Jesse Jackson Dies; Iran & US Meet for Nuclear Talks

0:00Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London with the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Good morning, I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moskow. Here are the stories we're following today. Karen, we begin this morning with the passing of a civil rights icon. The Reverend Jesse Jackson has died at the age of 84. Bloomberg's Alexis Christophoris joins us with more. Good morning, Alexis. Good morning. The famed civil rights leader who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and later ran for president twice, died peacefully this morning, surrounded by his loved ones, according to his family. A cause of death was not immediately given. Jackson revealed he had Parkinson's in 2017 and had been hospitalized since November after being diagnosed with a degenerative condition.

1:48Jackson's activism spanned decades, including two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 88. In 2000, President Clinton awarded Jackson the country's highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing his decades of work to make the world a better place. Jesse Jackson is survived by his six children and his wife of 60 years. In New York, Alexis Christophoris, Bloomberg Radio. All right, Alexis, thank you. We now turn to a couple of high-profile talks in Geneva. The U.S. and Iran are set to meet for a second round of nuclear talks as they seek to avoid renewed conflict in the Middle East.

2:22On Air Force One, President Trump said he will be following the talks closely. So I'll be involved in those talks indirectly, and they'll be very important. We'll see what can happen. Typically, RANDs are very tough to negotiate. I think they want to make a deal. I don't think they want the consequences of not making a deal. They want to make a deal. And along with President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he's hopeful Tehran and Washington brokered agreement. Rubio spoke with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwaite on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. I think it's pretty clear that Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, that that poses a threat, not just to the United States, to Europe, to world security, and to the region.

3:05There's no doubt about it. The second is, we obviously want to have forces in the region because Iran has shown the willingness and the capability to lash and strike out at the United States' presence in the region. You know, we have bases because of our alliances in the region. And Iran has shown in the past that they're willing to attack us and or threaten our bases. So we have to have sufficient firepower in the region to ensure that they don't make a mistake and come after us and trigger something larger. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

3:31Iranian officials have expressed willingness to discuss their nuclear enrichment activities, but they've tied any concessions to the potential easing of U.S. sanctions. Well, Nathan, President Trump is reaping high praise on Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but fell short of saying if he would support either one of them to lead the Republican presidential ticket in the 2028 election. Something I don't have to worry about now. I've got three years to go. So it's something I don't have to worry. J.D.'s fantastic and Marcus, they're both fantastic. President Trump made the comments to reporters on board Air Force One.

4:05And as we approach the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Karen, there will also be U.S.-brokered talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Geneva. Bloomberg's Hugo Miller has the latest from Switzerland. It's going to be up to whether the lead U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner can really kind of bring the sides together, knock some heads together. They've also brought their own idea of a U.S. free economic zone. But that's interesting. And that's one thing that both the Russians and the Ukrainians agree on. They're both rather cool on the idea of a kind of neutral, free economic zone.

4:42So there's really going to be a full day, perhaps two days of discussions here in Geneva. But no one is too optimistic that a lot of headway is going to get made. Bloomberg's Hugo Miller says the intensity of military strikes has risen sharply on both sides this month, despite U.S. efforts to end the war. Well, back here in the nation's capital, Nathan, the Department of Homeland Security is still shut down amid a congressional funding impasse. According to an aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, The Democrats have sent a counteroffer on limits they're demanding on immigration enforcement activities to the Republicans and the White House.

5:19The lapse in funding could last for weeks with Congress on a recess. And there's yet more fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein files, Karen. Billionaire Tom Pritzker says he is stepping down as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, citing his association with the disgraced financier. In a news release, Pritzker says he exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Well, he says there's no excuse for failing to distance himself sooner. Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Thomas Massey is taking aim at Attorney General Pam Bondi for the Justice Department's handling of the files.

5:50Ultimately, it's her who is responsible for the document production, according to our law. The Attorney General, it's not Todd Blanche, it's not the people below them. You can assign tasks to people, but you can't assign your responsibility. Republican Thomas Massey appeared on ABC's This Week, heard Sundays on Bloomberg Radio. The latest tranche of Justice Department documents, as well as a cache of emails from Epstein's Yahoo account, show he also worked behind the scenes at the World Economic Forum to help his friends score accommodations and meetings with billionaires and government officials at the event.

6:20The DOJ files include messages between Epstein and World Economic Forum president Borga Brenda. Brenda says he had been completely unaware of Epstein's criminal activities. Nathan, authorities are saying a shooting during a Rhode Island youth hockey game has left three people dead, including the shooter. Authorities say they believe the shooting was a targeted attack stemming from a family dispute. And here's Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Gonsalves. We probably had about 100 people within the station that we talked to. We can also tell you that a good Samaritan stepped in and interjected in the scene.

