China has stopped buying beef, dairy products, and beer from Lithuania this week, the Lithuanian authorities said on Thursday. China’s General Administration of Customs suspended the imports due to a “lack of documentation,” Lithuania’s State Food and Veterinary Service said in a statement cited by Reuters.

The agency added that “this is the first such notification we ever received, because the importing countries usually start by asking for any missing information.”

Beijing announced it had stopped imports of Lithuanian products on Thursday, but did not specify the reasons.

According to the Lithuanian authorities, China carried out a remote audit of Lithuanian beef and fish product exporters in 2020, and no complaints were filed, while exports continued to run well up until the end of last year. Since early December 2021, however, Lithuania hasn’t exported any food products, including beef, to China.

“As far as I know, the Chinese move does not create practical problems, because we do not export these products to China now. The exporters have moved on to other markets,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said on Thursday. She added that “if the problem is procedural and bureaucratic, as China says, then it will get solved very easily.”

READ MORE: Taiwan cheers rum producer to make China feel sour

However, this may not be the case, as Vilnius and Beijing are currently at odds over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory. The row unfolded when Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in Vilnius in November last year, a move that angered China, whose policies demand that countries recognize its claim to Taiwan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian refused to discuss the suspension of exports, but urged Lithuania to correct its “mistakes.”

“What Lithuania should do is face up to facts, redress its own mistakes, and come back to the right track of adhering to the one China principle, instead of confusing right with wrong,” Zhao said on Thursday.

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry in turn decried Beijing’s exports move, with spokeswoman Joanne Ou slamming it as “bullying.”

China is the world’s leading importer of beef, accounting for 2.36 million tons of beef imports in 2021. However, its beef imports from Lithuania are minor, with a mere 775 tons bought last year, Chinese customs data shows.

The latest conflict is not the first between Beijing and Vilnius. Last month, Chinese Customs blocked a shipment of Lithuanian rum. It ended up in Taiwan, which bought the entire shipment in an effort to support its Baltic ally.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549081-taiwan-china-lithuania-exports/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Russia could get an additional $65 billion for its state coffers this year if higher oil prices remain resilient, Bloomberg reported this week, citing estimates made by economists.

For the windfall to realize, prices need to remain around $90 per barrel of Brent for the rest of the year, according to the estimates. Yet with many forecasters expecting even higher prices later in the year, topping $100 and more, Russia may gain a lot more, up to $73 billion in additional oil revenues.

With gas prices high, too, Russian fossil fuel revenues are set to go even higher in total.

“Russia’s fiscal position is so super-stable that even with more modest oil prices, it’s hard to compromise it in the current situation,” Bloomberg quoted Renaissance Capital analyst Donets as saying.

“This year’s energy windfall looks set to be staggeringly large. That’s swelling Russia’s fiscal reserves at just the right time for the Kremlin, providing a bigger buffer against crisis in the event of sanctions. Geopolitics aside, it also means more flexibility to boost spending and invest in the economy,” Bloomberg economist Scott Johnson told the news agency.

READ MORE: Strategist outlines scenario for oil to hit $120 a barrel

Forecasts about oil reaching and topping $100 this year have been multiplying recently as bullish factors strengthen, led by continued strong demand coupled with the relaxation of Covid-19-related restrictions. Tight supply remains in the spotlight as well, despite recent forecasts about a strong rebound in US oil production this year.

It seems everyone is watching OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) rather than the US right now, with the cartel’s capacity being cited by most analysts as a big reason for their bullish forecasts.

There are also geopolitical factors: on the tailwind side, there is the situation around Ukraine that, in case of escalation, could push oil prices significantly higher, and on the headwind side, there are the Iranian – US nuclear talks that just might end with a deal this time. A deal would mean more Iranian barrels coming into international markets legally, but, according to analysts, this has already been factored into prices.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549082-russia-oil-prices-rally/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

The CEO of Unilever, which owns ice cream maker Ben Jerry’s, advised its brands to keep away from matters where they lack expertise. 

