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Winning North Carolina and Georgia, Donald Trump seizes the advantage

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5 months ago

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Editor’s note (November 6th, 2024): This story was updated after Mr Trump won Georgia.

DONALD TRUMP won the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia as he took a clear advantage in his race for the White House against Kamala Harris. The vice-president’s path to victory narrowed sharply as counts showed her underperforming Joe Biden’s showing of four years ago and giving, as of 12.30am Eastern time, Mr Trump a strong lead in the electoral college.

There were already warning signs for the Harris campaign as the first results poured in. Several hours after their polls closed, four of the other seven swing states seen as vital to the two candidates’ chances for winning the electoral college—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—were too close to call. Nevada was yet to release early numbers.

The road to an electoral-college victory for Ms Harris has tightened considerably. It would require her to sweep the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the vote count was proceeding more slowly. That now seems increasingly unlikely.

Outside the key battlegrounds, the early picture was no more encouraging for the Harris campaign. Ms Harris eked out a narrow victory in Virginia, which Mr Biden won comfortably in 2020. There, similarly to other suburban jurisdictions in Virginia, Ms Harris’s share of a near-complete vote trailed Mr Biden’s performance four years ago by more than six percentage points. That is a concerning trend if it extends to Pennsylvania and Michigan, where suburban voters are crucial to Ms Harris’s prospects.

In Florida, a former battleground that Mr Biden lost by just over three percentage points last time, Ms Harris was doing even worse, underperforming Mr Biden’s margin by ten percentage points with almost all of the state vote counted. Across all early reporting states, Ms Harris’s performance in counties posting near-complete votes to Mr Biden’s numbers in 2020 showed the vice-president underperforming.

Ms Harris and her allies will have to hope that the picture unfolds differently in Pennsylvania, the most important of the three blue-wall states, which always looked like a crucial state for both her and Mr Trump. Here there were at least a few encouraging signs. With just over a third of the expected vote posted in Montgomery County, a populous suburb of Philadelphia that leans Democratic, Ms Harris led with 68% of the vote, more than five percentage points better than Mr Biden’s performance four years ago. That is the sort of result she will probably need in all of Philadelphia’s blue-tinted-collar counties if she is to hold off Mr Trump’s strength in less populated rural areas.

Michigan’s vote was too incomplete to judge even several hours after its polls closed, and in Wisconsin, which Mr Biden won by just 20,000 votes four years ago, Mr Trump led narrowly with 61% of the vote counted. A similar early picture prevailed in Arizona, a state where pre-election polls had shown Mr Trump held his most significant advantage.

Because the trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin remained in play at 11pm EST—and no other state pegged for Ms Harris had fallen to Mr Trump—the election remained in the balance. What seemed clear is that if Ms Harris were to defy the early run of results and squeeze out a victory, it would emerge from the key Rust Belt states and would probably be as close as the razor-thin margins Mr Biden won there in 2020.■

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Economics

CEOs think the U.S. is ‘probably in a recession right now,’ says BlackRock’s Larry Fink

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1 hour ago

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April 7, 2025

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Larry Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc., speaks during the 2025 National Retirement Summit in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Monday that many business leaders believe the United States economy is already in a significant downturn.

“Most CEOs I talk to would say we are probably in a recession right now,” Fink said at an event for the Economic Club of New York.

“One CEO specifically said the airline industry is a proverbial bird in a coal mine — canary in the coal mine — and I was told that the canary is sick already,” Fink added.

The asset management executive also said that the he thinks the tariff policies of President Donald Trump could put upward pressure on inflation and make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, as the central bank often does during recessions.

“This notion that the Federal Reserve is going to ease four times this year, I see zero chance of that. I’m much more worried that we could have elevated inflation that’s going to bring rates up much higher than they are today,” Fink said.

Pricing in the Fed funds futures market currently suggests that traders expect the central bank to lower its benchmark interest rate by at least 1 percentage point by the end of the year, according to the CME FedWatch tool, which could be four cuts of 0.25 percentage points.

BlackRock as a firm held more than $11 trillion in assets as of the end of 2024, spread across public and private investments.

Fink’s comments were broadcast on Bloomberg Television.

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Economics

Trump is losing the confidence of business leaders, billionaire investor Bill Ackman says

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15 hours ago

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April 6, 2025

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Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, speaks during an interview for an episode of “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations,” in New York on Nov. 28, 2023.

Jeenah Moon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said that America was heading toward a self-inflicted “economic nuclear winter” as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy rollout.

“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner,” Ackman, who had endorsed Trump during the elections, wrote on social media platform X.

Trump’s latest tariffs, signed into effect Wednesday, set a 10% baseline levy on all imports, hitting over 180 countries and hammering global markets.

China faces the highest tariffs, with the Trump administration having imposed 54% in duties since January. Beijing has retaliated with 34% tariffs on all goods imported from the U.S.

U.S. equities capped off a vicious week for investors last Friday, down 9.08%, according to data from FactSet, as Trump’s moves stoke fears of a global economic slowdown. J.P. Morgan lifted the odds for a U.S. and global recession to 60% by the end of the year, up from 40% previously.

“Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe,” Ackman said.

“The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for,” the hedge fund manager said.

Trump has the opportunity to call for a timeout for any negotiations to resolve any “unfair” tariff deals.

“Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down,” he said.

In a separate tweet, Ackman also took potshots at U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “He profits when our economy implodes. It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income,” Ackman said, adding that it is an “irreconcilable conflict of interest.”

On Sunday, Lutnick told CBS that the Trump administration will remain steadfast in its reciprocal tariffs against key trading partners even in the face of a global stock rout.

The U.S. Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

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Economics

Texas looks set to pass America’s biggest school-voucher scheme

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1 day ago

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April 6, 2025

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GREGG ABBOTT was playing retribution politics before it was cool. Two years ago the governor of Texas named his top policy priority: a sprawling school-voucher bill that would give parents $10,000 each year if they sent their children to private schools, opting out of the public system. He wants choice “not just for millionaires” but for the state’s nearly 6m schoolchildren, one of every nine in America. But after failing to get his bill passed he went on the attack and backed primary challenges to Republicans who had voted against it, knocking most of them out of the legislature. Now Austin’s politicos are betting vouchers will pass. On April 3rd the bill made it out of committee. Mr Abbott is planning a “Texas-sized party” to celebrate its becoming law.

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