Doug Emhoff among those fired from Holocaust Museum board by Trump

Gregory Svirnovskiy
Tue, April 29, 2025 

POLITICO




The White House has fired several of former President Joe Biden’s appointees to the board overseeing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — including former second gentleman Doug Emhoff — and is actively interviewing new candidates, an administration official, granted anonymity to discuss personnel changes, told POLITICO on Tuesday.

"Today, I was informed of my removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council,” Emhoff said in a statement. “Let me be clear: Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”

The New York Times first reported the list of officials removed, includes Emhoff; former Biden White House officials Ron Klain, Susan Rice and Anthony Bernal; and former DNC Chair Tom Perez.

The board consists of more than 50 presidentially appointed members, who serve for a five-year term, as well as several members from the House, Senate and three federal agencies. The museum is partially funded by the federal government.

With Biden in the White House, Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, became the first Jewish person ever to be married to a president or vice president. He emerged as a key voice for the administration on Israel, and to the Jewish community. Emhoff lamented a rising “antisemitism crisis” on college campuses following the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. And he hosted six Jewish college students — all with grandparents who survived the Holocaust — at the White House on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2024.

As the 2024 presidential campaign geared up, Emhoff tore into then-candidate Trump for saying Jews voting for Democrats “hate Israel.”

More recently, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, the law firm where Emhoff is a partner, reached a deal with the Trump administration to avoid White House sanctions. Emhoff criticized the maneuver, CNN reported.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Holocaust Museum did not address the board members being released, only saying ”we look forward to continuing to advance our vitally important mission as we work with the Trump Administration.”

"No divisive political decision will ever shake my commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education or to combating hate and antisemitism,” Emhoff said in his statement. “I will continue to speak out, to educate, and to fight hate in all its forms — because silence is never an option."

REVANCHIST COURT

Brazil's Supreme Court deals blow to Amazon 'Soy Moratorium'

FILE PHOTO: Soybean harvest on a farm in Maringa


By Ana Mano and Ricardo Brito

Tue, April 29, 2025 

SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazil's Supreme Court will allow the country's biggest farming state to withdraw tax incentives from signatories of the so-called "Soy Moratorium," a voluntary ban by grain traders on soybean purchases from Amazon areas deforested after 2008, in a setback for the conservation movement.

Conservationists have praised the 2006 Soy Moratorium initiative for slowing damage to the world's largest rainforest. But the agreement is under growing pressure from farmers' lobbies interested in expanding plantings to meet rising demand for soy from Brazil, the leading producer globally.

Separately on Tuesday, Brazil's Mato Grosso farmers lobby Aprosoja-MT filed a fresh lawsuit against global grain companies and their Brazilian lobbies over the rules of the moratorium, according to a copy of the complaint filed with the court and seen by Reuters.

They want the court to force the defendants to cease what they called "the illegal conduct that has been practiced within the scope of the Soy Moratorium." Farmers are seeking to persuade the judge to make the defendants pay compensation for the losses this agreement allegedly imposed on Brazilian soybean farmers.

Aprosoja-MT is suing the Brazilian units of ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus Company and COFCO and lobbies for grain exporters, such as Abiove and Anec.

Louis Dreyfus Company referred Reuters to Abiove for comment. Cargill and Abiove declined to comment on the lawsuit. Anec and the other firms did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Mato Grosso state, which supplies almost a third of Brazil's soybeans, passed a law last year pulling tax advantages for those joining the Soy Moratorium.

The Supreme Court had provisionally suspended enforcement of the law pending a ruling on its compliance with the constitution.

In the decision handed down on Monday following arguments from Mato Grosso, Justice Flavio Dino acknowledged the moratorium as an important conservation tool; however, he wrote it cannot be used to constrain the actions of the state.

The state "may base its tax incentive policy on criteria that are different from those of a private agreement, as long as it is in compliance with national legislation," Dino wrote.

"It seems reasonable to me that [Mato Grosso] state should not be obliged to grant tax incentives or public land [use] to companies failing to comply with laws that took effect after the signing of the Soy Moratorium," he added.

The ruling must now be confirmed by a panel of Supreme Court justices before it can be enforced from January 1, 2026, the decision said.

Abiove, which represents soybean traders, said last week before a Senate committee that the case gave the soy industry a chance to improve the moratorium.

On the Supreme Court's decision itself, Abiove vowed to open talks with the Mato Grosso government to discuss the application of the new law if the panel confirms the latest ruling on the matter. Abiove praised the fact Justice Dino gave time in his decision for private and public agents to have talks.