“On subjects where Unilever brands don’t have the expertise or credibility, we think it’s best that they stay out of the debate,” Alan Jope said during a conference call with the press on Thursday.

Jope’s words referred to last year’s decision by Ben Jerry’s to stop selling its ice cream in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, stating that selling its ice cream there is a move “inconsistent” with the company’s values. Initially, Unilever did not protest the boycott, with Jope saying last August the company does not interfere in the actions of “independent” boards. However, now the company, which employs thousands in Israel and has millions invested there, is working on creating a “new arrangement” for Ben Jerry’s sales in Israel, and recommended its board to not interfere in the matter.

READ MORE: Ben Jerry’s issues Russia warning

“Our absolute focus right now is to figure out what the new arrangement will be for Ben Jerry’s,” Jope stated, adding that the arrangement is expected to come around by year’s end.

Still, Jope did not criticize the politically-charged ice cream brand’s decision and even praised it for its activism.

“Ben Jerry’s is a great brand – most of the time they get it right – they have a great track record of campaigning on important issues that are relevant to their consumers,” Jope said.

In its most recent activism case, Ben Jerry’s last week targeted US President Joe Biden for his stance on the mounting tensions over Ukraine.

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” Ben Jerry’s said on Twitter, while also calling on Biden directly to “de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war.”

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549152-icecream-maker-boycott-israel-unilever/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Authorities in the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto plan to introduce a tax on empty houses, the Financial Times reported on Saturday citing Japanese media.

The city is struggling to deal with some 15,000 rapidly decaying abandoned homes, also known as akiya, which were literally left to rot after owners died and heirs refused to manage them. Many delay the sale of such heirlooms, keeping them for the use of children and grandchildren. However, left unmanaged for years, the houses simply decompose.

The goal of the tax plan is to salvage such structures before they become uninhabitable. The proposed measure will demand that current owners of the abandoned homes pay the Kyoto government a fee, which would be spent on the restoration of the buildings. According to the plan’s initiators, the tax incentive could help rent or sell the salvaged homes to new owners.

READ MORE: Tokyo flats available to rent for $1, but there’s a catch

The problem of akiya is widespread in Japan, where the population is declining at a rate of about 1,500 people a day. According to government data, in 2021 the Japanese population declined by 630,000 people.

Regarding houses, some 14% of the country’s housing stock, or about 8.5 million homes, were unoccupied as of 2018, figures from the internal affairs ministry show. According to forecasts of the Nomura Research Institute, this number may exceed 31%, or 22 million houses, by 2038.

Kyoto’s tax plan, if introduced, would be the first such measure to deal with the akiya problem, and some say it could become a template for other local governments. Authorities still need the plan to be approved by the Internal Affairs Ministry and the city council. The approvals are expected to be received later this month. Hiroyuki Nakagami, who manages the empty home tax system, is hopeful of a positive outcome and expects the measure “to widen the choices of residences which are still not on the distribution market, so that we don’t leave these assets idle but deliver them to the next generation.”

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549147-kyoto-authorities-tax-empty-homes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

The CEO of US-based NFT marketplace Cent shut the platform down on February 6, due to people selling fake and illegal content.

“There’s a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn’t be happening – like, legally,” CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters on Saturday. He stated that, according to findings, the marketplace was flooded with plagiarism and “rampant” fakes, with people either selling unauthorized copies of other NFTs, making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, or selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.

“[They were] minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets,” he said. The term ‘mint’ refers to the creation of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are crypto assets in the form of digital files such as images, videos, music records, or texts. Anyone with internet access can mint an NFT, while the ownership of the token may not be tied to the ownership of the item the token is based on.

“It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole… Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up,” Hejazi said.

READ MORE: NFTs create risk of art-related money laundering – study

Cent is a relatively small NFT marketplace with 150,000 users and revenue “in the millions,” but notable for hosting one of the first publicly known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet as an NFT last March.