6:53And that's probably what led to a swift end of this tragic event. And that's Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Gonsalves, who says the shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Gonsalves identify the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who said she also went by the name Roberta Esposito. Now, Karen, let's get to the latest on Nancy Guthrie's disappearance. The search for Today Show host Savannah Guthrie's mother is now into a third week. Investigators are consulting with management at Walmart to develop leads. The Ozark Trail hiker pack backpack that the suspect was wearing in surveillance video from Nancy Guthrie's porch is sold exclusively at Walmart.

7:30Investigators also say a glove found near the home was sent for DNA testing. Stephen Jensen is a former investigator from the FBI's Washington field office. Descriptors like the clothing, the glove, the unique holster that he was wearing. Can we identify where this was purchased? And it sounds like Walmart is a prime retailer for many of these items. And then you're looking for patterns inside of the retail data. That's former FBI investigator Stephen Jensen. Pima County Sheriff Chris Danos also says members of Guthrie's family, including siblings and spouses, have been ruled out as suspects. President Trump told the New York Post he would ask the Justice Department to seek the death penalty if Nancy Guthrie is not returned alive.

8:10Nathan, let's turn to the markets now. Futures are lower as Wall Street returns to a holiday-shortened trading week, and it will once again be a busy week for earnings. You get a preview with Bloomberg's Charlie Pellett. Investors are looking beyond the headline and guidance numbers for clarity on AI capital investments. Mark Lushini is chief investment strategist at Jannie Montgomery. Scott, he's watching revenue. I mean, right now we're seeing not only estimates, obviously, as we're closing out confession season for the fourth quarter, continue to beat expectations. That's a pretty heady pace, not only on earnings, but revenues.

8:43Among this week's most closely watched reports will be Walmart, also reporting tech names, Palo Alto networks, analog devices, and cadence design systems. In New York, Charlie Pellett, Bloomberg Radio. All right, Charlie, thank you. We have some deal news on this Monday observed, I think we could say. The Financial Times is reporting that Danaher is near a$10 billion deal to acquire medical technology firm Massimo, the purchase of Mark Danaher's largest acquisition since its $21 billion takeover of Cytiva in 2020. Massimo shares up 38 % in early trading. And then shares of BHP, they're up more than 1 % in Europe.

9:22The world's largest miner posted earnings at the upper end of analyst expectations. A years-long effort to shore up copper production combined with a historic metals rally offset a lackluster period for its giant iron ore business.

9:38Time now for a look at some of the other stories making news in New York and around the world. And for that, we're joined by Bloomberg's Michael Barr. Michael, good morning. Good morning, Karen. It is a tragic day for an Indianapolis community. Authorities say a Beech Grove officer was shot and killed Monday while responding to a domestic incident, and another officer was wounded. 33-year-old Officer Brian Elliott was killed at the scene, and the suspect fled. Sergeant John Perrine with Indiana State Police said the suspect was caught. An alert community member flagged down a police officer and said, hey, something's not right, and they were correct.

10:15they pointed us in the direction of where they believed the suspect was hiding and IMPD SWAT was able to move in within minutes of that tip. Sergeant Perrine says Officer Elliott had been with the department a little over the year. The second officer is expected to survive. A federal judge has ordered an exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington to be restored at his former home in Philadelphia after President Donald Trump's administration took it down last month. The order came on President's Day. The city of Philadelphia sued last month after the National Park Service removed the panels from Independence National Historical Park.

10:55Tributes continue to come in for actor Robert Duvall. His family confirmed he died Monday at his Virginia farm. Duvall said his most quotable line, it came from the apocalypse now. I love the smell of red palm in the morning. Among his many films, Duvall is also remembered for his role as Tom Hagen in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Nobody has ever gunned down a New York police captain, never. It would be disastrous. All the five families would come after you, sonny. The Corleone family would be outcast. Even the old man's political protection would run for cover. He also wrote, directed, and starred in the acclaimed movie The Apostle and was hailed for his performance in the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove.

11:43Robert Duvall was 95. Global News 24 hours a day and whenever you want it. With Bloomberg News Now, I'm Michael Barr and this is Bloomberg, Karen. Thanks, Michael. Time now for our Bloomberg Sports Update. And for that, we bring in John Stashauer. Thanks, Karen. Dude number one in college basketball. Michigan for the first time since 2013. Houston is now ranked second, but the Cougars lost at sixth-ranked Iowa State, 70-67. Duke is now ranked third. Easy win over Syracuse, 101-64. Speaking of easy wins, U.S. 5-0 over Sweden in the women's hockey semifinals. The U.S. team is 6-0 by a cumulative score of 31-1.

12:22Play Canada for the gold medal Thursday. A gold medal in the bobsled for American Elena Myers-Taylor. That's your Bloomberg Sports Update. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Daybreak coming up. After this. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real. Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders.

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14:25Coast to coast on Bloomberg Radio, nationwide on Sirius XM, and around the world on Bloomberg.com and the Bloomberg Business App. This is Bloomberg Daybreak. Good morning, I'm Nathan Hager. Geneva is the epicenter of diplomacy today with the U.S. holding high-level talks both on Iran's nuclear program and the war in Ukraine. President Trump says he will be involved in the Iran discussions indirectly. Correctly. Typically, Iran's a very tough negotiator. They're good negotiators or bad. I would say they're bad negotiators because we could add a deal instead of sending the B2s in to knock out their nuclear potential.

