Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorganChase, speaks during the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, U.S. December 6, 2025.
Jonathan Alcorn | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to sue JPMorgan Chase over allegedly “debanking” him following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“I’ll be suing JPMorgan Chase over the next two weeks for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest, a protest that turned out to be correct for those doing the protesting,” Trump said in a social media post. “The Election was RIGGED!”
“While we won’t get specific about a client, we don’t close accounts because of political beliefs,” said JPMorgan spokesperson Trish Wexler. “We appreciate that this Administration has moved to address political debanking and we support those efforts.”
In August, Trump signed an executive order requiring banks to ensure they are not refusing financial services to clients based on religious or political beliefs, a practice known as “debanking.”
Trump claimed without evidence in an August CNBC interview that he was personally discriminated against by banks. He said JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America refused to take his deposits following his first term in office.
At the time, JPMorgan said it does not close accounts for political reasons, while Bank of America said it doesn’t comment on client matters. BofA also said it would welcome clearer rules from regulators on how to conduct its activities.
Trump and his family have a history of railing against financial institutions for allegedly refusing to work with them on the basis of their political orientation.
“So, [my family] got into crypto, not because it was like, ‘hey, this is the next cool thing,’ we got into it out of necessity,” Trump Jr. told CNBC in an interview last June.
JPMorgan shares are down about 5% over the past week, even after the bank on Tuesday topped expectations for its fourth-quarter earnings and revenue. The shares, and others in the banking sector, fell in response to Trump’s demand to cap credit card rates at 10%, giving financial firms until Jan. 20 to comply.
Trump’s legal threat against JPMorgan comes as the president, in the same Truth Social post, denied a Journal report on Wednesday that said the president had offered JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the position of Federal Reserve chairman months ago during a meeting at the White House.
Dimon took the proposition as a joke, according to the Journal report.
In his post, Trump denied the report, underscoring his reservations about Dimon and JPMorgan.
“This statement is totally untrue, there was never such an offer,” he wrote. “Why wouldn’t The Wall Street Journal call me to ask whether or not such an offer was made? I would have very quickly told them, “NO,” and that would have been the end of the story.”
JPMorgan’s Wexler said the “offer” reported by the Journal was a miscommunication. “I should have been more vigilant in correcting that word while attempting to dispute the WSJ’s anonymous sources,” she said.
The Journal did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside of normal business hours.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, US President Donald Trump, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte gather and chat with each other in the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, United States on August 18, 2025.
Ukrainian Presidency | Anadolu | Getty Images
As 2026 kicks off with several unexpected geopolitical earthquakes, Europe looks woefully unprepared to deal with the upending of old rules — and the new world order — being created by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Less than a week into the new year and not only has the U.S. deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and threatened Colombia, Iran, Cuba and Mexico, but has also turned its sights on taking over Danish territory Greenland, potentially using military force, and threatening the very fabric and future of NATO.
Then there’s Ukraine, with European leaders’ efforts this week to cement security guarantees in a potential peace deal to end the war looking like small fry as other potential territorial takeovers garner global attention.
Largely seen as the “Old World” by the rest of the globe, Europe appears to have fallen far behind other power blocs on a number of levels, with its economy in the slow lane and its geopolitical isolation — and apparent impotence — in stark contrast with bullish regional superpowers like the U.S., Russia and China.
It’s a dangerous moment for Europe and the existing international order, analysts say, as the established rules-based international order is torn up.
“What happened in Venezuela and now talk about Greenland, Cuba or Colombia, we are really into getting into uncharted territory, and we have to be really extremely careful,” Wang Huiyao, founder and president at the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, told CNBC Wednesday.
“The international community has to work together now and probably stop this kind of unilateral approach. It’s a wake-up call for the European countries so closely allied with the U.S. who have suddenly realized now that its fundamental basis has been eroded and has been really challenged.”
Europe senses danger
There’s no doubt that Europe knows the trouble it’s in as it confronts both the dangers of ongoing war in Ukraine, and an elusive peace deal, as well as the real possibility of a confrontation with the U.S. over Greenland, which belongs to EU and NATO member Denmark.
European leaders met on Tuesday to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine, but also issued a statement pushing back against any American territorial ambitions over the Arctic island, insisting: “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”
A flurry of fraught diplomacy ensued on Wednesday morning, with France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stating that he had spoken to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The French politician said Rubio had “ruled out the possibility of what happened in Venezuela happening in Greenland.”
Rubio reportedly told lawmakers at a closed briefing on Capitol Hill on Monday that the Trump administration did not plan to invade Greenland, but aimed to buy it from Denmark, the Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday.
Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNBC on Tuesday that the administration was considering “a range of options” in order to acquire Greenland — including “utilizing the U.S. Military.”
Greenland and Denmark have requested a meeting with Rubio to discuss the U.S.’ intentions. On Monday, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that “if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country, everything will stop.”
Existential crisis?
It’s not the first time that the transatlantic partnership has looked shaky under Trump’s leadership, with the president barely containing his disdain for Europe’s perceived shortfalls in recent years, particularly when it comes to defense spending, investment, and economic prowess.
In December, the U.S. warned in its new national security strategy (NSS) that the region faced oblivion. Trump then called Europe’s leaders “weak” and said the region was “decaying.”
European officials responded to Trump’s comments with irritation, but the uncomfortable question was whether the U.S. had a point.
In its NSS, the U.S. listed Europe’s waning economy, migration policies, and “loss of national identities and self-confidence” as reasons to worry for the continent. It then warned that European countries faced “civilizational erasure” and questioned whether they can “remain reliable allies.”
Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, told CNBC that Washington was essentially telling Europe not only what it already knew, but what it was already trying to fix.
“Civilizational erasure’ sounds offensive, but many European leaders – in France, Germany, Italy – have been raising similar concerns for years. In fact, EU migration policy has tightened considerably since [former Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s open-door approach,” he told CNBC.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meets with U.S. President Donald Trump during the 80th United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, New York, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Alexander Drago | Reuters
“The key difference is that Europeans want to address these and other challenges by making Europe stronger, not by tearing it apart,” Bremmer said.
“European leaders see this for what it is,” he added.
“If Washington is no longer aligned with Europe on values Europeans consider essential, then the United States can no longer be counted on as an ally. That’s an existential crisis for the transatlantic alliance … What the Europeans are prepared to do about it is another matter entirely.”
The department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics will “promptly resume” work on September’s consumer price index data, a White House official said. The report will come out at 8:30 a.m. ET on Oct. 24, nine days after it was originally scheduled, according to the BLS.
The department had originally paused work on the CPI report – which tracks a broad basket of goods and services for price changes over time — because of its shutdown plan, the official said. But the Social Security Administration needs third-quarter CPI data for calculating and publishing annual cost-of-living adjustments before Nov. 1.
