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      The Markets Cheer Trump’s Treasury Pick, Scott Bessent

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      Investors seemed to signal their approval for Scott Bessent as a safe choice to implement the president-elect’s economic agenda.Stocks and bonds are gaining on Monday, as investors seem to cheer the pick of Scott Bessent to run the Treasury Department.Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesA steady hand Stocks and bonds are rising on Monday, and the dollar is down. On the first trading day since Donald Trump chose the billionaire financier Scott Bessent as his pick for Treasury secretary, investors seem to be signaling they like the choice.The hedge fund mogul is seen as a steady hand to enact the president-elect’s economic vision — and, just as important, oversee the $28 trillion Treasuries market. “Investors prefer orthodoxy, predictability, and coherence from economic policy; there were fears that some of the candidates may not possess those attributes. Bessent does,” Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a research note on Monday.The Key Square Group founder overcame serious opposition from some in Trump’s inner circle. Elon Musk derided Bessent as a “business-as-usual choice” and threw his weight behind Howard Lutnick, the C.E.O. of Cantor Fitzgerald. When Trump tapped Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department instead, Bessent was left to fight it out against the likes of Mark Rowan, the boss of Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant.Bessent won a “knife fight” to get the nod. On Wall Street, a document was circulated suggesting that his Key Square hedge fund had underperformed the booming markets. Bessent’s ascent is notable in that he doesn’t appear to have been on Trump’s radar during his first administration.His background as a former Democratic donor who worked with George Soros, a villain for the right, has also been scrutinized. (Interesting fact: Bessent furnished the progressive billionaire financier with key data that prompted Soros to make one of his most famous trades: shorting the British pound.) Some Trump backers, including Palmer Luckey, the defense tech entrepreneur, worried about Bessent’s commitment to the president-elect’s America-first agenda.Investors appear to have fewer qualms. Bessent gets high marks as a fiscal conservative and a champion of growth — at Key Square, he told clients that Trumponomics would usher in an “economic lollapalooza” — through deregulation and lower taxes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Washington Curtails Intel’s Chip Grant After Company Stumbles

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      The Biden administration is reducing its award to the chip maker, partly to account for a multibillion-dollar military contract.The Biden administration plans to reduce Intel’s preliminary $8.5 billion federal CHIPS grant, a move that follows the California-based company’s investment delays and broader business struggles.Intel, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, will see its funding drop to less than $8 billion from the $8.5 billion that was announced earlier this year, four people familiar with the grant said. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because the final contract had not yet been signed. The change in terms takes into account a $3 billion contract that Intel has been offered to produce chips for the U.S. military, two of these people said.The government’s decision to reduce the size of the grant follows Intel’s move to delay some of its planned investments in chip facilities in Ohio. The company now plans to finish that project by the end of the decade instead of 2025. The chip maker has been under pressure to reduce costs after posting its biggest quarterly loss in the company’s 56-year history.The move by the Biden administration also takes into account Intel’s technology road map and customer demand. Intel has been working to improve its technological capacity to catch up to rivals like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, but it has struggled to convince customers that it can match TSMC’s technology.Intel’s troubles have been a blow to the Biden administration’s plans to rev up domestic chip manufacturing. In March, President Biden traveled to Arizona to announce Intel’s multibillion-dollar award and said the company’s manufacturing investments would transform the semiconductor industry. Intel’s investment was at the forefront of the administration’s ambition to return chip manufacturing to the United States from Asia. The CHIPS Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2022, provided $39 billion in funding to subsidize the construction of facilities to help the United States reduce its reliance on foreign production of the tiny, critical electronics that power everything from iPads to dishwashers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Season 1, Episode 2 Recap: The Agony

