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Elon Musk says Twitter is still losing cash because advertising has dropped by half.

In a reply to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted Saturday, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to (about a) 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he concluded.

Ever since he took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, Musk has tried to reassure advertisers who were concerned about the ouster of top executives, widespread layoffs and a different approach to content moderation. Some high-profile users who had been banned were allowed back on the site.

In April, Musk said most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company might become cash-flow positive in the second quarter.

In May, he hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with deep ties to the advertising industry.

But since then, Twitter has upset some users by imposing new limits on how many tweets they can view in a day, and some users complained that they were locked out of the site. Musk said the restrictions were needed to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data.

Twitter got a new competitor this month when Facebook owner Meta launched a text-focused app, Threads, and gained tens of millions of sign-ups in a few days. Twitter responded by threatening legal action.
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On the heels of a trip to Beijing, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is back in India for the third time in nine months, this time to meet finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations about global economic challenges like the increased threat of debt defaults facing low-income countries.

Yellen will use her time in Gandhinagar to try to foster warming relations between the U.S. and India. She also plans a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam, to address supply chain reliability, clean energy transition and other matters of economic resilience.

Yellen’s goals for her time in India: press for debt restructuring in developing countries in economic distress, push to modernize global development banks to make them more climate-focused and deepen the ever-growing U.S.-India relationship.

Yellen’s frequent stops in the country signal the importance of that relationship at a time of of tensions with China.

India’s longstanding relationship with Russia also will loom as the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine continues despite U.S. and allied countries’ efforts to sanction and economically bludgeon Russia’s economy. India has not taken part in the efforts to punish Russia and maintains energy trade with that country despite a Group of Seven agreed-upon price cap on Russian oil, which has seen some success in slowing Russia’s economy.

Still, the U.S. increasingly relies on India and has courted its leaders.

President Joe Biden hosted a White House state visit honoring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June, designed to highlight and foster ties. The two leaders pronounced the U.S.-India relationship never stronger and rolled out new business deals between the nations.

Raymond Vickery Jr., a policy expert on U.S.-India relations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Yellen’s coming to India shortly after visiting China is meaningful in that Indian officials “are going to want to know in great detail what happened in the meetings with her Chinese counterparts and see where it fits with their perspective on economic relations with China.”

“They’re going to want to know whether or not the United States is serious about moving some of its sourcing activity from China to India.”

A senior Treasury official, speaking on condition of anonymity to preview Yellen’s trip, said there was hope that debt treatments for Ghana and Sri Lanka will be discussed and completed quickly at the meetings.

Sri Lanka and Ghana defaulted on their international debts last year, roughly two years after Zambia defaulted. And more than half of all low-income countries face debt distress, which hurts their long-term ability to function and develop.

Last month, Zambia and its government creditors, including China, reached a deal to restructure $6.3 billion in loans, on the sidelines of a global finance summit in Paris.

The agreement covers loans from countries such as France, the U.K., South Africa, Israel and India as well as China — Zambia’s biggest creditor at $4.1 billion of the total. The deal may provide a roadmap for how China will handle restructuring deals with other nations in debt distress.

Yellen’s trip comes shortly after she spent a week in China, meeting the nation’s finance ministry and discussing mutual trade restrictions and national security concerns.

Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said Yellen’s trip to India “is a reflection of a naturally developing alliance.”

“India has a great deal of tension with China — they have constant border disputes,” he said.” And India wants to develop and has developed into sort of an Indian Ocean naval power, which is also a region that China wants to develop.”
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On a recent cross-border shopping trip, four friends from Fray Bentos, Uruguay, visited the nearby Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, where they could afford to live lavishly and snap up eye-popping bargains.

Thanks to a huge disparity in the two South American countries’ currencies, Stella Ferreira and a friend treated themselves to a low-cost pampering at a hair salon, while two other friends looked for stylish but inexpensive pants.