Other BLS data releases including the nonfarm payroll report haven’t been published as originally intended since the federal government shutdown due to a lapse in funding. The Senate on Thursday failed to pass funding bills for the seventh time that would have ended the closure, which began last week.
Bloomberg News first reported that the BLS was calling employees back to work on the CPI data.
— CNBC’s Steve Liesman contributed to this report.
Correction: The Social Security Administration needs third-quarter CPI data for calculating and publishing annual cost-of-living adjustments before Nov. 1. An earlier version misstated the organization’s name.
Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister and president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), at the party’s headquarters following the lower house election, at the party’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Monday signaled that he intends to continue running the government after his Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner Komeito lost a majority in the lower house following a snap election.
“We will continue to advance national politics in a steady manner,” Ishiba said at a news conference at party headquarters in Tokyo, according to local news. “National politics cannot stagnate for even one moment.”
Ishiba promised to work on an economic stimulus package, and added that the party needs to recognize the reasons behind the oppositions’ gains.
Japan’s ruling coalition lost its parliamentary majority after voters cast their ballots on Sunday to determine control of the lower house. The election marked the first time since 2009 that the LDP has lost its majority.
“Our party fought hard all over the country under the slogan ‘Protect Japan, Turn growth into strength,’” the LDP said in a statement. “However, the party was unable to dispel the public’s distrust over the political funding issue, resulting in a harsh result.”
In various media interviews as votes were being counted, Ishiba had said: “We will humbly and solemnly accept the harsh judgment.”
After markets opened on Monday, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 rose 1.79%, leading gains in Asia, while the Topix was up 1.38%. The moves were supported by a weaker yen, which fell 0.65% to trade at 153.28.
Ishiba succeeded Fumio Kishida as prime minister on Oct. 1 and called for a snap general election on Sept. 30 after winning the party’s internal vote against rival Sanae Takaichi.
On the campaign trail, Ishiba had vowed to reduce the burden on households suffering from rising living costs and showed intentions to boost rural revitalization, as Japan’s countryside suffers from a broader demographic crisis and an aging population.
David Roche, a strategist at Quantum Strategy, said Ishiba is now a “dead man walking” with his Liberal Democratic Party “very likely to lose power completely or see its power very diluted in a messy coalition after an even messier protracted period of haggling.”
“What is sure is that policy uncertainty will rule while the haggling goes on,” he said in a flash research note Sunday night, predicting the yen to weaken from here.
“Equities will mark time (the bull period is over anyway). JGBs [government bonds] will stagnate waiting to learn about the next bout of futile fiscal largesse or lack of it,” he added.
The Washington Post Building at One Franklin Square Building in Washington, D.C., June 5, 2024.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
The Washington Post said Friday that it will not endorse a candidate in the presidential election this year — or ever again — breaking decades of tradition and sparking immediate criticism of the decision.
But the newspaper also published an article by two staff reporters revealing that editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump in the election.
“The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” the article said, citing two sources briefed on the events.
Trump, while president, had been critical of the billionaire Bezos and the Post, which he purchased in 2013.
The newspaper in 2016 and again in 2020 endorsed Trump’s election opponents, Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, in editorials that condemned the Republican in blunt terms.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it had lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft because Trump had used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.
The Post since 1976 had regularly endorsed candidates for president, except for the 1988 race. All those endorsements had been for Democrats.
In a statement to CNBC, when asked about Bezos’ purported role in killing the endorsement, Post chief communications officer Kathy Baird said, “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse, and I would refer you to the publisher’s statement in full.”
The Post on Friday evening published a third article, signed by opinion columnists for the newspaper, who said, “The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake.”
“It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love, and for which we have worked a combined 218 years,” the column said. “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.”
CNBC has requested comment from Amazon, where Bezos remains the largest shareholder.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos arrives for his meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the UK diplomatic residence in New York City, Sept. 20, 2021.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis, in an article published online explaining the decision, wrote, “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election.”
“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility,” he wrote.
“That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
Seven of the 13 paragraphs of Lewis’ article either quoted at length or referred to Post Editorial Board statements in 1960 and 1972 explaining the paper’s rationale for not endorsing presidential candidates in those years, which included its identity as “an independent newspaper.”
Lewis noted that the paper had endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976 “for understandable reasons at the times” — which he did not identify.
“But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to,” Lewis wrote.
“Our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent,” he wrote. “And that is what we are and will be.”
Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, a member of the paper’s opinions section, resigned following the decision, multiple news outlets reported.
More than 10,000 reader comments were posted on Lewis’ article, many of them blasting the Post for its decision and saying they were canceling their subscriptions.
“The most consequential election in our country, a choice between Fascism and Democracy, and you sit out? Cowards. Unethical, fearful cowards,” wrote one comment. “Oh, and by the way, I’m canceling my subscription, because you are putting business ahead of ethics and morals.”
The announcement came days after Mariel Garza, the head of The Los Angeles Times‘ editorial board, resigned in protest after that paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, decided against running a presidential endorsement.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, is a billionaire.
Marty Baron, the former editor of The Washington Post, called that paper’s decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
″@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others),” Baron wrote. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
The Washington Post Guild, the union that represents the newspaper’s staff, in a statement posted on the social media site X said it was “deeply concerned that The Washington Post — an American news institution in the nation’s capital — would make a decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, especially a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”
“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial,” the Guild said in the statement, which noted the paper’s reporting about Bezos’ role in the decision.
“We are already seeing cancellations from once loyal readers,” the Guild said. “This decision undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it.”
Read more CNBC politics coverage
Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose stories about the Watergate break-in during the Nixon administration won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, in a statement said, “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
“Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process,” Woodward and Bernstein said.
Post columnist Karen Attiah, in a post on the social media site Threads, wrote, “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”
“What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line to call out threats to human rights and democracy,” Attiah wrote.
Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, in his own tweet on the news wrote, “The first step towards fascism is when the free press cowers in fear.”
Trump in August told Fox Business News that Bezos called him after the Republican narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in July at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania.
“He was very nice even though he owns The Washington Post,” Trump said of Bezos.
Bezos last posted on X on July 13, hours after the assassination attempt.
“Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight,” Bezos wrote in that tweet. “So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.”
Trump on Friday met in Austin, Texas, with executives from the Bezos-owned space exploration company Blue Origin, among them CEO David Limp, the Associated Press reported
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss a new rule requiring financial institutions to share customer data with other providers at customer request for free, how the new rule would improve competition in the banking space, privacy protection concerns, and more.
Construction of a KB Home single-family housing development is shown in Menifee, California, on Sept. 4, 2024.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Both presidential candidates promise to build more homes. One promises to deport hundreds of thousands of people who build them.
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” would hamstring construction firms already facing labor shortages and push record home prices higher, say industry leaders, contractors and economists.
“It would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems,” said Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. The trade group considers foreign-born workers, regardless of legal status, “a vital and flexible source of labor” to builders, estimating they fill 30% of trade jobs like carpentry, plastering, masonry and electrical roles.
