Tag: Jamie

Categories
Entertainment

Jamie Spears Stays A part of Britney Spears’ Conservatorship

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - FEBRUARY 11: Singer Britney Spears walks the red carpet at the 2017 Pre-GRAMMY Gala and Salute to Industry Icons Honoring Debra Lee at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 11, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Scott Dudelson / Getty Images)

The battle for Britney Spears’ conservatories continues. According to diversity, new court documents filed Wednesday showed that LA judge Brenda Penny has denied the 39-year-old singer’s request to remove her father, Jamie Spears, as her co-restorer. Britney’s attorney Samuel Ingham III filed the application on her behalf back in November 2020. At that time, Samuel said on behalf of Britney that she was “afraid of her father” and would not perform again with his involvement. Despite hearing Britney’s explosive testimony last week, the judge ruled that Jamie would keep his career charge.

Britney has been under the direction of her father Jamie since 2008, with Jodi Montgomery, a licensed restorer, stepping in as co-restorer in 2019. During her June 23 trial, Britney shared harrowing details of the abuse she suffered from the Conservatory, including being forced to tour and take medication, and not being able to marry or have children. “It’s not okay to force myself to do something I don’t want to … I really believe that these conservatories are abusive. I don’t feel like I can live a full life, “said Britney. “It is my wish and my dream that this will come to an end.”

Both Jodi and Jamie have since responded to Britney’s shocking testimony with testimony from their respective attorneys, essentially shifting the blame on one another. In addition to requesting an investigation, Jamie claims Jodi was responsible for Britney’s “troubles and suffering”. “Ms. Spears informed the court on June 23 that she was opposed to a restoration and disclosed her ongoing disputes with Ms. Montgomery over her medical treatment and other personal care issues,” said Jamie’s attorney Vivian Lee Thoreen. “These statements contradict the idea that Ms. Spears would seek to make Ms. Montgomery her permanent curator of the person.”

Meanwhile, Jodi says she was a “tireless advocate” for Britney and that Jamie, as the controller of her estate, was responsible for approving all expenses. “Practically speaking, since everything costs money, no expenses can be made without Mr. Spears and Mr. Spears’ approval,” said Jodi’s statement. “Ms. Montgomery has worked on Britney’s behalf for any expenses Britney has requested and any expenses recommended by Britney’s medical team.”

Categories
Politics

Jamie Dimon is skeptical of Biden’s minimal international company tax price

Jamie Dimon is skeptical of Biden's minimum global corporate tax rate

JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon testifies during a US House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 19, 2012, about JPMorgan Chase’s trading loss.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Citigroup chief Jane Fraser on Thursday expressed concerns over President Joe Biden’s effort to hike the amount of taxes businesses pay on foreign profits and a concurrent goal to set a global minimum corporate tax rate.

Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Dimon argued that a plan to raise the U.S. tax rate on foreign profits to 21% could, over time, push firms to move business overseas. Dimon thinks that shift could accelerate if allies renege on their promises to impose a similar global minimum tax rate.

“America would be the only country, I think, in the world that would have what we call a global tax rate,” he said, referring to the proposed 21% rate on U.S. companies’ foreign income.

“There’s no question in my mind that, at the margin … that will drive capital and, eventually, brains and R&D and investment overseas,” he said. “And that would be a mistake for America.”

Fraser, Citigroup’s new CEO, concurred, adding that “it’s very hard to get other countries to sign on to an equivalent program despite some optimism.”

“I think that will be extremely difficult,” she continued. “And, therefore, it could put the U.S. in a position of being less competitive around the world.”

The commentary from two of the nation’s top bankers came as the Biden administration continued to seek international support for a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%.

CNBC Politics

Read more of CNBC’s politics coverage:

The Treasury Department, which has taken the lead in trying to persuade Germany, France and others to back the plan, contends that a universal floor on corporate tax rates would allow governments to more effectively generate tax revenue.

Neither the White House nor the Treasury Department wished to comment on the record.

The current system, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, incentives countries to offer lower effective corporate rates over time in a “race to the bottom” to lure corporations across geographies.

But Dimon and others have expressed doubts over any chance of long-term success in persuading U.S. peers to adhere to a global minimum at 15% or any other level, especially when it may be more lucrative for governments to cheat the system by offering backdoor incentives or flouting the agreement entirely.

A JPMorgan spokesperson explained that the concern is that the U.S. would adopt a relatively high tax on foreign income, at 21%, only for foreign partners to shirk their own tax promises. That scenario could put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage and encourage the offshoring of factories, profits and workers.

The Treasury Department has reiterated that the 15% proposal should be thought of as a sort-of floor and that subsequent talks could eventually push it higher. That, in theory, could work to reduce a tax disadvantage.

That the White House is keen to coax others into a global minimum tax isn’t necessarily a surprise given the amount of spending it wants to see to achieve its agenda priorities.

Its American Jobs Plan, an infrastructure-focused proposal, would funnel $2.3 trillion over a decade into traditional infrastructure as well as toward scientific innovation, pay for home health aides and the construction of 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations.

