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Exxon poised to overtake Shell and BP on low carbon spending

US oil major’s $30bn plan depends on Trump administration retaining Biden-era tax incentives

ExxonMobil, which once derided European rivals’ clean energy investments as a “beauty contest” that would do little to halt climate change, is poised to leapfrog Shell and BP in low carbon spending.

Investment guidance issued by six of the largest western oil majors shows that Exxon plans to spend $30bn on “low emissions opportunities” between now and 2030 — far higher than its $3bn spending plan announced in 2021.

The US oil major defines low carbon spending as investment aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and has focused on technologies such as carbon capture, biofuels, hydrogen and lithium extraction. Unlike its European rivals it has not built a large renewable energy business.

The stepped-up investment plan from Exxon comes just as European rivals that ploughed cash into clean energy in recent years begin scaling back their investments under pressure from investors.

Data compiled by Wood Mackenzie, an energy research group, shows that Shell, BP and Equinor have slashed their guidance for low carbon spending to focus on more profitable fossil fuel production.

It marks a surprising turn for Exxon, which has drawn much criticism from climate activists for continuing to increase fossil fuel output — and lobbying against restrictions — despite knowing they were causing global warming.

In February, BP — which proclaimed itself a green energy leader in 2020 — cut its annual guidance on low carbon spending to $1.75bn, down from $6.45bn, and far below Exxon’s $5bn a year. Shell has cut its proposed low carbon investments to $3.5bn a year, from $5.58bn.

Norway’s Equinor has reduced its annual guidance from $3.9bn to $2.3bn, according to Wood Mackenzie, which has analysed company data issued between 2023 to 2025.

TotalEnergies remains a leader in low carbon investment with $5bn annual spending guidance in 2025, although the company disclosed in January it would spend $4.5bn in 2025. The French group plans to spend 29 per cent of its total budget on low carbon projects, compared with 17 per cent for Exxon and Shell. BP plans to spend 12 per cent following its recent cuts.

“ExxonMobil’s low carbon strategy is gaining momentum at a time when some peers are scaling back ambitions,” said Tom Ellacott, senior vice-president at Wood Mackenzie’s corporate research division.

“The company is focusing on technologies in which it believes it has a competitive advantage and has built an attractive pipeline of opportunities in low-carbon hydrogen, carbon capture and lithium.”

But Ellacott said there was uncertainty over whether Exxon would deliver on its spending guidance, which relies on US government subsidies and customer demand.

Exxon has said investment in some of its low carbon projects, including a multibillion-dollar hydrogen plant at its Baytown refinery in Texas, depends on tax breaks in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act — the flagship climate law President Donald Trump has vowed to rescind.

“It’s important for these nascent businesses and industries to get some initial support,” Kathy Mikells, Exxon’s chief financial officer, told the Financial Times in January.

Analysts and climate groups said comparing oil producers’ low carbon spending was complex as definitions can differ between companies.

“There are two aspects of low carbon spending. The first is spend to decarbonise the existing asset base, so-called scope 1 and 2. The European majors typically include this spend in their divisional budgets, upstream and downstream, whereas Exxon and Chevron include this in their low carbon spending,” said Biraj Borkhataria, global head of energy transition research at RBC.

This could account for about half of Exxon’s spending and 20 per cent of Chevron’s, he said.

Exxon told the FT that almost 65 per cent of its low carbon investment would be spent on reducing emissions for its customers. Chevron, which plans to trim its low carbon budget this year by $500mn to $1.5bn, did not reply to a request for comment.

Follow This, a shareholder activist group that clashed with Exxon last year over climate policy, said the oil producer could not be considered a leader because it was not including the pollution from its customers burning its oil and gas — so-called scope 3 emissions.

Even so, analysts say there has been a step change in Exxon’s strategy since chief executive Darren Woods told analysts in 2020 that he sought to avoid a “beauty competition” with rivals on carbon emissions.

“Exxon is leaning into these areas not because of environmental social governance or sustainability initiatives but rather genuine business opportunities where XOM has a competitive advantage and the ability to scale,” said Betty Jiang, analyst at Barclays.

Shell said Wood Mackenzie’s data overlooked the “scale of our historical investments in the low carbon space”.

Environmental Defense Fund, a climate group, said Exxon had increased its low carbon spending — but not enough.

“It’s still woefully short of the kind of capital that needs to deploy if we’re going to make major progress in decarbonising our collective economies in the next 30 years,” said EDF’s Mark Brownstein.

The Elliott investor in a full-blown proxy fight against Big Oil

John Pike had his target in his sights. The Elliott Management partner was facing off against the chief executive of Phillips 66, the oil and gas giant in which he had built a $2.5bn stake, across a Manhattan meeting room. 

Over the course of an hour, the Texan company and its legion of defence advisers had a final chance to negotiate a truce with the world’s most feared activist hedge fund and avert the type of expensive proxy fight for which Pike was becoming known. They failed. 

Within 24 hours Elliott had launched one of the most aggressive activist campaigns the energy sector had seen in years with a full-blown proxy battle for four seats on Phillips 66’s board, nominating a slate of new directors. The fight underlines how even as rivals have switched to behind-the-scenes lobbying and Elliott itself has softened its style, Pike embodies the hedge fund’s “old aggressive style”, according to former colleagues.

In this deep dive, my colleagues look at Elliott’s maverick agitator — a man whom one person who has encountered him calls “a lone wolf inside of Elliott who wants to do things a different way”, even as the firm’s campaigns have become “corporatised and mature”.