Abiove added Dino's decision "makes it clear" that all previous legal acts and acquired rights "are guaranteed," meaning the incentives already granted to the trading companies cannot be withdrawn, according to the statement.

The current moratorium agreement bars soy purchases from a whole farm if it includes areas deforested since 2008, and one potential change could allow more flexibility by drawing a distinction between individual soy fields.

Farmers and traders, however, have yet to reach a compromise.

(Reporting by Ana Mano in São Paulo and Ricardo Brito in Brasília; Additional reporting by Oliver Griffin in São PauloEditing by Joe Bavier and Aurora Ellis)

 Port of L.A. executive director says retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left amid U.S.-China trade war

Alena Botros

Tue, April 29, 2025 

• The U.S.-China trade war fallout has begun. The Port of Los Angeles anticipates plummeting cargo traffic until a deal on tariffs is reached, but the Trump administration has not indicated whether negotiations are happening. Time is running out, a JPMorgan chief market strategist said.

The U.S.-China trade war has begun, so say goodbye to the goods. The Port of Los Angeles anticipates a drop-off in imports next week compared to a year ago, totaling more than a third of typical incoming cargo traffic.

“It’s a precipitous drop in volume, with a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs,” Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of L.A., said on CNBC Tuesday morning.

While President Donald Trump pressed pause on his sweeping tariff regimen and placed a 10% blanket tax on other countries, he taxed China more. He placed a 145% tariff on China, which retaliated with a 120% duty on American goods. No trade deal has been made, and it is unclear whether there are negotiations happening. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put the onus on China to come to the table and ink a deal. Still, just under half of the port’s business emanates from China, Seroka explained. So things could be bleak until then.

“What we’re going to see next is retailers have about five to seven weeks of full inventories left, and then the choices will lessen,” Seroka told CNBC. That doesn’t mean shelves will be empty, but in Seroka’s hypothetical, it could mean if you’re out shopping for a blue shirt, you may see 11 purple ones—but only one blue that isn’t your size and is costlier.

“Nobody wins,” he said. “China is America’s factory.” He later said: “The pain is felt on both sides of the Pacific.”

Bessent has repeatedly called the tariffs on China unsustainable because the country sells much more to the U.S. than the other way around. He appears to believe China wants a de-escalation because of the exemptions to tariffs it has introduced, but he has still threatened an escalation ladder if that isn’t the case. Nonetheless, the Trump administration, according to a recent LPL Financial note, has adopted a softer tone on China. Less than a week ago, the president floated the notion that tariffs on Chinese goods would be reduced substantially.

“We’ll see what that means, but the conciliatory tone was enough to add fuel to the market recovery,” according to LPL. So far, the three major indexes are relatively flat in early afternoon trading.

Earlier Tuesday, Gabriela Santos, JPMorgan Asset Management chief market strategist for the Americas, told CNBC: “Time is running out to see a lessening of the tariffs on China.” Everyone knows the tariffs are unsustainable, she said, but markets need to see them actually drop.

“We’re not talking about higher prices and companies figuring out ways to pass that on,” Santos said. “We’re talking about actual disruption to the supply chain.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

 BlackRock is piling money into the U.K. as Larry Fink claims the country has discovered its ‘capitulation point’

Larry Fink says the U.K. market is undervalued. · Fortune · Michael Nagle—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Ryan Hogg

Mon, April 28, 2025 

Larry Fink, CEO of the $11.6 trillion investing titan BlackRock, is used to making contrarian bets. The entire U.K. economy, much maligned in the past year, could be his latest one.

Fink says BlackRock is investing in U.K. assets “across the board” after being reassured by the Labour government’s “pro-growth” agenda, adding that the U.K. and Europe are entering a rebound era after discovering their “capitulation point.”

The 72-year-old BlackRock boss has spied an investing opportunity in the U.K., name-checking finance stocks like NatWest, Lloyds, and St. James’s Place as equities that were undervalued by a level of negativity that Fink thinks “was probably not warranted.”

In his interview with the Times, Fink pointed to several examples of shifting public practices that gave him confidence in the U.K.’s ability to discover fresh growth opportunities and argued that Keir Starmer’s government was focused on “hard issues.”

“It just resonated with me—that there are so many fundamentally strong attributes about the U.K. and Europe, and they’ve been so smothered by overregulation, by too much control,” he said. “And to me, it was just very clear we were at a capitulation point.”

Fink’s positive ruminations on the U.K. economy are a divergence from popular opinion, which has painted the U.K. as a growth laggard on the cusp of both a recession and an exodus of its richest citizens.