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      Valya has shown that she is clearly willing to sacrifice whatever, and whomever, it takes to accomplish her goal. Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Two Wolves’Desmond Hart is an anomaly. He is alive after a sandworm attack that should have left him in the belly of the beast. He knows of the Sisterhood’s secret plan to play puppet master with the universe’s rulers as their marionettes. He can burn people to death using only his mind, apparently from light years away. He can resist the Voice, with which Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen has subdued even other powerful members of her own Sisterhood.He has no compunction about consigning a child to an agonizing death, or about torturing that child’s father for displaying insolence toward the emperor he serves. He’s a scary dude.He also has a point.There’s no question where “Dune: Prophecy” wants your sympathies to lie regarding this guy; burning a little boy to death won’t win you many fans. However, in its second episode, the show reveals that Mother Valya is playing a game in which, up until recently, she was the only real player on the field. By installing her Truthsayers throughout the Imperium, she has managed to manipulate not only the emperor and his aristocratic frenemy, Duke Richese, but also the rebel forces responsible for taking down spice harvesters on Arrakis and infiltrating the imperial palace. When the rebel cell has outgrown its usefulness, she has no problem ordering its exposure and destruction. It’s all for the greater good, after all.The same is true of the orders she gives back at the Sisterhood’s home base. To her sister Tula’s dismay, Valya orders that Tula’s star pupil, Lila (Chloe Lea), undergo “the Agony.” This portentously named process, a version of which is undergone by Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, in the “Dune” films, involves ingesting a poison with no antidote. With proper command of the body on a cellular level, an acolyte can break the poison down, unlocking her “genetic memory” — the collected knowledge and wisdom of all her maternal forebears — and becoming a Reverend Mother in the process.Why Lila? A powerful empath, she is secretly the great-great-granddaughter of Mother Raquella, the Sisterhood’s founder and the first woman to (involuntarily) undergo this process. If Lila is able to contact Raquella within her own mind, Valya believes that they can learn more about their founder’s prophecy concerning “the Reckoning” and “the Burning Truth.”But training for the Agony usually takes many years, and this is a rush job, precipitated by the coming of Desmond Hart and the monkey wrench he has thrown into the Sisterhood’s plans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Uruguay’s Center Left Reclaims Power in Presidential Election

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      After a campaign notable for the amiable tone from both sides, Yamandú Orsi was named the winner.MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — A onetime mayor and history teacher defeated the candidate of the conservative coalition that has governed Uruguay for the past five years to win his country’s presidency on Sunday.Even as ballots in the closely contested runoff election were still being counted, Álvaro Delgado, the current president’s chief of staff, conceded defeat to his challenger, Yamandú Orsi.“With sadness, but without guilt, we can congratulate the winner,” Mr. Delgado said.Mr. Orsi’s center-left party, the Broad Front, released a statement saying that “joy will return” and announcing him as the winner.Election officials said that with just over half the ballots counted, Mr. Orsi had secured 784,523 votes, and Mr. Delgado 771,434.Mr. Delgado’s concession signaled an end to the short stint of the right-leaning government in Uruguay that in 2020, when President Luis Lacalle Pou took office, ended 15 years of government by the Broad Front. During that period, the Broad Front oversaw the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and the sale of marijuana.“I called Yamandú Orsi to congratulate him as president-elect of our country,” Mr. Lacalle Pou said in a statement, adding that he would “put myself at his service and begin the transition as soon as I deem it appropriate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Official Unofficial Record

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      On This Week’s Episode:How do you count almost 12 million votes if you’re not the government?This is the extraordinary story of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who created the only verifiable public record of votes in their presidential election.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNew York Times Audio is home to the “This American Life” archive. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      Trump Cabinet: Inside the Many Ideologies of His Nominees