Under Pike, Elliott has taken a series of high-profile energy positions in recent months, seeking to guide the direction of blue-chip companies from BP in the UK to RWE in Germany — as well as at Phillips 66 in the US.

Meanwhile Elliott is turning up the heat on BP. Last week we revealed that the activist group is pressing the energy group to increase its free cash flow by an additional 40 per cent through deep cuts to spending, as it upped its stake to more than 5 per cent and sharpened its criticism of the group.

US stocks have underperformed the rest of the world this year by the widest margin in more than three decades as Donald Trump’s erratic policymaking sparks an investor exodus from American assets.

The MSCI USA index — a broad gauge of US equities — lost 11 per cent in the first 16 weeks of the year, write Arjun Neil Alim in Hong Kong and Ray Douglas in London. The MSCI all world ex-US benchmark climbed 4 per cent in dollar terms over the same period, the biggest gap with Wall Street since 1993, when US investor enthusiasm for foreign stocks surged on the back of trade liberalisation and concerns over the domestic economy.

The gulf in performance underlines investors’ expectation that Trump’s tariff blitz will take a heavier toll on the US economy, by hurting growth and driving up inflation, than it will on economies elsewhere. The gap has been particularly marked with Europe, where US isolationism has prompted pledges of higher government spending — particularly on defence — which are expected to boost the local economy and support equity markets.

“A large part of this underperformance is the repricing of US assets due to increased policy uncertainty and the stagflationary shock from tariffs,” said Sameer Goel, head of emerging markets and Apac research at Deutsche Bank.

The tumbling greenback has helped widen the gap in performance. It has fallen by 8 per cent this year against a basket of six major currencies including the euro and yen, boosting non-US market performance in dollar terms.

Investors started the year betting that US stocks would continue to outshine their peers elsewhere as Trump’s tax cuts buoyed corporate profits. But that view quickly unwound after the US president launched a trade war that was far more aggressive than most investors had anticipated.

“Capital is flowing towards Europe, buoyed by confidence in strong institutions, governance, and equity markets which typically trade at discounts relative to their US counterparts,” said Lewis Grant, senior portfolio manager for global equities at Federated Hermes.

Lender proposes funding deal by selling its shares in country’s biggest insurer

Italy’s Mediobanca on Monday launched a €6.3bn offer to buy domestic rival Banca Generali as it expands in wealth management as part of a wave of consolidation in the country’s banking sector.

Mediobanca said it would fund the deal by selling its shares in Assicurazioni Generali, Italy’s largest insurer, which controls Banca Generali. Mediobanca is the largest shareholder in Assicurazioni Generali.

The combination with Banca Generali “will produce a European market leader”, Mediobanca said in a statement.

The offer represents an 11.4 per cent premium to Friday’s closing share price for Banca Generali, which gave it a market capitalisation of €5.7bn.

Mediobanca shareholders will vote on the deal at a meeting on June 16.

Bookings plunge as importers hold off on shipping goods to America in hope of Beijing-Washington deal

Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing is starting to affect the wider US economy as container port operators and air freight managers report sharp declines in goods transported from China.

Logistics groups said container bookings to the US have fallen sharply since the introduction of 145 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports to the US.

The Port of Los Angeles, the main route of entry for goods from China, expects scheduled arrivals in the week starting May 4 to be a third lower than a year before, while airfreight handlers have also reported sharp falls in bookings.

Bookings for standard 20-foot shipping containers from China to the US were 45 per cent lower than a year earlier by mid-April, according to the latest available data from container tracking service Vizion. 

John Denton, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce, said the upheaval in China-US trade flows reflected traders “kicking decisions down the road” as they waited to see how quickly Washington and Beijing could reach a deal to lower tariffs.

A survey of ICC members conducted in more than 60 countries after Trump’s April 2 “liberation day” tariff announcement showed expectations that trade would be permanently impacted, whatever the result of coming negotiations.

The cost of access to the US market would be the highest since the 1930s, Denton said. Referring to the baseline tariff for all countries, he said there was “almost an acceptance that 10 per cent will be the minimum charge to access US market, whatever other uncertainties there may be”.

Washington and Beijing showed signs of starting to feel the effects — with both sides announcing some tariff exemptions this week on important products for their respective economies and Trump predicting the 145 per cent tariff would “come down substantially”. However, China said on Friday it was not in talks with the US.

As the first container shipments from China to face tariffs are due to land in the US in the coming week, freight operators said supply chains were shifting.

Nathan Strang, ocean freight director at US logistics group Flexport, said companies were waiting to ship goods in anticipation of Washington and Beijing agreeing a deal to mitigate the levies.

US importers are looking to use up stockpiled inventories before importing fresh stock from China, said logistics executives. They are also holding stock in bonded warehouses where inventory can be stored duty-free with taxes paid on withdrawal, or diverting it to other nearby countries such as Canada.

“They’re sitting on goods at origin, sitting on goods at destination,” Strang said, warning that if a deal was done to cut tariffs, shipping rates would then jump sharply.

Hapag-Lloyd, one of the world’s largest container shipping lines, said Chinese customers had cancelled roughly 30 per cent of its bookings out of China.

Hong Kong-listed Taiwanese container shipping company TS Lines has suspended one of its Asia to US west coast services in recent weeks. “Demand is not there,” one person at the group said.

The declines in order volumes have fed through to landings in Los Angeles, according to shipping data analysts Sea-Intelligence, which reported a surge in ‘blank sailings’, where scheduled vessels from China were being cancelled.

Almost 400,000 fewer containers are booked on Asia to North America routes during the four weeks from May 5 than planned — a 25 per cent drop from the amount scheduled for the same period at the start of March, before tariffs were imposed.

