Economy

US president defends economic policies as polls show growing angst among voters over prices.

United States President Donald Trump has defended his administration’s record on lowering prices as he faces growing discontent from Americans over the cost of living.

In a speech to McDonald’s franchise owners and suppliers on Monday, Trump claimed credit for bringing inflation back to “normal” levels while pledging to bring price growth lower still.

“We have it down to a low level, but we’re going to get it a little bit lower,” Trump said.

“We want perfection.”

Returning to his regular talking point that Democrats had mismanaged the economy, the Republican president blamed cost pressures on former US President Joe Biden and insisted Americans were “so damn lucky” he won the 2024 election.

“Nobody has done what we’ve done in terms of pricing. We took over a mess,” Trump said.

Trump, whose 2024 presidential campaign focused heavily on the cost of living, has struggled to win over Americans with his protectionist economic message amid persistent affordability concerns.

In an NBC News poll released this month, 66 percent of respondents said Trump had fallen short of their expectations on affordability, while 63 percent answered the same for the economy in general.

Voter angst over prices has been widely identified as a key reason Republicans suffered a shellacking in off-year elections held early this month in multiple states, including New Jersey and Virginia.

Despite repeatedly playing down the effects of his tariffs on prices, Trump on Friday signed an executive order lowering duties on 200 food products, including beef, bananas, coffee and orange juice.

Trump has also floated tariff-funded $2,000 rebate cheques and the introduction of 50-year mortgages as part of a push to address affordability concerns.

While inflation has markedly declined since hitting a four-decade high of 9.1 percent under Biden, it remains significantly above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

The inflation rate rose to 3 percent in October, the first time it hit the 3 percent mark since January, although many analysts had expected a higher figure due to Trump’s trade salvoes.

Trump, who is well known for his love of McDonald’s, spent a considerable portion of Monday’s speech praising the fast-food chain and casting the company as emblematic of his economic agenda.

“Together we are fighting for an economy where everybody can win, from the cashier starting her first job to a franchisee opening their first location to the young family in a drive-through line,” he said.

Trump also offered “special thanks” to the fast-food giant for rolling out more affordable menu options, including the reintroduction of extra value meals, which were phased out in 2018 and are priced at $5 or $8.

“We’re getting prices down for this country, and there’s no better leader or advocate than McDonald’s,” he said.

Cook’s lawyer says the criminal referrals against her ‘fail on even the most cursory look at the facts’.

United States Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s lawyer has offered the first detailed defence of mortgage applications that gave rise to President Donald Trump’s move to fire her, saying apparent discrepancies in loan documents were either accurate at the time or an “inadvertent notation” that couldn’t constitute fraud given other disclosures to her lenders.

Cook has denied wrongdoing, but until Monday, neither she nor her legal team had responded in any detail to the fraud accusations first made in August by Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director William Pulte.

She has challenged her removal in court, and the US Supreme Court has for now blocked Trump’s firing attempt and will hear arguments in the case in January.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said the department “does not comment on current or prospective litigation, including matters that may be an investigation”.

In a letter to US Attorney General Pam Bondi seen by the Reuters news agency, Cook’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said the criminal referrals Pulte made against her “fail on even the most cursory look at the facts”.

The two separate criminal referrals Pulte made fail to establish any evidence that Cook intentionally deceived her lenders when she obtained mortgage loans for three properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts, the letter said.

Lowell also accused Pulte of selectively targeting Trump’s political enemies while ignoring similar allegations against Republican officials, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Lowell said other recent conduct by Pulte “undercut his criminal referrals concerning Governor Cook”. That behaviour includes the recent dismissal of the FHFA’s acting inspector general and several internal watchdogs at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage-finance giants under FHFA control.

The letter also cited a recent article by Reuters that said the White House ousted FHFA acting Inspector General Joe Allen right after he tried to provide key discovery material to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia who are pursuing an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

James was charged with bank fraud and lying to her lender also after Pulte made a referral to the Justice Department. She has pleaded not guilty, and she is seeking a dismissal of the case on multiple grounds, including vindictive and selective prosecution.

Cook’s case is being handled in part by Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, whom Bondi named as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud probes into public figures.

The case is still being investigated, and no criminal charges have been brought. The department is also separately investigating Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff, also at Pulte’s request.

San Francisco, United States – Just weeks ago, Brandon Praileau, a pastor from Norfolk, Virginia, was speaking to families in his community about a federally funded programme that would help them install rooftop solar units in their homes. The government funds would take care of their installation costs, and once installed, lower the burden of rising electricity costs, a pressing concern.

Then, Praileau heard the federal government had scrapped the $7bn Solar For All programme through which his project and other solar projects across the country were to be funded, leaving them stranded.

It is one of several federally funded renewable energy projects that have been scrapped or will end early, veering off the country’s planned shift to renewable energy, also making it harder to meet climate goals.

Praileau, Virginia programme director for Solar United Neighbors, had been helping roll out the project that received $156m in federal funds to support 7,500 low- and middle-income families with solar installation. Praileau say he was “mind blown” by the sudden withdrawal.

The federal government will also end the 30 percent tax credit for solar rooftop installation in homes this December. For businesses, these tax credits will only be available if they start construction of factories, malls or other businesses, for which the solar installations are meant, by June 2026.

The Department of Energy also withdrew $13bn in funding from a range of other renewable energy projects, including upgrading power grids, carbon-neutral cement production, and battery energy storage. The administration also ended several funding initiatives for wind energy.

President Trump has said, “We’re not going to be approving windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency.”

This could lead to a $114bn loss in delays or cancellation of wind energy projects, according to an April 2025 report by BloombergNEF.

In Florida, intake forms for 10,000 low- and middle-income households to enrol for federal subsidies to get solar units installed on their rooftops were ready when the $156m project was scrapped in August.

A resident of Miami-Dade County had told volunteers who were helping her fill in the forms to enrol for the grant that she was “scared to use power. I am scared to put on air conditioning”, because the steep rise in power costs in the state had put it out of reach for her.

Power costs in the state are up 60 percent for some residents since 2019, Heaven Campbell, Florida programme director of Solar United Neighbors, which was working on implementing the project, told Al Jazeera.

Other states have also seen varying power cost hikes due to hurricanes and the war in Ukraine, which made Russian natural gas more expensive.

Florida Power and Light, the utilities provider, has also currently made a case to increase rates further to raise nearly $10bn over the next four years, according to Florida’s Office of Public Counsel.

Solar United’s staff has tried to educate residents that not using power could get them disconnected, and reconnecting comes with a fee.

Early ending of the tax credit will mean “consumers are stuck at the mercy of utilities”, and their rising rates, says Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group.

‘Rain shadow impact’

With the solar rooftop tax credits set to expire in December, there has been a scramble to install, and some solar installers say they are having to turn away customers.

“We will see the rain shadow impact of this in 2026,” Del Chiaro says, referring to a sharp drop in business and jobs that the industry is steeling itself for next year.

