BEIJING — In the third high-level U.S. official visit to China in about a month, U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry emphasized efforts to stabilize the bilateral relationship.

“Now we’re in a place where because of the efforts of President Biden and President Xi to try to stabilize the relationship, we can now I hope, make progress between now and the meeting in the UAE, in December, of COP 28,” Kerry said Tuesday, in opening remarks at a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang.

About a week earlier, Li met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in the same building. In late June, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also met there with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Blinken’s visit brought a thaw to increasingly frigid relations in which climate talks, one of the few areas of cooperation, have even seen temporary suspension.

The U.S. and China are also the world’s largest polluters. In recent weeks, global temperatures have climbed to record highs.

The world faces great “challenges” in responding to climate change, Li said.

“It is incumbent upon China, the United States, and indeed all countries in the world to strengthen coordination with consensus and speed of actions,” he said, according to an official translation of his Mandarin-language remarks.

Earlier on Tuesday, Kerry also emphasized stability in his meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi.

“Biden is very committed to stability within this relationship and also to achieve efforts together, that can make a significant difference in the world,” Kerry said.

“Our hope is now that this could be the beginning of a new definition of collaboration and the capacity to resolve the differences between us.”

Climate talks between the U.S. and China were temporarily suspended after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August last year, drawing the ire of Beijing.

China considers the democratically self-ruled island as part of its territory.

Tensions between the U.S. and China have also spilled over into technology, with U.S. efforts to limit Chinese access to high-end semiconductor technology.

“Of course, pushing for cooperation on climate change is under the larger scope of China-U.S. relations,” Wang said, according to a CNBC translation of the Mandarin.

He said the two countries could resolve problems as long as the dialogue was based on “equality” and with “mutual respect.”

Following the latest U.S. senior official visits to Beijing, high-level Chinese officials are expected to visit the U.S. at an unspecified date.

Since arriving in Beijing on Sunday, Kerry has focused on talks with his climate counterpart Xie Zhenhua. Kerry is set to depart on Wednesday.

Parts of meetings open to the press were tense.

During the meeting with the Chinse premier, Kerry brought up a report of a 52°C (125.6°F) temperature reading in China a few days earlier. Li interjected to question whether it was from an official weather report or “small” media, and whether it was a reading from the ground or air.

“Oh. Well, it may not be,” Kerry said. He said that he’d seen the news on TV and said his point was about the rate of change and predictions for the future.

State-run China News Agency on Monday said an “automatically” recorded temperature from a local weather station showed the Sanbao township in Xinjiang reached a record high of 52.2°C on Sunday.

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a House-approved bill late Thursday to raise the debt ceiling and cap government spending for two years, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk .

He is expected to sign it Friday, just three days before the U.S. risked its first-ever sovereign debt default.

“No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: This bipartisan agreement is a big win for our economy and the American people,” Biden said in a statement after the vote.

The compromise debt ceiling bill passed the Senate by a 63-36 margin, enough support from Democrats and Republicans to overcome the chamber’s 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster.

The vote was the final chapter in a remarkable day of deal making and rapid-fire voting in the Senate, a body that typically requires days, not hours, to deliberate over and amend House bills.

On Thursday night, the chamber voted down 11 proposed amendments to the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed by the House, before ultimately voting to pass the bill itself.

The driving force behind the turbo votes was simple: The Treasury Department’s June 5 deadline for raising or suspending the debt ceiling was just four days away.

Secretary Janet Yellen has said she believed the government will most likely be unable to meet its debt obligation after Monday, unless Congress votes to raise the debt limit.

Following the Senate vote, Yellen praised the bill, saying it “protects the full faith and credit of the United States and preserves our financial leadership, which is critical to our economic growth and stability.”

The bill that passed Thursday was the result of a compromise deal negotiated by delegates for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden. It handed conservatives several ideological policy victories in exchange for their votes to raise the debt ceiling beyond next year’s presidential election and into 2025.

The bill moved through the House in less than 72 hours, and passed Wednesday night with a resounding majority, 314-117. The vote breakdown surprised House leadership on both sides: In the end, more House Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans.

In the Senate, the final vote was similarly bipartisan, but it was not an easy lift.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spent much of the day Thursday hammering out an agreement with a group of Senate Republicans who demanded that he pledge to support a supplemental defense funding bill before they would agree to fast-track the debt ceiling bill.

The current House debt ceiling bill provided $886 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2024, an increase of 3% year over year. That figure increased to $895 billion in 2025, an increase of 1%.

But GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine called this “woefully inadequate” Thursday, arguing that a 1% increase did not keep pace with inflation, so in practical terms, it was actually a decrease in military funding. The solution came in the form of a rare joint statement from Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., which was read on the floor.

“This debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia and our other adversaries and respond to ongoing and growing national security threats,” Schumer read. “Nor does this debt ceiling limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds and respond to various national issues, such as disaster relief, combating the fentanyl crisis or other issues of national importance,” said Schumer.

The message was unmistakable: Regardless of what the bill said, the Senate would continue to spend money above and beyond that to fund what its members believed was important.

With the debt ceiling crisis averted, Congress now turns its eyes to a summer of appropriations, haggling over how to spend their capped sums of money next year.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Friday that the United States will likely have enough reserves to push off a potential debt default until June 5.

“We now estimate that Treasury will have insufficient resources to satisfy the government’s obligations if Congress has not raised or suspended the debt limit by June 5,” Yellen wrote in a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The new date Friday provided some much needed breathing room for negotiations between the White House and congressional Republicans that appeared to be closing in on a compromise agreement Friday to raise the debt ceiling for two years. 

The last time the so-called “X date” was updated was on May 1, when Yellen told Congress the United States had enough cash available to meet its obligations until “early June, and potentially as early as June 1.” 

Friday’s letter marked the first time since Yellen began sending regular updates to Congress in January that the secretary did not caveat the date with a phrase like “as early as.”

Instead, Yellen explained that Treasury would make more than “$130 billion of scheduled payments in the first two days of June,” leaving the agency with “an extremely low level of resources.”

“During the week of June 5, Treasury is scheduled to make an estimated $92 billion of payments and transfers,” Yellen continued, and “our projected resources would be inadequate to satisfy all of these obligations.”

To underscore just how low Treasury’s reserves had fallen, Yellen said the agency was forced to deploy an obscure measure on Thursday to move $2 billion from a civil service retirement fund over to the government’s main borrowing institution, the Federal Financing Bank.

The move was necessary because “the extremely low level of remaining resources demands that I exhaust all available extraordinary measures to avoid being unable to meet all of the government’s commitments,” Yellen wrote.

Markets closed higher Friday, buoyed in part by optimism that there would be a deal passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president by June 1. 

But as talks dragged on this week with little more than vague claims of “progress” by those involved, optimism faded that deal would be reached by the end of Friday.

Officials said Friday was widely seen as the last possible day to reach a deal and still have enough time to craft it into legislation, pass it in the House and then pass it in the Senate before the previous “X-date” of June 1.

Yellen’s new date came amid growing concerns around the world about the U.S. credit rating. 

On Wednesday, the Fitch credit rating agency announced it had placed the United States’ triple-A status on “rating watch negative.”

On Friday, in a preliminary International Monetary Fund annual assessment of the United States, officials wrote that “brinkmanship over the federal debt ceiling could create a further, entirely avoidable systemic risk to both the U.S. and the global economy.”

Should the United States technically default, even for just a few days, it could drive up interest rates and undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar. Economists note that America’s adversaries, and in particular Russia and China, are watching the current debt limit standoff with delight, secure in the knowledge that an erosion of trust in the U.S. dollar would accrue to their benefit.

The on-again, off-again deliberations on Capitol Hill surrounding the debt ceiling are back off-again, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters on Saturday Republicans will only continue negotiations when President Joe Biden returns from the Group of Seven Summit in Japan.

“Unfortunately, the White House moved backwards,” McCarthy said about the current deliberations surrounding the debt ceiling. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to move forward until the president can get back in the country,” he added.

On Saturday evening, the Biden administration countered that it was the Republicans who on Friday made an offer on the debt ceiling that was “a big step back,” asserting that the proposal contained “extreme partisan demands that could never pass both Houses of Congress.”

“It is only a Republican leadership beholden to its MAGA wing — not the President or Democratic leadership — who are threatening to put our nation into default for the first time in our history unless extreme partisan demands are met,” according to a statement by Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Biden is scheduled to return to Washington, D.C., from the G-7 summit on Sunday. The president said at a press conference from the summit that he is “not at all” concerned about the negotiations and believes “we’ll be able to avoid a default and we’ll get something decent done.”

McCarthy’s revelation that the talks are on pause again, at least for now, is the latest hurdle facing the debate in Congress on what to do with the pending debt limit. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen pegged June 1 as the earliest date on which the United States could run out of money to pay debts the government has already incurred.

Any deal to raise or suspend the debt limit will need to pass in both the GOP-led House and the Democratic-controlled Senate, and key lawmakers in both parties have acknowledged that the eventual compromise bill could be unacceptable to hardliners.

