President Joe Biden will release his proposed budget on March 9, the White House said on Tuesday, setting a deadline before his meeting with the Republican House speaker on Wednesday to discuss the nation’s spending.

Biden will ask Kevin McCarthy to release a budget plan in the meeting, and to pledge to meet the nation’s debt obligations, according to a White House memo seen by Reuters.

McCarthy and his fellow conservatives, who narrowly won control of the House of Representatives in November, are threatening to block a regular increase of the nation’s debt limit unless Biden pledges lower spending. Biden has said any negotiation on previously approved U.S. spending, which is generally approved on a bipartisan basis, was a non-starter.

Republicans have not yet agreed on how fiscal spending should be trimmed, or firmed up the parameters of a 2023 budget.

The White House has seized on the lack of consensus to highlight fringe proposals from some Republicans, including one that abolishes the Internal Revenue Service in favor of a higher sales tax and one that trims Social Security retirement benefits.

Asked what his message will be for McCarthy, Biden told reporters on Monday: “Show me your budget, I’ll show you mine.”

McCarthy responded with an admonition to Biden to not rule out negotiations before their White House meeting.

“The first thing they should do, especially as the president of the United States: say he’s willing to sit down and find a common ground and negotiate together,” McCarthy said on Tuesday.

While the president can propose a budget plan, both houses of Congress must pass any spending legislation. Biden’s fellow Democrats narrowly control the Senate, where spending bills need 60 votes to pass. The House needs a simple majority to pass these bills; McCarthy has ruled out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the two largest benefit programs.

The showdown over the growing U.S. debt threatens to roil the global economy if the United States defaults. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the country may reach its debt limit as soon as June and has called on Congress to take swift action.

The Treasury Department has already started taking “extraordinary measures” to stave off a default until summer after hitting the U.S. government’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit earlier in January.

On Wednesday, Biden plans to ask McCarthy if he will “commit to the bedrock principle that the United States will never default on its financial obligations” and if he agrees “that it is critical to avoid debt brinksmanship.”

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A gauge of global stocks rose on Tuesday, erasing earlier declines, while U.S. Treasury yields mostly moved lower after as investors digested economic data and earnings reports ahead of a string of central bank policy announcements.

On Wall Street, U.S. stocks were slightly higher, getting a boost from data that showed labor costs growth in the fourth quarter was the smallest in a year with a 1.0% increase. Other data showed consumer confidence eased in January, with inflation expectations over the next twelve months climbing to 6.8% from 6.6% last month.

The U.S. Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise interest rates by 25 basis points (bps) at the conclusion of its two-day policy meeting on Wednesday. Investors will also closely monitor comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell following the announcement for clues on the path of monetary policy.

“The question is now going to be how does the Fed communicate after that – if there are any changes to the statement and how does the press conference go afterwards,” said Jason Pride, chief investment officer for private wealth at Glenmede in Philadelphia.

“The Fed is probably looking at today and thinking they are on the right path on rates but the overall financial system – if you take into account the rise in equities, the lowering of longer-term rates – has shifted easier on them. I suspect they don’t like that, it is not necessarily what they want to have happen.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI)
rose 100.29 points, or 0.3%,
to
33,817.38
, the S&P 500 (.SPX)
gained 27.25 points, or 0.68%,
to
4,045.02
and the Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC)
added 118.73 points, or 1.04%,
to
11,512.54
.

The S&P 500, up about 5.2% for the month, is on track for its best January performance since 2019.

Interest rate announcements from the Bank of England and the European Central Bank are scheduled for Thursday, with both seen as likely to hike by 50 basis points.

Markets will also grapple with a host of U.S. economic data this week, culminating in Friday’s payrolls report for January. Investors see signs of weakening in the labor market as a key factor in bringing down high inflation. Other data included gauges of the manufacturing and services sectors.

In addition, more than 100 S&P 500 companies, including market heavyweights Apple (AAPL.O), Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O), are scheduled to report results this week.

Names such as Caterpillar and McDonald’s both lost ground on Tuesday after their quarterly results.

European shares retreated ahead of the central bank meetings. Economic data for the euro zone showed slight growth for the fourth quarter, but further weakness is expected this year.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index (.STOXX) lost 0.22% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe (.MIWD00000PUS) gained 0.20%. MSCI’s index was on pace for its biggest January percentage gain since 2019.

