President Donald Trump signed an agreement with visiting Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to boost access to critical minerals and rare earths, as the US looks to reduce reliance on Chinese supplies.

“In about a year from now, we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them,” Trump said Monday at the White House during a meeting between the two leaders.

Albanese said the deal represented an $8.5 billion “pipeline that we have ready to go.” He hailed the minerals and rare earths pact as taking the nations’ economic and defence cooperation “to the next level.” (Bloomberg – Continue Reading)

US President Donald Trump on Monday threatened China on trade tariffs, saying that he would impose 155 percent levies on China if Xi Jinping signed a fair deal with Washington.

The statement came as Trump signed a critical minerals agreement with the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House.

"I think China’s been very respectful of us. They’re paying tremendous amounts of money to us in the form of tariffs. As you know, they’re paying 55% — that's a lot of money... China’s paying 55% and a potential 155% come November 1st unless we make a deal," Trump said before his bilateral talks with Albanese. (Hindustan Times – Continue Reading)

An outage involving Amazon Web Services, the cloud service provider that supports much of the internet, took many websites and apps offline for over two hours on Monday, in the latest disruption that showed the fragility of global technology infrastructure.

The outage, which affected websites and apps for some major banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, started shortly after 3 a.m. Eastern. Amazon said in an update at 5:27 a.m. that most websites and apps relying on its services were working normally again, and that it continued “to work through a backlog of queued requests.” (NY Times – Continue Reading)

Ukraine shouldn’t have to give up territory as part of a peace deal with Russia, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump pushed Kyiv to give up land to end the war.

“If we just give away the territories, then this gives a message to everybody that you can just use force against your neighbors and get what you want,” Kallas told journalists in Luxembourg after a meeting of foreign ministers. “I think this is very dangerous. That’s why we have the international law in place, [so] that nobody does that.” (POLITICO – Continue Reading)

Some Wall Street analysts now believe the Federal Reserve will pull the plug on its long-running effort to shrink its balance sheet at the end of the month.

These central bank watchers believe the ground has shifted for quantitative tightening, or QT, due to mounting money market friction, which could threaten the Fed’s control over the interest rate target it uses to achieve its inflation and employment goals.

Stopping the withdrawal of liquidity by QT at the October 28-29 Federal Open Market Committee meeting would help ensure the technical aspects of monetary policy continue to run well, these analysts reckon. (Investing – Continue Reading)