,” the announcement stated.

The ban follows a controversy last year when reports emerged that several officials traded individual stocks and stock funds just before the Fed adopted measures to keep the economy afloat during the Covid-19 crisis. The regulation therefore “aims to support public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of the [Fed’s] work by guarding against even the appearance of any conflict of interest.”

Under the ban, officials who currently hold market positions will have one year to dispose of them. Furthermore, officials covered by the new rules will have to give 45 days’ notice before making any asset purchases and hold those positions for at least a year.

Separately, Congress has also been preparing a measure that would prohibit its members from owning individual stocks, reports say, but no official regulation has been unveiled yet.

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Credit Suisse reportedly served a motley client roster that included heads of state and spy chiefs, as well as sanctioned individuals and allegedly corrupt officials, according to a rare data leak from the Swiss banking giant.

The revelations are based on data from more than 18,000 bank accounts that held upward of $100 billion combined between the 1940s and the 2010s. The information was leaked by a self-described whistleblower to Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and shared with other media outlets, which nicknamed the trove “Suisse secrets.”

Account holders included Jordan’s King Abdullah II and the sons of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, according to the New York Times, one of the outlets that received the data. The Mubarak brothers allegedly held six accounts, including one that amassed $196 million as of 2003.

Spymasters who stashed money at Credit Suisse reportedly included the late Omar Suleiman of Egypt and Jordan’s Saad Kheir. The latter started compiling millions of dollars at Credit Suisse after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. In 1985, when then-Pakistani intelligence chief Akhtar Abdur Rahman Khan was helping to funnel billions of dollars in aid to Mujahideen militants in Afghanistan, a Credit Suisse account was apparently opened in the names of his sons.

READ MORE: Could the CIA be behind the leak of the Pandora Papers, given their curious lack of focus on US nationals?

A businessman who had been sanctioned by US and European governments for his ties to then-Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe also was on the bank’s client roster. Another controversial account holder was Nervis Villalobos, Venezuela’s former energy minister. Credit Suisse in 2011 opened an account for Villalobos, holding as much as $10 million, despite knowing of corruption allegations against him, the Times said. In fact, the bank allegedly hosted 25 accounts holding a combined $270 million for people accused of being involved in a conspiracy related to Venezuela’s state oil company.

Bank spokeswoman Candice Sun told the newspaper that many of the accounts referenced in the data leak date back decades, “to a time where laws, practices and expectations of financial institutions were very different from where they are now.” Many of the accounts cited in the leak have been closed, she said, and with those that remain active, “we are comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control-related steps were taken, including pending account closures.”

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Norway’s Equinor will maintain maximum natural gas production rates through the spring and summer to help the European Union fill its gas storage facilities, the company’s chief executive said this week.

The pledge comes amid continued concern about gas supplies into the warmer months of the year, which is typically the time storage is filled up for the peak demand period of winter. Last year, most of Europe failed to make sure it had enough gas for the winter, which sparked the gas crunch.

Speaking to Bloomberg this week, Equinor’s Anders Opedal said that Norway had always been a reliable partner of Europe and will continue to supply as much gas as it can to the continent as possible. The problem for Europe is that what’s possible is less than half of the gas it needs. Much less, in fact.

According to Eurostat, the EU imported 46.8% of its natural gas from Russia in the first half of last year. Norway, for its part, accounted for 20.5% of natural gas imports during that period—less than half of what Russia sent the EU’s way.

According to Bruegel, a European economics think tank, Norway exported over 2.9 billion cu m weekly to the EU in late 2021. This compared with a little over 2.3 billion cu m for Russia. During the first half of the year, however, Gazprom kept flows above 3 billion cu m weekly while Norway never reached that level.

The situation highlights the biggest problem that the EU has with its gas supply security. It has been over-reliant on Russia for years, and this has bred complacency and the certainty that whatever happens, Russia will continue shipping gas to Europe.

Russia shares the sentiment, but the recent events around gas prices and Ukraine have shaken it among European governments, which are now in a rush to find alternative suppliers in case they are needed. The task is proving more challenging than perhaps they had expected.

Norway can probably keep pumping at maximum for a while longer, although it would need to stop for maintenance at some point. Yet Norway clearly cannot cover the whole amount of gas that Russia supplies to Europe right now. Also, it can’t cover the additional demand that will be coming from Germany as it closes its coal and nuclear power plants.

This was the point of the Nord Stream route expansion, by the way—ensuring supply for nuclear-free and, later, coal-free Germany. The Nord Stream 1 pipeline currently ships more than a third of Russian gas exports to Europe. Doubling its capacity with Nord Stream 2—unless the Biden administration makes good on its threat to kill it, of course—will make it fit to handle more than two-thirds of Russia’s gas exports to Europe.