With its economy faltering, Argentina’s peso has plunged against the U.S. dollar and its annual inflation is 115.6%, one of the highest rates in the world. In contrast, Uruguay’s economy is more stable, with low inflation and a stronger currency.

The result has been a huge flow of shoppers from Uruguay throwing an economic lifeline to struggling Argentine stores and restaurants in cities like Gualeguaychú, Concordia and Colón.

But there’s a downside for Uruguayan businesses along the border: In the provinces of Salto, Paysandú, Río Negro and Soriano, municipal authorities say 170 stores closed in the first five months of this year. Businesses still open complain they hardly have any customers.

With about $100 apiece, the four friends planned to get their hair done, buy clothing, gasoline and other goods and eat out in Gualeguaychú, in Entre Rios province, which for more than a year has been a shopping mecca for Uruguayans looking for deals. Back in Uruguay, Ferreira, 29, said that same $100 would “get your hair done and not much else.”

Uruguayan businesses just across the border are finding it hard to compete with such bargains.

“Everything is very quiet,” said Susana Guerrero, owner of a shop that sells cheese and sweets in Salto. “I lost an employee, and I did not replace him.”

Guerrero went to Gualeguaychú on an exploratory trip and now sees why Uruguayans are going there to shop. The price differences between the two countries can be staggering. A liter of sunflower oil that costs $5 in Uruguay is 50 cents in Argentina. A jar of skin-care cream that costs $10 in Uruguay can be had for a dollar across the border. And a liter of gasoline in Uruguay is close to $2. In the Argentine province of Entre Rios it is 52 cents.

“Yes, it’s cheap and we can’t fight it,” Guerrero said.

Fray Bentos storefronts, meanwhile, are covered with signs offering specials in a bid to attract customers.

“This year, sales have dropped by 40% or more,” said Alicia Nedor, who works in a pharmacy. She said the sector is seeing its worst crisis in decades.

Nedor, 70, said several small businesses have closed in Fray Bentos and the big ones have laid off staff.

Cross-border bargain hunters also hail from neighboring Chile, Paraguay and Brazil. In Uruguay, industry representatives have called the phenomenon a “border pandemic” and even the country’s president has acknowledged the problem.

“The prices of goods in Argentina are extremely cheap, and naturally its neighbors consume where it is cheaper for them,” President Luis Lacalle Pou said in early May. “This creates an imbalance. We have applied measures, but it is not enough.”

The government then introduced additional measures, including tax breaks for Uruguayan businesses and a 5-kilogram limit on what Uruguayans returning from Argentina can bring with them. But business leaders say the controls are not applied and are demanding a “zero-kilo” border policy, something that Lacalle Pou has rejected.

Lacalle Pou said the government will seek to make sure contraband doesn’t cross the border but added that “it is impossible to solve the exchange rate problem with Argentina.”

The Catholic University of Uruguay has developed a Border Price Indicator for the Argentine city of Concordia, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Gualeguaychú. According to its latest data from May, it is 59% cheaper to buy a basket of food, drinks, clothing and household products in Concordia than in the Uruguayan town of Salto.

The price gap reflects the devaluation of the Argentine peso, which has lost 47% of its value against the U.S. dollar at the official rate so far this year.

Argentina has struggled with inflation multiple times over the last century. Its current crisis started in 2018 but has worsened in the past year and a half, said María Castiglioni, director of C&T Asesores Económicos. The inflation problem arose from several factors, she said, including government overspending and problems in monetary policy.

The country doesn’t have funds to solve its overspending because it has lost access to the international debt market after multiple defaults on its loans. The loss of access means other countries do not feel confident lending money to Argentina.

As this debt crisis arose, the government turned to the country’s central bank for assistance. In an effort to sustain the economy, the central bank hasn’t stopped printing pesos, which has led to the devaluing of the peso. The increase in the flow of pesos also led to ballooning inflation that Argentinians experience every day.

On holidays and weekends, long lines of cars wait to cross the General San Martín International Bridge that crosses the Uruguay River and joins Argentina’s Gualeguaychú with Fray Bentos in Uruguay.