The GOP countered with its own version Thursday, a more modest $928 billion proposal with a greater emphasis on “hard” infrastructure like roads, bridges and public transit.

The White House also hopes to enact the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion piece of legislation aimed at funding for social programs like paid family leave, free early childhood education and free community college. 

Biden’s economic team says its Made In America tax plan would help cover the costs of both bills. Broadly, that tax plan seeks fortify the IRS and crack down on tax evasion, raise the amount the wealthiest households pay on capital gains, and hike the rate U.S. businesses pay on domestic profits to 28%.

President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the U.S. corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%. 

The bank CEOs appeared on Wednesday before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

One testy exchange from that hearing came between Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Dimon. Warren accused JPMorgan Chase, and the other consumer banks, of not doing enough to communicate to its customers about relaxation of certain overdraft fee rules during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dimon countered that the bank had accommodated customers who had made qualifying overdraft fee waiver requests and that the bank would not be refunding billions it collected in such fees in 2020.

Categories
Business

‘The U.S. Economic system Will Possible Increase,’ Jamie Dimon Predicts: Reside Updates

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Jeenah Moon/Reuters

The annual letter to shareholders by JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, was published early Wednesday. The letter, which is widely read on Wall Street, is not just an overview of the bank’s business but also covers Mr. Dimon’s thoughts on everything from leadership lessons to public policy prescriptions.

“The U.S. economy will likely boom.” A combination of excess savings, deficit spending, vaccinations and “euphoria around the end of the pandemic,” Mr. Dimon wrote, may create a boom that “could easily run into 2023.” That could justify high stock valuations, but not the price of U.S. debt, given the “huge supply” soon to hit the market. There is a chance that a rise in inflation would be “more than temporary,” he wrote, forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively. “Rapidly raising rates to offset an overheating economy is a typical cause of a recession,” he wrote, but he hopes for “the Goldilocks scenario” of fast growth, gently increasing inflation and a measured rise in interest rates.

“Banks are playing an increasingly smaller role in the financial system.” Mr. Dimon cited competition from an already large shadow banking system and fintech companies, as well as “Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and now Walmart.” He argued those nonbank competitors should be more strictly regulated; their growth has “partially been made possible” by avoiding banking rules, he wrote. And when it comes to tougher regulation of big banks, he wrote, “the cost to the economy of having fail-safe banks may not be worth it.”

“China’s leaders believe that America is in decline.” The United States has faced tough times before, but today, “the Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure and education — a nation torn and crippled by politics, as well as racial and income inequality — and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.”

“The solution is not as simple as walking away from fossil fuels.” Addressing climate change doesn’t mean “abandoning” companies that produce and use fossil fuels, Mr. Dimon wrote, but working with them to reduce their environmental impact. He sees “huge opportunity in sustainable and low-carbon technologies and businesses” and plans to evaluate clients’ progress according to reductions in carbon intensity — emissions per unit of output — which adjusts for factors like size.

Other notable news (and views) from the letter:

  • With more widespread remote working, JPMorgan may need only 60 seats for every 100 employees. “This will significantly reduce our need for real estate,” Mr. Dimon wrote.

  • JPMorgan spends more than $600 million a year on cybersecurity.

  • Mr. Dimon cited tax loopholes he thought the United States could do without: carried interest, tax breaks for racing cars, private jets and horse racing, and a land conservation tax break for golf courses.

This was Mr. Dimon’s longest letter yet, at 35,000 words over 66 pages. The steadily expanding letters — aside from a shorter edition last year, weeks after Mr. Dimon had emergency heart surgery — could be seen as a reflection of the range of issues top executives are now expected, or compelled, to address.

Target said its commitment added to its other moves to improve racial equity in the past year,.Credit…Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

Target will spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025, it announced on Wednesday, joining a growing list of retailers that have promised to increase their economic support of such companies in a bid to advance racial equity in the United States.

Target, which is based in Minneapolis, will add more products from companies owned by Black entrepreneurs, spend more with Black-owned marketing agencies and construction companies and introduce new resources to help Black-owned vendors navigate the process of creating products for a mass retail chain, the company said in a statement.

After last year’s protests over police brutality, a wave of American retailers, from Sephora to Macy’s, have committed to spending more money with Black-owned businesses. Many of them have joined a movement known as the 15 Percent Pledge, which supports devoting enough shelf space to Black-owned businesses to align with the African-American percentage of the national population.

Target’s announcement appears to be separate from that pledge. It said its commitment added to other racial-equity and social-justice initiatives in the past year, including efforts to improve representation among its work force.

A Samsung store in Seoul. The company’s Galaxy S21 series of  phones have sold well in the United States since their introduction in January. Credit…Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Samsung’s sales grew by an estimated 17 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, and operating profit increased by 44 percent, the company said on Wednesday. The South Korean electronics titan’s growth has been helped during the pandemic by strong demand for televisions, computer monitors and other lockdown staples.

The company released its latest flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S21 series, in January. In the United States, the devices handily outsold Samsung’s last line of premium phones in their first six weeks on the market, according to Counterpoint Research, which attributed the strong performance in part to Americans receiving stimulus payments.