The high-stakes talks over raising the debt limit resumed in the Capitol on Friday evening, hours after they were paused at midday when Republican negotiators walked out of the room, blaming the White House for holding up discussions.

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Investors like jobs growth.

The U.S. labor market is still hot. There were 253,000 new nonfarm jobs last month, handily beating Wall Street estimates for job growth of 180,000. Average hourly earnings unexpectedly rose by 0.5% — the biggest monthly gain in a year.U.S. markets jumped Friday as Apple shares popped and regional bank stocks recovered. Europe’s Stoxx 600 rose 1.1% — Adidas, with an 8.9% surge, was a big winner in the index.If the White House fails to raise the debt ceiling, there will be a “steep economic downturn” and “economic chaos will ensue,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Sunday. The U.S. might hit its debt ceiling as early as June 1.PRO During Berkshire’s meeting, Buffett shared his favorite stocks. One of them is a “better business than any we own,” Buffett said. Another is “one of the best-managed and important companies in the world” — yet Buffett decided to sell shares in it. Here’s why.

A strong jobs reading, a note from JPMorgan and an optimistic earnings report from Apple buoyed U.S. markets Friday.

The gains made by stocks were impressive — especially after the previous few days of renewed banking fears — so let’s start with them. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 1.65%, the S&P 500 rose 1.85% and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.25%.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq’s jump is straightforward: Apple shares leaped 4.7% after the company reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue Thursday. Other Big Tech companies, like Microsoft and Amazon, rose alongside Apple.

Broader markets were boosted by April’s jobs report, which showed a higher-than-expected increase in jobs growth and an unemployment rate of 3.4% — a record low since 1969.

Markets’ reaction might seem confusing at first. A tight labor market implies the Federal Reserve might continue raising interest rates. Generally speaking, that’s bad for markets. Recall January’s jobs report: There were 517,000 new jobs in December, almost three times the forecast. Markets fell on the news.  

Yet this time, markets rallied, suggesting that the worry gripping traders is one of recession, not inflation. A strong jobs market increases the probability that the U.S. economy can tame inflation without contracting too severely.

Indeed, there are signs the U.S. economy has been slowing. At the end of April, we learned that GDP rose at an annualized 1.1% pace in the first quarter, about half of what analysts had estimated. The banking crisis — resurrected by First Republic’s failure — is spreading again, causing banks to lend less and ultimately slow growth even further.

There’s good news on that front, however. On Friday, banking titan JPMorgan Chase upgraded three regional bank stocks to “overweight,” saying that Western Alliance, Zions Bancorp and Comerica were all “substantially mispriced” — as I had argued in Friday’s edition of this newsletter.

Investors digested the note and pushed the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) up 6.3%. Individual bank stocks saw more drastic jumps: PacWest surged 81.7% and Western Alliance popped 49.2%.

But make no mistake: This isn’t a sign that banking fears have been put to rest definitively. If stocks can swing so drastically in one direction on the back of a note, they can do so in the other at the faintest whisper of trouble. What we’re seeing isn’t renewed confidence, but continued volatility.

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WASHINGTON — Federal bank regulators are not considering any plans to insure all U.S. bank deposits, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.

Several banking groups and consumer advocates have called for some kind of a universal deposit guarantee after the government refunded most of the uninsured deposits at two banks that collapsed earlier this month, California-based Silicon Valley Bank and New York-based Signature Bank.

“I have not considered or discussed anything having to do with blanket insurance or guarantees of all deposits,” Yellen told senators during a hearing on Capitol Hill to consider the Treasury Department’s 2024 budget request.

The comments helped to fuel a decline in the stock market, and a drop in regional bank shares.

The deposit guarantees for SVB and Signature set off a fierce debate in Washington over whether big banks that had taken excessive risks were getting a special bailout, while smaller banks were being forced to confront a rush of withdrawals — triggered by public fears about the big banks — without any special help.

“I’m very troubled,” said Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins. “It seems to me, by guaranteeing all of the deposits [at SVB] that you’re creating a situation where they are immune from losses … in a way that puts the well managed community bank at a competitive disadvantage. So I guess my question to you is, how is this fair?”

Yellen said that at the time, regulators weren’t thinking about giving one bank an advantage over any other bank. At the time, they were thinking about “the implications for the broader banking system because of the contagion potential,” she said.

That explanation has not been enough to satisfy small and mid-sized banks, however.

“If policymakers decide to provide unlimited deposit insurance to some institutions, they cannot leave others out—certainly not the community banks that have, as always, operated on a safe and sound basis,” Rebeca Rainey, CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in a recent statement.

