Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - Republican civil war

The slow-motion, self-induced calamity faced by House Republicans continued today, with some seeing the historic standoff as the start of a GOP “civil war.” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California failed to win an unprecedented six votes for Speaker of the House thanks to a group of far-right members who won’t even listen to Donald Trump. So what do these 20 rebels want? Some, it turns out, just want power. The House was to reconvene Wednesday night, but even if McCarthy prevails, the fight may not bode well for the future of the new Congress. —David E. Rovella

Call it Fear of Recession. Salesforce’s clients in tech and finance, two sectors where thousands have been fired in recent months, are also pulling back when it comes to software purchases, the enterprise software giant says. This manifestation of growing corporate anxiety over the possibility of a US downturn is part of the reason Salesforce said Wednesday that it too will fire employees—about 8,000 of them.

Betting everything will go south has been immensely profitable for Eagle’s View Capital Management. A hedge fund it launched a year ago—the Contrarian Macro Fund—has registered a 163% return. New York-based founder Neal Berger loaded up on bets that the Federal Reserve would unwind a decade of stimulus, just as policymakers were describing inflation as “transitory.” How did Berger see it coming? “Central bank flows were going to change 180 degrees. That key difference would be a headwind on all asset prices,” he said. “One had to believe that the prices we saw were, to use the academic term, wackadoodle.” 

The US stock market will bottom out by the middle of 2023 as the Fed tamps down inflation without causing anything worse than a “mild” recession, according to Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone’s private wealth solutions business, and the firm’s chief investment strategist, Joe Zidle. Stocks closed up Wednesday. Here’s your markets wrap.

Byron Wien Photographer: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg

Minutes from the last Fed meeting showed the central bank grimly resolved to finish its war on inflation. New numbers released on Wednesday won’t necessarily help, though. The record US job market remains strong with 10.46 million job openings in November, more than economists predicted. While a tight labor market is good news for American workers, the persistent imbalance keeps upward pressure on wages—which is bad news when it comes to crushing inflation.

Xi Jinping’s government has officially acknowledged only about a dozen Covid-19 deaths in China since he abandoned strict pandemic controls a month ago. But at one funeral home in Shanghai, 500 corpses recently arrived on one day—about 400 more than usual. Crematoriums across the country are overwhelmed, the dead are left for days before they can be picked up and families are marched through five-minute goodbyes with lost loved ones. Experts have forecast potentially millions of deaths in China by the time the current infection wave runs its course. Chinese officials meanwhile have been assailing governments across the globe, and threatening retaliation, for imposing testing requirements on travelers from the Asian country. The World Health Organization has now expressed concern about the threat to human life posed by the health crisis in China—and like the US, some European nations and others, criticized the lack of information being provided by the Chinese government.

Mourners pay their final respects inside a memorial hall at a funeral home in Shanghai on Dec. 31. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Natural gas prices in Europe fell back to levels not seen since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a bout of mild weather reduced demand and eased fears of a prolonged supply crunch. Benchmark futures fell as much as 11% as a warm spell curbs heating demand and blustery conditions cut use of gas in power generation. The turn of events is bad news for Vladimir Putin, who has been trying to squeeze European nations that have sanctioned his country over its war.

In the annals of cryptocurrency, 2022 will go down as the year when the industry nearly died, Andy Mukherjee writes in Bloomberg Opinion. But December saw the birth of a pair of exchange-traded funds in Hong Kong, offering new hope to both retail and professional investors. Asia’s first futures ETFs for Bitcoin and Ether join a growing list of initiatives that, Mukherjee says, will go some way toward ameliorating the current crisis of legitimacy facing virtual assets.

Bloomberg continues to track the global coronavirus pandemic. Click here for daily updates.

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The Grand Tier, a 30-story high-rise in Manhattan, features Central Park views and a lobby ornamented in French tapestry and Italian ironwork. In the basement, however, is the real attraction: an array of pipes and compressors that scrubs exhaust from the building’s two natural gas boilers, liquefying it and storing it in metal tanks. The city’s only residential carbon-capture rig, it reflects a bigger environmental challenge: A new law aims to cut emissions from New York’s largest buildings some 40% by 2030, and next year the penalties begin.

The Grand Tier Source: CarbonQuest

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