“This is a big plunge on the solar coaster,” says Barry Cinnamon, chief executive of Cinnamon Energy Systems, a San Francisco-based solar installation company.

Ed Murray, president of the California Solar and Storage Association, told Al Jazeera he expects the elimination of tax credits to double the payback time for installation and other costs associated with the solar units to up to 12 years.

It would also lead to job losses for thousands of skilled workers in the sector, Murray said, even as the air quality is likely to worsen and the state is expected to fail to meet its climate goals.

In its announcement withdrawing from these projects, the Department of Energy notification said the projects “advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda”.

In the statement, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that, “By returning these funds to the American taxpayer, the Trump administration is affirming its commitment to advancing more affordable, reliable and secure American energy and being more responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

Critics of solar projects have said they drive up costs for households still on the power grid because solar customers pay less to utilities but still use that power when needed.

The Trump administration has, instead, supported oil and gas production through several measures, including plans to open up the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas leasing recently. It has also eased permitting for drilling on federal lands.

Rising costs

The Biden administration had funded renewable energy projects under what it called the Green New Deal, a programme to accelerate economic growth and job creation while having a positive climate impact.

But even as these projects began rolling out, power costs have risen sharply in many states, including Virginia.

A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the rise in power costs had outpaced inflation in 26 states and listed a range of factors for it, including the Ukraine war and extreme weather factors such as wildfires and hurricanes that have damaged an already ageing electric poles and grid.

For instance, prices in California have risen more than 34 percent since 2019, the study says, in part because the record-breaking wildfires forced utilities to replace and strengthen their power lines. Federal funding of $630m to strengthen grids in California was among the projects scrapped by the Department of Energy.

“A majority of the projects that were scrapped were mid-implementation,” says Ryan Schleeter, communications director of The Climate Center, a California-based think tank.

Federal incentives also meant that more than 20 percent of the cars sold in the state over the last two years had been electric vehicles (EVs). These allowed middle-income families to buy EVs, Schleeter says. With incentives having ended on September 30, “the central challenge will be how to be equitable,” he says.

Susan Stephenson, executive director of California Power and Light, which supports places of worship to have renewable energy, says several places of worship that had planned to move to solar energy or install EV charging stations are now struggling to find installers and have seen costs going up beyond their initial budget due to federal cuts.

In Virginia, Praileau says power costs came up as one of the greatest concerns in his interactions with his congregants. The state has among the most data centres in the country, and Praileau believes that could be a reason for rising costs.

Voter dissatisfaction over rising power costs has been among the top issues in the governor’s elections in the state that went to the polls on November 4. One of the promises that Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat candidate who won, had made was to reduce power costs by increasing energy production and getting data centres to pay a higher share of power costs.

Praileau hopes the solar project, the cuts to which are already being litigated, can also be revived by the new governor. In Florida, too, there is ongoing litigation on the federal funding cuts.

Several states, including California, have announced their own rollbacks on renewable energy incentives.

But with funding withdrawals hurting residents, Steve Larson, a former executive director of the California Public Utilities Commission, expects more litigation to restore programmes and mastering “techniques of delay”, for federal cuts in grants and to allow renewable energy projects to keep going.

A BRIT has become the first person to fly around the world in economy class.

Dale Charman, 44, spent £1,300 to set off from London Heathrow to return just 67 hours later, having stopped at Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and Los Angeles.

The tube driver, who posts videos on YouTube on his channel ‘Dale Charman Travels’, said he had seen videos of people online doing the same challenge, but for business and first class – not economy.

So the flight enthusiast decided to be the first to fly around the globe in economy.

Dale set off from London Heathrow at 9:35pm on August 25 and then returned to the capital – after 24,000 miles of flying – on August 28 just after 5pm.

According to Dale, he was “absolutely knackered” after his journey, which included four flight.

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He said: “I knew I’d be tired, because that’s obvious.

“What I didn’t think about was I wouldn’t be laying down for the best part of three days.

“It’s amazing how much pain you get in your knees and your hips, just being in a sitting position for so long.

“My friends and family all think I’m crazy – some people think it’s cool, my mum thinks I’m absolutely crazy.”

Over the course of nearly three days flying, Dale explained how he tried to sleep as much as possible and when he wasn’t asleep he would watch films via the in-flight entertainment screens.

After spending 12 hours on a Malaysia Airlines flight from London to Kuala Lumpur, Dale had just a five-hour layover before boarding another Malaysia Airlines flight, lasting eight hours, to Sydney in Australia.

Once in Sydney, Dale had a seven-hour layover, so had enough time to make a quick visit to the Sydney Opera House.

He then returned to the airport and boarded a 13-hour Qantas flight to Los Angeles in America.

Dale added that the flight has the best “comfort food” out of all the flights, consisting of beef and mash.

Even though Dale had another seven-hour layover in Los Angeles, this time he decided to stay in the airport as it took over an hour to get through immigration.

Then, all that was left was a 12-hour Virgin Atlantic flight back to London Heathrow, landing just after 5pm on August 28.

Dale then had a couple of days of rest, before heading back to work on August 31.

Dale said: “I just think it’s a cool thing to do. Obviously the environment doesn’t particularly like it.

“I’d never flown across the Pacific.

“I’ve been to Australia and I’ve been to the US many, many times, but I’ve never done that other bit.

“I thought it was cool to cover that, and it’s just an adventure.

“You never know when you’ll wake up tomorrow, and I thought it was just a cool thing to say I’d done.

“It’s a shame I didn’t have more time to actually visit these places properly, but I always use it as an excuse – I’ll have to do it again when I’ve got more time and more money.”

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In other aviation news, a budget airline has slashed flights from a major UK airport in a scramble to cut costs.

Plus, Jet2 is set to launch its first ever flights from a major UK airport with 29 new ‘sunshine’ routes.

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have plummeted over Japanese leader’s recent remarks on Taiwan.

Japanese shares linked to the tourism industry have nosedived following China’s warning to its citizens against travelling to Japan.

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have plummeted since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested earlier this month that Japan’s military could intervene to stop China from taking control of Taiwan.

In a sharp escalation of the dispute on Friday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised citizens to avoid travel to the East Asian country, claiming that Takaichi’s comments had increased risks to their “personal safety and lives”.

The issue continued to reverberate as Japan’s stock market reopened on Monday after the weekend break, with shares of airlines and retail outlets taking sharp falls.

Department store group Isetan Mitsukoshi fell more than 11 percent in afternoon trading, while its rival Takashimaya tumbled about 5 percent.

Japan Airlines fell about 4 percent, while Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing dipped about 5 percent. Cosmetics company Shiseido plunged about 9.5 percent.

China is Japan’s biggest source of foreign tourists, accounting for almost one-quarter of the 31.65 million arrivals in the first nine months of this year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Ryota Abe, an economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) could shrink by about 0.5 percent in the event of a total collapse in Chinese arrivals and by about 0.1-0.2 percent if arrivals decreased by about one-third.