Hejazi said Cent may re-open after the owners explore measures to protect content creators. These may even include the launch of centralized controls as a short-term measure.

According to the CEO, the problem of counterfeit NFTs is gaining momentum across the entire digital data sector.

“I think this is a pretty fundamental problem… We realized that a lot of it is just money chasing money,” he said.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace with $13.3 billion valuation, revealed last month that over 80% of the NFTs minted on the platform for free were “plagiarized works, fake collections and spam.”

The unauthorized use of digital data by NFT creators has already led to a number of lawsuits. Earlier this month, Nike sued an online reseller that made profits on the unauthorized sale of NFTs of their sneakers.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549135-nft-pltform-shuts-plagiarism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen gave a long-anticipated update on the electric carmaker’s Roadster hypercar on the Spike Car Radio podcast on Thursday.

According to von Holzhausen, the company is “feverishly” working on the vehicle, which will be an “exciting flying machine.”

“We are working on the Roadster. I wish we were working faster, but I also wanted to say that, in the time we have been developing it, we have also been learning a lot…

All those experiences will, you know, make their way back into a much better Roadster than had we launched right after we debuted it. No products can come fast enough from us for the public, but rest assured we are working on it feverishly,” the designer said.

According to him, the highly anticipated hypercar will have an improved (with no further details given) version of Tesla’s new tri-motor powertrain launched in the updated Tesla Model S and Model X last year. And much more.

READ MORE: Elon Musk reveals Tesla’s top priority, and it is not cars

“It will be an amazing, exciting flying machine with the SpaceX package,” von Holzhausen stated. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the carmaker plans to add a “SpaceX package” to the Roadster, but the designer has now confirmed these plans.

The ‘package’ refers to cold air rocket thrusters around the vehicle which are aimed at boosting performance. According to Musk, the technology will allow the Roadster to accelerate from 0 to 100kph in 1.1 seconds, and even allow it to fly, albeit briefly, as the CEO bragged on Twitter. The vehicle will also have a range of nearly 1,000km on one charge.

However, the new generation of the Roadster is one of Tesla’s most delayed programs. First unveiled in 2017, it was scheduled to come to the market in 2020. The carmaker delayed the program on more than one occasion, with Musk stressing that the Roadster was not a priority for Tesla.

This will actually be able to fly very briefly. I always laughed at flying cars now making one. Fate 🖤 irony haha.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2021

In 2020, Musk said the hypercar would be delayed until at least 2022 while the company focused on the release of the Tesla Cybertruck, which is also delayed. There has not been any news regarding the Roadster since September 2021, when Musk said the launch would be delayed even further – until at least 2023. The CEO also stated that the hypercar’s arrival will depend entirely on how much “drama” Tesla goes through in 2022, pointing to worries surrounding the lingering semiconductor chip shortage, which has already led to production delays at some Tesla factories.

Despite the delays, 2021 was Tesla’s most successful year in its history, with full-year profits reaching $5.5 billion, up from $721 million in 2020, while sales soared 71% to $53.8 billion, compared to $31.5 billion in 2020. Tesla nearly monopolized the American electric car market in 2021, with over 72% of all electric cars sold in the US last quarter made by Tesla.

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549043-tesla-flying-car-spacex/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

The Fed is about to conduct its annual “stress test” on the largest US banks, measuring their ability to manage events like a drop in real estate and other asset prices coupled with a surge in unemployment, while still paying their shareholders dividends for four successive quarters.

The US central bank announced the parameters of the tests on Thursday, revealing that the 34 banks being tested must endure a “hypothetical recession” that focuses stress on commercial real estate and corporate debt markets.

This year’s stress test will feature a six-point surge in unemployment to 10% paired with a 40% collapse in commercial real-estate and other asset prices, along with growing corporate bond spreads. Banks will be graded based on their ability to weather the simulated recession while still making four quarters of planned shareholder dividends. Those who fall short are supposed to be saddled with restrictions on dividends and buybacks until they amass the necessary capital needed to pass.

