Financial Times - Colby Smith, Nicholas Megaw and Arjun Neil Alim / Federal Reserve cuts rates by half a point and signals era of easing has begun

• The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point on Wednesday and signalled more reductions would follow, launching its first easing cycle since the onset of the pandemic. 
• The US central bank’s first cut in more than four years leaves the federal funds rate at a range of 4.75 per cent to 5 per cent. Michelle Bowman, a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, voted in favour of a quarter-point cut — the first Fed governor since 2005 to dissent from a rate decision. 
• The bumper half-point cut suggests the US central bank is seeking to pre-empt any weakening of the US economy and labour market after more than a year of holding rates at their highest level since 2001.

• “The US economy is in a good place and our decision today is designed to keep it there,” Fed chair Jay Powell said at a news conference on Wednesday. “This recalibration of our policy stance will help maintain the strength of the economy and the labour market and will continue to enable further progress on inflation as we begin the process of moving towards a more neutral stance.”.

   

The Washington Post - Loveday Morris, Joby Warrick and Shira Rubin / A key question behind Israeli attack on Hezbollah devices: Why now?

• The complex, multistage attack that caused thousands of Hezbollah pagers and handheld radios to explode across Lebanon over the last two days appears to have been meticulously mapped out. 

• Israel, which rarely comments on its intelligence operations abroad, has neither claimed nor denied responsibility for the attack, which continued into a second day Wednesday as more devices exploded across Lebanon. The Israelis did not inform the United States about the specifics of the attack before it took place but told Washington afterward through intelligence channels, according to two U.S. officials. Like others in this story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

• An adviser to Israel’s military intelligence directorate and a former senior commander in Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, assessed that agents may have taken control of the beeper supply chain, emptied the devices’ contents and filled them with small amounts of explosives. Once that was complete, he told The Washington Post, there would have been limited time to act: “The level of suspicion is high, and it takes only one to explode [unintentionally] for the operation to be burned.” 

• Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi approved “offensive and defensive” plans for the northern border, the military said in a statement Wednesday. Israeli military radio reported that the army’s 98th Division would be transferred from Gaza to the north.

   

Reuters - Krishn Kaushik / Exclusive: Ammunition from India enters Ukraine, raising Russian ire

• Artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers have been diverted by European customers to Ukraine and New Delhi has not intervened to stop the trade despite protests from Moscow, according to eleven Indian and European government and defence industry officials, as well as a Reuters analysis of commercially available customs data. 

• The transfer of munitions to support Ukraine's defence against Russia has occurred for more than a year, according to the sources and the customs data. Indian arms export regulations limit the use of weaponry to the declared purchaser, who risks future sales being terminated if unauthorised transfers occur. 

• Two Indian government and two defence industry sources told Reuters that Delhi produced only a very small amount of the ammunition being used by Ukraine, with one official estimating that it was under 1% of the total arms imported by Kyiv since the war. The news agency couldn't determine if the munitions were resold or donated to Kyiv by the European customers. 

• Among the European countries sending Indian munitions to Ukraine are Italy and the Czech Republic, which is leading an initiative to supply Kyiv with artillery shells from outside the European Union, according to a Spanish and a senior Indian official, as well as a former top executive at Yantra India, a state-owned company whose munitions are being used by Ukraine”.

   

Euractiv - Thomas Moller-Nielsen / All eyes on China’s Wang, EU’s Dombrovskis talks ahead of crunch tariffs vote

• Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis are set for tough talks on Thursday morning (19 September) ahead of a pivotal vote by EU member states next week. 

• Wang’s visit, which follows whistle-stop trips to Germany and Italy earlier this week, is a last-ditch effort ahead of a vote next Wednesday (25 September) on whether to definitively implement the EU executive’s proposed duties of up to 35.3% on electric vehicles (EVs). 

• According to reports by the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU (CCCEU), Wang told Chinese and European automakers at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday (18 September) that China-EU trade ties are now at a “crossroads”, with “one path leading to openness and collaboration [and] the other to protectionism and isolation”. 

• Commission spokesperson Olof Gill told Euractiv on Wednesday that the European Commission remains “open to a negotiated solution […] provided that such a solution is adequate and effective in addressing the risk of injury to EU industry that we established in our investigation.”.
   

Our opinion reads for today:

• Politico - Simone Tagliapietra, Cecilia Trasi and Giovanni Sgaravatti / The European Green Deal must go global 
• The Guardian – Lina Khatib / Bloodied, humiliated and knocked off guard by deadly pager warfare – what will Hezbollah do next?