Between June 30 and July 4, which included the first days of the southern winter vacation for Uruguayans, more than 100,000 people left Uruguay for Argentina, most of them through the three border crossings in Entre Ríos. The majority were Uruguayans, although there were other nationalities. Uruguay has a population of about 3.4 million people.

Claudio Gatt, who owns the hair salon Ferreira and her friends went to, said that the flow of Uruguayans into Argentina has been like oxygen.

“If they were not here, sales would drop by a minimum of 50%,” he said.

Signs reading “dollars accepted” hang in store windows in Gualeguaychú and its main streets are filled with visitors from different parts of Uruguay. Half of the purchases of medicines and cleaning supplies in the city are by Uruguayans, according to a local business chamber.

For Alejandro Ramos, a 49-year-old Argentine teacher who lives in Gualeguaychú, the problem is not the Uruguayans, because “they come and buy legally.”

The problem “is us,” he said. “We first have to realize that we are an economic disaster in this country.”
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The chief executives of Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc are planning to visit Washington next week to discuss China policy, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The executives plan to hold meetings with U.S. officials to talk about market conditions, export controls and other matters affecting their businesses, one of the sources said. It was not immediately clear whom the executives would meet.

Intel and Qualcomm declined to comment, and officials at the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

The sources said other semiconductor CEOs may also be in Washington next week. The sources declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.  

U.S. officials are considering tightening export rules affecting high-performance computing chips and shipments to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, sources told Reuters in June. The rules would respectively affect Intel, which is preparing a new artificial intelligence chip that could be shipped to China, and Qualcomm, which has a license to sell chips to Huawei.

The Biden administration last October issued a sweeping set of rules designed to freeze China’s semiconductor industry in place while the U.S. pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its own chip industry.

The possible rule tightening would hit Nvidia particularly hard. The company’s strong position in the AI chip market helped boost its worth to $1 trillion earlier this year.

The chip industry has been warmly received in Washington in recent years as lawmakers and the White House work to shift more production to the U.S. and its allies, and away from China. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon have met often with government officials.

Next week’s meetings, which one of the sources said could include joint sessions between executives and U.S. officials, come as Nvidia Corp NVDA.O and other chip companies fear a permanent loss of sales for an industry with large amounts of business in China while tensions escalate between Washington and Beijing.

One of the sources familiar with the matter said the executives’ goals for the meetings would be to ensure that government officials understand the possible impact of any further tightening of rules around what chips can be sold to China.

Many U.S. chip firms get more than one-fifth of their revenue from China, and industry executives have argued that reducing those sales would cut into profits that they reinvest into research and development.
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Two U.S. senators are pursuing a legislative plan to track U.S. investments in China, as the White House works to complete long-awaited action that would also restrict investment in certain, highly targeted sectors.  

The Outbound Investment Transparency Act, filed late on Thursday as an amendment to a defense bill, is the latest bipartisan legislation introduced by Democratic Senator Bob Casey and Republican John Cornyn aimed at tackling the risks of U.S. investment going to foreign adversaries like China.

Unlike an unsuccessful version the senators introduced in 2021, the latest measure requires notification of some outbound investments, rather than review or prohibition of certain deals, and targets fewer industry sectors.  

“As a matter of national and economic security, we need greater insight into which of our nation’s critical technological capabilities have been moved overseas and at what scale,” Casey said in a statement.  

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is finalizing an executive order that would also restrict certain investment in sectors including advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.  

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the aim was to wrap up legal and other reviews of the outbound investment order by Labor Day.  

The White House had no comment.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Sunday, at the end of a four-day trip to China, that she had spoken with her Chinese counterparts about the proposed order and said that any investment curbs would be “highly targeted, and clearly directed, narrowly at a few sectors where we have specific national security concerns.”

She said the order would enacted in a transparent way, through a rule-making process that would allow public input.  