“Even if the number of visitors decreases 30 percent because of the heightened tensions, the negative impact will be around 0.1-0.2 percent,” Abe told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s economy shrank by 0.4 percent in the three months to September, official data released on Monday showed, the first contraction in six quarters.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular news briefing on Monday that Beijing’s travel warning was inconsistent with mutually beneficial ties and that Tokyo had requested “appropriate steps” from the Chinese side.

Japan’s top official for Asia Pacific affairs, Masaaki Kanai, departed for China on Monday for talks aimed at lowering tensions between the sides, Japanese media reported.

Masaaki Kanai will meet his Chinese counterpart, Liu Jinsong, in Beijing, where he is expected to clarify that Tokyo has made no change to its security policy despite Takaichi’s comments on Taiwan, the reports said.

Japan has long viewed China’s threats to take control of Taiwan with concern due to the self-ruled island’s close proximity to Japanese territory and its location in waters that carry large volumes of trade.

China considers Taiwan part of its territory and has pledged to “reunify” the island with the Chinese mainland, by force if necessary.

Taiwan is not officially recognised by most countries but has many characteristics of a de facto independent state, including its own military and passport, and a democratically elected president and legislature.

Russian attacks killed three people in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region as President Zelenskyy visits Paris to meet President Macron.

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Federal Aviation Administration says airlines can resume normal schedules from Monday.

Flights in the United States are set to return to normal after the country’s aviation authority announced an end to restrictions introduced during the government shutdown.

Airlines will be able to return to their normal schedules from 6am Eastern Time (11:00 GMT) on Monday after the lifting of an emergency order reducing the number of flights, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement on Sunday.

The FAA ordered reductions in flights at 40 major airports during the shutdown to ensure safety amid reports of air traffic controllers exhibiting fatigue and refusing to turn up for work.

The restrictions resulted in the cancellations of thousands of flights and delays to countless more.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a bill to resume government funding and end the shutdown, bringing to an end a six-week standoff between Republicans and Democrats.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the lifting of the order reflected a “steady decline in staffing concerns.”

Staffing triggers, which refer to instances where the number of available air traffic controllers falls below safe levels, dropped from 81 on November 8 to six on Friday, eight on Saturday and just one on Sunday, according to the aviation authority.

Under the restrictions, airlines were ordered to reduce flights by 4 percent by November 7 and 6 percent by November 10.

Officials on Friday scaled back the restrictions to 3 percent, pointing to improving staffing levels following the end of the government shutdown.

In its statement on Sunday, the FAA said it was also “reviewing and assessing enforcement options” amid reports of airlines not complying with the emergency order in recent days.

Just 149 flights were cancelled on Sunday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware, well below the 3 percent cut mandated by the FAA.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s problems with fixing the high cost of living might be giving voters a feeling of deja vu.

Just like the president who came before him, Trump is trying to sell the country on his plans to create factory jobs. The Republican says he wants to lower prescription drug costs, as did Democratic President Biden. Both tried to shame companies for price increases.

Trump is even leaning on a message that echoes Biden’s assertions in 2021 that elevated inflation is a “transitory” problem that will soon vanish.

“We’re going to be hitting 1.5% pretty soon,” Trump told reporters Monday. ”It’s all coming down.”

Even as Trump keeps saying an economic boom is around the corner, there are signs that he has already exhausted voters’ patience as his campaign promises to quickly fix inflation have gone unfulfilled.

Voter frustration

Voters in this month’s elections swung hard to Democrats over concerns about affordability. That has left Trump, who dismisses his weak polling on the economy as fake, floating half-formed ideas to ease financial pressures.

He is promising a $2,000 rebate on his tariffs and said he may offer 50-year mortgages — 20 years longer than any available now — to reduce the size of monthly payments. On Friday, Trump scrapped his tariffs on beef, coffee, tea, fruit juice, cocoa, spices, bananas, oranges, tomatoes and certain fertilizers, acknowledging that they “may, in some cases,” have contributed to higher prices.

But those are largely “gimmicky” moves unlikely to move the needle much on inflation, said Bharat Ramamurti, a former deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council.

“They’re in this very tough position where they’ve developed a reputation for not caring enough about costs, where the tools they have available to them are unlikely to be able to help people in the short term,” Ramamurti said.

Ramamurti said the Biden administration learned the hard way that voters are not appeased by a president saying his policies would ultimately cause their incomes to rise.

“That argument does not resonate,” he said. “Take it from me.”

Biden on inflation

Biden inherited an economy trying to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, which had shut down schools and offices, causing mass layoffs and historic levels of government borrowing. In March 2021, he signed into law a $1.9-trillion relief package. Critics said it was excessive and could cause prices to rise.

As the economy reopened, there were shortages of computer chips, kitchen appliances, autos and even furniture. Cargo ships were stuck waiting to dock at ports, creating supply chain issues. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 pushed up energy and food costs, and consumer prices reached a four-decade high that June. The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rates to cool inflation.

Biden tried to convince Americans that the economy was strong. “Bidenomics is working,” he said in a 2023 speech. “Today, the U.S. has had the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies since the pandemic.”

Though many economic indicators compared with those of other nations at the time largely supported his assertions, his arguments did little to sway voters. Only 36% of U.S. adults in August 2023 approved of his handling of the economy, according to a poll at the time by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Trump on inflation

Republicans made the case that Biden’s policies made inflation worse. Democrats are using that same framing against Trump today.

Here is their argument: Trump’s tariffs are getting passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices; his cancellation of clean energy projects means there will be fewer new sources of electricity as utility bills climb; his mass deportations made it costlier for the immigrant-heavy construction sector to build houses.

Former Biden administration officials note that Trump came into office in January with strong economic growth, a solid job market and inflation declining close to historic levels, only for him to reverse those trends.

“It’s striking how many Americans are aware of his trade policy and rightly blame the turnaround in prices on that erratic policy,” said Gene Sperling, a senior Biden advisor who also led the National Economic Council in the Obama and Clinton administrations.

“He is in a tough trap of his own doing — and it’s not likely to get easier,” Sperling said.

Consumer prices had been increasing at an annual rate of 2.3% in April when Trump launched his tariffs, and that rate accelerated to 3% in September.

The inflationary surge has been less than what voters endured under Biden, but the political fallout so far appears to be similar: 67% of U.S. adults disapprove of Trump’s performance, according to November polling data from AP-NORC.

“In both instances, the president caused a nontrivial share of the inflation,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “I think President Biden didn’t take this concern seriously enough in his first few months in office and President Trump isn’t taking this concern seriously enough right now.”

Strain noted that the two presidents have even responded to the challenge in “weirdly, eerily similar ways” by playing down inflation as a problem, pointing to other economic indicators and looking to address concerns by issuing government checks.

White House strategies

Trump administration officials have made the case that their mix of income tax cuts, foreign investment frameworks tied to tariffs and changes in enforcing regulations will lead to more factories and jobs. All of that, they say, could increase the supply of goods and services and reduce the forces driving inflation.

