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Yellen says U.S. plans to ‘underscore’ need for China to shift policy

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen attends a press conference at U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Beijing on April 8, 2024.

Pedro Pardo | Afp | Getty Images

BEIJING — U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Monday that future discussions between the U.S. and China will focus on Beijing’s need to shift its policy on industry and the economy.

“We intend to underscore the need for a shift in policy during these talks — building on the over two hours I spent on this topic with the Vice Premier last week,” she said in prepared remarks for a press conference Monday, as she wrapped up the fourth and final full day of her trip to China.

She arrived in Guangzhou on Thursday and is set to depart Beijing on Tuesday.

Yellen said her conversations with Chinese officials during her trip discussed plans Beijing had for its economy. But she did not elaborate.

During her trip, Yellen met with top Chinese officials including Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Guangzhou.

'Cold War' between U.S. and China is threat despite leaders' phone call: Asia expert Stephen Roach

“Over the past year, we have put our bilateral relationship on more stable footing,” Yellen said in prepared remarks for her meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on Sunday.

“This has not meant ignoring our differences or avoiding tough conversations,” she said. “It has meant understanding that we can only make progress if we directly and openly communicate with one another.”

In a readout from China, Li said Beijing hoped the U.S. would abide by market economy norms and avoid politicizing trade issues. He said the development of China’s new energy industry will make important contributions to global carbon neutrality efforts.

The U.S. and China agreed to “intensive exchanges on balanced growth in the domestic and global economies,” according to a Treasury readout following Yellen’s meetings in Guangzhou with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

The two countries also agreed to “start Joint Treasury-PBOC Cooperation and Exchange on Anti-Money Laundering to expand cooperation against illicit finance and financial crime,” the readout said.

The Chinese side did not explicitly mention such agreements, but said both sides planned to maintain communication. Beijing also “expressed serious concerns” about U.S. trade restrictions.

The Chinese readout described the talks as “constructive,” and noted conversations about “balanced economic growth,” “financial stability” and “anti-money laundering.” That’s according to a CNBC translation.

The U.S. Treasury secretary also met Minister of Finance Lan Fo’an, the mayors of Beijing and Guangzhou, representatives of U.S. businesses and professors and students at Peking University during the visit.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

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