Bloomberg - Evening Briefing - BRICS goes big

Major emerging market nations invited top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, along with Iran, Egypt, Argentina, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates, to join their bloc in an ambitious push to expand global influence. The new BRICS members bring together several of the largest energy producers with the developing world’s biggest consumers, suddenly giving the bloc outsized economic clout. With most of the world’s energy trade taking place in dollars, the expansion could also enhance its ability to push more trade to alternative currencies.

From left, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg Wednesday. Photographer: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on the sidelines of the summit in a bid to resolve their bitter border dispute. The feud over where exactly to put the 2,170 mile line erupted into violence in 2020, sparking some of the worst clashes between the two nations in four decades. —David E. Rovella

Two US Federal Reserve officials signaled the central bank may be close to done with interest-rate increases given slowing inflation, but one of them held back from ruling out further hikes. “We may need additional increments, and we may be very near a place where we can hold for a substantial amount of time,” Boston Fed President Susan Collins said Thursday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

As the US Treasury borrows heavily in the bills market, the Fed may find it has to pause efforts to shrink its balance sheet to ensure the banking system remains stable, according to the St. Louis Fed. The Treasury has sold about $1 trillion of bills since June after the government suspended the debt ceiling. The cash to buy this government debt can come from at least two places instead: bank accounts or money market funds. Recently though, money market funds have been holding back.

Turkey’s central bank’s jumbo interest-rate increase triggered a major rally in the country’s assets. The hope is that it signals an end to government policies that sent foreign investors fleeing the $900 billion economy. The Turkish lira, long one of the world’s worst-performing currencies, surged the most in almost two years, gaining almost 8% against the dollar.

Ukrainian commandos reportedly staged a raid in Russian-occupied Crimea in a symbolic move on the nation’s Independence Day. It came as more of Kyiv’s forces press a slow-moving counterattack that’s threatening to break Moscow’s lines. Using speedboats, special forces landed in a bay on the westernmost edge of the peninsula overnight in the first such sortie since the start of Russia’s war last year, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence said on its website.

A growing rift in the Republican Party over foreign policy was further exposed by barbs between former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who supports US aide to Ukraine, and entrepreneur and political novice Vivek Ramaswamy, who echoed the party’s far-right base and its opposition to more assistance. His stance is not unlike that of GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who has expressed admiration for Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

Vivek Ramaswamy, left, and Nikki Haley joust over foreign policy at the Republican debate Wednesday night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images

T-Mobile USA is terminating 5,000 people, or 7% of its staff, part of an effort the company says will rein in costs as it tries to attract new subscribers. The dismissals will be of mostly corporate and back-office employees along with some technology roles, T-Mobile said in a regulatory filing. Retail and consumer-care experts won’t be impacted.

Barnacles found on a piece of plane debris might hold the key to discovering what happened to MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in 2014. MH370 might have drifted “far south” of where previous models have speculated, according to research published in AGU Advances, which analyzed barnacles found on a flaperon, the moving part of a wing. The plane part washed up on Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, a year after the disappearance. Flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, with an intended destination of Beijing. However, it lost contact with air traffic control less than an hour after takeoff, when the plane was over the South China Sea, and was never seen again. All 227 passengers and 12 crew members are presumed dead.

Police carry a piece of aircraft debris found on Reunion Island, on July 29, 2015. Photographer: Yannick Pitou/AFP

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The kind of gun crime that happens everyday in America, a nation where mass-killings in elementary schools and shopping centers can seem like a monthly occurrence, has landed in Canada. The wave of violence has come amid a historic increase of US semiautomatic firearm shipments to its northern neighbor, part of a two-decade long push by American manufacturers—backed by their powerful lobbying arms in Washington—to export guns around the world. The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation have chased profits by stoking opposition to gun control. During their two-decade campaign, Canada’s annual rate of shootings per capita surged almost sevenfold. Now, as the government seeks to better regulate firearms, a pro-gun movement is rising there, too.

Emergency personnel tend to a shooting victim in the Danforth section of Toronto in 2018. A rampage by a gunman killed two people and wounded 13. Photographer: Richard Lautens/Toronto Star via Getty Images

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