“The policies that we’re pursuing right now are increasing supply,” Kevin Hassett, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, told the Economic Club of Washington on Wednesday.

The Fed has cut its benchmark interest rates, which could increase the supply of money in the economy for investment. But the central bank has done so because of a weakening job market despite inflation being above its 2% target, and there are concerns that rate cuts of the size Trump wants could fuel more inflation.

Time might not be on Trump’s side

It takes time for consumer sentiment to improve after the inflation rate drops, according to research done by Ryan Cummings, an economist who worked on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

His read of the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment is that the effects of the post-pandemic rise in inflation are no longer a driving factor. These days, voters are frustrated because Trump had primed them to believe he could lower grocery prices and other expenses, but has failed to deliver.

“When it comes to structural affordability issues — housing, child care, education and healthcare — Trump has pushed in the wrong direction in each one,” said Cummings, who is now chief of staff at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

He said Trump’s best chance of beating inflation now might be “if he gets a very lucky break on commodity prices” through a bumper harvest worldwide and oil production continuing to run ahead of demand.

For now, Trump has decided to continue to rely on attacking Biden for anything that has gone wrong in the economy, as he did last week in an interview with Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

“The problem was that Biden did this,” Trump said.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

The Transportation Department announced its plan in September after referring to the requirement as ‘unnecessary regulatory burdens’.

The United States Department of Transportation is officially withdrawing from a directive that requires airlines to pay passengers if their flights are delayed.

The White House announced its official withdrawal on Friday after first disclosing its plan back in September.

The plan was first outlined during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

In December 2024, the federal agency under former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sought public comment on the plan, which would have required airlines to pay $200 to $300 for domestic delays totalling more than three hours and as high as $775 for even longer, unspecified delays.

Trump’s Transportation Department said the rules would be “unnecessary regulatory burdens” amid its explanation of why it will scrap the plan.

Last month, a group of 18 Democratic senators urged the Trump administration not to drop the compensation plan.

“This is a common-sense proposal: when an airline’s mistake imposes unanticipated costs on families, the airline should try to remedy the situation by providing accommodations to consumers and helping cover their costs,” said the letter signed by Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal, Maria Cantwell, Ed Markey and others.

Airlines in the US must refund passengers for cancelled flights, but are not required to compensate customers for delays.

The European Union, Canada, Brazil and the United Kingdom all have airline delay compensation rules. No large US airline currently guarantees cash compensation for significant flight disruption.

The Transportation Department said on Friday that abandoning the compensation plan would “allow airlines to compete on the services and compensation that they provide to passengers rather than imposing new minimum requirements for these services and compensation through regulation, which would impose significant costs on airlines.”

New rules

The Transportation Department also announced in September that it was considering rescinding Biden regulations requiring airlines and ticket agents to disclose service fees alongside airfares.

It also plans to reduce regulatory burdens on airlines and ticket agents by writing new rules detailing the definition of a flight cancellation that entitles consumers to ticket refunds, as well as revisiting rules on ticket pricing and advertising.

The department did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Al Jazeera also reached out to Buttigieg, who was behind the policy that is now being scrapped, but did not receive a response.

On Wall Street, most airline stocks remain below the market open but were trending upwards in midday trading. American Airlines is down 1.2 percent from the opening bell, United Airlines is down 1 percent, and Delta is down 1.3 percent. JetBlue is tumbling 3.6 percent for the day. Southwest is down by 0.2 percent.

The airline industry is still dealing with delays and cancellations brought on by the US government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday. There are still 1,000 delays on flights to, from and within the United States and 615 cancellations, according to FlightAware, a platform that tracks flight cancellations globally.

More than a thousand unionised Starbucks baristas have walked off the job in more than 40 cities across the United States as negotiations have stalled between the company and the union, Starbucks Workers United.

Workers at 65 stores began an open-ended strike on Thursday, coinciding with the Seattle, Washington-based coffee shop chain’s Red Cup Day sales event, when customers who order a holiday-themed beverage can receive a free reusable cup with their purchase.

The event typically drives higher traffic to Starbucks stores.

The coffeeshop chain, which has more than 18,000 stores across the US and Canada, says that the walkouts have caused limited impact.

More stores could soon join the strike. Starbucks Workers United represents roughly 550 stores around the US. Combined, this strike could be the largest in the history of the coffeeshop chain.

Stores in cities including Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and Portland will join the work stoppage, it said. Some locations had already shut down for the day, a union spokesperson told journalists on a media call.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, the union called on consumers not to shop at any Starbucks location “today and beyond” ahead of a nationwide rally slated to begin at 4pm local time for each location.

The union has filed more than 1,000 charges to the National Labor Relations Board for alleged unfair labour practices such as firing unionising baristas, and last week, it voted to authorise a strike if a contract was not finalised by November 13.

Starbucks has said it pays an average wage of $19 an hour and offers employees who work at least 20 hours a week benefits including healthcare, parental leave and tuition for online classes at Arizona State University.

The union said starting wages are $15.25 per hour in about 33 states and the average barista gets less than 20 hours per week.

Talks between the union and the company stretched for about eight months in 2024, but broke down in December, after which workers went on strike during the key holiday period.

“Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to see stall tactics used in collective bargaining, as we’re seeing with Starbucks. But the situation and the strike vote also demonstrate that long-term grassroots organising empowers workers. There’s strength in numbers,” Jennifer Abruzzo, former General Counsel at the National Labor Relations Board under former US President Joe Biden, said in remarks shared with Al Jazeera.

History of strikes

Starbucks workers have gone on strike several times over the last few years, starting in 2021. Workers at a location in Buffalo, New York became the first unionised store and subsequently launched a nationwide movement, which now represents four percent of the Starbucks cafe workforce, or about 9,500 people.

In 2022, workers at roughly 100 stores went on strike, and in December 2024, workers walked off the job amid stalled negotiations at 300 stores. Negotiations began again earlier this year, but the two parties have yet to come to an agreement.

In April this year, the union voted to reject a Starbucks proposal that guaranteed annual raises of at least two percent, saying it did not offer changes to economic benefits such as healthcare, or an immediate pay hike.

“Despite the fact that thousands of Starbucks baristas voted to engage in collective bargaining some years ago, the company has manipulated the situation to avoid having a contract,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, said in remarks provided to Al Jazeera.

“Baristas are staying strong. The strength of the strike vote shows that baristas aren’t giving up. They continue to demand fair treatment by the company.”

Executive pressures

The strike comes as Starbucks under CEO Brian Niccol shuts hundreds of underperforming stores this year, including the unionised flagship Seattle location, while trimming corporate roles to control costs.

Niccol, who previously spent six years leading Chipotle, has stressed improving service times and in-store experience in the US to revive demand for beverages as sales have remained flat or negative for the past seven quarters.

Niccol had said in September last year when he took over as CEO that he was committed to dialogue.

However, Lynne Fox, the union’s international president, said on a call with journalists that things changed once Niccol took the helm.

“A year into Niccol’s tenure, negotiations have gone backwards after months of steady progress and good faith negotiations last year,” Fox said.