The Fed imposed similar restrictions on the 33 largest banks in the US – all with more than $100 billion in assets – in 2020, forbidding them to engage in share buybacks and capping dividend payments out of perceived need to conserve fiscal resources and retain the ability to lend during the Covid-19 crisis. 

Banks were subjected to a second round of stress tests that year, which they reportedly passed with flying colors.

At the time, the Fed signaled it would hold interest rates at their current near-zero position for at least three years. However, Fed chair Jerome Powell hinted last month that the central bank will raise rates this year after all, most likely in March. 

Such a rate raise could trigger the market volatility scenarios modeled in the stress tests, particularly the collapse in real estate prices. However, Powell has insisted it is needed to control inflation, which has already triggered the largest increase in consumer goods prices in 40 years.

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549121-federal-reserve-stress-test/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Hard drive giant Western Digital said a contamination issue in two of its Japanese factories severely impacted production, resulting in a loss of 6.5 billion gigabytes of flash storage. 

The company admitted the mishap in a Wednesday press release, revealing the contamination issue had effectively shut down two of its NAND production facilities. The incident will impact the availability of the chips that are vital to production of many electronic devices and serve as the primary component of solid state hard drives (SSDs).

Western Digital claimed to be working with its joint venture partner Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) to “restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible.” 

However, the two companies between them produce a whopping 30% of the NAND flash storage on the market, according to TrendForce. The company did not reveal what caused the contamination or whether products currently on the market will need to be recalled. It’s also unclear when the affected factories in Yokkaichi and Kitakami will be back online.

Indeed, with Kioxia revealing the incident also affected the more advanced BiCS 3D NAND flash memory production, buyers may try to stock up on whatever supply is already in retailers’ inventories, worsening the already dire global chip shortage sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain issues. 

Market research firm TrendForce predicted a price spike of anywhere from 5% to 10% for NAND flash chips on Friday, as demand for the chips is unlikely to falter in the absence of sufficient supply. 

The chip shortage has cost the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars, and while local governments play catch-up funding stateside chipmaking factories, production lines sit idle as a growing portion of everyday consumer items require some form of chip to work. 

US politicians have cited the perceived unfairness of an industry American manufacturers ‘invented’ having moved almost completely overseas, and many – including President Joe Biden – are belatedly pushing to bring chip production back to US soil. 

Article source: https://www.rt.com/business/549105-western-digital-factory-contamination-shortage/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, will make a $200 million strategic investment in the 104-year-old US business media brand Forbes, CNBC reported on Thursday. Binance founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao told the broadcaster he saw media as “an essential element to build widespread consumer understanding and education” of the crypto market and emerging blockchain technologies.

The Chinese Canadian billionaire, whose net worth is estimated to be nearly $100 billion, added that his firm was also eyeing investments in other traditional companies as it looks to advance the adoption of blockchain.

Forbes said the deal would help make it a leader in supplying information about digital assets like Bitcoin. According to CNBC sources, the funds will help Forbes execute its plan to merge with a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

Binance will replace half of the $400 million in commitments from institutional investors announced by Forbes in August, the unnamed sources said. That would make Binance one of the top two biggest owners of Forbes, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FRBS, they added.

News of the investment raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. In 2020, Binance sued Forbes for defamation over a story the magazine published regarding the exchange’s corporate structure. The crypto exchange later dropped the case.

Forbes said the deal would not change its areas of coverage, but hopefully allow its existing digital assets team and “some other beats” to grow over time. The company’s spokesman, Bill Hankes, told the BBC, “Forbes has been fiercely independent for more than a century, regardless of our ownership, and that is not changing,” adding: “The integrity of our trusted journalism is our most important brand asset.”

For more stories on economy finance visit RT’s business section