Donald Trump claims to have received call from Xi Jinping and to have cut ‘200 deals’ on trade
Beijing says there are no active talks and Washington should ‘stop creating confusion’
Donald Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping had “called” him, despite denials from Beijing that talks to ease trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies had started.
The US president also made the claim that he had sealed “200 deals” on trade, even though no such pacts have been announced.
“You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals,” Trump said in an interview with Time Magazine published on Friday.
Trump said of the Chinese president: “He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf.”
However, several people familiar with the situation in Washington and Beijing said Xi had not called Trump. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not comment.
In his Time interview, the US president also insisted that “100 per cent” he had done 200 trade deals with countries across the globe, even though none have been announced. But he also suggested that they could be unveiled in the next month. “Over the next three to four weeks . . . we’re finished, by the way,” he said.
On Friday morning, as he left Washington for Rome to attend the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump was asked to clarify whether he had spoken to Xi since the US imposed bruising tariffs of up to 145 per cent on Chinese imports, triggering a trade war that has rattled financial markets.
“I don’t want to comment on that, but I’ve spoken to him many times,” Trump said.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has made multiple claims about contacts between the US and China that have later been questioned.
Trump said last month that Xi was planning to visit the US and would be “coming in the not too distant future”. But people familiar with the matter said there had been no conversations between Washington and Beijing about a summit.
On multiple occasions Trump has also referred to trade talks between the countries, even though these are yet to take place, according to people in Washington and Beijing.
“China and the US are NOT having any consultation or negotiation on #tariffs. The US should stop creating confusion,” the Chinese foreign ministry posted on X on Friday.
Chinese officials have also stressed that any trade negotiations in the future would have to be held at the working level and that the two countries would have to reach some kind of tentative agreement before Beijing would agree to set up a phone call or meeting with Xi.
When asked what Xi had told him in the conversation that Trump claims happened, the US president referred to the power he had as gatekeeper for the US consumer market. “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay,” Trump told Time.
Toyota chair proposes $42bn buyout deal for carmaker’s biggest subsidiary
Japanese company has come under investor pressure to simplify its web of interconnected companies
Toyota’s chair has proposed a ¥6tn ($42bn) deal to take the company’s biggest subsidiary private as he seeks to cement control over the world’s largest carmaker and streamline its notoriously complex governance structure.
In recent years, Japan’s most powerful company has faced increasing investor pressure to simplify its web of interconnected equity holdings that the group holds across tens of suppliers and affiliate automakers.
Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota’s founder, is considering investing his personal money to lead a buyout of Toyota Industries, which makes industrial equipment and vehicles, with financing from the country’s three biggest banks, according to four people with knowledge of the talks.
The proposal values Toyota Industries at about ¥6tn, including debt. The listed subsidiary has a market capitalisation of ¥4.3tn at present.
The same people warned that the talks, which were first reported by Bloomberg, could still collapse. Toyota, which with its affiliates has a 40 per cent stake in Toyota Industries, is considering whether to participate in the take-private deal, the people said. It is unclear how advanced those discussions are or if the carmaker will follow through, they added.
Private equity groups have also explored participating in a buyout or buying sections of the business carved out as part of the deal, according to one person with knowledge of the talks.
In recent years, Japan’s government and regulators have pushed companies to rapidly improve corporate governance. The Tokyo Stock Exchange is also trying to reform so-called parent-child listings, where a large company controls a listed subsidiary.
Shareholder approval for Toyoda fell to a record low of 72 per cent last year, prompting the carmaker to increase the number of non-executive directors on its board ahead of this year’s annual meeting.
Within the carmaker’s sprawling empire, Toyota Industries is considered one of the most important suppliers for the group since it owns a 9.1 per cent stake in the carmaker and was intimately tied to the founding of the company.
Toyota Industries did not respond to a request for comment. Toyota declined to comment.
Japan’s auto suppliers, and Toyota’s in particular, have also become a target for activist investors who are betting both that corporate governance reform will force carmakers to buy in their subsidiaries and that competition will demand changes to their supply chains.
A number of Toyota’s smaller suppliers have already been targeted by funds linked to Yoshiaki Murakami, the country’s most notorious activist.