In 2024, Niccol’s compensation package totaled more than $95m, which is 6,666 times the median employee salary, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch tracker. That represents the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the S&P 500, according to the Institute for Policy Studies’ Executive Excess report.

Niccol’s pay, however, is largely driven by the performance of Starbucks’ stock, with $90m coming from the value of stock awards. Since Niccol took over the company in September 2024, the stock price of Starbucks has fallen by about 6 percent.

On Wall Street, Starbucks’ stock in midday trading is down by 0.9 percent.

China’s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders.

Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called “open” language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.

The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US’s efforts to stunt China’s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as “fast and cheap”.

Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot’s Kimi K2 as it was “way more performant” and “a ton cheaper” than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.

The assistants’ developers, Cursor and Cognition AI, have not publicly confirmed their use of Chinese technology and did not respond to requests for comment, though Z.ai has said the speculation aligns with its “internal findings.”

Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher who founded the Atom Project, an initiative to promote open models in the US, said such public examples were the “tip of the iceberg”.

“Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US,” Lambert told Al Jazeera.

“I’ve personally heard of many other high-profile cases, where the most valued and hyped American AI startups are starting training models on the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM or DeepSeek,” Lambert said, adding that many US firms have been reluctant to publicly disclose their use of Chinese technology.

While it is not possible to precisely quantify the usage of different AI models, industry data points to the rising popularity of Chinese offerings.

Chinese AI tools, including MiniMax’s M2, Z.ai’s GLM 4.6 and DeepSeek’s V3.2, took up seven spots among the 20 models with the most usage last week, according to data from OpenRouter, a platform that connects developers with AI models.

Among the top 10 models used for programming, four were developed by Chinese firms, according to OpenRouter.

In the open model space, China’s clear lead is evident, with cumulative downloads surpassing 540 million as of October, according to an Atom Project analysis of data from hosting platform Hugging Face.

Rui Ma, the founder of Tech Buzz China, said Chinese models are particularly attractive to fledgling startups, while “high-resource organisations” have gravitated towards premium US models.

“These are typically cost-conscious early-stage companies that experiment widely, and many of them will not survive,” Ma told Al Jazeera.

Unlike leading US platforms such as ChatGPT, China’s open-weight large language models make their trained parameters – called weights – publicly available.

While open-weight models do not generate licensing or subscription fees, running them at enterprise scale requires large amounts of computing power, which creators can offer to users at a cost.

Developers such as Beijing-based Z.ai and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek have reported using older-generation chips that are not subject to US export controls, in relatively small quantities, dramatically reducing training and hardware costs compared with their Silicon Valley rivals.

“The success of these Chinese models demonstrates the failure of export controls to limit China,” Toby Walsh, an expert in AI at the University of New South Wales, told Al Jazeera.

“Indeed, they’ve actually encouraged Chinese companies to be more resourceful and build better models that are smaller and are trained on and run on older generation hardware. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

With lower input costs, Chinese firms have been able to offer their services far more cheaply than their US peers.

In an analysis published by AllianceBernstein in February, DeepSeek’s pricing for its models at the time was estimated to be up to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI’s, for instance.

“I do think China’s AI progress has been underestimated, partly because the signal is fragmented,” Greg Slabaugh, a professor who studies AI at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera.

“Much of the uptake of Chinese models is in China. China’s scale in AI publications and patents has long been visible; the emergence of open-weight models simply makes that capability more globally consumable.”

Some industry analysts have likened China’s approach to AI to the strategy undertaken by Chinese firms in other industries, such as solar panels, that flooded markets with cheap goods.

“This is the solar panel playbook running on software,” Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst, wrote last week in his Substack newsletter, Hello China Tech.

But while Chinese AI models have made inroads with their low cost, US tech giants are in a strong position to dominate the high-end market and highly regulated sectors where considerations such as national security are paramount, according to analysts.

Ma, the Tech Buzz China founder, said the development of AI could end up following a similar trajectory to the Android and iPhone platforms, the former of which has about three times as many users worldwide.

“Over the longer term – likely faster than what we saw in the mobile era – it’s entirely possible that AI adoption might follow similar economic dynamics. There are simply more users in the world who prioritise affordability than those who choose premium options,” Ma said.

“But that doesn’t mean the greatest margins or market capitalisation will exist at the low end; value may still concentrate where differentiation, performance and trust command a premium.”

“In Fortune 500 and regulated sectors, widespread adoption is probably not imminent,” said Slabaugh, the Queen Mary University of London professor, referring to the uptake of Chinese models.

“If there is a ‘rude awakening’, it may come on the pricing and flexibility front rather than from a sudden displacement of US models.”

United States President Donald Trump is committed to providing Americans with $2,000 cheques using money that has come into government coffers from Trump’s tariffs.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump’s staff is exploring how to go about making the plan a reality.

The president proposed the idea on his Truth Social media platform on Sunday, five days after his Republican Party lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere largely because of voter discontent with his economic stewardship — specifically, the high cost of living.

A new AP-NORC poll finds that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 33 percent approve.

The tariffs are bringing in so much money, the president posted, that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.’’

“Trump has taken to his favorite policymaking forum, Truth Social, to make yet another guarantee that Americans are going to receive dividend [cheques] from the revenues collected by tariffs,” Alex Jacquez, who served on the National Economic Council under former US President Joe Biden, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

“It’s interesting that Trump’s arguments—which he has been pushing forward for several months now on Truth Social—do not match the arguments that his lawyers are making in court. It seems he is trying to pressure the Justices by implying that this will be some massive economic disaster if they rule against the tariffs.”

Budget experts have scoffed at Trump’s tariff dividend plan, which conjured memories of the Trump administration’s short-lived plan for Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dividend cheques financed by billionaire Elon Musk’s federal budget cuts.

“The numbers just don’t check out,″ Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, told the Associated Press.

Details are scarce, including what the income limits would be and whether payments would go to children.

Even Trump’s US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, sounded a bit blindsided by the audacious dividend plan.

Appearing on Sunday on the ABC News programme This Week, Bessent said he hadn’t discussed the dividend with the president and suggested that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government. Instead, Bessent said, the rebate might take the form of tax cuts.

The tariffs are certainly raising money — $195bn in the budget year that ended September 30, up 153 percent from $77bn in fiscal 2024. But they still account for less than four percent of federal revenue, and have done little to dent the federal budget deficit, a staggering $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2025.

Budget wonks say Trump’s dividend math doesn’t work.

John Ricco, an analyst with the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will bring in $200bn to $300bn a year in revenue. But a $2,000 dividend — if it went to all Americans, including children — would cost $600bn. “It’s clear that the revenue coming in would not be adequate,” Ricco said.

The analyst also noted that Trump couldn’t just pay the dividends on his own. That would require legislation from Congress.

Legal challenges

Moreover, the centrepiece of Trump’s protectionist trade policies — double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country in the world — may not survive a legal challenge that has reached the US Supreme Court.