Either I make half as much money or I up my prices. And who ultimately pays for that? The homeowner.
Brent Taylor
President of Taylor Construction Group, Tampa, Fla.
Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants were living in the U.S. as of 2022, the latest federal data shows, down from an 11.8 million peak in 2007. The construction sector employs an estimated 1.5 million undocumented workers, or 13% of its total workforce — a larger share than any other, according to data the Pew Research Center provided to NBC News. Industry experts say their rates are higher in Sun Belt states like Florida and Texas, and more pronounced in residential than in commercial construction.
For Brent Taylor, home building has been “a very, very difficult industry the past few years, and it seems to only be getting worse.” His five-person, Tampa-based business hires subcontractors to perform all the labor, and if those firms’ employees “show up on my jobsite because they work for that company, I don’t know if they’re legal or not,” he said.
The labor pool is tight already, with the U.S. construction industry still looking to fill 370,000 open positions, according to federal data. If work crews dwindle further, “now I can only do 10 jobs a year instead of 20,” Taylor said. “Either I make half as much money or I up my prices. And who ultimately pays for that? The homeowner.”
Doubts also run high among homebuilders that Trump would deliver on his promise.
“They don’t think it’s going to happen,” Stan Marek, CEO of the Marek Family of Companies, a Texas-based specialty subcontracting firm, said of industry colleagues. “You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house.”
You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house.
Stan Marek
CEO of the Marek Family of Companies
Bryan Dunn, an-Arizona based senior vice president at Big-D Construction, a major Southwest firm, called “the idea that they could actually move that many people” out of the country “almost laughable.” The proposal has left those in the industry “trying to figure out how much is political fearmongering,” he said.
But while Trump has a history of floating outlandish ideas without seriously pursuing them — like buying Greenland — he has embraced other once-radical policies that reset the terms of political debate despite fierce criticism and litigation. That is especially true with immigration, where his administration diverted Pentagon money to build a border wall, banned travel from several Muslim-majority countries and separated migrant children from their parents.
Trump has emphasized his deportation pitch on the stump, at times deploying racist rhetoric like claiming thousands of immigrants are committing murders because “it’s in their genes.” This month he accused immigrant gangs of having “invaded and conquered” cities like Aurora, Colorado, which local authorities deny, saying they need federal assistance but want no part in mass deportations. Still, recent polling has found broad support for removing people who came to the U.S. illegally.
“President Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants will not only make our communities safer but will save Americans from footing the bill for years to come,” Taylor Rogers, a Republican National Committee spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement, referring to undocumented people’s use of taxpayer-funded social services and other federal programs.
Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the former president’s remarks about genetics were “clearly referring to murderers, not migrants.”
Tobin said the NAHB has real concerns about the deportation proposal but is engaging with both campaigns. It has called on policymakers to “let builders build” by easing zoning and other regulatory hurdles and improving developers’ access to financing.
We have to have a serious conversation in this country about immigration policy and reform, and we can no longer delay it.
Jim Tobin
CEO of the National Association of Home Builders
“The rhetoric on immigration, it’s at 11,” Tobin said. “We have to have a serious conversation in this country about immigration policy and reform, and we can no longer delay it.”
Marek, who has long advocated for more ways for undocumented people to work legally in construction, said reforms are decades overdue. As an employer, “I do everything I can to make sure everybody’s legal,” he said, even as the industry’s hunger for low-cost labor has created a shadow economy that he says often exploits the undocumented workers it depends upon.
“We need them. They’re building our houses — have been for 30 years,” he said. “Losing the workers would devastate our companies, our industry and our economy.”
There is evidence that foreign-born construction workers help keep the housing market in check. An analysis released in December 2022 by the George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University found U.S. metro areas with the fastest-growing immigrant populations had the lowest building costs.
“Immigrant construction workers in Sun Belt metros like Raleigh, Nashville, Houston, and San Antonio have helped these cities sustain their housing cost advantage over coastal cities despite rapid growth in housing demand,” the authors wrote.
But builders need many more workers as it is. “The math is just not there” to sustain a blow from mass deportations, said Ron Hetrick, a senior labor economist at the workforce analytics firm Lightcast. “That would be incredibly disruptive” and cause “a very, very significant hit on home construction,” he said.
Private employers in the field have been adding jobs for the past decade, with employment levels now topping 8 million, over 1 million more since the pandemic, according to payroll processor ADP. But as Hetrick noted, “the average high school student is not aspiring to do this work,” and the existing workforce is aging — the average homebuilder is 57 years old.
Undocumented workers would likely flee ahead of any national deportation effort, Hetrick said, even though many have been in the U.S. for well over a decade. He expects such a policy would trigger an exodus of people with legal authorization, too.
“That’s exactly what happened in Florida,” he said.
“These laws show that they have no idea what we do,” said Luciano, a carpenter who is originally from Mexico and has worked on residential builds across South Florida for the past decade.
“No one else would work in the conditions in which we work,” the 40-year-old said in Spanish, asking to be identified by his first name because he lacks legal immigration status, despite living in the U.S. for over 20 years. Workers on jobsites “have an entry time but no exit time,” often logging 70-hour weeks in rain and extreme heat, he said.
Taylor recalled fellow Florida builders’ panic at the time of the statewide crackdown but said he reassured them, “Look, just give it six months. We don’t have enough people to enforce it, so they’re coming back.”
Republican state Rep. Rick Roth, who voted for the measure, later conceded that Florida was unprepared for the destabilization it would cause and urged immigrant residents not to flee, saying the law “is not as bad as you heard.”
Some workers returned after realizing the policies weren’t being rigorously enforced, Taylor said: “Sure enough, now things are more normal.”
DeSantis’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When Arizona in 2010 enacted what were then some of the toughest immigration restrictions in the country, Dunn was working in Tempe as an executive at a construction management firm. As the legislation rolled out, he said, “a lot of people moved away, and they just never came back.”
By the time much of the law was overturned in 2012, he said, “Arizona had a bad rap” relative to other states that “were a lot more open and just less of a hassle to go work in.”
Dunn, a Democrat, said he’s “definitely” backing Vice President Kamala Harris, but other construction executives sounded more divided. Marek, a “lifelong Republican,” declined to share how he’s voting but noted that “a lot of Republicans aren’t voting for Trump.”
Taylor also wouldn’t say which candidate he’s supporting but praised Trump’s ability to “get things done.”
“There are many other issues with the economy that we are fighting daily that have nothing to do with immigration reform,” he said. “I am not a one-policy voter.”
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a speech on stage during the International Investment Summit, held at The Guildhall, in central London, on October 14, 2024.
Jonathan Brady | Afp | Getty Images
LONDON — The U.K.’s Labour government said Monday that it had secured £63 billion ($82 billion) in fresh investment at the close of a summit aimed at wooing overseas capital.