The Port of Los Angeles alone expects 20 blank sailings in May, representing more than 250,000 containers — up from six in April.

That is a sharp fall from this week, when arrivals were up by 56 per cent year-on-year — a sign that importers have been frontloading deliveries from other south-east Asian manufacturing hubs such as Cambodia and Vietnam that are enjoying a 90-day “pause” in tariffs.

Container prices reflected the supply chain shift, according to data from logistics hub Freightos, with a 15 per cent increase in the price of a 40-foot container from Vietnam compared with a 27 per cent fall on major China-US routes.

“Rates from other Asian countries to the US may continue to climb ahead of the July tariff deadline,” Judah Levine, head of research at Freightos, said.

Airfreight volumes have also fallen sharply, according to US industry association the Airforwarders Association, with its members’ bookings from China falling roughly 30 per cent.

“A lot of members have just stopped receiving orders from China,” said executive director Brandon Fried. “It’s also creating a whipsaw effect on prices and booking rates as traders reacted to each piece of news from the White House.”

The industry is expected to be further hit by a US decision to close its ‘de minimis’ scheme that allowed goods valued at under $800 to be imported tariff-free, an important route for e-commerce retailers such as Shein and Temu. Chinese goods are set to lose the exemption from May 2.

Lavinia Lau, chief commercial officer at Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific, whose air cargo business contributes about a quarter of its revenue, said it expected a “softening” of demand between China and the US because of the tariffs and de minimis rule changes.

Hong Kong freight forwarder Easyway Air Freight said business from China to the US dropped roughly 50 per cent following the tariff increases.

E-commerce executives noted waning freight demand. Wang Xin, head of the Shenzhen Cross-Border E-Commerce Association, said: “We are seeing noticeably fewer price quotation requests in relation to air cargo shipments.”

Even though stockpiling and supply-chain reorientation have helped buffer consumers from the sharp falls in freight volumes, hauliers and retailers are starting to feel the effects of the slowdown in imports.

Arizona-based Knight-Swift Transportation, one of the largest US trucking companies, warned of lower anticipated volumes, citing uncertainty caused by the tariffs threat.

Chief executive Adam Miller said some of the group’s largest customers were “expressing concern” that the cost of tariffs would feed into lower volumes in May.

“There are some that have told us that, yes, they’ve cancelled orders or they’ve stopped ordering, particularly from China, and we’ll figure out how to adjust their supply chain to avoid the cost,” he said.

Retail consultants said purchasing patterns were reflecting the three successive months of softening consumer confidence indices.

John Shea, the chief executive of Momentum Commerce, which helps consumer companies sell about $7bn annually on Amazon, warned of a potential “double whammy” of rising prices and falling consumer spending.

“We’re seeing evidence that consumers are starting to trade down . . . while at the same prices are creeping up,” he said.

Media group in early talks to buy UK broadcaster or its studio production arm

French media giant Banijay Group is working on plans for a takeover offer for ITV or its studio arm to bring together two of Europe’s largest TV production groups, according to two people familiar with the situation. 

Banijay has held early talks with the British media group, the people said, whose studio arm has attracted interest from a range of investment groups such as RedBird IMI, which owns rival All3Media, as well as private equity funds.

ITV’s share price has risen by a tenth this year given the talk around a potential deal for its studio arm, valuing the group at just over £3bn. Analysts say the studios arm could be worth that on its own, however, setting little value on a broadcasting business that includes a linear and streaming service in the UK.

Options that have been explored by Banijay include an offer for ITV’s studio business or the full takeover of ITV. The latter would be likely to mean Banijay would seek to bring in third-party investors, according to one person close to the situation.

The ITV discussions are at a very early stage, with no guarantee that they will progress to a deal for either the media group or its studio business, one person familiar with the situation said. 

The combination of Banijay and ITV Studios would make strategic sense given their strengths in scripted and unscripted TV production, with both making shows for the big broadcasters and US streamers. The combination would offer negotiating power given that many streamers and broadcasters are seeking to curtail expenditure.

ITV makes shows such as Love Island — which it also broadcasts in the UK — and Rivals for Disney, while Banijay produces successful programmes such as Peaky Blinders and Big Brother.

Banijay Entertainment, the French production and distribution company, is owned by Banijay Group, which is based and listed in Amsterdam. Banijay Group, controlled by French entrepreneur Stéphane Courbit, also makes a large number of non-English-language titles, such as Like Water for Chocolate for HBO’s Max, and Supersex, La Vita che Volevi and The Law According to Lidia Poët for Netflix in Italy. 

ITV has held separate, early talks with RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed investment group that last year acquired UK rival All3Media. ITV itself has also explored various combinations for rival businesses, including a potential offer for All3Media last year.  

Liberty Global, ITV’s largest shareholder with about a tenth of its shares, supports the management looking at options for the business, according to people familiar with the situation.  

Banijay and ITV declined to comment.

US billionaire wanted trophies to drive football club’s commercial revenue. Liverpool’s 20th league title will do just that.

Liverpool FC have won the Premier League for a second time under American ownership, breaking Manchester City’s grip on the English title with a dominant campaign under new manager Arne Slot.

The club’s 20th league title was confirmed after a comprehensive 5-1 win against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, equalling a record set by arch-rivals Manchester United. The club’s haul of 82 points from 34 games has put them out of reach of their closest rival, Arsenal, with four games of the season still left to play.