In a hearing last week, the court’s justices sounded sceptical about the Trump administration’s assertion of sweeping power to declare national emergencies to justify the tariffs. Trump has bypassed Congress, which has authority under the US Constitution to levy taxes, including tariffs.

If the court strikes down the tariffs, the Trump administration may be refunding money to the importers who paid them, not sending dividend cheques to American families. Trump could find other ways to impose tariffs, even if he loses at the Supreme Court, but it could be cumbersome and time-consuming.

Mainstream economists and budget analysts note that tariffs are paid by US importers who then generally try to pass along the cost to their customers through higher prices.

The dividend plan “misses the mark,” the Tax Foundation’s York said. “If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs.”

The carmaker first announced the plan for battery production in 2021.

Toyota Motor Corporation has begun production at its $13.9bn North Carolina battery plant as it ramps up hybrid production and confirms plans to invest $10bn over five years in United States manufacturing.

The Tokyo, Japan-based carmaker announced the developments on Wednesday.

It first introduced the plan in December 2021 to produce batteries for its hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs). Batteries from the plant are set to power hybrid versions of the Camry, Corolla Cross, RAV4, and a yet-to-be-announced, all-electric, three-row-battery vehicle. The plant is producing hybrid batteries for factories in Kentucky and a Mazda and Toyota joint venture in Alabama.

“Over the next five years, we are planning an additional investment of $10bn in the US to further grow our manufacturing capabilities, bringing our total investment in this country to over $60bn,” said Ted Ogawa, president of Toyota Motor North America.

Toyota’s 11th US factory, on a 1,850-acre (749-hectare) site, will be able to produce 30 gigawatt-hours of energy annually at full capacity and house 14 battery production lines for plug-in hybrids and full EVs. It will eventually employ 5,000 workers.

Last month in Japan, US President Donald Trump said Toyota planned a $10bn investment in the United States.

“Go out and buy a Toyota,” said Trump, who has been critical of Japanese and other auto imports and has imposed hefty tariffs on imported vehicles.

Toyota has been one of the slowest carmakers to move to full EVs, but has rapidly moved to convert its best-selling vehicles to hybrids.

“We know there is no single path to progress”, Ogawa said on Wednesday.

“That’s why we remain committed to our multi-pathway approach, offering fuel-efficient gas engines, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, battery electronics and fuel cell electronics.”

Other car companies like Volkswagen have said they will add more hybrids as the Trump administration has rescinded EV tax credits and eliminated penalties that incentivised EV sales.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at the event that the administration plans to soon propose to ease fuel economy standards, saying prior rules were too aggressive.

Duffy in January signed an order to direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to rescind fuel economy standards issued under former US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for the 2022-2031 model years that had aimed to drastically reduce fuel use for cars and trucks.

Toyota’s stock is up by about 0.4 percent in midday trading in New York.

DUA Lipa helped music boost the UK economy to the tune of £8billion last year. 

The singer — whose hits include New Rules and Levitating — was one of the industry’s biggest money-makers as its contribution to the country’s coffers leapt by five per cent. 

She saw album Radical Optimism debut at No1 in the charts, while dates in Singapore, Japan and Malaysia took export revenues to a new high of £4.8billion. 

Tours from Taylor Swift, Liam Gallagher, Take That and Bruce Springsteen also drove the figures, along with Charli XCX’s global success with album Brat. 

Of the £8billion total — up from £7.6billion in 2023 — £1.49billion came from physical sales, downloads and streaming.  

A record £1.02billion was paid out in songwriting royalties while merchandise sales rose too.  

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The findings are in UK Music’s annual economic report This Is Music 2025.  

It said the industry employs 220,000 people here, but warned growth was slowing down after taking off immediately after the pandemic. 

UK Music’s Chief Executive Tom Kiehl welcomed the figures but issued warning signs amid the challenges faced by the sector. 

He said:  “In recent years UK Music has reported that the music industry has enjoyed double-digit annual growth. 

“That growth has now halved indicates a levelling off of the immediate post-pandemic boost that we experienced, as well as other underlying issues set out in this report.  

“This points to the need for urgent action. If problems are not addressed then future growth cannot be guaranteed.” 

Dua, 30, is in Argentina on tour.  

She shared a snap of her with sister Rina at River Plate’s match against rivals Boco Juniors after two gigs at the Buenos Aires stadium.   

US airlines cancel 1,200 flights, marking five days of disruptions caused by the prolonged government shutdown.

Airlines in the United States have cancelled nearly 1,200 flights, marking the fifth consecutive day of mass delays and cancellations sparked by the country’s longest-ever government shutdown.

In addition to cancellations on Tuesday, passengers continued to face long wait times, as more than 1,300 domestic and international flights were delayed in the morning.

New York’s LaGuardia Airport, in particular, is seeing significant hold-ups, with average delays of one hour and 40 minutes, according to FlightAware — a platform that tracks flight disruptions worldwide.

On Monday, there were more than 2,400 cancelled flights to, from and within the US, along with over 9,500 delayed flights, according to the same tracker.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last week instructed airlines to cut 4 percent of daily flights from Friday at 40 major airports due to air traffic control staffing shortages. Reductions rose to 6 percent on Tuesday, then 8 percent on Thursday, and are expected to reach 10 percent by November 14th.

Airlines and the FAA are in talks over whether these cuts will be eased as a record-setting 42-day government shutdown draws to a close.

An end to the shutdown appears to be in sight. On Monday, the Senate passed a bill to reopen the federal government. It now heads to the House of Representatives and, if approved, will go to President Donald Trump’s desk for signing. Once signed, the bill would reopen the government.

Despite progress on Capitol Hill, the president has urged air traffic controllers across the country to return to work, warning that their pay could be “docked” if they do not comply. He also claimed that those who remained on duty during the shutdown would receive a $10,000 bonus.

On Wall Street, airline stocks are taking a hit amid persistent cancellations. As of 11am in New York (16:00 GMT), Delta Air Lines had fallen 1.26 percent since the market opened on Tuesday. United Airlines was down 1.7 percent, while American Airlines had tumbled more than 1.8 percent.

Budget carriers are also being hit hard. New York-based JetBlue has dropped by more than 2 percent, Dallas-based Southwest by 1.8 percent, and Alaska Airlines is down roughly 2.1 percent.

Over the weekend, United States President Donald Trump promised Americans $2,000 each from the “trillions of dollars” in tariff revenue he said his administration has collected.

During his second term, Trump has imposed tariffs broadly on countries and on specific goods such as drugs, steel and cars.

“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” Trump said in a November 9 Truth Social post. “We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

How seriously should people take his pledge? Experts urged caution.

Tariffs are projected to generate well below “trillions” a year, making it harder to pay each person $2,000. And the administration already said it would use the tariff revenue to either pay for existing tax cuts or to reduce the federal debt.

Trump’s post came days after the US Supreme Court heard arguments about the legality of his tariff policy. The justices are weighing whether Trump has the power to unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. If the justices rule against Trump, much of the expected future tariff revenue would not materialise.