15:02That was President Trump aboard Air Force One last night. This morning, we're joined by Bloomberg Chief Europe Correspondent Oliver Crook. Ali, good morning. What are we expecting from this next round of Iran talks? Yeah, well, listen, a very tall order for the Trump administration trying to resolve or at least make progress on two of the most sort of complicated geopolitical crises and situations that we've got, both Russia and Ukraine and, of course, Iran and the United States, which are now in open dialogue about kind of what the future of that relationship looks like. What the United States would like to achieve is to get forward on a sort of framework for the sort of denuclearization, the sort of commitment against enriching uranium, those sorts of things.

15:40What the Iranians want in return is sort of sanction relief. And given sort of how tall and order this is, we should say that these conversations with Iran, unlike the ones with Russia and Ukraine, these are still at the very sort of early stages here. But really upping the stakes here is the fact that there's a second aircraft carrier that's headed into the regions. We also had over the last couple of days the Iranians' Revolutionary Guard. They're holding exercises, again, in potential preparation for some kind of conflict. And that really is the kind of stakes here that have been set for the stage, whether it's President Trump, whether it's Marco Rubio over the last couple of days, basically all saying that they prefer a diplomatic resolution to this issue, but making very clear that force is certainly an option that is on the table.

16:17So we'll be watching very closely in Geneva. They've been speaking for about two hours now so far this morning. So we'll see if we can get anything out of that. As far as the markets are concerned, as we take as a sort of barometer for how worried they are, you know, the oil market looking pretty sedate this morning. So we're watching very closely what we can get on that. Certainly. But with those two aircraft carriers in the region, does that suggest something about the timing that the U.S. is looking for in terms of hammering out a final deal here? Well, I think that that's sort of a very sort of interesting side of it, right, because this is something that is obviously intended to escalate the pressure on the Iranians.

16:49But given how complicated any kind of deal between the two sides is going to have to be, you know, I don't imagine that this is something you can just hammer out in a couple of summits. The first round of talks was on February the 6th. This is only the second round of talks. When you think about the difficulty and the diplomacy here required in order to strike a deal, this is not something that is likely to happen overnight. That being said, we have been surprised in the past by Trump foreign policy efforts that have yielded something that was completely unexpected. We think, of course, of the truce or the ceasefire that was arrived at between the Israelis and Hamas, which really is something that at first I think there was very little optimism could really be achieved and then suddenly sort of came into fruition rather quickly.

17:27And in terms of the Russia-Ukraine discussions, I've kind of lost track of which round we're on there. But are we expecting any breakthroughs in Geneva today? Yeah, I think that the sort of expectations are fairly low from, you know, the sort of renewed effort with the trilateral talks that involved the United States, the Ukrainians and the Russians, where basically this is the third meeting in about three weeks. So there certainly has been an increase of the cadence of these sort of negotiations. That being said, again, you listen to Marco Rubio while he's been in Munich, while he's been in Budapest over the last couple of days.

17:57He's basically saying some days I feel better about it than others, but at the end of the day, you know, I'm not really in a position to say whether or not we're any closer to a resolution for this war. What we did hear, interestingly, from Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend was basically saying that if we can negotiate a ceasefire for two months, then the Ukrainians are willing to hold an election in Ukraine, which is, you know, a sort of meaningful step from the president of Ukraine, particularly since the Trump administration and Trump himself has put some pressure on the Ukrainians to do that.

18:26But that being said, we should also say that the Russians have been absolutely hammering the energy infrastructure over in Ukraine. And we should just say, just to give people a reminder here, the temperature in Kyiv right now is 17 degrees Fahrenheit with a low of 10 degrees, with hundreds of thousands of people across the country periodically without electricity and without heat. This is Bloomberg Daybreak, your morning podcast on the stories making news from Wall Street to Washington and beyond. Look for us on your podcast feed by 6 a.m. Eastern each morning on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen.

18:58You can also listen live each morning starting at 5 a.m. Wall Street time on Bloomberg 1130 in New York, Bloomberg 99.1 in Washington, Bloomberg 92.9 in Boston, and nationwide on Sirius XM Channel 121. Plus, listen coast-to-coast on the Bloomberg Business app now with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto interfaces. And don't forget to subscribe to Bloomberg News Now. It's the latest news whenever you want it, in five minutes or less. Search Bloomberg News Now on your favorite podcast platform to stay informed all day long. I'm Karen Moscow. And I'm Nathan Hager. Join us again tomorrow morning for all the news you need to start your day right here on Bloomberg Daybreak.

19:49This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. The time is approximately 11.15 a.m. About to start a consensual telephone call with Dr. Daiwa Zhang. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside.

20:30I've never seen that much evidence in my entire career, and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS. and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau from Bloomberg Podcasts starting on February 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.