Finance Minister Rachel Reeves hailed the “shovel ready” spending commitments — from companies including Blackstone, MacQuarie, Iberdrola, Amazon Web Services, ServiceNow and Eli Lilly — which she said would create almost 40,000 new jobs across the country.
“We are bringing investment and jobs back to this country. Britain is open for business again,” she said during closing remarks at the summit.
The announcement comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier on Monday vowed to slash regulatory red tape to boost anemic investment in the country.
“We’ve got to look at regulation across the piece, and where it is needlessly holding back investment … mark my words, we will get rid of it,” he told delegates at the government’s inaugural International Investment Summit, held at London’s Guildhall.
“It’s time to upgrade the regulatory regime. We will rip up the bureaucracy that blocks investment,” he added.
Starmer did not say exactly which regulations would be changed. However, the government said in a statement that it was “reviewing the focus” of major regulators, with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in particular being charged to “prioritise growth, investment, and innovation.”
The regulatory overhaul is just one part of the Labour Party’s plans to place Britain at the forefront of emerging opportunities.
Last week, it launched a new Regulatory Innovation Office to reduce the burden of red tape for businesses working on “game-changing” technologies. Meanwhile, ministers have been introducing changes to the planning system to boost new building projects.
The prime minister restated that growth was the “No. 1 test of this government,” and reiterated plans for the U.K. to become the fastest-growing G7 economy.
Starmer also outlined stability, strategy, regulation and improving Britain’s global standing as “four crucial areas” in his pitch for Britain.
“Private sector investment is the way we rebuild our country and pay our way in the world,” he said.
Speaking during a panel discussion with Starmer on Monday, Google‘s former CEO Eric Schmidt said he was “shocked” when he heard that the Labour party had become strongly in favor of growth.
Schmidt added that he was waiting to see “how you pull it off,” urging the government to invest further in artificial intelligence to achieve its wider growth goals.
Some have expressed concern over the government’s proposed regulatory rollback, warning that certain measures could risk harming growth and innovation.
“There are regulations that are bad for innovation, productivity and growth and there are regulations that are absolutely necessary for them,” Ali Nikpay, partner co-chair of the antitrust and competition group at law firm Gibson Dunn, told CNBC via email.
“Take merger control: The government wants the CMA to be more hands off. That might give a few sectors a sugar rush in the short run as deals that would have been blocked in the past are cleared. But in the longer run that’ll reduce innovation and growth across the economy,” he added.
Labour has been attempting to paint a more positive picture of the economy after being accused of doom-mongering in its early months in office. It is also seeking to position itself as a reliable partner after years of upheaval — including Brexit — a slew of prime ministers and a bond market selloff.
Opening the summit, Business and Trade Minister Jonathan Reynolds heralded a “new era of stability, of openness, [and] of commitment to use our mandate” to remove barriers to business.
The government on Sunday announced the launch of a new industrial strategy, designed to focus on eight “growth-driving sectors.” Those include the creative industries, financial services, advanced manufacturing, professional services, defense, tech, life sciences and clean energy industries.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris face off in the ABC presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024.
Getty Images
With the U.S. election less than a month away, the country and its corporations are staring down two drastically different options.
For airlines, banks, electric vehicle makers, health-care companies, media firms, restaurants and tech giants, the outcome of the presidential contest could result in stark differences in the rules they’ll face, the mergers they’ll be allowed to pursue, and the taxes they’ll pay.
During his last time in power, former President Donald Trump slashed the corporate tax rate, imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, and sought to cut regulation and red tape and discourage immigration, ideas he’s expected to push again if he wins a second term.
In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris has endorsed hiking the tax rate on corporations to 28% from the 21% rate enacted under Trump, a move that would require congressional approval. Most business executives expect Harris to broadly continue President Joe Biden‘s policies, including his war on so-called junk fees across industries.
Personnel is policy, as the saying goes, so the ramifications of the presidential race won’t become clear until the winner begins appointments for as many as a dozen key bodies, including the Treasury, Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
CNBC examined the stakes of the 2024 presidential election for some of corporate America’s biggest sectors. Here’s what a Harris or Trump administration could mean for business:
The result of the presidential election could affect everything from what airlines owe consumers for flight disruptions to how much it costs to build an aircraft in the United States.
The Biden Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has taken a hard line on filling what it considers to be holes in air traveler protections. It has established or proposed new rules on issues including refunds for cancellations, family seating and service fee disclosures, a measure airlines have challenged in court.
“Who’s in that DOT seat matters,” said Jonathan Kletzel, who heads the travel, transportation and logistics practice at PwC.
The current Democratic administration has also fought industry consolidation, winning two antitrust lawsuits that blocked a partnership between American Airlines and JetBlue Airways in the Northeast and JetBlue’s now-scuttled plan to buy budget carrier Spirit Airlines.
The previous Trump administration didn’t pursue those types of consumer protections. Industry members say that under Trump, they would expect a more favorable environment for mergers, though four airlines already control more than three-quarters of the U.S. market.
On the aerospace side, Boeing and the hundreds of suppliers that support it are seeking stability more than anything else.
Trump has said on the campaign trail that he supports additional tariffs of 10% or 20% and higher duties on goods from China. That could drive up the cost of producing aircraft and other components for aerospace companies, just as a labor and skills shortage after the pandemic drives up expenses.
Tariffs could also challenge the industry, if they spark retaliatory taxes or trade barriers to China and other countries, which are major buyers of aircraft from Boeing, a top U.S. exporter.
Big banks such as JPMorgan Chase faced an onslaught of new rules this year as Biden appointees pursued the most significant slate of regulations since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
Those efforts threaten tens of billions of dollars in industry revenue by slashing fees that banks impose on credit cards and overdrafts and radically revising the capital and risk framework they operate in. The fate of all of those measures is at risk if Trump is elected.
Trump is expected to nominate appointees for key financial regulators, including the CFPB, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that could result in a weakening or killing off completely of the myriad rules in play.
“The Biden administration’s regulatory agenda across sectors has been very ambitious, especially in finance, and large swaths of it stand to be rolled back by Trump appointees if he wins,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy at Wolfe Research.
Bank CEOs and consultants say it would be a relief if aspects of the Biden era — an aggressive CFPB, regulators who discouraged most mergers and elongated times for deal approvals — were dialed back.
“It certainly helps if the president is Republican, and the odds tilt more favorably for the industry if it’s a Republican sweep” in Congress, said the CEO of a bank with nearly $100 billion in assets who declined to be identified speaking about regulators.
Still, some observers point out that Trump 2.0 might not be as friendly to the industry as his first time in office.
Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance, of Ohio, has often criticized Wall Street banks, and Trump last month began pushing an idea to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, a move that if enacted would have seismic implications for the industry.
Bankers also say that Harris won’t necessarily cater to traditional Democratic Party ideas that have made life tougher for banks. Unless Democrats seize both chambers of Congress as well as the presidency, it may be difficult to get agency heads approved if they’re considered partisan picks, experts note.