Reuters reported in February that the proposed order was likely to track restrictions on artificial intelligence chips, chipmaking tools and supercomputers, among other technologies, imposed on exports to China in October. The order, which has been repeatedly postponed, was expected to also require notice for a broad swath of transactions.  

The senators’ proposed legislation was filed as an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of the NDAA. The chances of it becoming law were uncertain after Republicans added a series of culturally conservative amendments.

Debate in the Senate on its version of the must-pass bill is set to begin on Tuesday. The two houses of Congress must come to an agreement on a final version before it could go to President Joe Biden to approve or veto.
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U.S. lawmakers Thursday charged the Chinese Communist Party is using coercive economic practices to achieve worldwide dominance over the United States.

The accusations came at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party days after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the nations’ economic relationship.

Yellen said that while the United States was taking targeted national security actions, “a decoupling of the world’s two largest economies would be disastrous for interests for both countries and destabilizing for the world, and it would be virtually impossible to undertake. We want a dynamic and healthy global economy that is open, free and fair.”

Diplomatic relations between the two countries have been tense since the U.S. downed a Chinese spy balloon earlier this year. Witnesses told the House panel Thursday U.S. companies are facing increasing threats operating inside China.

“There’s no such thing as a private company in China, a raft of legislation like the updated counterespionage law, the data security law, the anti-foreign sanctions law has codified what was always true. China reserves the right to swipe any data, to seize any assets and take IP that it wishes,” committee Chairman Mike Gallagher said.

According to committee members, China’s restrictive environment is resulting in a so-called “brain-drain” of its own business people, turning China into the top country in the world for the departure of wealthy individuals, fleeing what they fear is the Communist Party’s ability to arbitrarily seize assets.

Witnesses testified the environment in China is becoming increasingly restrictive for American companies and individuals.

“In the last few months, PRC authorities are now charging any domestic or foreign businessperson with espionage simply for providing any services using PRC information to grant or give to third-country-based customers,” Piper Lounsbury, chief research and development officer at Strategy Risks, a risk management firm for companies doing business in China, said.

“The crackdown on consulting businesses, the enhanced data, secrecy laws and the flow of PRC information just highlight the negative symmetry that we have with China. This means that even companies now can’t even do due diligence in advance of any sort of business transaction,” Lounsbury, said.

The Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry pushed back against criticism of its business practices Monday in response to a U.S. State Department travel advisory issued this month warning Americans citizens of the “risk of wrongful detention.”

“China is a country under the rule of law. The decision of relevant departments to carry out security review of foreign companies according to law is based on laws and facts. China welcomes citizens and enterprises from all over the world to visit China and do business in China, and protects their safety and legitimate rights and interests in China, including freedom of exit and entry,” said Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the ministry.

Witnesses, though, told the committee told lawmakers that American businesses face a restrictive environment led from the top down by President Xi Jinping, potential intellectual property theft and the constant threat of seized assets.

“The issue is how much do I need to lose to have access to the market, so it’s a balancing act,” said Desmond Shum, a businessman whose ex-wife, Whitney Duan, was arrested by the Chinese. Shum, the author of Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption and Vengeance in Today’s China, told U.S. news program 60 Minutes that he and his then-wife participated in corrupt business practices in China.

In its latest report to Congress in 2022, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, set up by Congress in 2000 to monitor and report on the national security implications of the U.S.-China economic relationship, as well as make recommendations, said U.S. businesses and investors are reevaluating their reengagement in China.

“China has subverted the global trade system and moved further from the spirit and letter of its obligations under its WTO accession protocol,” the report said. “China’s subsidies, overcapacity, intellectual property theft, and protectionist nonmarket policies exacerbate distortions to the global economy. These practices have harmed workers, producers, and innovators in the United States and other market-based countries.”

The commission went on to say the United States’ ability to overcome harmful trade practices was undermined by the lack of a coherent strategy.
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Leaders of a Hollywood actors union voted Thursday to join screenwriters in the first joint strike in more than six decades, shutting down production across the entertainment industry after talks for a new contract with studios and streaming services broke down.