The league triumph is Liverpool’s second since the club was bought by US billionaire John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group in a £300mn deal in 2010. In that time, the club has also won the Champions League, Fifa Club World Cup, the FA Cup and three league cups.

There are signs that FSG’s vision of a virtuous circle — where success on the pitch powers commercial revenues, which can then be reinvested into the playing squad and the youth academy — is becoming a reality.

Liverpool won the title despite spending less than any other Premier League club across the summer and winter transfer windows, according to Transfermarkt data.

Its use of sophisticated data analysis techniques to identify undervalued players — such as midfielder Ryan Gravenberch and defender Ibrahima Konaté, each signed for €40mn — means they have spent less on transfers than all their major rivals since their last title win, in 2020.

Like Liverpool’s last league triumph, this victory owed much to the contributions of Egyptian forward Mohamed Salah and centre back Virgil van Dijk, the club captain. The experienced duo, who have both recently signed contract extensions, have played almost every minute of league football this season.

Salah has more goals and assists than any other player, while van Dijk has been at the heart of a defence that has conceded only 32 goals so far this season. By contrast, Liverpool’s rivals have relied more heavily on the contributions of less experienced players.

However, keeping a successful group of players together has required Liverpool to extend contracts and increase player wages. The result is that its wage bill is now the second highest in the league.

That puts the onus on Liverpool’s commercial department to increase revenues. Ben Latty, the club’s chief commercial officer, told the Financial Times that his department’s role was to generate income to “sustainably finance the pursuit of trophies.

“We’re already looking to the future and working out how we can best maximise this success [winning the Premier League] to continue our commercial growth and support further on-pitch success,” he added.

Commercial revenues, increasingly important at a time of slowing media rights growth, surpassed £300mn for the first time last year. They are expected to rise again next season after Liverpool switched kit supplier from Nike to Adidas.

The club’s commercial partners include insurer AXA, phonemaker Google Pixel and beer brand Carlsberg. This summer, players and staff will fly to Japan and Hong Kong with the club’s official airline partner Japan Airlines for the club’s pre-season tour.

But Liverpool’s season has not been a total success. They lost to minnows Plymouth Argyle in the fourth round of the FA Cup and their hopes of a seventh Champions League trophy ended with defeat to Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16.

Analyst Kieron O’Connor, who writes the SwissRamble football finance blog, estimates Liverpool’s revenue for the 2024-25 financial year is likely to surpass £700mn, on account of its participation in this season’s Champions League. Liverpool failed to qualify for the 2023-24 Champions League.

Ian Graham, Liverpool’s head of research until 2023, says that tying van Dijk and Salah down to new contracts has bought Liverpool time to fine tune their squad.

“They’ve given themselves breathing space to find world class replacements over the next two to three years,” he said.

Support is first funding from Riyadh as war-ravaged country seeks to rebuild its economy

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have said they will settle Syria’s outstanding debt to the World Bank, in a step that will help the war-ravaged country access funding for postwar reconstruction and public-sector salaries.

The funding of about $15mn will be the first financial assistance to Syria from Saudi Arabia since the fall last year of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a government that the kingdom had staunchly opposed.

“This commitment will pave the way for the World Bank Group to resume support and operations in Syria after a suspension of more than 14 years,” the two countries said in a joint statement on Sunday during the spring meetings in Washington of the World Bank and IMF.

Syria’s economy has been shattered by more than a decade of war and wide-ranging sanctions, presenting a formidable challenge for the new government led by former rebels from the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours have stepped up humanitarian aid to Syria in recent months, but the debt settlement plan will be the first Saudi funding for the country as Riyadh moves to step up its influence, including by welcoming the new Syrian leader on his first foreign trip in February.

Mohammed al-Jadaan, the kingdom’s finance minister, on Friday stressed the need to move cautiously on Syria because of sanctions and other factors, but said the international community should do more to support war-torn countries in the region, including Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

“They need to know that the international community . . . will stand by them,” he said.

Syria’s central bank governor and finance minister attended the World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington this week for the first time in more than two decades.

It was the first visit by Syria’s new government to the US since the Assad regime was toppled in December after a lightning offensive by opposition forces. Since then, Syria’s new government has sought to rebuild the country’s diplomatic ties with regional and global powers, as well as international financial institutions.

Officials from the IMF and the World Bank emphasised to the Syrian authorities the need for credible economic data and to rebuild the central bank.

Amid US-China trade war, videos showcasing China’s manufacturing prowess went viral but also drew controversy

People working in the fashion industry in Paris are wondering how they managed to get caught in the crossfire of the China-US trade war.

Amid rising trade tensions with the United States, English-language videos posted on TikTok by the operators of Chinese factories have showcased the country’s manufacturing prowess, going viral with claims that many expensive, high-quality European consumer goods are actually made in China.

The videos suggest many bags sold by luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Hermes are made in China at relatively low cost before being shipped to Europe for a final “Made in France” stamp – and huge mark-ups.

Those claims have been rejected by Benedicte Epinay, the head of Comite Colbert, a body that represents the French luxury goods industry, and current and former industry participants in France.

A tailor who worked for Dior for 17 years said: “I have never heard of us having a factory in China.

“It’s not something that one can learn in just months. It takes at least five years to train a craftsman at Dior. There is actually a severe labour shortage in the industry.”

LVMH group, which owns Dior, said it has 120 workshops in France, 66 in Italy and employs 58,000 people.

Hermes said it has 60 production sites in France and 15 in other countries. They are in Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, the US, Portugal and Australia – but not China.

Epinay said on Tuesday that a French anti-counterfeit association had alerted social media companies including TikTok and Meta on behalf of the brands early last week, “asking them to mediate to stop this defamatory misinformation”.