What other options does Europe have besides Norway? Central Asia is an option, and more specifically Azerbaijan, which is already shipping some gas through the Southern Gas Corridor ending in Italy. The only other alternative is LNG.

Europe has been the top destination for US liquefied natural gas for three months amid the energy crunch, despite limited LNG import terminal capacity. According to data from Refinitiv reported by Reuters, as much as 75% of US LNG exports went to Europe last month. So far this month, half of all US LNG cargos have been sent to Europe.

Qatar and Australia are also LNG options for the EU. The union even suspended an antitrust investigation into Qatar Petroleum—recently renamed QatarEnergy—this month in what might be a sign Brussels is willing to make concessions in exchange for gas. 

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Sales of snacks in the US grew by nearly 7% last year, according to Chicago-based market research firm IRI, with Americans consuming $30.5 billion of them and the industry outpacing total food and beverage trends.

“The world is snackifying,” Rob Sarlls, former chairman of SNAC International, the leading international trade association for the snack industry, told MarketWatch.

“It’s not the three square meals we remember growing up,” MarketWatch quotes Denise Purcell from the Specialty Food Association, an organization representing the gourmet industry, as saying.

IRI reported across-the-board growth in the snack sector last year, with potato chips up 3%, dried fruit up 15%, toasted corn nuts up 16.2%, and dried meat up 21.3%.

The statistics suggest that more people are choosing leaner and healthier options, as around 40% of adults in the US suffer from obesity, according to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

READ MORE: Parents boiling over Meatless Fridays at schools

Manufacturers are jumping on the health food bandwagon and offering new, more adventurous products. Cold oatmeal, marinated lupini beans, and pickled cauliflower florets are reportedly becoming more popular.

When it comes to the health benefits of snacking, research supports opposing views. While some studies suggest that it may help control appetite, others claim it may contribute to recreational eating and excess calories, says Food and Nutrition magazine, adding that the quality of meals and snacks is more important than the frequency of eating.

The CDC says that healthy eating plans allow for just one or two small snacks a day, with fresh fruit and vegetables the way nature provided them being the best choice. It explains that a whole fruit provides a larger snack than the same fruit dried – for the same number of calories.

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China’s national currency, the yuan, retained its position as the fourth most actively used currency for global transactions in January, according to data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).

Payments using the yuan soared to a record 3.2% of market share, breaking through its previous high set in 2015 and ranking behind the US dollar, the euro, and the British pound.

The dollar, which kept the top spot in January, saw a drop in market share, declining to about 39.9% from 40.5% recorded in December. The euro lost ground as well but held onto the second spot. Meanwhile, the share of global payments in yuan was up from the 2.7% posted in the previous month.

Yuan transactions have reportedly soared over the past three months as international funds boosted holdings of Chinese government bonds, pushing their share to a record high. Moreover, Russian gas producer Gazprom Neft’s announced plans to accept the yuan rather than US dollars as payment for fueling Russian airplanes at China’s airports, also boosted the Chinese currency.

READ MORE: China dumping US dollar in trade investment in Asia

Earlier this week, head of the People’s Bank of China, Yi Gang, urged emerging economies to promote using local currencies in trade, echoing a similar call from the Indonesian authorities to cut down reliance on the US dollar to mitigate the risks of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus withdrawal.

The Chinese currency will emerge as one of the biggest beneficiaries as “trade between various Asian countries and China grows, and more of it is denominated in yuan,” according to Alvin T. Tan, head of Asia FX strategy at Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong, as cited by Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, China issued a plan to bolster its cross-border yuan payments system, to be implemented between now and 2025.

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US prosecutors may use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in investigations into hedge funds and firms that are linked to short-selling, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Short-sellers are traders that bet a certain stock’s price will drop, usually by publishing negative reports on the stock in question. This is done to artificially lower the stock’s price, so it can be sold and then bought at a lower cost in order to pocket the difference. The activity is a widely used stock-trading move, however, it becomes illegal if a short seller is found to have spread false information in an effort to drive down a stock’s price. The US Justice Department last year issued subpoenas to numerous firms that were linked to short-selling in a push to combat potentially manipulative trading actions.

According to a Reuters report published on Saturday, the firms in question could now face charges under the 1970s anti-racketeering law. Prosecutors on the cases are investigating the relationships between the short-sellers who published negative stock reports and investors who may have profited from them, as well as whether the stock actions probed were coordinated steps taken by a “criminal enterprise.”

READ MORE: Credit Suisse ignored murders while laundering cocaine cash, banker testifies

RICO has historically been used in cases linked to bribery, money laundering and drug trafficking by organized criminal groups such as the mafia. It is rarely used to combat financial crimes, however, some precedent exists.