What Trump proposed, and who would qualify

The administration has published no plans for the tariff dividends, and in a November 9 ABC News interview, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had not spoken to Trump about giving Americans a dividend payment.

Details about a potential payment have been limited to Truth Social posts.

Trump said “everyone”, excluding “high income people”, would get the money, but did not explain the criteria for high-income people. He also did not say whether children would receive the payment.

In a November 10 Truth Social post, Trump said his administration would first pay $2,000 to “low and middle income USA Citizens” and then use the remaining tariff revenues to “substantially pay down national debt”.

Trump has not said what form the payments might take. Bessent said the dividend “could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways. You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. So, you know, those are substantial deductions.”

Analysts said it is a stretch to rebrand an already promised tax cut as a new dividend.

Trump has previously discussed paying Americans with tariff revenue.

“We have so much money coming in, we’re thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,” he told reporters on July 25. “We’re thinking about a rebate.”

Days later, Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation that would give $600 tariff rebate cheques to each American adult and child. Hawley’s bill has not advanced.

Tariff revenue collected versus cost of ‘dividend’ payment

Trump made the imposition of tariffs one of his signature campaign promises for the 2024 presidential election. Since taking office in January, he has enacted tariffs on a scale not seen in the US in almost a century; the current overall average tariff rate is 18 percent, the highest since 1934, according to Yale Budget Lab.

Through the end of October, the federal government collected $309.2bn in tariff revenue, compared with $165.4bn through the same point in 2024, an increase of $143.8bn.

The centre-right Tax Foundation projects that tariff revenue will continue to increase to more than $200bn a year if the tariffs remain in place.

Erica York, the Tax Foundation’s vice president of federal tax policy, estimated in a November 9 X post that a $2,000 tariff dividend for each person earning less than $100,000 would equal 150 million adult recipients. That would cost nearly $300bn, York calculated, or more if children qualified. That is more than the tariffs have raised so far, she said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected that Trump’s proposal could cost $600bn, depending on how it is structured.

The administration previously detailed other uses for tariff revenue

The Trump administration already promised to use tariff revenue for other purposes, including reducing the country’s deficit and offsetting the cost of the GOP tax and spending bill Trump signed into law in July.

As Trump announced new tariffs on April 2, he said he would “use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt”.

Bessent has made the same promise, falsely saying in July that tariffs were “going to pay off our deficit”.

The treasury secretary said in August that he and Trump were “laser-focused on paying down the debt”.

“I think we’re going to bring down the deficit-to-GDP,” Bessent said in an August 19 CNBC interview. “We’ll start paying down debt and then, at a point, that can be used as an offset to the American people.”

Tariffs’ current cost to Americans 

Tariffs are already costing Americans money, analysts say. Independent estimates range from about $1,600 to $2,600 a year per household. Given the similarity of these amounts to Trump’s proposed dividend, York said it would be more efficient to remove the tariffs.

Joseph Rosenberg, Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Centre senior fellow, said a $2,000 dividend in the form of a cheque would require congressional approval – and lawmakers have already declined to act on that idea once.

When members of Congress approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “They had the ability to include a tariff dividend, but they didn’t”, Rosenberg said.

When e-commerce company Jumia wanted to go public in 2019, Africa’s most celebrated start-up didn’t list in Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali or Johannesburg. It went to New York instead. That tells you everything about Africa’s start-up problem: It’s not a money problem; it’s an exit problem.

African entrepreneurs can build world-class businesses, but investors hesitate because they cannot see how or when they will get their money back. Initial public offerings (IPOs) remain extremely rare, and most exits take the form of trade sales – often unpredictable and slow to clear. Our stock exchanges offer little comfort either with liquidity outside the largest firms still limited.

Start-ups here can remain “start-ups” for decades with no clear path to maturity.

By contrast, Silicon Valley hums along because everyone knows the playbook: build fast, scale up and within five to seven years either list on an exchange or get acquired. Investors know they will not be stuck forever. That certainty, not just the capital, drives the flow of billions.

If Africa wants its tech ecosystems to thrive, we need a parallel play alongside any new funds. Yes, let’s mobilise sovereign wealth, pensions, banks and guarantees. But equally, let’s change the rules of the game. Let’s build an exit clarity framework that gives investors confidence.

That means fast-track “growth IPO lanes” on our exchanges with lighter costs and simpler disclosures. It means standardised merger templates that guarantee regulatory reviews within clear time limits.

It means regulated secondary markets where early investors and employees can sell shares before an IPO.

It means modernising employee stock ownership rules so talent can build wealth too.

And it means creating anchor-exit facilities where big domestic players like South Africa’s Public Investments Corporation or IDC commit to buy into IPOs with risk-sharing from development partners.

The evidence shows why these matter. More than 80 percent of startup funding in Africa comes from abroad. African unicorns are overwhelmingly funded by foreign venture capital, with several having foreign co-founders or being incorporated outside the continent. This means exits and wealth creation largely flow offshore. When global shocks hit, whether interest rate hikes in Washington or political turmoil in Europe, our ventures shake.

On the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, small-cap boards make up only a sliver of daily trading activity, underscoring how limited liquidity is outside the blue chips.

In Kenya, the Growth Enterprise Market Segment, set up to serve fast-growing firms, has struggled to gain traction with only five companies currently listed as of 2024 – more than a decade after its 2013 launch.

To be sure, there are those who will argue that exits already exist: Trade sales are happening, holding periods in Africa are shorter than in many markets and capital is trickling in regardless.

That is true, but partial. Trade sales can be an option, but they are often unpredictable. Regulatory approvals take time, and deal terms are not always transparent enough for investors to build them confidently into their models.

This is not a system that inspires confidence from our own pension funds or sovereign wealth managers.

The response, then, is not to simply wait for more money to arrive but to fix the structures that govern its movement. If we could walk into investor meetings and say, “Here’s the pipeline of companies. Here’s the capital vehicle, and here is a clear five-year exit pathway,” we could shift the conversation entirely.

We could make African innovation not only attractive to foreign investors but also bankable for African ones. South Africa is uniquely positioned to lead this change. It has deep capital markets, capable regulators and institutional pools of capital looking for new growth opportunities.

The ask is not just to invest in start-ups but to invest in a new rulebook that makes exits real. If we succeed, we will have built more than another fund. We will have built a system that recycles African savings into African innovation, creating African wealth.

For too long, the debate has been framed around scarcity of money. But the truth is less about scarcity and more about certainty. Investors do not only chase returns. They chase predictable exits. Without exits, funds hesitate. With exits, funds multiply.

So, yes, let us mobilise capital and launch new funds. But let us also do the harder, braver thing: change the rules, not just the money. That is how we ensure our unicorns aren’t built on foreign capital alone. That is how we give our own savers and pensioners a stake in Africa’s growth.