The French Trade Ministry declined to comment.

At one of Italian luxury brand Valentino’s Paris boutiques, a sales assistant said: “Customers of luxury goods know they are not buying luxury bags just for the leather, you are also paying for the design and the reputation of the brand.

“I think it’s a kind of compliment. No one would counterfeit you if you are not popular.”

In the comment section of a TikTok video about where to find Chinese factories that make convincing fakes, one person said he had bought a couple of bags for his wife that were “near identical to the original” and “worth the price”.

France has rules regulating what products can be labelled “Made in France”, making it difficult for companies with most of their production overseas to win certification.

The law requires products to undergo “substantial transformation” in France before they can receive the stamp, and the country’s Finance Ministry has a branch dedicated to policing attempts to fool consumers.

Many French luxury brands do work with Chinese-owned factories in northern Italy, and Manufactures Dior – owned by Dior’s Italian branch – was investigated by Italian authorities in July for using facilities suspected of exploiting their workers. The investigation resulted in a court order that was lifted in February.

State Administration for Market Regulation says it is ‘highly concerned about the relevant transaction’ following reports deal is to be split up

Mainland China’s market regulator has warned CK Hutchison Holdings and other parties involved in the controversial sale of the Hong Kong conglomerate’s overseas ports not to circumvent an ongoing antitrust probe into the deal, with some parts of the transaction reportedly set to be split up.

The warning from a spokesman for the State Administration for Market Regulation on Sunday followed a media question over a recent report that suggested the wealthy Italian Aponte shipping family was looking to carve out two Panama Canal ports from the US$23 billion deal.

The deal, which US investment firm BlackRock is leading, is still being reviewed by the market regulator.

“We are highly concerned about the relevant transaction and will review it in accordance with the law,” the spokesman said.

“The parties to the transaction shall not circumvent the review in any way and shall not implement the concentration [of business operators] before approval, otherwise they will bear the legal responsibility.”

Under Article 20 of the mainland’s Anti-Monopoly Law, “concentration” refers to the merger of business operators, acquiring control over another by acquiring their equity or assets, or an operator acquiring control or influence over others with a contract or other means.

The market regulator had earlier said it would launch an antitrust probe after the shock announcement by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison over the sale of its 43 overseas ports in a US$23 billion deal to a BlackRock-led consortium. The conglomerate would receive US$19 billion in cash under the deal.

The two ports it operates at either end of the Panama Canal have drawn intense scrutiny from both Beijing and Washington, with the strategic waterway becoming a geopolitical flashpoint in the US-China rivalry.

It was reported earlier this month that tycoon Gianluigi Aponte and his son Diego Aponte had held discussions about moving forward with most of the deal while waiting for the ongoing disputes about the two Panama ports to be resolved.

While the report suggested that separating the Panama ports would require the parties to reach a new agreement, it also quoted BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as earlier saying the deal was being treated as a single transaction and that he was “optimistic” a solution could be found for the disputes.

The Post earlier reported that BlackRock aimed to take control of CK Hutchison’s two Panama facilities, while the Aponte family’s Terminal Investment Limited would have a majority stake in the others.

CK Hutchison declined to comment.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to “take back” the canal, which the United States built and controlled for much of the 20th century before ceding it to Panama in 1999. The Panama Ports Company, a subsidiary of CK Hutchison, has operated two facilities, one at either end of the canal, since 1997.

Wilson Chan Wai-shun, co-founder and director of policy research at the Pagoda Institute think tank, described the market watchdog’s warning as a “rather neutral comment as any regulator will issue this kind of comment when there are reports or actions related to the deal they are currently investigating”.

“Of course, splitting the deal may have implications on the antitrust probe as now it involved two deals,” he said.

By issuing the warning, the market regulator could be putting pressure on the parties involved to avoid separating the deal “so as to prevent any unnecessary and unwanted consequences in the future”, Chan added.

Lau Siu-kai, a consultant at the semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies think tank, said Beijing would not support any transaction that violated the country’s anti-monopoly laws.

He said Beijing was concerned about the deal’s impact on the Belt and Road Initiative – China’s plan to grow global trade – its shipbuilding industry and its shipping sector.

Some ports in the CK Hutchison deal are located in belt and road countries.

Senator Cory Booker on the grave harm that Donald Trump has inflicted on American life in his first hundred days in office.

A few weeks ago, Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, rose on the floor of the Senate and said that he had the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.” With that, he launched into a sprawling, heartfelt speech directed at the Presidency of Donald Trump. He came prepared with more than a thousand pages of written material, including testimony from hundreds of New Jerseyans and other Americans.

Twenty-five hours and five minutes later, Booker stopped talking. He had broken the record for a continuous speech in the chamber, set, in 1957, by the South Carolina segregationist Strom Thurmond, whose oratory was in the service of filibustering against a civil-rights bill. Not long after finishing his marathon, Booker said that he would “go deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling.”

Since then, Booker, who served as mayor of Newark before winning his Senate seat in 2013, has kept up the volume of his critique of Trump. I spoke with him recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour about the impulse for his speech, the growing harms of the Trump Presidency, and what he sees as the dangerous failure of so many institutions and leaders to speak up. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We are coming up on Trump’s hundredth day in office, and I was just reading the slew of pieces that were written eight years ago—about the Muslim ban, Mike Flynn’s appointment and rapid dismissal, the crazy midnight tweeting, the flirtations with Moscow and Pyongyang, the atmosphere of general alarm. What is different now?