Toyota has previously made other automobile body suppliers into fully owned subsidiaries such as Toyota Auto Body and Kanto Auto Works in 2012.
Gatwick chief urges ministers to speed up approval of second runway
Current October deadline for final decision on expansion plans is too long a wait, says airport boss
Gatwick’s boss has urged the government to speed up approval of its proposed second runway but warned it could not fully comply with the Planning Inspectorate’s demands for changes to its proposals.
Stewart Wingate said he hoped the airport’s revised expansion plans, published on Friday by the planning authority, would allow ministers “a pathway that will enable them to give us the final approval” before an October deadline.
The application fell short of the Inspectorate’s full demands on noise and public transport use. However, Wingate said the application would allow the airport to invest with confidence while tackling concerns raised by the planners.
“You’ve got to have confidence, before you make the investment, that you can get the utility out of the investment,” he said.
After provisionally approving the project earlier this year, ministers had set an October deadline for a final decision.
But Wingate said: “Candidly, we don’t think we should have to wait until October . . . we think they should be able to make a decision ahead of the October deadline.”
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said in February she was “minded” to approve a second runway, but only if Gatwick agreed to change its plan by adding more stringent targets both for access to the site by public transport and for noise mitigation.
Wingate said the plan for upgrading the UK’s second-largest airport, published on Friday, would deal with the concerns over transport and noise.
The £2.2bn project would expand capacity by moving Gatwick’s emergency landing strip 12 metres to the north. Relocating it would put enough space between the reconfigured runways so that both could operate at the same time.
The first flights could take off by the end of the decade, and an expanded Gatwick would be able to handle up to 75mn passengers a year by the late 2030s, up from the record 46.5mn in 2019.
The Planning Inspectorate recommended refusing Gatwick’s original proposal but, unusually, said it would approve the project should changes be made.
The agency, responsible for decisions on land-use planning, had demanded in February that the airport adopt a legally binding target of 54 per cent of passengers annually arriving by public transport.
Gatwick has accepted that target but does not want it to be binding because the airport itself has little control over the public transport network. Instead, it proposed a scheme that would apply if the threshold were not to be met.
This would stop it using the second runway, should the number of vehicles travelling to the airport rise above 24mn a year, until road upgrades were completed.
The airport said it would offer more money than it had originally suggested to insulate houses against aircraft noise, but this is still less than the Inspectorate requested.
It also accepted a decrease in the size of the “noise contour” area that is affected by aircraft noise from 135 to 125 sq km, pending government “clarification on the evidence and rationale put forward . . . for this”.
Wingate said the airport was concerned that a smaller area could limit growth in long-haul flights.
Ministers have backed airport expansion across London as part of a wider plan to encourage growth, but environmental groups say the plans are incompatible with the UK’s 2050 target of net zero emissions.
The government has approved expanding London City and Luton airports, and urged Heathrow to bring forward its plans for a third runway.
The Department for Transport said: “Gatwick has responded to the Secretary of State’s ‘minded to approve’ letter, and that response is published on the Planning Inspectorate’s website. A consultation giving all interested parties an opportunity to comment will be launched shortly.”
“The deadline for a final decision remains October 27.”
ESG fund outflows hit record as sustainable investing backlash grows
European investors pull money from sector for first time in sign that US scepticism of ‘woke capitalism’ is spreading
Investors pulled a record amount from “sustainable” funds in the first quarter of the year, in an early sign that the US backlash against environmental, social and governance-based investing is going global.
While US investors cut their exposure to sustainable mutual and exchange traded funds for a 10th straight quarter, Europeans were net sellers for the first time on record in data going back to 2018, pulling out $1.2bn, according to data from Morningstar.
With Asian investors also cutting exposure, the $8.6bn of net outflows is by far the highest withdrawal figure ever seen.
The outflows indicate that the pushback against funds that invest on the basis of ESG factors may be spreading to Europe, the region where the concept first took hold and which accounts for 84 per cent of the $3.2tn held in ESG funds globally.
ESG has been criticised by many on the political right, who argue it prioritises contentious social and political agendas over financial returns, ushering in a form of “woke capitalism”.