“I would not write off the vice president as someone who’s automatically going to go more progressive,” said Lindsey Johnson, head of the Consumer Bankers Association, a trade group for big U.S. retail banks.
Electric vehicles have become a polarizing issue between Democrats and Republicans, especially in swing states such as Michigan that rely on the auto industry. There could be major changes in regulations and incentives for EVs if Trump regains power, a fact that’s placed the industry in a temporary limbo.
“Depending on the election in the U.S., we may have mandates; we may not,” Volkswagen Group of America CEO Pablo Di Si said Sept. 24 during an Automotive News conference. “Am I going to make any decisions on future investments right now? Obviously not. We’re waiting to see.”
Republicans, led by Trump, have largely condemned EVs, claiming they are being forced upon consumers and that they will ruin the U.S. automotive industry. Trump has vowed to roll back or eliminate many vehicle emissions standards under the Environmental Protection Agency and incentives to promote production and adoption of the vehicles.
If elected, he’s also expected to renew a battle with California and other states who set their own vehicle emissions standards.
“In a Republican win … We see higher variance and more potential for change,” UBS analyst Joseph Spak said in a Sept. 18 investor note.
In contrast, Democrats, including Harris, have historically supported EVs and incentives such as those under the Biden administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act.
Harris hasn’t been as vocal a supporter of EVs lately amid slower-than-expected consumer adoption of the vehicles and consumer pushback. She has said she does not support an EV mandate such as the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019, which she cosponsored during her time as a senator, that would have required automakers to sell only electrified vehicles by 2040. Still, auto industry executives and officials expect a Harris presidency would be largely a continuation, though not a copy, of the past four years of Biden’s EV policy.
They expect some potential leniency on federal fuel economy regulations but minimal changes to the billions of dollars in incentives under the IRA.
Both Harris and Trump have called for sweeping changes to the costly, complicated and entrenched U.S. health-care system of doctors, insurers, drug manufacturers and middlemen, which costs the nation more than $4 trillion a year.
Despite spending more on health care than any other wealthy country, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest rate of people with multiple chronic diseases and the highest maternal and infant death rates, according to the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group.
Meanwhile, roughly half of American adults say it is difficult to afford health-care costs, which can drive some into debt or lead them to put off necessary care, according to a May poll conducted by health policy research organization KFF.
Both Harris and Trump have taken aim at the pharmaceutical industry and proposed efforts to lower prescription drug prices in the U.S., which are nearly three times higher than those seen in other countries.
But many of Trump’s efforts to lower costs have been temporary or not immediately effective, health policy experts said. Meanwhile, Harris, if elected, can build on existing efforts of the Biden administration to deliver savings to more patients, they said.
Harris specifically plans to expand certain provisions of the IRA, part of which aims to lower health-care costs for seniors enrolled in Medicare. Harris cast the tie-breaking Senate vote to pass the law in 2022.
Her campaign says she plans to extend two provisions to all Americans, not just seniors: a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug spending and a $35 limit on monthly insulin costs.
Harris also intends to accelerate and expand a provision allowing Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices with manufacturers for the first time. Drugmakers fiercely oppose those price talks, with some challenging the effort’s constitutionality in court.
Trump hasn’t publicly indicated what he intends to do about IRA provisions.
Some of Trump’s prior efforts to lower drug prices “didn’t really come into fruition” during his presidency, according to Dr. Mariana Socal, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
For example, he planned to use executive action to have Medicare pay no more than the lowest price that select other developed countries pay for drugs, a proposal that was blocked by court action and later rescinded.
Trump also led multiple efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, including its expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults. In a campaign video in April, Trump said he was not running on terminating the ACA and would rather make it “much, much better and far less money,” though he has provided no specific plans.
He reiterated his belief that the ACA was “lousy health care” during his Sept. 10 debate with Harris. But when asked he did not offer a replacement proposal, saying only that he has “concepts of a plan.”
Top of mind for media executives is mergers and the path, or lack thereof, to push them through.
The media industry’s state of turmoil — shrinking audiences for traditional pay TV, the slowdown in advertising, and the rise of streaming and challenges in making it profitable — means its companies are often mentioned in discussions of acquisitions and consolidation.
While a merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media is set to move forward, with plans to close in the first half of 2025, many in media have said the Biden administration has broadly chilled deal-making.
“We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to do even better,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said in July at Allen & Co.’s annual Sun Valley conference.
Media mogul John Malone recently told MoffettNathanson analysts that some deals are a nonstarter with this current Justice Department, including mergers between companies in the telecommunications and cable broadband space.
Still, it’s unclear how the regulatory environment could or would change depending on which party is in office. Disney was allowed to acquire Fox Corp.’s assets when Trump was in office, but his administration sued to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner. Meanwhile, under Biden’s presidency, a federal judge blocked the sale of Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House, but Amazon’s acquisition of MGM was approved.
“My sense is, regardless of the election outcome, we are likely to remain in a similar tighter regulatory environment when looking at media industry dealmaking,” said Marc DeBevoise, CEO and board director of Brightcove, a streaming technology company.
When major media, and even tech, assets change hands, it could also mean increased scrutiny on those in control and whether it creates bias on the platforms.
“Overall, the government and FCC have always been most concerned with having a diversity of voices,” said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of Integrated Media, which specializes in digital media investment. “But then [Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter] happened, and it’s clearly showing you can skew a platform to not just what the business needs, but to maybe your personal approach and whims,” he said.
Since Musk acquired the social media platform in 2022, changing its name to X, he has implemented sweeping changes including cutting staff and giving “amnesty” to previously suspended accounts, including Trump’s, which had been suspended following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Musk has also faced widespread criticism from civil rights groups for the amplification of bigotry on the platform.
Musk has publicly endorsed Trump, and was recently on the campaign trail with the former president. “As you can see, I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA,” Musk said at a recent event. The billionaire has raised funds for Republican causes, and Trump has suggested Musk could eventually play a role in his administration if the Republican candidate were to be reelected.
During his first term, Trump took a particularly hard stance against journalists, and pursued investigations into leaks from his administration to news organizations. Under Biden, the White House has been notably more amenable to journalists.
Also top of mind for media executives — and government officials — is TikTok.
Lawmakers have argued that TikTok’s Chinese ownership could be a national security risk.
Earlier this year, Biden signed legislation that gives Chinese parent ByteDance until January to find a new owner for the platform or face a U.S. ban. TikTok has said the bill, the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which passed with bipartisan support, violates the First Amendment. The platform has sued the government to stop a potential ban.
While Trump was in office, he attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order, but the effort failed. However, he has more recently switched to supporting the platform, arguing that without it there’s less competition against Meta’s Facebook and other social media.
Both Trump and Harris have endorsed plans to end taxes on restaurant workers’ tips, although how they would do so is likely to differ.
