• U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cast doubt on Tuesday on President Donald Trump’s goal of cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, even as the president moved to inject new urgency into a sluggish effort in Congress to lower taxes.
“Ideally, he’d like to get it down to 15 percent. I don’t know if we’ll be able to achieve that given the budget issues, but we’re going to get this down to a very competitive level,” Mnuchin told a conference in New York hosted by CNBC.
• U.S. President Donald Trump is likely to make a stop in China in November during his first official visit to Asia, a U.S. official said on Tuesday, a trip that will come amid tensions over North Korea’s nuclear tests.
Trump is set to attend the U.S.-ASEAN summit and the East Asia summit in the Philippines in November, as well as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vietnam.
• United Nations sanctions on North Korea’s important textiles industry are expected to disrupt a business largely based in China and pose compliance headaches for clothing retailers in the United States and around the world.
• Analysts have been expecting Apple to post sales of $86.8 billion in the quarter ending in December, according to FactSet, up from $78.4 billion in the year-ago period. That figure is driven both by a record sales volume of 85 million phones, and an average price of $729, skewing higher than last year's December average of $695.
But on Tuesday, Apple revealed that its priciest phone, the iPhone X, won't be available to order until October and won't ship until November. That window may be a bit too tight to hit analysts' forecasts, according to Apple analyst turned venture capitalist Gene Munster.
Apple told CNBC that the forecast it provided Wall Street in July took all the shipping dates into account. And many analysts predicted Apple's high end phone would be delayed due to its complicated design.
Nonetheless, Apple's share price dipped slightly on Tuesday afternoon, and Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS, noted to CNBC that the "big phone is not coming out until October." Munster wrote in an email that about 10 percent of the iPhone X devices he had expected to be sold in the winter will now be sold in spring.
• Leaders of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee said on Tuesday they reached an agreement to finance a federal insurance program for millions of lower-income children and pregnant women that was due to expire at the end of the month.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the finance committee, and the panel’s top Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, said in a statement the agreement would provide money for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for five years.
• Oil prices eased on Wednesday, dampened by reports of rising U.S. crude stockpiles, but retaining some of the gains made in the previous session after OPEC said it expected higher demand for its crude next year.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) CLc1 was down 5 cents, or 0.1 percent, at $48.18 a barrel at 0650 GMT after rising earlier in the day. The contract rose0.3 percent on Tuesday.
International benchmark Brent crude LCOc1 was down 11 cents, or 0.2 percent, at $54.16 a barrel, having settled up 0.8 percent in the previous session.
Reference: Reuters, CNBC
Thai
Eng