The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is examining why banks with excess cash failed to lend to the overnight money market, following a week that revealed cracks in the US’s financial plumbing.John Williams, president of the New York Fed, on Friday questioned the hesitance of the banks in an interview with the FT. “The thing we need to be focused on today is not so much the level of reserves [held at the Fed],” he said. “It’s how does the market function.”Overnight borrowing rates rose as high as 10…

Kristine Phillips and Donovan Slack USA TODAY Published 3:12 PM EDT Sep 20, 2019 William Alfred Holloway’s health was improving – at least that’s what his family was told by staff at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Clarksburg, West Virginia. “The nurse told us his numbers are great,” his daughter, Karen, said. But the next morning, the 96-year-old Army veteran was dead. Holloway’s death, which has not been previously reported, was the first of three suspicious deaths in three days. All the patients stayed in the same third-floor unit of the Louis…

Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni, who was the premiere documenter of major Land Art works—including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence, 1976—has died at age seventy-seven. Born in Rome, Gorgoni moved to the US in 1968 to produce a photographic essay and stayed after a chance encounter with Robert Rauschenberg.In the 1970s, Gorgoni captured the portraits of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, Alfred Leslie, and others, many of which were included in his book The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies (1972)…

Donald Trump said he did not need to secure a deal with China to end the trade war before the 2020 election, as the US president stressed that he wanted a comprehensive pact and would not settle for a narrow agreement.“We’re looking for a complete deal. I’m not looking for a partial deal,” Mr Trump said, rejecting suggestions that he needed an agreement for his re-election campaign.“I don’t think I need it before the election. I think people know that we’re doing a great job,” the president said at a…

David Jackson USA TODAY Published 2:09 PM EDT Sep 20, 2019 WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said Friday it “doesn’t matter” if he asked the government of Ukraine to investigate Democratic opponent Joe Biden and that it should be done anyway. “Someone ought to look into Joe Biden,” Trump told reporters while declining to discuss investigations into whether he and aides are pressuring Ukraine to investigate one of his most prominent political opponents. That question is the subject of an ongoing congressional investigation and, reportedly, the still-secret complaint of a whistleblower in the…

As the United Nations prepares to host the Youth Climate Summit and Climate Action Summit on September 21 and September 23, which will introduce government, corporate, and civil initiatives that aim to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade and to net zero by 2050, New Zealand–based artist Joseph Michael will light up the UN’s New York headquarters with large-scale projections of a massive iceberg.Titled VOICES FOR THE FUTURE, the artwork was produced in collaboration with the environmental charity Project Pressure and the Permanent Mission…

A group of 23 states including California have filed a lawsuit after the Trump administration moved to pull a waiver granting the state the ability to set its own car emissions rules.California led the lawsuit against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US auto regulator, arguing the federal government’s decision was “unlawful and should be vacated”.California was joined by 22 other states, the District of Columbia and the cities of New York and Los Angeles in the lawsuit filed Friday in the US district court in DC.Andrew Wheeler, the…

The Kathmandu Triennale has appointed Nepalese artists and cultural organizers Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari as cocurators of its 2020 edition. They join director Sharareh Bajracharya and artistic director Cosmin Costinas in organizing the festival, which began in 2009 to address questions of climate change and feminism and was reformatted into a triennial in 2017, shifting its focus to further engage trans-Asian voices and the Nepali contemporary art scene. The forthcoming edition is slated to open in December 2020.Gurung was born in Nepal in 1986 and studied at Tribhuvan…

Ledyard King USA TODAY Published 1:04 PM EDT Sep 20, 2019 MIDDLETOWN, PA – Even 40 years later, John Garver vividly remembers the metallic taste of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear disaster. An acrid odor permeated Harrisburg as he walked out of a restaurant in Pennsylvania’s capital city the morning of March 28, 1979. “We had this smell in the air, wondering what it was,” recalled Garver, 80, now a retired salesman. “Well it didn’t take us long to find out … that the accident started.” Some 14 miles away, the “accident” was…

FT subscribers can click here to receive FT Free Trade every day by email.US president Donald Trump is on the cusp of completing a mini-trade deal with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council at the White House, went as far as saying that an agreement could be signed when the two leaders meet next week at the UN General Assembly in New York.The deal will be limited because it will essentially swap some Japanese concessions on agriculture, in line with what Tokyo…