Finance

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — President Joe Biden wants to end the preferential U.S. tax treatment of investment income that has benefited the nation’s wealthy as he seeks to fund a sweeping new social-spending program. But he will need to overcome a major political hurdle in Congress to do so. The White House plans to propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for those earning $1 million or more, to 39.6%, according…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Like clockwork through the 1990s, Sufian Beker trekked to Paris to plead for cuts in Ethiopia’s soaring debt. As the war-torn country’s finance minister from 1996 to 2015, Beker had few options other than what’s known as the Paris Club, an informal group of wealthy nations that has bailed out governments from Argentina to Zambia. In 2004 he found himself again in the monumental French Treasury building towering over…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Christopher Giancarlo, the former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission who’s known as “Crypto Dad” for his early embrace of digital assets, joined the board of cryptocurrency lender BlockFi. Giancarlo, 61, headed the CFTC when the Chicago Board Options Exchange and CME Group Inc. first offered Bitcoin futures contracts. He gained tens of thousands of followers on Twitter after his February 2018 congressional testimony in which he advocated…

LONDON(Capital Markets in Africa) — The U.K. government is drawing up plans to prevent the creation of a European breakaway soccer league comprising the world’s richest clubs, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the idea. “We will put everything on the table to prevent this from happening,” Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said in the House of Commons on Monday, adding that the government is not ruling out legislative measures. “We will do whatever it takes to protect…

LONDON(Capital Markets in Africa) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. is bankrolling the biggest upheaval of European soccer since the 1950s in a 4 billion-euro ($4.8 billion) bet that has already drawn heavy criticism from fans, domestic leagues and politicians. The U.S. investment bank agreed to underwrite an initial 3.5-billion-euro investment to help a group of the world’s richest soccer clubs set up a top-tier Super League, a figure that will total 4 billion euros after…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) — Egypt seized the giant container vessel that blocked the Suez Canal last month as part of an effort to get more than $900 million in compensation. A court in the city of Ismailia granted a seizure request regarding the Ever Given vessel at the behest of the Suez Canal Authority. Egypt’s move underscores the legal complications following the container vessel’s grounding on March 23, which closed the canal for six…