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Senate Democrats to Unveil $1 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

Democrats offer a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan

Daring Mr. Trump to make good on his grand infrastructure promises, Senate Democrats on Tuesday will unveil a trillion-dollar plan to rebuild the nation’s roads, railways, airports, waterways and sewer systems over 10 years.

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“From our largest cities to our smallest towns, communities across the country are struggling to meet the challenges of aging infrastructure,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, will say. “Our urban and rural communities have their own unique set of infrastructure priorities, and this proposal would provide funding to address those needed upgrades that go beyond the traditional road and bridge repair.”

Republicans resisted President Barack Obama’s push for an infrastructure “surge” for eight years, arguing that the federal government couldn’t afford it and that state and local governments should shoulder more responsibility for improvements. But Mr. Trump has taken up the Democratic cause.

“We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation,” he vowed in his Inaugural Address.

The plan dedicates $180 billion to rail and bus systems, $65 billion to ports, airports and waterways, $110 billion for water and sewer systems, $100 billion for energy infrastructure, and $20 billion for public and tribal lands.

“We’re asking President Trump to work with us to make it a reality,” Mr. Schumer will say.

Government ethicist to Trump: Let me help you

Despite a rocky start to their relationship, Walter M. Shaub Jr., the head of the Office of Government Ethics, is apparently still “willing and ready” to help Mr. Trump handle his potential conflicts of interest.

Mr. Shaub met with members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in a closed-door session on Monday afternoon at the request of the chairman of the panel, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah. After Mr. Shaub publicly criticized Mr. Trump’s plans this month, Mr. Chaffetz accused him of playing politics — prompting Democrats and other watchdogs to come to the ethics monitor’s defense.

According to a recap of Monday’s meeting by Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, Mr. Shaub said that his office had not received copies of documents that Mr. Trump referenced at a news conference on Jan. 11, and that it had been provided with no new information. Still, Mr. Shaub said he would help the president, if called upon.

There were about nine members of the committee at the meeting — eight Democrats and Mr. Chaffetz, according to his spokeswoman, M.J. Henshaw.

After Mr. Chaffetz left the meeting with Mr. Shaub, he told reporters: “I think we understand each other better.”

The building trade unions love Trump

Big Labor may have been With Her, but the unions that represent builders and pavers Love Him.

“We have a common bond with the president,” said Sean McGarvey, the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, after meeting on Monday with Mr. Trump and hearing him promise a major push to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. “We come from the same industry. He understands the value of driving development, moving people to the middle class.”

If the labor movement divides over Mr. Trump, it would not be the first time. An old saying holds that the building trades would pave over their mothers’ graves if it created jobs. And before Mr. Trump’s rise, unions like the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union had split with the building unions over the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, with the former siding with liberal environmentalists and the latter seeing opportunities for work.

In this case, the unions may unite with Democrats behind the new president — leaving Republican spending hawks in the cold.

Defense secretary seeks to reassure NATO chief

On his first working day as the country’s new secretary of defense, James N. Mattis spoke with the head of NATO and told him that the United States depends on it and on Europe for trans-Atlantic security.

The telephone conversation came just a week after Mr. Mattis’s boss, Mr. Trump, called NATO “obsolete,” because, Mr. Trump said, the alliance hasn’t done enough to combat terrorism.

Mr. Mattis “wanted to place the call on his first full day in office to reinforce the importance he places on the alliance,” a Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said in a statement on Monday night.

Jay Z hasn’t found a new owner for Tidal, his streaming music service. But he’s getting closer.

Sprint says it has bought a third of Tidal; Billboard says the carrier is paying $200 million for its stake, which pegs Tidal’s value at $600 million.

Sprint and the music service aren’t offering any other details, except that Sprint customers will get “exclusive artist content not available anywhere else” and that Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will join Tidal’s board.

Jay Z has been shopping Tidal for at least a year — Samsung, which seemed like a logical buyer, kicked its tires for a while, then walked away; everyone else gave it at least a look — so it’s logical to assume that this deal gives Sprint a “path to control”: The ability to buy a majority stake in the company over time.

It’s also logical to see why he’d want to get out of the streaming business, which he entered by buying Aspiro, a Swedish streaming company, for $56 million in 2015: Everyone in the streaming music business loses money.

That doesn’t matter to tech giants like Apple and Amazon, who use music to promote other products. It also doesn’t seem to matter to bigger streaming music companies like Pandora and Spotify, that have investors willing to bet that they’ll figure out how to turn a profit, one day.

But if you’re Jay Z and you’re running a small scale streaming business — Tidal claims it has three million subscribers, though those numbers have been disputed — then you’re either funding those losses out of your pocket or getting someone else to do it for you. So an early exit would have always been part of the plan.

It’s not surprising to see Sprint bet on streaming. Sprint’s owner SoftBank has long been interested in music, and at one point tried to buy Universal Music, the world’s largest music label.

It is harder to see what Sprint gets out of the deal.

Yes, it can use Tidal exclusives as a marketing sweetner. But this is the same issue that AT&T has if/when it buys Time Warner: All of the content that makes the entertainment company valuable only has value if everyone can get to it, regardless of which carrier/cable company they use.

That is, you can make, say, a single Jay Z track exclusive to Sprint customers. But if you lock up all of his music on a single carrier, then the overall Jay Z market is going to get much, much smaller than Jay Z likes.