In the most recent case, prosecutors charged JPMorgan Chase executives with racketeering for manipulating prices of precious metals in 2019.

The Justice Department in Washington and the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles are involved in the short-selling probes, according to the sources, but they declined to comment on the report when contacted by Reuters.

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Underground gas storage facilities (UGS) in Europe were 95.3% empty as of February 17, Russia’s state energy giant and major gas exporter Gazprom said on Saturday, citing data from Gas Infrastructure Europe.

This means that Europe now has only 4.7% of its gas reserves left for the remainder of the winter season.

The volume of active gas in storage facilities is 21% or 8.3 billion cubic meters less compared to the same time last year. In total, 44.8 billion cubic meters have already been withdrawn from Europe’s UGS this winter.

According to Gazprom, gas reserves in underground storage facilities in Ukraine are also at a minimum, having dropped to 10.6 billion cubic meters, which is 45% less than last year.

Also, earlier this week, authorities in Germany, which has one of the largest underground storage capacities in Europe, reported a plunge in storage volumes to historically low levels compared to previous years.

READ MORE: Europe is running out of space for LNG

The European Union, however, this week claimed that its supplies were sufficient to last several more weeks in the event that Russia stops its gas flow to the bloc amid tensions over Ukraine.
Russian gas supplies to European countries had already started to fall in mid-2021, and the decline accelerated at the beginning of 2022. Gazprom, however, repeatedly insisted that it is still supplying Europe with gas in strict accordance with existing contracts.

Despite this, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Saturday called Gazprom’s supply policy intentionally harmful.

“Gazprom is consciously trying to store and deliver as little as possible while prices and demand are skyrocketing,” she said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, as quoted by Anadolu news agency.

According to the Commission, until recently, the EU satisfied almost a quarter (24%) of its energy needs with gas, 90% of which was imported. Some 40% of its imports came from Gazprom.

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Global computer chip industry sales reached the highest-ever annual total of $555.9 billion last year, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported this week. The figure represents an increase of 26.2% compared to the 2020 total of $440.4 billion.

The association went on to report that the industry shipped a record 1.15 trillion units in 2021 in response to high demand.

“In 2021, amid the ongoing global chip shortage, semiconductor companies substantially ramped up production to unprecedented levels to address persistently high demand, resulting in record chip sales and units shipped,” said SIA president and CEO John Neuffer.

SIA predicts that demand for semiconductors will “rise significantly” in the coming years, as chips become heavily embedded in the essential technologies.

Millions of products, such as cars, smartphones and washing machines, rely on computer chips.

When the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, some tech firms started stockpiling chips or ordering them in advance, which led to many companies struggling to buy the components. As lockdowns forced millions to work from home, demand for laptops, tablets and webcams skyrocketed. At the same, labor shortages at chip factories lead to shortages worldwide.

The situation has led governments and lawmakers to work on securing the supply chain and bringing the manufacture of semiconductors closer to home, as some of the biggest chip makers are located in Asia.

Last year, US President Joe Biden pledged $50 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research with a bill known as the CHIPS for America Act.

Earlier this month, the EU announced a new European Chips Act that will see €15 billion ($17.11 billion) of additional investments in the industry until 2030.

SIA represents 99% of the US semiconductor industry by revenue and nearly two-thirds of non-US chip firms.

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US regulators have added e-commerce sites operated by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba to the ‘notorious markets’ list, the US Trade Representative’s office (USTR) said on Thursday.

“This includes identifying for the first time AliExpress and the WeChat e-commerce ecosystem, two significant China-based online markets that reportedly facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting,” the USTR statement reads.

The list now includes 42 online markets and 35 physical markets that are accused of “engaging in or facilitating trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy.” Apart from this week’s big-name additions, China-based online markets Baidu Wangpan, DHGate, Pinduoduo, and Taobao are also on the list, as well as nine physical markets located in China “known for the manufacture, distribution, and sale of counterfeit goods.”

READ MORE: US accuses China of harming global trade

Inclusion on the list, published annually since 2006, does not lead to any direct sanctions or penalties, but, according to the USTR, serves to raise public and government awareness of intellectual property issues. It does not reflect any actual findings of legal violations of intellectual property rights – nevertheless, it is considered a stain on a company’s reputation.

Beijing slammed the recent additions as “irresponsible” in a statement on Friday, saying the list lacks conclusive evidence and sufficient proof.

Both Tencent and Alibaba vowed to work with government agencies to resolve the matter, noting that both actively monitor and act upon intellectual property rights violations on their respective platforms.

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