Benchmark U.S. 10-year notes were down 2.4 basis points to 3.527%, from 3.551% late on Monday after hitting a 2-week high 3.574%, in the wake of the data.

In currencies, the U.S. dollar index, on track for a fourth month of declines, slipped against a basket of currencies, while the euro strengthened.

The dollar index fell 0.088%, with the euro up 0.14% to $1.0859.

Oil prices recovered from earlier lows, as U.S. crude recently rose 1.57% to $79.12 per barrel and Brent was at $84.65, down 0.29% on the day.

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Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) posted a $56 billion net profit for 2022, the company said on Tuesday, taking home about $6.3 million per hour last year, and setting not only a company record but a historic high for the Western oil industry.

Oil majors are expected to break their own annual records on high prices and soaring demand, pushing their combined take to near $200 billion. The scale has renewed criticism of the oil industry and sparked calls for more countries to levy windfall profit taxes on the companies.

Exxon’s results far exceeded the then-record $45.2 billion net profit it reported in 2008, when oil hit $142 per barrel, 30% above last year’s average price. Deep cost cuts during the pandemic helped supercharge last year’s earnings.

“Overall earnings and cash flow were up pretty significantly year on year,” Exxon Chief Financial Officer Kathryn Mikells told Reuters. “So that came really from a combination of strong markets, strong throughput, strong production, and really good cost control.”

Exxon said it incurred a $1.3 billion hit to its fourth-quarter earnings from a European Union windfall tax that began in the final quarter and from asset impairments. The company is suing the EU, arguing that the levy exceeds its legal authority.

Excluding charges, profit for the full year was $59.1 billion. Production was up by about 100,000 barrels of oil and gas per day over a year ago to 3.8 million bpd. Adjusted per-share profit of $3.40 beat consensus of $3.29 per share, according to Refinitiv data.

Shares were up about 1% at $114.70.

“It’s a headline beat,” Biraj Borkhataria from RBC Capital said in a note, despite lower chemical margins, lower-than- expected downstream gains and plans for higher maintenance works in refineries this quarter.

The results may set up another confrontation with the White House. President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday blasted oil firms for pouring cash into shareholder payouts rather than production. Exxon distributed $30 billion in cash to shareholders last year, more than any of its Western rivals.

Windfall profit taxes are “unlawful and bad policy,” countered Mikells. Slapping new taxes on oil earnings “has the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve,” she said, adding that it would discourage new oil and gas production.

Exxon boasted that its cash flow from operations soared to $76.8 billion last year, up from $48.1 billion in 2021. And it decided to hold $30 billion in cash balance. The company said it learned from the pandemic, when it found itself empty handed and raised debt to pay dividends to shareholders.

“Having a really strong balance sheet is a competitive advantage for us,” Mikells said, adding that it allows the company to wait for potential acquisition opportunities and sustain its dividend program intact even if energy prices eventually fall.

Exxon posted $12.8 billion in fourth-quarter net profit excluding charges, 44% more than the same period last year but down 35% from the previous quarter as oil prices eased and some operations suffered from cold-weather-related outages.

Exxon’s spending on new oil and gas projects bounced back last year to $22.7 billion, up 37% from the prior year. The company increased outlays on discoveries in Guyana, in the top U.S. shale field, and on fuel refining and chemicals.

“The counter-cyclical investments we made before and during the pandemic provided the energy and products people needed as economies began recovering,” Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods said in a statement.

Investments can go up to $25 billion this year, Woods said. Part of it is explained by rising costs in the Permian, with inflation in the double digits, amid “really, really hot” demand for equipments and services, he said.

Exxon guided Permian production this year to 600,000 bpd, up 50,000 bpd from last year but slightly below market expectations. On the other hand, Woods projected that strong refining margins will continue in 2023.

Exxon’s results come ahead of what are expected to be strong earnings from Shell plc on Thursday and from BP plc and TotalEnergies next week.

For years the nascent cultivated meat industry has bristled at critics who say that their product, grown with a nutrient broth in a stainless-steel vat, is not meat. But when Israel’s chief rabbi ruled that Aleph Farms’ thin cut steak—a credit-card-size slab of beef cultivated from bovine stem cells that sizzles, tastes, and smells exactly like its conventional twin—is not meat, it was cause for celebration.

