Joseph Belbruno Blog

  EU leaders will loan 90 billion euros to Ukraine, but fail to agree to use frozen Russian assets 0 seconds of 0 seconds BRUSSELS, Dec 18 (Reuters) -  European Union  leaders decided on Friday to borrow cash to loan 90 billion euros ($105 billion) to Ukraine to fund its defence against Russia for the next two years rather than use  frozen Russian assets,  sidestepping divisions over an unprecedented plan to finance Kyiv with Russian sovereign cash. The leaders also gave the European Commission a mandate to keep working on a so-called reparations loan based on Russian immobilised assets but that option proved unworkable for now, above all due to resistance from Belgium, where the bulk of the assets is held. Get a look at the day ahead in European and global markets with the Morning Bid Europe newsletter. Sign up  here. "Today we approved a decision to provide 90 billion euros to Ukraine," EU summit chairman Antonio Costa told a press conference early on Fri...

  China and Russia Bolster Their ‘No Limits’ Alliance By Seth G. Jones China and Russia are deepening their cooperation and taking aggressive actions with profound consequences for the U.S. On Dec. 9, Chinese and Russian bombers and other aircraft flew near Japan and South Korea, forcing the U.S. and Japan to scramble fighter aircraft and bombers. The incident is the most recent example of an emboldened China-Russia axis. Beijing and Moscow view America as their primary enemy and aim to expand their power at the expense of the U.S. and its allies. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are deeply revisionist and want to re-establish some semblance of the historical Chinese and Russian empires. They have repeatedly noted that their partnership has “no limits” and have met in person more than 40 times. The arms trade is among many areas of stepped-up cooperation. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, China has increased exports to Russia of “highpriority items,” a se...

  The Fed Quietly Announces It’s No Longer Steering the Ship As President Trump’s beauty pageant to select a new Federal Reserve chief grinds on, spare a thought for the booby prize Jerome Powell has left for his successor. Last week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting dragged the central bank back into quantitative easing. Most attention after the meeting focused on Mr. Powell’s interest-rate cut, the sixth since September 2024, totaling 1.75 percentage points. But the Fed also announced (via a dry “implementation note”) that it will buy roughly $40 billion in shortterm Treasury bills over the next month, and an indeterminate (but probably similar) monthly amount until at least April. There’s reason to believe that if the Fed has started expanding its balance sheet again, it will continue indefinitely. The Fed thinks it is merely finetuning a financial system it rewired after the 2008 financial panic. The core issue is the liability side of the  central bank’s balance she...

  Navigated Menu Back Financial Times Financial Times Europe 19 Dec 2025 Buttons.Search Options EU’s eco­nomic secur­ity blanket is patchy and thin Alan Beat­tie alan.beat­tie@ft.com Settings Print Share Listen It has been two years since the European Com­mis­sion pub­lished an eco­nomic secur­ity strategy long on abstract verbs (“pro­mote, pro­tect, part­ner”) and short on spe­cific actions. It was clearly time for an update. Two weeks ago said com­mu­nic­a­tion duly arrived with a clarion call for “an integ­rated, whole-of-gov­ern­ment and busi­ness approach, improved gov­ernance, as well as even closer co-oper­a­tion with like-minded part­ners and, where appro­pri­ate, joint action”. This declar­a­tion of intent will no doubt have Xi Jin­ping bark­ing down the phone to his min­ions that they had bet­ter up their game. Since the strategy was ori­gin­ally pub­lished in 2023, the dif­fi­culty of deal­ing with China’s aggress­ive trade tac­tics has been com­poun­ded by ran­dom lash­...