And that is how we finally write a new playbook under which African innovation, African capital and African ownership all run on the same page because, in the end, the real lesson of Jumia is not that Africa cannot produce billion-dollar start-ups. It is that until we change the rules of exit, we risk exporting the wealth that should be owned and grown at home.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

US Senate vote to end shutdown delivers reprieve to investors worried about AI valuations and weakness in US economy.

Stocks from the United States to Japan have risen sharply amid hopes that an end to the longest US government shutdown in history is imminent.

US lawmakers on Sunday moved to end a five-week impasse over government funding, a boost for investors unnerved by signs of growing weakness in the US economy and the sky-high evaluations of firms involved in artificial intelligence.

After a group of Democrats broke with the party leadership to join Republicans, the US Senate voted 60-40 to advance a bill that would fund government operations through the end of January.

The funding package still needs to win final approval in the Senate and then pass the US House of Representatives, after which it would go to US President Donald Trump for his signature – a process expected to take days.

Stock markets in the Asia Pacific made large gains on Monday, while futures in the US also rose in advance of stock exchanges reopening.

South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI led the gains, rising about 3 percent as of 4pm local time (07:00 GMT).

Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng also rose sharply, advancing about 1.3 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively.

Taiwan’s Taiex rose about 0.8 percent, while Australia’s ASX 200 gained about 0.75 percent.

Futures for the US’s benchmark S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq-100, which are traded outside of regular market hours, were up about 0.75 and 1.3 percent, respectively.

The reprieve comes as investors are concerned that AI-linked stocks may be wildly overvalued and that Trump’s sweeping tariffs could be doing more damage to the US economy than has been captured in headline data so far.

Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are integral to the development of AI, last month became the first company in history to reach a market valuation of $5 trillion, a day after tech giant Apple surpassed $4 trillion in market value.

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ official jobs report has been suspended since August due to the government shutdown, several other analyses have pointed to a rise in layoffs in October.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm, said in a report last week that layoffs surged 183 percent last month, making it the worst October for jobs since 2003.

A separate analysis by Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics company, estimated that the economy shed 9,100 jobs during the month.

US senators reach stopgap deal to end government shutdown, raising hopes for end to six-week-long impasse.

Airlines in the United States have cancelled more than 3,300 flights amid a top transport official’s warning that air travel could “slow to a trickle” due to the ongoing government shutdown.

The cancellations on Sunday came as Republicans and Democrats reached a stopgap deal on ending the shutdown after the impasse over the passage of a funding bill dragged into its 40th day.

Travel disruption has been mounting since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)  last week ordered reductions in air traffic amid reports of air traffic controllers exhibiting fatigue and refusing to turn up for work.

Some 13,000 air traffic controllers, who are deemed “essential” employees under US government rules, have been forced to work without pay since the start of the shutdown on October 1.

A total of 3,304 US flights were cancelled and more than 10,000 flights were delayed on Sunday, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightAware.

More than 1,500 flights were cancelled on Saturday, following the cancellation of about 1,000 flights on Friday.

Under the FAA’s phased-in reduction in air traffic, airlines were ordered to reduce domestic flights by 4 percent from 6am Eastern Standard Time (11:00 GMT) on Friday.

Flights are set to be reduced by 6 percent from Monday, 8 percent by Thursday, and 10 percent by Friday.

In media interviews on Sunday, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy warned that air travel could grind to a standstill in the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday on November 27.

“As we get closer to Thanksgiving travel, I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to have air travel slow to a trickle, as everyone wants to travel to see their families,” Duffy told Fox News.

“It doesn’t get better,” Duffy added. “It gets worse until these air traffic controllers are going to be paid.”

The period around Thanksgiving is one of the busiest times for travel in the US calendar.

An estimated 80 million Americans travelled during the Thanksgiving period in 2024, with airports screening a record 3.09 million passengers on the Sunday after the holiday alone.

As fears of travel chaos mounted on Sunday, US senators said they had reached a compromise agreement to restore funding for government operations through the end of January.

In a late night session, the Senate voted 60-to-40 to break the filibuster and advance the funding package after a group of moderate Democrats joined Republicans to support the resumption of government funding.

The funding plan still needs to be approved by the Senate and the US House of Representatives, and then signed into law by US President Donald Trump, before the shutdown ends.

It is also unclear whether travel disruption could persist after the government reopens.

The FAA said last week that decisions on lifting its flight reductions would be “informed by safety data”.

Al Jazeera has contacted the FAA for comment.

Richard Aboulafia, managing director at the consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said that if air traffic controllers have been skipping work due to pay, the disruptions should quickly dissipate once the shutdown ends.

But there are also suspicions among aviation analysts that the flight restrictions are an “arbitrary” measure designed to raise political pressure for an end to the government shutdown, Aboulafia said.

“The decision to restrict capacity was understandable if the facts and data support it,” Aboulafia told Al Jazeera.

“Secretary Duffy says the data does indeed support it, but he has not shared any of that data. People are right to be suspicious, particularly in light of other unnecessary cuts by the administration.”

Trump promises to defend Hungary’s finances amid Orban-EU tensions and to sign $600m gas deal, says Hungarian leader.

Hungary has struck a deal for what Prime Minister Viktor Orban called a “financial shield” to safeguard its economy from potential attacks following talks with US President Donald Trump.

Orban, a longtime ally of Trump and one of Europe’s most outspoken nationalist leaders, met the US president at the White House on Friday to seek relief from sanctions on Russian oil and gas. Following the meeting, he announced that Hungary had secured a one-year exemption from those measures.

“I have also made an agreement with the US president on a financial shield,” Orban said in a video posted by the Hungarian outlet index.hu on Sunday. “Should there be any external attacks against Hungary or its financial system, the Americans gave their word that in such a case, they would defend Hungary’s financial stability.”

A White House official said the deal also included contracts worth roughly $600m for Hungary to buy US liquefied natural gas. Orban gave no details of how the “shield” would work, but claimed it would ensure Hungary would face “no financing problems”.

“That Hungary or its currency could be attacked, or that the Hungarian budget could be put in a difficult situation, or that the Hungarian economy could be suffocated from the financing side, this should be forgotten,” he said.

The move comes as Orban faces economic stagnation and strained relations with the European Union, which has frozen billions of euros in funding over what Brussels calls Hungary’s democratic backsliding. Critics accuse Orban of using his ties with Washington to sidestep EU pressure and secure new financial lifelines.

Orban said on Friday that Hungary also received an exemption from US sanctions on Russian energy after a meeting with Trump.

Hungary’s economy has struggled since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but its currency, the forint, has shown some recovery this year, supported by high interest rates.

Trump, meanwhile, has extended his support to another far-right leader, Argentina’s Javier Milei, pledging to strengthen the country’s collapsing economy through a $20bn currency swap deal with Argentina’s central bank. Trump said he would also buy Argentinian pesos to “help a great philosophy take over a great country”.

Milei, who has made more than a dozen trips to the US since taking office in December 2023, including to attend Trump’s second inauguration, is battling inflation, debt, and dwindling reserves. Argentinian bond prices plunged in late September as the central bank scrambled to stabilise the peso.