Trump slaps 25% tariffs on auto imports, warns EU and Canada will face ‘far larger’ levies if they ally [CNN]
The market is keen to find out how broad those duties will end up, and Trump has provided mixed signals. He has sent mixed signals on flexibility, but said Wednesday that “people are going to be pleasantly surprised” at how “fair” and “nice” the duties are to other countries. Trump said he would hold a news conference on the reciprocal tariffs next week.
U.S. Prosecutors Probe Tip About Timing of Pfizer Vaccine [WSJ]
A senior GSK scientist, who formerly worked at rival Pfizer, had told GSK colleagues that Pfizer delayed announcing the success of its Covid vaccine in 2020 until after that year’s election…. Trump for years has claimed that Pfizer sat on the positive results of clinical trials, which could have reflected well on his management of the pandemic and reassured voters as they headed to the polls….
It isn’t clear what potential violations could be at issue.
OpenAI Close to Finalizing $40 Billion SoftBank-Led Funding [Bloomberg]
Magnetar Capital — an Evanston, Illinois-based hedge fund — could contribute up to $1 billion…. The deal is set to value the company at $300 billion including dollars raised — almost double the ChatGPT maker’s previous valuation of $157 billion from when it raised money in October.
Fed Urged to Explore Hedge Fund Bailout Tool for Basis Trade [Bloomberg]
Any vicious unwinding of a swath of the estimated $1 trillion in hedge fund arbitrage bets would not only hamper the Treasuries market, but others as well — requiring Fed intervention to assure financial stability. When the US central bank did that in March 2020, during the initial Covid crisis, it engaged in massive outright purchases of Treasury securities, to the tune of about $1.6 trillion over several weeks.A better way of stepping in would be via hedged bond purchases, according to a Brookings Institution paper….
Consumer Bureau Seeks to Undo Settlement and Repay Mortgage Lender [NYT]In an especially strange twist, the case — against Townstone Financial, a small Chicago-based lender — was brought during Mr. Trump’s first term by Kathleen Kraninger, the director he appointed to run the consumer bureau.
Russell Vought, who became the agency’s acting director last month, said it had “used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them.”
Sam Bankman-Fried Moved to Oklahoma Prison Transit Facility [WSJ]
Bankman-Fried was awakened by prison officials at around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning and taken out of his unit at the Brooklyn MDC, a person familiar with the matter said, adding that the officers didn’t tell him where he was going…. The 33-year-old FTX founder’s legal team has pushed for him to serve out his sentence in California, so he can be closer to his parents’ home near Stanford University….
Bankman-Fried’s parents have sought advice about seeking a presidential pardon from a former federal prosecutor who worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign.