On January 18, after consulting with Aleph Farms’ production and research teams in Rehovot, Israel, Chief Rabbi David Lau, Israel’s pre-eminent Jewish authority, declared that Aleph’s steak could be considered kosher—permissible to eat for those following Judaism’s specific dietary laws.

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In fact, he wrote in a ruling translated by the Jerusalem Post, Aleph’s steak, which does not come from a slaughtered animal and does not have blood, should be considered pareve—a vegetable product that is neither milk nor meat.

While actual Kosher certification can only be done by a certifying institution, and only once commercial sales are permitted by regulatory authorities, it is an important step forward for a young industry that is trying to revolutionize how the world produces meat. It is the first time that a religious leader has officially ruled on whether or not cultivated meat is acceptable for dietary restrictions. “This a huge step forward, and a very important milestone if we want to provide food for the next generation,” says Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms. Toubia himself keeps kosher, but that is not the reason why the ruling matters, he says. Aleph Farms will also seek Halal certification for Muslim communities, as well as a ruling on whether or not observant Hindus, who do not eat beef, could eat Aleph’s steaks. “This is a protein solution for the world, not just for San Francisco and New York. We really want to make sure that most of the population in the world would be able to enjoy the benefits of cultivated meat,” says Toubia.

Read more: Exclusive: We Tasted The World’s First Cultivated Steak, No Cows Required

As cultivated meat comes closer to market—Singapore is the only country that currently permits the sale of cultivated chicken, from San Francisco based startup GOOD Meat, but the U.S. is likely soon to follow now that the Food and Drug Administration has deemed that Upside Food’s cultivated chicken is “safe for human consumption”—the conversation has moved from whether or not it is possible to produce on a commercial scale, to whether or not people will actually eat it. While kosher beef sales make up just a fraction of the global beef market, the Israeli Chief Rabbi’s imprimatur offers a wholesome-seeming stamp of approval on a new innovation that might otherwise be seen as a frightening adulteration of food by science.

Like most cultivated meat companies, Aleph Farms uses a small sample of cells that have been collected painlessly from living livestock to start the cell lines that are the basis of all their products. Those cells are grown in a nutrient-rich broth in a medical-grade bioreactor until they can be harvested as cuts of real meat, a process that usually takes a couple of weeks. By producing meat this way, companies such as Aleph Farms hope to significantly reduce not only animal suffering, but the outsize impact of the livestock industry on global warming. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture contributes 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more: The Cow That Could Feed the Planet

“There are huge advantages to synthetic meat,” says Rabbi Menachem Genack, the New York based CEO of the Orthodox Union, one of the world’s largest kosher certification authorities, using an alternative term for cultivated meat. But as much as he would like to see companies like Aleph Farms succeed, he says he can’t agree with Rabbi Lau—even though he is a personal friend. “With no disrespect for the Chief Rabbi, we have a different opinion. [Aleph’s steak] cannot be kosher.”

In Rabbi Genack’s reading of the kosher laws, meat must be considered in terms of its origins—in the case of cultivated meat, the source animal for the original cell line. If meat is harvested from a living animal, even a microscopic amount of cells, “it’s not kosher,” says Genack. The solution, he says, is to obtain genetic material from a freshly slaughtered animal. “Maybe that is a little bit of a challenge, but if it’s possible to do, then it would be kosher.” While theoretically possible, this would go against cultivated meat companies’ principal selling point: no animal slaughter.

Read More: How Israel Became the Global Center For Alternative Meat Tech

The diverging opinions from some of the world’s top authorities on Jewish dietary law come from differences in how they see cultivated meat. Because it is grown, not slaughtered, Rabbi Lau’s ruling does not consider it to be meat. But because it looks like meat, tastes like meat, and has an animal origin, it is meat, and the rules for kosher meat should be applied accordingly, says Rabbi Genack. What they can both agree on is that cultivated meat, whether or not it is considered permissible under Jewish dietary law, should not be served with dairy products, lest it appear to contravene one of the most important kosher laws of all: the prohibition against cooking meat with milk. So that still means no cheeseburgers, even with plant-based cheese.

Charles McGonigal