Meanwhile, you certainly don’t need to buy a streaming music service to do a promotional deal with a streaming music service. All of the carriers have done variations on this, for years, without taking equity stakes.

Here’s a good hunch: In a year or so, Jay Z will have sold the whole thing to Sprint, which will be left trying to figure that problem out for itself.

In May of 2010, someone on a Bitcoin forum by the name of Lazlo claimed to have bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It was the first time anyone had purchased anything with the new digital currency, which at that time was valued at practically nothing.

Today, the cryptocurrency market is worth nearly $19 billion and those 10,000 bitcoins would be worth more than $10 million. Most of the cryptocurrency market is in Bitcoin, followed by Ether, the currency used by the smart contract platform Ethereum. Now tech giants, like Microsoft, IBM and Amazon, as well as major Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, are investing in blockchain technology, the underlying class of technology that started with Bitcoin. Infosys, TCS, HCL, and Accenture are working on blockchain-based products for banks as well.

With the new year, everyone is wondering what’s to come in the next chapter. Based on my work in the field, here are five predictions on major trends in cryptocurrencies for 2017.

As an asset class, cryptocurrencies are tough to ignore. As I write this, Bitcoin is trading at just over $1,000. Hedge funds and venture capital firms will look for more ways to tap into the cryptocurrency market. Doing so will remove some of the social stigma around cryptocurrencies—mainly due to Bitcoin’s history of use on the dark markets—and popularize investment in cryptocurrencies.

Global currency disorders are on the rise: Think of what’s happening in India, where the government recently scrapped 86 percent of cash in circulation, and in Venezuela, where currency is so devalued people now need to carry stacks of cash just to buy food. As a result, many retail investors are turning their attention to digital currencies, as well. Cryptocurrencies are free from government control. Governments can’t easily call in bitcoins or halt their movement across international borders without taking drastic actions.

Financial institutions, bound by charters that describe the types of investments they can embark upon, have had few means of putting their money into bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. But in 2017, we’ll see a greater push towards a diversity of cryptocurrencies as investments, and ETFs, hedge funds, and derivatives will start to act as conduits for institutions to gain exposure and get into the cryptocurrency game.

Private blockchains (like the Hyperledger project from the Linux Foundation, R3CEV’s Corda, and the Gem Health network) will start to feel real friction. To date, private blockchains have gotten the benefit of the doubt, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding with little to show for it in production. Many of their projects are not terribly innovative, and haven’t been subjected to the same rigorous review as more public projects.

Greater scrutiny from analysts, well-informed media, and investors will put some much-needed cold water on private blockchains in 2017.

Despite the enormous technological and political difficulties involved in upgrading Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s core developers have finally introduced Segregated Witness to the network. The benefits of SegWit are clear: a higher transaction throughput without altering the block size, no transaction malleability and faster block validation. SegWit also makes it easier to develop better wallet software and permits off-chain transactions on the Lightning Network, a protocol for scaling and speeding up blockchains.<

There are no clear downsides to this upgrade, but it’s been taken hostage in the political battle over block size. Some mining pools are refusing to switch to SegWit, holding out for a block size increase instead, which does involve trade-offs. However, the fight seems to be running out of steam, which bodes well for SegWit.

The price of Bitcoin will continue to rise due to increased demand from investors but usage—that is, how many people are using it to actually buy and sell things in the open market—will not change substantially. Arguably the biggest application for Bitcoin over the last few weeks has been as a tool for capital flight. In China, for instance, investors are buying bitcoins as part of a rush to convert their RMB into currencies that aren’t losing value. This means the currency won’t necessarily be trading hands much. Instead people will be holding on to it as a hedge or using it to get money out of their countries.

Regulators will keep a light touch on the technologies behind cryptocurrencies, but they will look more closely at exchanges, which is where traditional banking meets the new world of cryptocurrencies.

While exchanges are an excellent resource, allowing people to conveniently buy and sell digital currencies with ease, they also centralize risk. This makes them a virtual honeypot for hacks and thefts. So increasingly we will see governments stepping in to oversee how they operate with an eye on consumer protection. Some regulation will include new ways to confirm identities and block money laundering—and in extreme cases, block exchanges all together. Take the case of Colbitex, the first bitcoin exchange in Colombia, which the Colombian government closed down in August, claiming bitcoin was not real money and therefore unregulated.

Over a relatively short amount of time, we’ve watched cryptocurrencies evolve from relative obscurity to a point where governments and financial institutions are taking it seriously and making huge investments in blockchain technologies for their own use. Through 2017, we’ll see that evolution continue as serious blockchain platforms begin to emerge and people begin using cryptocurrencies, not just for capital flight and a hedge against hyperinflation, but for real day to day trading—and we’re not just

We downgrade Remy Cointreau to Neutral from Buy following the stock’s outperformance post its FY3Q17 sales results. Remy reported a strong sales beat, driven by better organic performance from the cognac division, notably in China. The shares reacted positively to the results, closing up 6% on the day. We have increased our FY organic sales growth estimate to 5% (from 4%), and our FY organic EBIT growth increases to 10% (from 9%). Since being added to the Buy List on March 10, 2015, Remy’s shares are up 32% vs. the FTSE World Europe’s -7% and are up 14% vs. our European Staples coverage over the last three months.

- a capitalistic CANAL deal with ORANGE

- the transfer of its stake in TELECOM ITALIA (TI) to the French leader.