San Francisco Financial News

Xi Jinping has told his US counterpart Joe Biden that the Taiwan question is the «first red line» that must not be crossed by Washington, and warned that Beijing will not «sit on its hands» if "Taiwan independence" forces step up their "separatist activities" with the help of external elements. Biden spoke on the phone with Xi on Tuesday, marking the first conversation between the two leaders since their historic in-person summit last November in San Francisco and the latest in ongoing efforts by US and Chinese officials to defuse tensions between the two countries. The White House described the one-hour-45-minute conversation as «candid and constructive» on a range of issues on which the leaders agreed and disagreed. Biden stressed the need to maintain «peace and stability» across the Taiwan Strait and he also raised his concerns over China's support for Russia's defence industry, the White House said.

SiftHub, an artificial intelligence-enabled platform for enterprise sales teams, on Wednesday said it has raised $5.5 million in a seed round of funding led by Matrix Partners India and Blume Ventures. The San Francisco-headquartered startup was founded by Manisha Raisinghani, cofounder and former chief technology officer of Tiger Global Management-backed software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup LogiNext Solutions. ET had first reported about the deal talks in June 2023.

Donald Trump is suing two co-founders of Trump Media & Technology Group, the newly public parent company of his Truth Social platform, arguing that they should forfeit their stock in the company because they set it up improperly

A failed Australian taxi-industry disruptor has told a court that Uber began illegally operating its ridesharing service in Australia a decade ago to gain an unfair advantage over competitors

Warburg Pincus is closing in on Shriram Housing Finance Ltd (SHFL), having emerged as the frontrunner to acquire the unit of Chennai-based non-banking finance company (NBFC) Shriram Finance, said people in the know. In a closely fought race, Bain Capital is the other serious contender, they said. Binding bids were submitted last week, they added. Negotiations are ongoing with both seeking to maximise value, “but for the moment, Warburg seems a more aggressive suitor or bidder for the company,” said a person close to the company on condition of anonymity. To be sure, the sale likely hinges on the matter of valuation. Shriram pegs it at Rs 6,500 crore, inclusive of a control premium, but the offers have been in the Rs 5,300-5,500 crore range.

Most of California's fast food workers are set to be paid at least $20 per hour.

Google has agreed to purge billions of records containing personal information collected from more than 136 million people in the U.S. surfing the internet through its Chrome web browser

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fools' Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago

Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users’ web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge. The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private “Incognito" browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google’s marketing and privacy disclosures didn’t properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed.

The entity behind the layer-1 blockchain Tron has requested the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against it, arguing that the regulator’s focus on “predominantly foreign conduct” goes beyond its jurisdiction. 

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is getting into the voice assistant business and showing off new technology that can clone a person’s voice, but says it won’t yet release it publicly due to safety concerns

Jerome Powell repeated that the US central bank isn't in any rush to cut interest rates. «We don't need to be in a hurry to cut,» Powell said Friday at an event at the San Francisco Fed. Fresh inflation data released earlier is «pretty much in line with our expectations,» he said. But Powell reiterated it won't be appropriate to lower rates until officials are confident inflation is on track toward their 2% goal.

annual rate of 2.5 per cent in February, up 0.1 percentage points from a month earlier. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index data released on Friday "is what we were expecting," Powell said, and even though the numbers showed less of a slowdown than last year, "you won't see us overreacting." The data last month were "not as low as most of the good readings we got in the second half of last year, but it's definitely more along the lines of what we want to see," Powell said during an appearance at the San Francisco Fed where he was interviewed by Kai Ryssdal of public radio's "Marketplace" program.

Inmates can make ceramics or crochet at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif. At a federal prison in Mendota, a few hours away, inmates can have a harmonica or play basketball on one of five facility courts. Those prisons represent possible landing places for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who will in coming months report to begin serving his 25-year sentence, imposed Thursday by U.S.

Amazon says it is pouring an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence startup to $4 billion

A debate has emerged over whether modern safety protections could have saved a Baltimore bridge after it was struck by a cargo ship

A 420-meter or quarter-mile white steel tube running alongside a railway line in the windswept northern Netherlands could usher in a new era in the transportation of people and freight

Amazon is making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as it looks to gain an edge in the artificial intelligence race. 

Richard Serra, known for his massive yet minimalist steel sculptures, died Tuesday at age 85, US media reported. His strikingly large pieces are installed all over the world, from Paris museums to the Qatari desert, and have sometimes sparked controversy over their imposing nature. Serra died of pneumonia Tuesday at his home on Long Island, New York, his lawyer John Silberman told The New York Times.

BEIJING — U.S. business leaders met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, the latest of Beijing's efforts to bolster foreign investment in China amid tensions with the U.S.

Port of Baltimore and closed a major highway will cause weeks or months of transportation disruptions in the Mid-Atlantic region and accelerate a shift of cargo to the US West Coast as importers and exporters try to avoid potential bottlenecks at trade gateways from Boston to Miami. “Companies have already begun shifting volumes from the East Coast to the West Coast,” said Ryan Petersen, the founder and chief executive of Flexport Inc., a digital freight platform based in San Francisco. “Baltimore being taken offline means all the other ports on the East Coast are getting this bubble of cargo — creating congestion and delays.” That also means companies and consumers may face a repeat of one of the big supply chain lessons of the Covid pandemic: that a sudden 10% or 20% increase in volumes through a port “is enough to cause massive backlogs, congestion, ships waiting offshore and all sorts of delays that can compound on themselves,” Petersen said.