While these concerns have been strongest in the US, there has also been a pushback against ESG funds’ traditional disdain for defence stocks in Europe, amid a drive for the continent to re-arm following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and doubts over the Trump administration’s support for Kyiv.
“The quarter signals a shift. We’re seeing an intensifying ESG backlash in the US, which is now also noticeably affecting sentiment in Europe,” said Hortense Bioy, head of sustainable investing research at Morningstar Sustainalytics.
The withdrawals have come despite strong buying of conventional funds, particularly in Europe, during the quarter, meaning they were not driven by a broader investor retreat from the market.
Bioy said she believed the pushback against ESG and diversity, equity and inclusion policies driven by the Trump administration was affecting asset managers around the world.
“The ESG backlash coming out of the US is affecting managers and making them more cautious globally,” she said. “It’s influencing the way they are talking about products and selling them outside of the US.”
With the EU set to tighten anti-greenwashing rules relating to investment funds’ names, Morningstar found that 335 sustainable products changed their names in Europe during the first quarter, including 116 that dropped ESG-related terms.
A further 94 European funds were liquidated or merged, while US fund closures hit a record quarterly level of 20.
Bioy said the political push to redefine defence companies as acceptable holdings for ESG funds in Europe might be disconcerting for some longtime proponents of sustainable investing.
“[Regulators] are saying it’s OK to invest in weapons,” she said. “That’s something that [ESG] investors a few years ago would never have accepted. It can create a little bit of confusion.”
Jane Street’s Crypto Trading Tripled Last Year
Wall Street firm benefited from market rebound and new bitcoin ETFs.
Jane Street, a Wall Street powerhouse, more than tripled its crypto trading in 2024 during the market rebound, boosted by bitcoin exchange-traded funds and the expected easing of crypto rules under President Donald Trump.
The New York–based company purchased $110 billion worth of cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, and sold $110 billion worth of cryptocurrencies last year, according to financial documents seen by The Information. In 2023, it bought $31 billion in crypto and sold $30 billion in crypto.
Trading firms buy and sell crypto on exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, making money on the spread and boosting liquidity in the market.
Part of Jane Street’s growth came from the firm’s role trading bitcoin for ETFs that hold the cryptocurrency. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved bitcoin ETFs for the first time in January 2024, allowing investors to buy bitcoin the same way they would a stock. That kicked off a yearlong crypto market comeback, supercharged by Trump’s election victory in November.
Jane Street is one of the largest traditional financial trading firms that has ventured into crypto trading. The company, which made its first crypto trade in 2017, was for years a major liquidity provider in crypto. Its entry brought legitimacy to the industry. Several of its alumni went on to start or join crypto firms, including Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto founder of FTX.
But the company pulled back its crypto activities in 2023, as regulators cracked down on the industry. Its buying and selling of crypto in 2023 dropped by nearly half from levels in 2022, when it bought $57 billion of crypto and sold $57 of billion crypto, according to the document.
The company doesn’t break down revenue from crypto-trading activities. In the document, it says it has “intentionally ensured [that crypto trading] remains a small portion of the broader firm” and that its trading is limited to “certain coins and venues.”
As the regulatory environment becomes friendlier, Jane Street could face competition from new entrants, such as Citadel Securities, which said it plans to enter crypto trading. Banks may also get into the field, if they get permission from regulators.
Jane Street’s total trading revenue nearly doubled to $20.5 billion last year, surpassing banks like Bank of America and Citigroup.
Jane Street declined to comment.
Anthropic CEO wants to open the black box of AI models by 2027
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027.
Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has made early breakthroughs in tracing how models arrive at their answers — but emphasizes that far more research is needed to decode these systems as they grow more powerful.
“I am very concerned about deploying such systems without a better handle on interpretability,” Amodei wrote in the essay. “These systems will be absolutely central to the economy, technology, and national security, and will be capable of so much autonomy that I consider it basically unacceptable for humanity to be totally ignorant of how they work.”
Anthropic is one of the pioneering companies in mechanistic interpretability, a field that aims to open the black box of AI models and understand why they make the decisions they do. Despite the rapid performance improvements of the tech industry’s AI models, we still have relatively little idea how these systems arrive at decisions.