It’s the first time two major Hollywood unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the actors’ guild president.

In an impassioned speech as the strike, which begins at midnight, was announced, actors’ union president Fran Drescher, former star of “The Nanny,” chastised industry executives.

“Employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run,” Drescher said. “It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.”

Hours earlier, a three-year contract had expired, and talks broke off between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers representing employers including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others.

Outside Netflix’s Hollywood offices, picketing screenwriters chanted “Pay Your Actors!” immediately after the strike was declared. Actors will begin picketing alongside writers outside studio headquarters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

“It looks like it’s time to take down the MASKS. And pick up the SIGNS,” Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis said in an Instagram post with a photo of the tragic and comic masks that represent acting.

The premiere of Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” in London was moved up an hour so that the cast could walk the red carpet before the SAG board’s announcement. Stars including Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon left the event once the strike was announced.

The strike — the first for film and television actors since 1980 — casts a shadow over the upcoming 75th Emmy Awards, whose nominations were announced a day earlier. Union rules prevent actors from doing any interviews or promotions around the awards, and they may not appear at the ceremony.

The strike rules also prevent actors from making personal appearances or promoting their work on podcasts or at premieres. And they are barred from doing any production work, including auditions, readings, rehearsals or voiceovers, along with actual shooting.

While international shoots technically can continue, the stoppage among U.S.-based writers and performers is likely to have a drag on those, too.

Disney chief Bob Iger warned the strike would have a “very damaging effect on the whole industry.”

“This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption,” Iger said on CNBC. “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic.”

A nearly two-week extension of the actors union contract and negotiations only heightened the hostility between the two groups. Drescher said the extension made us “feel like we’d been duped, like maybe it was just to let studios promote their summer movies for another 12 days.”

Before the talks began June 7, the 65,000 actors who cast ballots voted overwhelmingly for union leaders to send them into a strike, as the Writers Guild of America did when their deal expired more than two months ago.

When the initial deadline approached in late June, more than 1,000 members of the union, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Bob Odenkirk, added their names to a letter signaling to leaders their willingness to strike.

While famous names predominate, the strike also includes tens of thousands of little-known actors who scramble for small parts at sometimes meager pay. The union says modest-but-essential income streams, including long-term residuals for shows they appear in, have dried up.

Stakes in the negotiations included that kind of pay, which actors say has been undercut by inflation and the streaming ecosystem, benefits, the growing tendency to make performers create video auditions at their own expense, and the threat of unregulated use of artificial intelligence.

“At a moment when streaming and AI and digital was so prevalent, it has disemboweled the industry that we once knew,” Drescher said, drawing applause from her fellow union leaders. “When I did ‘The Nanny’ everybody was part of the gravy train. Now it’s a vacuum.”

The AMPTP said it presented a generous deal that included the biggest bump in minimum pay in 35 years, higher caps on pension and health contributions, and “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses.”

“A strike is certainly not the outcome we hoped for as studios cannot operate without the performers that bring our TV shows and films to life,” the group said in a statement. “The Union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.”

SAG-AFTRA represents more than 160,000 screen actors, broadcast journalists, announcers, hosts and stunt performers. The walkout affects only the union’s actors from television and film productions, who voted overwhelmingly to authorize their leaders to call a strike before talks began on June 7. Broadway actors said in a statement that they stand “in solidarity” with SAG-AFTRA workers.

The 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since their own talks collapsed and their contract expired on May 2. The stoppage has showed no signs of a solution, with no negotiations even planned.

That strike brought the immediate shutdown of late-night talk shows and “Saturday Night Live,” and several scripted shows, including “Stranger Things” on Netflix,” “Hacks” on Max, and “Family Guy” on Fox, which have either had their writers’ rooms or their production paused. Many more are sure to follow them now that performers have been pulled too.
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