Tausi Insider

Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos will give away a majority of his $124-billion wealth during his lifetime, the billionaire told CNN in an interview on Monday. Without providing further details, Bezos said he and partner, journalist-turned-philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, were “building the capacity to be able to give away this money.” The billionaire has committed $10-billion to fight climate change and protect nature through the Bezos Earth Fund, where he is the executive chair. The fund did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Country music star and philanthropist Dolly Parton received $100-million through the “Bezos Courage & Civility Award,” an honor recognizing leaders who “pursue solutions with courage and civility,” he said on Twitter on Saturday. Bezos, who stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021, owns about 10 per cent of the ecommerce giant, along with news organization Washington Post and space tourism company Blue Origin. https://www...

Switzerland has frozen financial assets worth 7.5 billion Swiss francs ($7.94-billion) as of Nov. 25 under sanctions against Russians to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said on Thursday. SECO, the agency overseeing sanctions, also said that 15 properties in six cantons are also “blocked”. It did not name the cantons. Up until June 3, SECO had been notified of existing deposits held by Russian nationals, and individuals and legal entities in Russia, amounting to 46.1 billion francs, it said. This was far below the 150 billion to 200 billion Swiss francs of Russian wealth that the Swiss Bankers Association has estimated Swiss banks hold. SECO officials said the discrepancy could reflect the fact that Russians who are also Swiss or EU citizens, or have residence there, are not covered by the measures. Only bank deposits of at least 100,000 francs – and not securities portfolios – are subject to reporting, they added. Officials...

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem in Ottawa on Jan. 26. Blair Gable/Tausi Insider John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and managing director of Seaford Macro. Central bankers must be feeling punch-drunk. For years, they strode like superheroes. We praised their genius, bestowed them with titles such as “maestro” – as one journalist labelled Alan Greenspan in a now-infamous encomium – and revelled in the New Jerusalem to which they’d delivered us: a Promised Land of low inflation and endless credit, where all we had to do to get rich was buy a house and watch it grow. But then, almost overnight, the story changed. Central bankers turned into villains – architects of soaring inflation, punishing mortgage costs, plunging house values and the inevitable advance toward recession. Unifor chief Lana Payne, leader of Canada’s largest private-sector union, recently charged that, by raising interest rates, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem “has basically de...

People visit the immersive video experience hosted by the National Geographic Society at a press event during COP15 in Montreal on Dec. 7. ANDREJ IVANOV/Getty Images Anyone showing up to the United Nations biodiversity conference, known as COP15, will discover it takes time just getting in the door. Having first shown proof of vaccination in order to obtain a conference badge, the would-be attendee is then handed a box of KN95 masks and a two-week supply of COVID-19 test kits. The next stop is to show a negative result from a rapid test before being admitted. For the thousands of participants, it’s a fitting reminder that the pandemic is still with us – fitting because global pandemics are a risk we all face when wildlife is destroyed or harvested in ways that expose humans to the viruses of other species. But there is another way that the pandemic reveals what is at stake as countries work toward a pact to protect nature for future generations. At COP15, a movement grows to manage n...