Businesses have complained about new national insurance obligations and flexible working policies that they argue make it harder to hire and grow. Meanwhile, there are reports that billionaires are kick-starting a mass exodus from the country owing to changes in non-dom tax regulations. Billionaire real estate investing brothers Ian and Richard Livingstone were among the latest to exit the U.K., joining thousands of others since last May’s election.

The U.K. is also facing pressure on its already tight public finances from the Donald Trump administration’s threats of widespread retaliatory tariffs that would significantly affect growth.

These pressures appear to be driving the dominant sentiment among the U.K. public.

An Ipsos MORI poll revealed 75% of Brits expect the economy to get worse over the next 12 months, marking the gloomiest sentiment among the public since the survey was launched in 1978. The group’s Economic Optimism Index registered a -68, worse than results during the cost-of-living crisis in 2022, the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, and a global recession kick-starting in 1980.

That sentiment is similar among businesses, which are beginning to build their defenses ahead of a possible recession induced by the tariff war. The U.K.’s Purchasing Managers’ Index fell to its lowest level since 2022 in March, suggesting businesses are reducing activity owing to low confidence.

Despite this evidence to the contrary, however, Fink is cheerier on the U.K. than he was in the final months of Rishi Sunak’s premiership. Bloomberg reported last year that BlackRock was among the investment groups being wooed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves to help rebuild Britain.

“I have more confidence in the U.K. economy today than I did a year ago.”

Fink laments lack of space

One obstacle that might halt BlackRock’s march on the U.K. is office space.

Fink is keen to bring all of his approximately 3,000 London employees under one roof to expedite the group’s bet on the U.K. He’s being foiled, though, by a lack of available real estate.

“I am so short of space here in London with all our acquisitions. I need an office tomorrow, but there is nothing here,” Fink told the Times.

“If I knew I could put the shovel in the ground in the next 12 months, I’d build our own.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

UC study uncovers unexpected link between police spending, housing prices

Breaking down the data by income level reveals large but opposite moves in home prices

University of Cincinnati

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A first-of-its-kind study on the link between police budgeting and the housing market seemed to be a dead end — showing practically no relation between the spending on law enforcement and home transaction volume and prices, just like previous studies. 

But University of Cincinnati economics professor David Brasington found surprising results when he split the data between low-income and high-income communities: large, completely opposite moves in housing prices.

Brasington, PhD, published a new study called “The Effect of Increased Police Spending on House Prices and Sales Volume: A Tale of Two Types of Cities.” In it, he wrote that “the small or nonexistent link between house prices and crime found by the literature really just reflects the sum of large but opposite moves in house prices in different market segments.”

His research, published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, found that voting to increase the police budget raises housing prices by about 13% in low-income communities, but lowers housing prices by at least 14% in high-income communities. 

“Nobody had split the sample between the higher- and lower-income areas,” he said. Without splitting the data, the results virtually cancel each other out. Those huge swings on opposite sides of the income range were hidden in plain sight, he said, even as economic theoretical models supported the existence of an effect of police spending on housing. 

“Just intuitively, you’d think that police services would make a difference in house prices. And it just wasn’t there in the data,” he added, “until you split the sample.” 

In his study, Brasington analyzed communities across Ohio by looking into decades of votes on taxes to increase police funding by an average of 15%. He then compares that to Ohio’s housing data from 1995 to 2018.

At the onset of his research, Brasington’s plan was to compare police tax renewals and home sale volumes. Overall, the data showed little change in volume and prices after a police funding levy. Even after dividing his sample by income, he says that there is seemingly no link between police spending and the quantity of houses sold in a community. But the decrease in home prices for high-income communities and increase in home prices in low-income communities remained consistent for at least five years following the police budget vote. 

Brasington says that the decrease in housing prices on the high end suggests police may be overfunded in richer communities. “If you cut police taxes and services, the high end views that as a good thing,” he said. “There would be an increased demand for those houses because of the tax cut and a decreased supply of houses,” he added.

He also says there could be value in looking into how other types of levies impact home prices, and what these big swings on high- and low-income areas mean for the middle class, in future research. 

But for lower-income communities, he says the data from this report suggests additional spending on crime-fighting could be worth it. “There’s something about housing demand that says, ‘We need more police funds,’” he said. 

Read the complete study.

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Journal

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The Effect of Increased Police Spending on House Prices and Sales Volume: A Tale of Two Types of Cities

Article Publication Date

28-Apr-2025