There is a deeper, more grave attack going on with our fundamental constitutional principles that I believe we all share. The Trump Administration seems resolute to tear down a century of traditions—or at least post-World War Two traditions—of world order. And Trump is effectively, thus far, doing it without Republican congressional leaders doing anything—not just to stop him, but even to offer up a strong rebuke or critique. And so I think that the danger signs this time are far greater.

I have been told by people doing scientific research, people doing international work to stop the spread of infectious diseases, people who are talking about agency investigations into horrific crimes, that a lot of the things that he’s doing are irreversible, or at least will take a generation to try to undo. And so the consequences every day that this Administration continues in this manner are grave and great.

What has been accomplished in a hundred days that you think is particularly grave and particularly irreversible?

There are many things to point to that are grave. I’ll start with one of them that I mentioned. A lot of people who are doing research are pointing to example after example of how Trump’s actions have stopped it—whether it’s actually taking scientists themselves through immigration action and bouncing them out of our country, or putting them in detention, or just cutting the funding.

Trump has taken a page out of China’s book and they have taken a page out of our book. China attacked their universities during the Cultural Revolution in a stunning way. They attacked élite institutions that were doing scientific research as well as culture. And then they realized, in our generation, how much that cost them. Now they’re seeing things like breakthroughs in A.I., robotics, autonomous vehicles, E.V.s. They understand that the future will be shaped fundamentally by those who are inventing it.

And what has Trump done in a hundred days? He’s declared a cultural revolution of his own, attacking universities, attacking folks that are on the frontiers of science and research, putting them on the defensive, cutting billions of dollars, creating a situation where they are stopping research or stopping an inflow of the world’s best researchers. This is not a loss we can just bounce back from.

What, if anything, about the first hundred days of this Administration has surprised you?

Trump is losing his ability to surprise me. When people ask me about his talking about a third term, or deporting American citizens to a gulag in El Salvador—I mean, these outrageous things he’s said, I’ve come to expect them, and believe him. So I don’t know if there’s surprise. There’s been a lot of profound disappointment.

I know my Republican colleagues in the Senate and some in the House. I know their core values. I listen to them—from the Signalgate and the problems with [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth, all the way to just cutting bipartisan-approved investments in things like science, in some of the bipartisan bills that we pass that deal with gun violence, bipartisan investments in health innovations—I know privately from conversations how much they object to these things. And right now where my heartbreak lies is that so far you’ve seen scant few people willing to step up and take risks because there is a reality—Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Liz Cheney—that people who did stand up, did speak out, are no longer in Congress.

Are these jobs so great? Is being a senator so wildly awesome that one would not give it up in order to live by one’s principles? Lisa Murkowski whispers that people are frightened, but that’s about as much resistance as you hear or see among Republicans. Are the jobs that great?

I certainly don’t believe they are. I really don’t. I just know from psychology that we’re always the heroes in our own story. People think to themselves, I will make these compromises in order to be in a position to do this good, and they do this calculus in their head.

But there is a truth that I always joke about, which is that “Profiles in Courage” is a very thin volume. We’ve seen, though, Margaret Chase Smith, at a time where she took great political risk in a fierce speech she gave in criticism of her own party during the McCarthy era. We’ve seen demagogues rise before, to positions of great power and influence, from Father [Charles] Coughlin to [Joseph] McCarthy. Usually you see people who have the courage to step up and say, “Sir, do you have no shame?”

At this point, we have not gotten there yet. My father has this old story about a hound dog howling next to a man in a rocking chair, and a guy walks on the country road and asks him, “Why is your hound dog howling so much?” And he goes, “Well, he’s sitting on a nail.” And he goes, “Well, why doesn’t the hound dog just get up off the nail?” And the man on the rocking chair says, “Well, he’s not hurting bad enough yet.”

I’ve heard a lot of howling from people across the political spectrum, but the question is: When is the pain going to be enough? When he brings private businesses to heel for private political purposes, like law firms? When he attacks centers of excellence on planet Earth—our universities? Is that enough? Is it going to be enough when he violates due process and disappears people off of our streets? Is that going to be enough for you? When he brings about a tariff regime that’s so chaotic, that’s so unplanned, that’s so unstrategic, that he throws our economy into peril—is that enough? When is it enough for you to speak up? And when I ask that question, it’s not just for the Republicans that are elected. It’s for all of us.

Bring me into the cloakroom. You’re having a conversation with a Republican colleague, and you’re discussing the situation in these terms. What is the ensuing dialogue like?

One of the reasons why politicians don’t act is because the demand from the people is not enough yet. And so as much as we want to point a finger at people who are elected to positions, which is justified, I also want to ask a lot of other powerful people in this country who are remaining silent. We’ve seen what many corporate leaders are doing right now—instead of speaking up and speaking truth, they’re kowtowing for their own private deals. In a tariff regime, do you go and say, “Hey, please exclude electronics.” Or do you go and say, “This is fundamentally wrong. You are hurting the economy. And I may face some backlash for this, but, when they look back at this moment in history, I’m going to be one of those leaders in our country.” Whatever the sector is—from the faith community to the business community, to the nonprofit community, to the foundation community—when are more Americans going to speak up?

My community, too. We’re talking an hour after the news came down that the executive producer of “60 Minutes” quit, which can only tell you that CBS [which is owned by Paramount] is ready to make a deal with Donald Trump and his lawsuit against them.

