ECONOMY

Photo Credit: Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters

Credit Suisse will borrow up to 50 billion Swiss francs ($54bn) from Switzerland’s central bank to shore up confidence in the troubled lender amid concerns about the health of the global banking system after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Credit Suisse said on Thursday the loan from the Swiss National Bank (SNB) would support the bank’s core businesses as it took the “necessary steps to create a simpler and more focused bank built around client needs”.

The Zurich-based lender said it would also buy back about $3bn of its debt. The announcement comes after Credit Suisse shares lost more than one-quarter of their value amid persistent market jitters in the wake of SVB’s collapse, the biggest bank failure in the United States since 2008.

Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin

President Joe Biden's upcoming budget proposal aims to cut deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, the White House said Wednesday.

That deficit reduction goal is significantly higher than the $2 trillion that Biden had promised in his State of the Union address last month. It also is a sharp contrast with House Republicans, who have called for a path to a balanced budget but have yet to offer a blueprint.

The White House has consistently called into question Republicans' commitment to what it considers a sustainable federal budget. Administration officials have noted that the various tax plans and other policies previously backed by GOP lawmakers would add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci

United States President Joe Biden will call on Congress to impose a 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires as part of a series of proposed tax hikes on wealthy individuals and corporations, according to a US media report.

Biden’s proposed spending plan would also nearly double the capital gains tax for investment from 20 percent to 39.6 percent, and lift income levies on corporations and wealthy Americans, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

Photo Credit: Drew Angerer

Hundreds of activists and borrowers traveled to the Supreme Court on Tuesday as President Joe Biden’s administration defended its sweeping student debt cancellation plan in oral arguments before the justices.

Some supporters of the program said they camped out the night before, weathering the low temperatures and rain, to witness the Supreme Court justices' nearly four-hour questioning in two cases challenging Biden -- with the bulk of the time lending itself to the lawsuit brought by six GOP-led states, which contended that Biden’s debt forgiveness plan overstepped his legal authority as the federal government argued the states had no standing to try and block what they called crucial economic relief.

Photo Credit: ABC News

The U.S. risks defaulting on its debts as early as July unless the borrowing limit is raised, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report on Wednesday.

The federal government on Jan. 19 reached its approximately $31.4 trillion debt ceiling -- which legally caps how much the U.S. can borrow to pay for what tax and other revenue doesn't cover -- and the Treasury Department has since been using "extraordinary measures" along with its current cash flow to keep the government's obligations paid.

"CBO estimates that under its baseline budget projections, the Treasury would exhaust those measures and run out of cash sometime between July and September of this year," according to the report.