Samsung’s handset business has also been buoyed of late by the U.S. campaign against Huawei, one of the company’s main rivals in smartphones. The Chinese tech giant’s device sales have plummeted because American sanctions prevent its phones from running popular Google apps and services, limiting their appeal to many buyers.

Another competitor, LG Electronics, said this week that it was getting out of the smartphone business to focus on other products.

Samsung’s first-quarter revenue was likely hurt by February’s winter storm in Texas, which caused the company to halt production for a while at its manufacturing facilities in Austin.

The company is expected to report detailed financial results later this month.

Jeff Bezos in 2019. He said in a statement on Tuesday that he applauded the Biden administration’s “focus on making bold investments in American infrastructure.”Credit…Jared Soares for The New York Times

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said on Tuesday that he supported an increase in the corporate tax rate to fund investment in U.S. infrastructure.

President Biden is pushing a plan to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure improvements, in part by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from its current rate of 21 percent.

Mr. Bezos said in a statement on Amazon’s corporate website that he applauded the administration’s “focus on making bold investments in American infrastructure.”

“We recognize this investment will require concessions from all sides — both on the specifics of what’s included as well as how it gets paid for (we’re supportive of a rise in the corporate tax rate),” Mr. Bezos said.

For years, Amazon has been a model for corporate tax avoidance, fielding criticism of its tax strategies from Democrats and former President Donald J. Trump. In 2019, Amazon had an effective tax rate of 1.2 percent, which was offset by tax rebates in 2017 and 2018, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group in Washington. In 2020, the company paid 9.4 percent in taxes on U.S. pretax profit of about $20 billion, the group said.

The company has said in the past that it “pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate.”

Companies employ varied strategies to reduce their tax liabilities. In 2017, the same federal bill that lowered the tax rate to 21 percent expanded tax breaks, including allowing the immediate expensing of capital expenditures. The goal was to lift investment, but the change also caused the number of profitable companies that paid no taxes to nearly double in 2018 from prior years.

Brandon Brown and Jeremiah Collins, students at American Diesel Training.Credit…Brian Kaiser for The New York Times

American Diesel Training, a school in Ohio that prepares people for careers as diesel mechanics, is part of a new model of work force training — one that bases pay for training programs partly on whether students get hired.

The students agree to an share about 5 percent to 9 percent of their income depending on their earnings. The monthly payments last four years. If you lose your job, the payment obligation stops.

Early results are promising, Steve Lohr reports for The New York Times, and experts say the approach makes far more economic sense than the traditional method, in which programs are paid based on how many people enroll. But there are only a relative handful of these pay-for-success programs. The challenge has been to align funding and incentives so that students, training programs and employers all benefit.

State and federal officials are now looking for new ways to improve work force development. President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, announced last week, includes billions for work force development with an emphasis on “next-generation training programs” that embrace “evidence-based approaches.”

Social Finance, a nonprofit organization founded a decade ago to develop new ways to finance results-focused social programs, is seeking, designing and supporting new programs — for-profit or nonprofit — that follow the pay-for-success model.

“There is emerging evidence that these kinds of programs are a very effective and exciting part of work force development,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “Social Finance is targeting and nurturing new programs, and it brings a financing mechanism that allows them to expand.”

A former Kmart in West Orange, N.J., is now a coronavirus vaccination center. The International Monetary Fund said successful vaccination programs have improved countries’ growth prospects.Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Major U.S. and European stock indexes hovered near record highs on Wednesday after a stream of mostly upbeat economic data and the progress on vaccinations.

U.S. stock futures were little changed on Wednesday, but the S&P 500 was set to open within half a percentage point of its record. The Stoxx Europe 600 and DAX index in Germany both fell about 0.1 percent after climbing to new highs on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund upgraded its forecast for global economic growth and said some of the world’s wealthiest countries would lead the recovery, particularly the United States, where the economy is now projected to grow by 6.4 percent this year.

The rollout of vaccines is a major reason for the rosier forecast in some countries, the I.M.F. said. President Biden said that he wanted states to make all adults eligible for vaccines by April 19, two weeks earlier than his previous deadline. In Britain, the Moderna vaccine was administered for the first time on Wednesday, making it the third vaccine available.

Still, the I.M.F. warned on Tuesday against an unequal recovery because of the uneven distribution of vaccines around the world with some lower-income countries not expected to be able to vaccinate their populations this year.

  • The yield on U.S. 10-year bonds dropped for a third straight day to 1.64 percent, the lowest in two weeks, before the Federal Reserve publishes the minutes from its mid-March meeting. Last month, policymakers released new economic projections that had the central bank’s interest rate near zero for several more years.

  • Oil price fell with futures for West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, declining 0.5 percent to $59.06 a barrel.

  • Shares in Carnival, the cruise ship operator, rose nearly 5 percent in premarket trading after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said sailings could restart “hopefully, by midsummer,” Bloomberg reported. Carnival shares have already jumped 10 percent since the C.D.C. issued new guidance for the cruise industry on Friday.