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      One faction of prospective nominees appears focused on revenge, another on calming markets and a third on relentlessly — perhaps hopelessly — cutting people and budgets.President-elect Donald J. Trump’s final flurry of cabinet picks and other appointments rounded out what his aides described as a unified, loyal, MAGA-driven administration. But scratch the surface and there are at least three distinct factions and a range of ideologies, barely suppressed to get through the rigors of the confirmation process.There is a revenge team, led by prospective nominees with instructions to rip apart the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, hunting down the so-called deep state and anyone who participated in the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.There is a calm-the-markets team, which Mr. Trump hopes will be led by Scott Bessent, the Wall Street billionaire who Mr. Trump chose for Treasury secretary. Mr. Bessent can recite the MAGA lines about deregulation and lower taxes but would likely try to make sure Mr. Trump’s most extreme solutions, like inflation-inducing tariffs on foreign goods, do not end the post-election stock market surge.And then there is a government shrinkage team, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose goals are wildly ambitious, to put it mildly. They want to carve what Mr. Musk says will be “at least” $2 trillion from the annual federal budget, a figure that exceeds the annual cost of salaries for every federal employee. (For the record, the total federal budget in the 2024 fiscal year was $6.75 trillion.)How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.Diversity of ideology and opinion is usually seen as a strength, not a defect, of presidential cabinets. But if there is a surprise about Mr. Trump’s choices in recent days, it is the range of experiences and worldviews that in some cases lie just beneath a veneer of recently declared Make America Great Again loyalty — and loyalty to Mr. Trump himself. It is hard to imagine a few of his picks sitting comfortably at a Trump rally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NYT Crossword Answers for Nov. 25, 2024

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      Dena R. Witkes makes her Crossword debut.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — It’s easier to solve a crossword puzzle than it is to construct one, and the easiest puzzles can actually be the hardest to construct. So it is precisely because today’s solve was such a breeze that I want to applaud its constructor, Dena R. Witkes. Not only is this a thoroughly enjoyable Monday puzzle, it’s also Ms. Witkes’s New York Times Crossword debut. What an auspicious start to a career in crosswords, insofar as there is such a thing.Today’s theme has been influenced, you might say, by a certain subject that all of us feed on. I trust the solve will make you content.Today’s ThemeIn addition to hinting at the theme itself, a puzzle’s revealer — here, at 59-Across — will tell you which clues are part of it: [Modern networking aid, as suggested by the starts of the answers to the starred clues]. We find these starred clues at 17-, 27- and 44-Across.17A. A [Corporate investor] is a SHAREHOLDER.27A. If something is [Difficult to wrangle, per an idiom], you might say it’s LIKE HERDING CATS.44A. FOLLOW YOUR BLISS is good [Advice to someone seeking happiness].The “starts” of these entries are their first words or compounds: SHARE, LIKE, FOLLOW. The networking aid that uses these terms is SOCIAL MEDIA.Did you FOLLOW all of that? SHARE any thoughts you have about the theme in the comments section — I’d LIKE to hear them.Tricky Clues40A. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by verbs’ past participles masquerading as adjectives (and vice versa). You can’t know whether “bothered” in the clue [Really bothered] functions as a verb or an adjective, so your best bet is to wait for crossings to reveal it to you. It’s a verb, in this case, and the answer is ATE AT.58A. In crosswords, [Miss Piggy’s pronoun] is generally neither she nor her. Rather, it’s a French term that she uses to refer coyly to herself: MOI.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Conducts Widespread Strikes Near Beirut

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      As negotiators inch toward a cease-fire deal, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has intensified.The Israeli military late on Sunday conducted a heavy barrage of airstrikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, with fighter jets racing across the skies above the Lebanese capital and deafening explosions ringing out for miles.Lebanon’s state-run news agency described the bombardment as a “ring of fire,” with thick, black plumes of smoke seen rising above the city’s skyline.The airstrikes followed a series of sweeping evacuation warnings on Sunday by the Israeli military for the area, known as the Dahiya — more warnings than in any other day this month. They also came as Hezbollah fired about 250 projectiles into Israel on Sunday, one of the group’s largest aerial attacks over the past year.Analysts said that Israel’s ramped up attacks in recent days were intended to pressure Hezbollah into accepting a cease-fire on favorable terms. Hezbollah, however, has shown few signs of backing down, and both sides have pledged to keep up their attacks while negotiations are taking place.There were no immediate reports of casualties from Israel’s strikes late on Sunday. The Dahiya, once a bustling cluster of neighborhoods that are home to hundreds of thousands of people, has been almost entirely emptied in recent weeks because of intense airstrikes.The Israeli military said in a statement late on Sunday that it had struck 12 “command centers” in the Dahiya that it described as belonging to Hezbollah.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More