The food service and restaurant industry is the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer, with 15.5 million jobs, according to the National Restaurant Association. Roughly 2.2 million of those employees are tipped servers and bartenders, who could end up with more money in their pockets if their tips are no longer taxed.
Trump’s campaign hasn’t given much detail on how his administration would eliminate taxes on tips, but tax experts have warned that it could turn into a loophole for high earners. Claims from the Trump campaign that the Republican candidate is pro-labor have clashed with his record of appointing leaders to the National Labor Relations Board who have rolled back worker protections.
Meanwhile, Harris has said she’d only exempt workers who make $75,000 or less from paying income tax on their tips, but the money would still be subject to taxes toward Social Security and Medicare, the Washington Post previously reported.
In keeping with the campaign’s more labor-friendly approach, Harris is also pledging to eliminate the tip credit: In 37 states, employers only have to pay tipped workers the minimum wage as long as that hourly wage and tips add up to the area’s pay floor. Since 1991, the federal pay floor for tipped wages has been stuck at $2.13.
“In the short term, if [restaurants] have to pay higher wages to their waiters, they’re going to have to raise menu prices, which is going to lower demand,” said Michael Lynn, a tipping expert and Cornell University professor.
Whichever candidate comes out ahead in November will have to grapple with the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence sector.
Generative AI is the biggest story in tech since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. It presents a conundrum for regulators, because it allows consumers to easily create text and images from simple queries, creating privacy and safety concerns.
Harris has said she and Biden “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.” Last year, the White House issued an executive order that led to the formation of the Commerce Department’s U.S. AI Safety Institute, which is evaluating AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Trump has committed to repealing the executive order.
A second Trump administration might also attempt to challenge a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that requires companies to disclose cybersecurity incidents. The White House said in January that more transparency “will incentivize corporate executives to invest in cybersecurity and cyber risk management.”
Trump’s running mate, Vance, co-sponsored a bill designed to end the rule. Andrew Garbarino, the House Republican who introduced an identical bill, has said the SEC rule increases cybersecurity risk and overlaps with existing law on incident reporting.
Also at stake in the election is the fate of dealmaking for tech investors and executives.
With Lina Khan helming the FTC, the top tech companies have been largely thwarted from making big acquisitions, though the Justice Department and European regulators have also created hurdles.
Tech transaction volume peaked at $1.5 trillion in 2021, then plummeted to $544 billion last year and $465 billion in 2024 as of September, according to Dealogic.
Many in the tech industry are critical of Khan and want her to be replaced should Harris win in November. Meanwhile, Vance, who worked in venture capital before entering politics, said as recently as February — before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate — that Khan was “doing a pretty good job.”
Khan, whom Biden nominated in 2021, has challenged Amazon and Meta on antitrust grounds and has said the FTC will investigate AI investments at Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.
JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon speaks during the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing on Wall Street firms, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 6, 2023.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sees risks climbing around the world amid widening conflicts in the Middle East and with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showing no signs of abating.
“We have been closely monitoring the geopolitical situation for some time, and recent events show that conditions are treacherous and getting worse,” Dimon said Friday in the bank’s third-quarter earnings release.
“There is significant human suffering, and the outcome of these situations could have far-reaching effects on both short-term economic outcomes and more importantly on the course of history,” he said.
Dimon went deeper into his concerns last month during a fireside chat held at Georgetown University.
The international order in place since the end of World War II was unraveling with conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, rising U.S.-China tensions and the risk of “nuclear blackmail” from Iran, North Korea and Russia, Dimon said.
“It’s ratcheting up, folks, and it takes really strong American leadership and western world leaders to do something about that,” Dimon said. “That’s my number one concern, and it dwarves any I’ve had since I’ve been working.”
Dimon also said that he remained wary about the future of the economy, despite signs that the Federal Reserve has engineered a soft landing.
“While inflation is slowing and the U.S. economy remains resilient, several critical issues remain, including large fiscal deficits, infrastructure needs, restructuring of trade and remilitarization of the world,” Dimon said. “While we hope for the best, these events and the prevailing uncertainty demonstrate why we must be prepared for any environment.”
Vice President Kamala Harris sits for an interview with Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast.
Call Her Daddy
Vice President Kamala Harris was all business in an interview on the sex-positive “Call Her Daddy” podcast that aired Sunday.
Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, spent the bulk of the roughly 40-minute conversation litigating her case against Donald Trump, blasting the Republican nominee’s track record on abortion and women’s rights.
“There are now 20 states with Trump abortion bans,” Harris told “Call her Daddy” host Alex Cooper. “This is the same guy that said women should be punished for having abortions.”
In 2022, three Supreme Court justices whom Trump nominated during his presidency were part of a majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that for a half-century had said there was a federal right to abortion. The decision allowed individual states to restrict or permit abortions as they saw fit.
The “Call Her Daddy” podcast is largely popular with young women, a voter base Harris already polls strongly with.
But the podcast does not typically broach political topics, Cooper noted.
“I am so aware I have a very mixed audience when it comes to politics, so please hear me when I say my goal today is not to change your political affiliation,” Cooper said on the podcast before she began interviewing Harris.
Read more CNBC politics coverage
Harris’ appearance on “Call Her Daddy” is part of a larger media storm her campaign has scheduled for the upcoming week, an attempt to elbow Trump out of the news cycle.
Earlier Sunday, Trump’s wife, former first lady Melania Trump, doubled down on her own pro-choice abortion stance, bucking the Republican party line in a Fox News interview.
Former President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.
Evan Vucci | AP
Former President Donald Trump is set to hold a Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of his July 13 rally that erupted in chaos after a gunman opened fire in a failed attempt to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee, killing one crowd member instead.
Trump first announced his plan to return to Butler in July, 13 days after the rally shooting.
With roughly four weeks until the Nov. 5 election and early voting well underway, the Trump campaign has been working to gin up hype around the Butler event. It could be one of Trump’s final high-profile opportunities to make his case to the American public, in a key swing state no less.
“BUTLER ON SATURDAY — HISTORIC!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.
But Trump returns to Butler in a very different presidential race.
Ahead of that first Butler visit, Trump was still reveling in the disastrous performance of President Joe Biden at their June 27 debate, which spurred Democrats’ growing doubt about their candidate’s ability to win a second term.
Since then, Biden has dropped out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris has taken the helm of the Democratic ticket and she has begun to erode Trump’s edge.
Trump’s second Butler rally will also spotlight his new entourage.
Tesla CEO and new Trump ally Elon Musk announced Saturday that he would speak at the rally. Musk officially endorsed Trump hours after the Butler assassination attempt, marking a stark pivot in their formerly hostile relationship.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will also deliver an opening speech.
Family members of Corey Comperatore, the crowd member who was shot and killed at the July rally, are also expected to join, according to the campaign.
Going into Saturday’s rally, the Secret Service said it beefed up its security plan.