For example, OpenAI recently launched new reasoning AI models, o3 and o4-mini, that perform better on some tasks, but also hallucinate more than its other models. The company doesn’t know why it’s happening.
“When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does — why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate,” Amodei wrote in the essay.
In the essay, Amodei notes that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah says that AI models are “grown more than they are built.” In other words, AI researchers have found ways to improve AI model intelligence, but they don’t quite know why.
In the essay, Amodei says it could be dangerous to reach AGI — or as he calls it, “a country of geniuses in a data center” — without understanding how these models work. In a previous essay, Amodei claimed the tech industry could reach such a milestone by 2026 or 2027, but believes we’re much further out from fully understanding these AI models.
In the long term, Amodei says Anthropic would like to, essentially, conduct “brain scans” or “MRIs” of state-of-the-art AI models. These checkups would help identify a wide range of issues in AI models, including their tendencies to lie or seek power, or other weakness, he says. This could take five to 10 years to achieve, but these measures will be necessary to test and deploy Anthropic’s future AI models, he added.
Anthropic has made a few research breakthroughs that have allowed it to better understand how its AI models work. For example, the company recently found ways to trace an AI model’s thinking pathways through, what the company call, circuits. Anthropic identified one circuit that helps AI models understand which U.S. cities are located in which U.S. states. The company has only found a few of these circuits but estimates there are millions within AI models.
Anthropic has been investing in interpretability research itself and recently made its first investment in a startup working on interpretability. While interpretability is largely seen as a field of safety research today, Amodei notes that, eventually, explaining how AI models arrive at their answers could present a commercial advantage.
In the essay, Amodei called on OpenAI and Google DeepMind to increase their research efforts in the field. Beyond the friendly nudge, Anthropic’s CEO asked for governments to impose “light-touch” regulations to encourage interpretability research, such as requirements for companies to disclose their safety and security practices. In the essay, Amodei also says the U.S. should put export controls on chips to China, in order to limit the likelihood of an out-of-control, global AI race.
Anthropic has always stood out from OpenAI and Google for its focus on safety. While other tech companies pushed back on California’s controversial AI safety bill, SB 1047, Anthropic issued modest support and recommendations for the bill, which would have set safety reporting standards for frontier AI model developers.
In this case, Anthropic seems to be pushing for an industry-wide effort to better understand AI models, not just increasing their capabilities.
BYD First-Quarter Profit Doubled on Strong EV Sales
Healthy demand for its cars in China and overseas drove its revenue 36% higher
Chinese auto giant BYD continued to outpace Tesla TSLA 3.50%increase; green up pointing triangle in the first quarter, reporting a doubling in net profit on robust growth in its electric-vehicle business.
The Chinese EV maker said Friday that its net profit surged to 9.15 billion yuan, equivalent to $1.26 billion, from 4.57 billion yuan a year earlier. That compared with the company’s guidance of between 8.5 billion yuan and 10 billion yuan, and stood in contrast with Tesla’s own first-quarter results that showed declines in profit and global sales.
Healthy demand for BYD’s cars in China and overseas drove its revenue 36% higher to 170.36 billion yuan. The company attributed the stronger revenue to the growth of its new-energy-vehicle business, a term in China that refers to fully electric cars and plug-in hybrids.
The Chinese automaker sold more battery EVs than Tesla in the first three months of the year, keeping its crown as the world’s top EV seller. Total sales, including hybrids, skyrocketed 60% to 1.0 million units.
Analysts see scope for BYD to keep its edge in the EV market, helped by continued investment in autonomous-driving technology and a wide range of models. The company’s research-and-development expenses rose 34% to 14.22 billion yuan in the first quarter, which it said was due to higher employee remuneration and material consumption.
BYD in February said it planned to include its “God’s Eye” system in all mass-market cars, igniting competition among Chinese automakers to roll out affordable autonomous-driving features.
Looking ahead, BYD appears relatively insulated from the U.S. tariffs on the auto sector, having long prioritized other international markets over the U.S.
Citing a meeting with management, Citi analysts said BYD is confident about hitting its 800,000-unit export target for 2025, seeing limited impact from U.S. tariffs and stronger growth in Europe and South America.