While Yellen ruled out universal blanket deposit guarantees, she appeared to be open to other potential ways to help smaller banks offer additional insurance to large deposits.

One idea volunteered by Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was to create a system where depositors who needed to keep cash in excess of the $250,000 FDIC limit could pay slightly higher bank fees, akin to an insurance premium, in order to secure a higher level of FDIC insurance.

“Shouldn’t I be able to buy or pay a little higher bank fee, to get protection … with a cap maybe at $10 million?” Manchin said to Yellen near the end of her testimony. “We’ve been talking … some senators have been talking back and forth … and I don’t think we should [craft legislation] without you all involved, showing us how to structure that.”

“I think this is very worthwhile, for you and your colleagues to be discussing what’s appropriate here,” Yellen replied. “And we would be more than willing to work with you to think this through.”

She added: “For the moment, we’re trying to stabilize the situation using the tools at our disposal.”

These efforts are starting to bear fruit, Yellen told a bankers group Tuesday. She said that “aggregate deposit outflows from regional banks have stabilized.”

But while the trends are moving in the right direction, the amount of money banks borrowed in the week ending March 15 from the Fed’s discount window set a new record at $153 billion, according to the Fed’s weekly report, a sum that suggests the banking sector is not quite stable yet.

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sought to reassure markets and lawmakers on Thursday that the federal government is committed to protecting U.S. bank deposits following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank over the weekend.

“Our banking system remains sound and Americans can feel confident that their deposits will be there when they need them,” Yellen said in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee.

Under questioning, however, Yellen admitted that not all depositors will be protected over the FDIC insurance limits of $250,000 per account as they did for customers of the two failed banks.

Yellen has been at the center of emergency federal efforts this past week to recover deposits for account holders at two failed banks, the California-based SVB and the crypto-heavy Signature Bank, based in New York.

A majority of SVB’s customers were small tech companies, venture capital firms and entrepreneurs who used the bank for day-to-day cash management to run their businesses. Those customers had $175 billion on deposit with tens of millions in individual accounts. That left SVB with one of the highest shares of uninsured deposits in the country when it collapsed, with 94% of its deposits landing above the FDIC’s $250,000 insurance limit, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data from 2022.

U.S. bank regulators announced a plan Sunday to fully insure all deposits at the two failed banks, including those above the $250,000 limit covered by traditional FDIC insurance. The additional protection will be paid for out of a special fund made up of fees levied on all FDIC-insured institutions.

In addition, the Federal Reserve loosened its borrowing guidelines for banks seeking short-term funding through its so-called discount window. It also set up a separate unlimited facility to offer one-year loans under looser terms than usual to shore up troubled banks facing a surge in cash withdrawals. Both programs are being paid for through industry fees, not by taxpayers, the Biden administration has emphasized.

“This will help financial institutions meet the needs of all of their depositors,” Yellen said. “This week’s actions demonstrate our resolute commitment to ensure that depositors’ savings remain safe.”

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have largely supported the emergency actions taken in the past week. But with markets recovering somewhat, lawmakers Thursday questioned Yellen about whether backstops for big banks will become a new norm, and what that could mean for community lenders.

“I’m concerned about the precedent of guaranteeing all deposits and the market expectation moving forward,” Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, the committee’s ranking member, said in his opening remarks.

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma pressed Yellen about how widely the uninsured deposit backstops will apply across the banking industry.

“Will the deposits in every community bank in Oklahoma, regardless of their size, be fully insured now?” asked Lankford. “Will they get the same treatment that SVB just got, or Signature Bank just got?”

Yellen acknowledged they would not.

Uninsured deposits, she said, would only be covered in the event that a “failure to protect uninsured depositors would create systemic risk and significant economic and financial consequences.”

Lankford said the impact of this standard would be that small banks would be less appealing to depositors with more than $250,000, the current FDIC insurance threshold.

“I’m concerned you’re … encouraging anyone who has a large deposit at a community bank to say, ‘We’re not going to make you whole, but if you go to one of our preferred banks, we will make you whole.'”

“That’s certainly not something that we’re encouraging,” Yellen replied.

Members of Congress are currently weighing a number of legislative proposals intended to prevent the next Silicon Valley Bank-type failure.

One of these is an increase in the $250,000 FDIC insurance limit, which several senior Democratic lawmakers have called for in the wake of SVB’s collapse.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Congress raised the FDIC limit from $100,000 to $250,000, and approved a plan under which big banks contribute more to the insurance fund than smaller lenders.