And we’ve seen this before in too many countries where there’s been democratic backsliding. When good people are silent, that’s when bad things and bad people flourish. Donald Trump is trying to intimidate people. He’s trying to threaten people. And too many people are allowing him to continue because they’re thinking of what is in their own personal, financial well-being, and not what is in the well-being of our democracy. It frustrates me. We are now at a moment where you have to choose—between financial comfort and security, or the well-being of your economy and vulnerable people who are right now in the crosshairs.

Senator, you’ve portrayed Donald Trump in pretty dark terms, and yet you’re a person who prizes empathy and tries to figure out what’s in the head of the other, even if it’s a political opponent as stark as Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t go to bed at night thinking he’s awful or pernicious or selfish. How do you imagine that he sees himself?

I just recently read the actual judge’s decision from the E. Jean Carroll case, and I was stunned. I don’t know why I hadn’t looked at it until now, with such credible allegations of rape that the judge, in no flourish of politics at all, but focussing on the facts before him, cast this picture of such a despicable act by Donald Trump. I see the crass way he talks about veterans or other marginalized groups. I’ve sat with him, up close and personal—one of my first meetings in his first term, I still remember this moment, seeing his lack of curiosity, or even the most basic understanding—but more than that, how easily he was distracted, how his top aides treated him like a child, almost like they were jangling their keys for a child to keep him focussed. I remember walking out of that meeting and turning to my colleague from New York, just despondent, and saying, “World leaders are going to see what I just saw. World leaders are going to see that kind of reckless arrogance and almost conscientious ignorance about details.”

So I have stopped concerning myself with Donald Trump’s motivations and thought processes. I need to deal with him, with what he is doing to people that I care about and love in this country. You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. I love my state—I love Jersey. But my bigger concern and anger right now is what is taking so long for many people to say that this is too far? Why are so many good people with power and privilege remaining so silent, keeping their frustration and outrage to quiet conversations with their friends? When is it enough? That is the moral crisis of this moment. We know who Donald Trump is. But the question is: Who are we?

My understanding is that you were hearing silence in your own party leadership, and the occasion for your twenty-five hour speech on the floor of the Senate was your hearing from a lot of your constituents. What were they saying, and at what volume?

I was encountering a lot of anger toward me, because when I would explain to people that we don’t have the votes as Democrats, we don’t have the ability to stop this spending bill or stop this confirmation—that was wholly unsatisfying to people who were afraid, who were themselves angry, who couldn’t imagine these things happening in their country, and expected more from me and more from the Democratic Party. We decided, after I had a disagreement with my leader, Chuck Schumer, over the continuing resolution [on the budget]—I decided that I had to shift my own way of working now. I felt like my constituents were demanding from me that I take risks, that I think outside of the box.

Why did you decide that a day-long speech from the well of the Senate was the political theatre that would be most effective?

We were getting letters that would literally render my staff in tears. We had people coming to our office, not even from our state, because they saw this as an outpost, to tell us that they were going to lose their farm because Donald Trump had cut contracts. Stories that were just gut-wrenching to my staff. And they said, “We’ve got to find a way to make those stories break through.” And so part of our strategy was: How do you get the nation to listen a little bit more? In this terribly competitive attention economy that we have, what could break through?

The same year that John Lewis wrote a letter to Martin Luther King, and King then sent him a bus ticket—that was the same year that Strom Thurmond gave the longest speech in Senate history, trying to stop what Martin Luther King and John Lewis were doing in that letter exchange. And so as a Black man who was not envisioned by Strom Thurmond ever serving in [the Senate]—in fact, I’m the fourth Black person ever popularly elected to that body, after Barack Obama, who was the third—we knew that if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public. We never imagined that we would get, on TikTok alone, over three hundred million people liking the live stream. We never thought that it would be as successful as it was. That’s the key here—to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now. The poverty of realizing that this is happening to my neighbor, that this fundamentally implicates me and endangers me.

You mentioned Senator Schumer earlier. You’ve said that you would not want the job of Minority Leader in the Senate. Why not?

Well, let me first say that I may have disagreed with Senator Schumer vehemently in this instance, but anybody who looks at the Senate in the last three or four years would have to say that this guy, this tactician behind the scenes, has racked up one hell of a record. I mean, the bipartisan bills that I watched from a front-row seat: a bipartisan gun bill, the bipartisan CHIPS act, a bipartisan infrastructure bill. This is Chuck Schumer’s leadership. Chuck pulled the trifecta off. He won in Wisconsin, he won in Michigan, he won in Arizona—seats that by all intents and purposes we should have lost. And we obviously had great candidates, but Chuck was doing it.

So you don’t think Chuck Schumer’s time has come?

No.

You think that’s the case indefinitely?

No, I wouldn’t say indefinitely. Look, the last baby boomers are leaving power in American politics. This is the last baby-boomer President, Chuck is the last baby-boomer leader of the Senate. A new generation is dawning, and my critique thus far of my generation and millennials is that we have failed to step up and say, like generations before us, that it’s time to dream America anew.

When Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran President, visited the White House earlier this month, he paraded as a kind of fellow-autocrat with the President. Trump said that he’d like to include “homegrown criminals that push people into subways” in the “group of people to get ’em out of the country.” I don’t think he was kidding around. You’ve got a President who believes he can even send American citizens to foreign prisons. Are Democrats working on anything preëmptively to protect American citizens?

You ask whether the Democrats are working on anything. I’m trying to broaden this to say that all Americans—the responsibility falls on all of us.

That’s totally fair. But you’ve got a job. And I do, too—

But New Jersey did not send me to Washington to be a great Democratic senator. They sent me to be a great New Jersey senator, and a great fighter for America. And this is why during the twenty-five hour [speech in the Senate] we brought in the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation‚ Republican gubernatorial voices—all to make the point, from their own words, why this President is so dangerous and why this is a time of moral urgency. Right now, one of my biggest areas of focus is stopping this bill that will gut Medicaid and health care for eighty, ninety million people and endanger hospitals. We need Republicans of good conscience, like we did in 2017 with the Affordable Care Act, to vote with us. And so playing this as a partisan game—

Fair enough.

—cheapens the larger cause of the country. This is a time when America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership. And that’s what I’m standing up and saying. I’m accepting responsibility for my own leadership failings. And I want to appeal to the soul, the heart, the conscience of our country—it’s not just important for leaders now to speak against Trump, but also to capture the imagination of people for how we can rise above this moment.

Senator Booker, over the years, you have been a really clear opponent of antisemitism, over and over again. But would you agree that antisemitism, to some extent, is being exploited in a political way by the Trump Administration? How do you see that very complicated piece of business?

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I see it very clearly. Were there things happening on college campuses that were dead wrong in my book? Absolutely. College campuses, college presidents and leadership, made mistakes. And they should be owning up to them and taking corrective action. But, yes, Donald Trump is exploiting antisemitism in order to pursue an agenda that is far greater and far more authoritarian. We know that people preyed upon Jewish populations during the Red Scare, and used hate and antisemitism in a different way then, as a tool to pursue what I consider a dark chapter in American history. Political opportunists will exploit fear, hate, and division for their larger authoritarian aims. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.

Now I know you got a lot of positive reaction to your twenty-five-hour-long speech. I wonder if you got the other thing, too. Lisa Murkowski has talked about threats that have come her way. Do they come your way as well?

Yeah. Look, there’s a great book—“How Democracies Die” [by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky]. They talk about the different signs. One sign I started seeing when Obama was President, where the letter of the law was followed, but the spirit of the Constitution wasn’t, was when they wouldn’t give [Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court] Merrick Garland a hearing. That was a slow unwinding of the spirit of bipartisanship, or the spirit of democratic norms and traditions. And I’ve seen that erode even more quickly, obviously, under this current President, in a disastrous way.

One of the other signs they talked about was the heightening of political violence and threats of violence. We are seeing chilling things. Esther Salas is a federal judge in my state. A murderer went to her house and murdered her child and shot and severely wounded her husband. That was bad enough. Threats at that point on federal judges were up about four hundred per cent. But to see how they’re skyrocketing even more now under Donald Trump—there’s been incendiary language across the board on federal judges.

I saw [Esther Salas] interviewed. She was shaken, because people are sending pizzas to federal judges who are deciding against Donald Trump from her son’s name, Daniel Anderl. They’re using her murdered son’s name to send pizzas to the homes of a federal judge, almost to say: we know where you live. I’m definitely facing a whole new order of security concerns in my own life, as are senators on both sides of the aisle. When [Iowa Senator] Joni Ernst dared to question the qualifications of Pete Hegseth, what she endured online—the vicious things that were being said about her, the political threats, and more, in my opinion, were vile. And we’re just seeing it go up more and more. This is something that has to stop in our country.

Do you think that played a role in her, in the end, supporting Hegseth?

I will make no guesses as to what her internal deliberations were.

But it must be scary.

Most senators and congresspeople, on both sides whom I’ve talked to, know that we are living in a scary environment. We are seeing the largest level of antisemitic hate in my lifetime. We’re seeing threats on Muslim Americans, Sikh Americans—every religious group is seeing a rise in threats of violence and hate crimes. Blacks and Latinos—what’s happening to the Latino community at this time is chilling.

Your Latino constituents must be watching what’s happening with extraordinary alarm.

Let me be clear. Even ones who voted for Trump never imagined this and have expressed regret that they voted for Donald Trump. People in my neighborhood are afraid to walk their children to work, are afraid to go out to restaurants. Restaurants are seeing a plunge in attendance because of the fear within the immigrant communities here, and these are people who are doing jobs that—just a few years ago, we were calling them “essential workers.” These are people who have contributed to our economy, who have paid taxes—many of them run businesses that pay taxes and employ people. So we are in crisis right now. There is a presumption of criminality that puts communities at risk, and puts their families at risk, and undermines, again, the strength of our economy.

I find that the conversation that we’re having sounds like a conversation that would be born of ten years of experience rather than a hundred days. A hundred days! Wednesday is the one hundredth day of Trump’s second term, and there are thirteen hundred days remaining, or thereabouts. What do you expect to see happen?

Well, first of all, I hope it’s chilling to some to understand that it takes years—years—to establish democratic norms and traditions. Decades to strengthen democratic principles and ideals. Generations to instill them within the hearts and minds of a people. But it could take days to unravel them—days to tear them down.

I have never in my life been as worried about our country, about our democracy, about our traditions, as I am now. But I will say this: Shiva, in the Hindu faith, is the god of destruction. And I know Donald Trump would get glee from me comparing him to any kind of god. But Shiva’s also a valued god because you can’t have renewal and rebirth without facing destruction.

I am a prisoner of hope. I always will be. I think the best way to answer despair is to not let it have the last word. That’s what hope is. I will always counter despairing times with telling what I think is the truth of our country’s history. It has often been out of the darkest times, where we’ve seen the infernos of Hell, where we’ve seen destruction, where we’ve seen Shiva—from those ashes has often risen the best of who we are. And that’s really what I’m working for right now. Not just to stop the destruction coming from the White House but to usher in the next generation of leadership in this country to help us to dream America anew and redeem the dream for so many who’ve given up on the very dream of America.