The Butler shooting put the Secret Service under intense scrutiny as questions lingered about how a gunman could come within shooting distance of a former president at a public event. That outrage mounted further after Trump was the target of another assassination attempt in September.
On Friday, the Secret Service pledged that it had “made comprehensive changes and enhancements” to its communications abilities and resources.
“The former President is receiving heightened protection and we take the responsibility to ensure his safety and security very seriously,” spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.
“Jamie Dimon has not endorsed anyone. He has not endorsed a candidate,” Dimon spokesman Joe Evangelisti told CNBC in a phone call.
Trump on Truth Social had posted a screenshot falsely claiming, “New: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has endorsed Trump for President.”
The claim appears to have originated from a verified account on X earlier Friday. It was quickly amplified on social media by other pro-Trump accounts, and then the former president himself, before the bank issued its denial.
When NBC News asked Trump about the post later Friday, Trump said he did not know about it and that it was not posted by him.
“Somebody put it up,” Trump said, adding, “I don’t know.”
The post, published at 1:56 p.m. ET, was still visible on Trump’s official account more than two hours later.
The Trump campaign did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Former President and GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump post a Truth that claims J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has endorsed Trump for President.
Source: @realDonaldTrump | Truth Social
In September, Dimon said that he is not backing either Trump or Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
“I’m not endorsing anyone at this time,” Dimon told CNBCTV-18 at the JPMorgan Investor Summit in Mumbai.
Dimon has at times offered qualified praise for Trump, but the two men have also clashed repeatedly over the years.
During the Republican presidential primary season, Dimon had urged corporate leaders to support former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley over Trump.
Trump tore into Dimon for siding with Haley, saying he “had to live with this guy when he came begging to the White House.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks to the press ahead of the presidential debate between US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024.
Newsom said the bill “does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data” and would apply “stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it.”
Newsom said he had asked leading experts on generative AI to help California “develop workable guardrails” that focus “on developing an empirical, science-based trajectory analysis.” He also ordered state agencies to expand their assessment of the risks from potential catastrophic events tied to AI use.
Generative AI — which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended prompts — has spurred excitement as well as fears it could make some jobs obsolete, upend elections and potentially overpower humans and have catastrophic effects.
The bill’s author, Democratic State Sen. Scott Wiener, said legislation was necessary to protect the public before advances in AI become either unwieldy or uncontrollable. The AI industry is growing fast in California and some leaders questioned the future of these companies in the state if the bill became law.
Wiener said Sunday the veto makes California less safe and means “companies aiming to create an extremely powerful technology face no binding restrictions.” He added “voluntary commitments from industry are not enforceable and rarely work out well for the public.”
“We cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public,” Newsom said, but added he did not agree “we must settle for a solution that is not informed by an empirical trajectory analysis of AI systems and capabilities.”
Newsom said he will work with the legislature on AI legislation during its next session. It comes as legislation in U.S. Congress to set safeguards has stalled and the Biden administration is advancing regulatory AI oversight proposals.
Newsom said “a California-only approach may well be warranted – especially absent federal action by Congress.”
Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition, praised Newsom’s veto saying “the California tech economy has always thrived on competition and openness.”
Among other things, the measure would have mandated safety testing for many of the most advanced AI models that cost more than $100 million to develop or those that require a defined amount of computing power. Developers of AI software operating in the state would have also needed to outline methods for turning off the AI models, effectively a kill switch.
The bill would have established a state entity to oversee the development of so-called “Frontier Models” that exceed the capabilities present in the most advanced existing models.
The bill faced strong opposition from a wide range of groups. Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google, Microsoft MSFT.O-backed OpenAI and Meta Platforms META.O, all of which are developing generative AI models, had expressed their concerns about the proposal.
Some Democrats in U.S. Congress, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, also opposed it. Proponents included Tesla TSLA.O CEO Elon Musk, who also runs an AI firm called xAI. Amazon AMZN.O-backed Anthropic said the benefits to the bill likely outweigh the costs, though it added there were still some aspects that seem concerning or ambiguous.
Newsom separately signed legislation requiring the state to assess potential threats posed by Generative AI to California’s critical infrastructure.
The state is analyzing energy infrastructure risks and previously convened power sector providers and will undertake the same risk assessment with water infrastructure providers in the coming year and later the communications sector, Newsom said.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban cautioned Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday against forming an alliance with former President Donald Trump, because, he said, the Republican presidential nominee may not ultimately repay his political debts.
“Elon, there will come a time when you need something from Donald Trump,” Cuban wrote in an X post to his fellow billionaire. “You will think you will have earned the right to ask and receive. You have been a loyal, faithful soldier for him.”
“At the point you need him the most,” Cuban continued. “You will find out what so many before you have learned, his loyalty is only to himself.
Cuban’s message came in response to an earlier X post from Musk in which the SpaceX CEO amplified a variety of conspiracy theories about Democrats encouraging immigration into battleground states as “a surefire way to win every election.”
“If Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk wrote.
Musk’s endorsement of Trump is a stark reversal from 2022 when he would openly sling insults at the former president on social media.
Cuban’s warning to Musk, one billionaire to another, hinted at the implicit bid for governmental favor that wealthy political supporters make when they hitch their wagon to a presidential candidate.
The two billionaires are on opposing sides of the presidential race this election cycle. But both business leaders have their eyes on some level of regulatory control.
Trump, Cuban believes, might not follow through on that exchange for Musk.
Cuban has become an outspoken surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris and her economic agenda. In recent weeks, he has regularly championed Harris as “better for business,” even amid some skepticism about her plan to raise corporate tax rates.
As Cuban ramps up his public support, he is also keeping tabs on a potential new job opportunity at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“I told her team, put my name in for the SEC, it needs to change,” Cuban said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Musk is chasing a new job of his own. Musk has repeatedly floated the creation of a so-called government efficiency commission to crack down on federal spending if Trump wins a second term in the White House. And he has raised his hand to helm such an agency.
Earlier this month, Trump endorsed the government efficiency commission idea and suggested Musk could be a “good one” to lead it.
But the Republican nominee hedged that Musk, a busy CEO of multiple companies, might not have the time for the job, but that he could “consult.”
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 26, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
Trump in a social media post wrote that if the Department of Justice does not prosecute Google “for this blatant interference of Elections” he would request its prosecution “when I win the election and become President of the United States!”
He seemed to be reacting to a new study by the right-leaning Media Research Center, which purportedly found that Google search engine results tended to show news articles that supposedly were positive to the Democrat Harris ahead of Trump’s own campaign website when a user searched for “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”
In his post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris.”
US Vice President and Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris speaks at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University on September 25, 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Swensen | Getty Images
MRC founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital earlier this week that “Google is trying to stack the deck in favor of Kamala Harris.”
CNBC has requested comment from Google’s parent company Alphabet, as well as the campaigns of Trump and Harris.
This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.
JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon gestures as he speaks during the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing on Wall Street firms, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6, 2023.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become.
The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation.
In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”
The prospect of a bank suing its regulator would’ve been unheard of in an earlier era, according to policy experts, mostly because corporations used to fear provoking their overseers. That was especially the case for the American banking industry, which needed hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to survive after irresponsible lending and trading activities caused the 2008 financial crisis, those experts say.
But a combination of factors in the intervening years has created an environment where banks and their regulators have never been farther apart.
Trade groups say that in the aftermath of the financial crisis, banks became easy targets for populist attacks from Democrat-led regulatory agencies. Those on the side of regulators point out that banks and their lobbyists increasingly lean on courts in Republican-dominated districts to fend off reform and protect billions of dollars in fees at the expense of consumers.
“If you go back 15 or 20 years, the view was it’s not particularly smart to antagonize your regulator, that litigating all this stuff is just kicking the hornet’s nest,” said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy at Wolfe Research.
“The disparity between how ambitious [President Joe] Biden’s regulators have been and how conservative the courts are, at least a subset of the courts, is historically wide,” Marcus said. “That’s created so many opportunities for successful industry litigation against regulatory proposals.”
Those forces collided this year, which started out as one of the most consequential for bank regulation since the post-2008 reforms that curbed Wall Street risk-taking, introduced annual stress tests and created the industry’s lead antagonist, the CFPB.
In the final months of the Biden administration, efforts from a half-dozen government agencies were meant to slash fees on credit card late payments, debit transactions and overdrafts, among other proposals. The industry’s biggest threat was the Basel Endgame, a sweeping plan to force big banks to hold tens of billions of dollars more in capital for activities like trading and lending.
“The industry is facing an onslaught of regulatory and potential legislative change,” Marianne Lake, head of JPMorgan’s consumer bank, warned investors in May.
JPMorgan’s disclosure about the CFPB probe into Zelle comes after years of grilling by Democrat lawmakers over financial crimes on the platform. Zelle was launched in 2017 by a bank-owned firm called Early Warning Services in response to the threat from peer-to-peer networks including PayPal.
The vast majority of Zelle activity is uneventful; of the $806 billion that flowed across the network last year, only $166 million in transactions was disputed as fraud by customers of JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the three biggest players on the platform.
But the three banks collectively reimbursed just 38% of those claims, according to a July Senate report that looked at disputed unauthorized transactions.
Banks are typically on the hook to reimburse fraudulent Zelle payments that the customer didn’t give permission for, but usually don’t refund losses if the customer is duped into authorizing the payment by a scammer, according to the Electronic Fund Transfer Act.
A JPMorgan payments executive told lawmakers in July that the bank actually reimburses 100% of unauthorized transactions; the discrepancy in the Senate report’s findings is because bank personnel often determine that customers have authorized the transactions.
Amid the scrutiny, the bank began warning Zelle users on the Chase app to “Stay safe from scams” and added disclosures that customers won’t likely be refunded for bogus transactions.
The company, which has grown to become the largest and most profitable American bank in history under CEO Jamie Dimon, is at the fore of several other skirmishes with regulators.
Thanks to his reputation guiding JPMorgan through the 2008 crisis and last year’s regional banking upheaval, Dimon may be one of few CEOs with the standing to openly criticize regulators. That was highlighted this year when Dimon led a campaign, both public and behind closed doors, to weaken the Basel proposal.
In May, at JPMorgan’s investor day, Dimon’s deputies made the case that Basel and other regulations would end up harming consumers instead of protecting them.
The cumulative effect of pending regulation would boost the cost of mortgages by at least $500 a year and credit card rates by 2%; it would also force banks to charge two-thirds of consumers for checking accounts, according to JPMorgan.
The message: banks won’t just eat the extra costs from regulation, but instead pass them on to consumers.
While all of these battles are ongoing, the financial industry has racked up several victories so far.
Some contend the threat of litigation helped convince the Federal Reserve to offer a new Basel Endgame proposal this month that roughly cuts in half the extra capital that the largest institutions would be forced to hold, among other industry-friendly changes.
It’s not even clear if the watered-down version of the proposal, a long-in-the-making response to the 2008 crisis, will ever be implemented because it won’t be finalized until well after U.S. elections.
If Republican candidate Donald Trump wins, the rules might be further weakened or killed outright, and even under a Kamala Harris administration, the industry could fight the regulation in court.
That’s been banks’ approach to the CFPB credit card rule, which aimed to cap late fees at $8 per incident and was set to go into effect in May.
A last-ditch effort from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and bank trade groups successfully delayed its implementation when Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas sided with the industry, granting a freeze of the rule.
A key playbook for banks has been to file cases in conservative jurisdictions where they are likely to prevail, according to Lori Yue, a Columbia Business School associate professor who has studied the interplay between corporations and the judicial system.
The Northern District of Texas feeds into the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is “well-known for its friendliness to industry lawsuits against regulators,” Yue said.
“Venue-shopping like this has become well-established corporate strategy,” Yue said. “The financial industry has been particularly active this year in suing regulators.”
Since 2017, nearly two-thirds of the lawsuits filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce challenging federal regulations have been in courts under the 5th Circuit, according to an analysis by Accountable US.
Industries dominated by a few large players — from banks to airlines, pharmaceutical companies and energy firms — tend to have well-funded trade organizations that are more likely to resist regulators, Yue added.
The polarized environment, where weakened federal agencies are undermined by conservative courts, ultimately preserves the advantages of the largest corporations, according to Brian Graham, co-founder of bank consulting firm Klaros.
“It’s really bad in the long run, because it locks in place whatever the regulations have been, while the reality is that the world is changing,” Graham said. “It’s what happens when you can’t adopt new regulations because you’re terrified that you’ll get sued.”
— With data visualizations by CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes.
Shares of Trump Media sank Monday to their lowest price since 2021, days after majority owner Donald Trump and other company insiders got the green light to start selling their stakes in the Truth Social operator.
The stock, which appears as DJT on the Nasdaq, dropped more than 10% in the final hour of trading, falling as low as $12.16 per share and putting the company on track for its sixth straight day of declines.
Trump Media (DJT) Stock Price
Trump Media’s share price has fallen nearly 85% since the company surged in its public trading debut in late March.
The stock as of Monday at 3:30 p.m. ET was at its lowest intraday level since before October 2021, when it was revealed that the blank-check firm Digital World Acquisition Corp. was planning to merge with then-private Trump Media.
The company’s market capitalization, which crossed $10 billion in March, has shrunk below $2.5 billion. Trump owns nearly 57% of the company’s outstanding shares, a stake worth nearly $1.4 billion as of Monday around noon.
Trump and other company insiders were bound by lockup agreements that barred them from selling their shares in the initial months after Trump Media went public.
Those restrictions expired at the closing bell Thursday.
Trading volume accelerated significantly as the lockup lifted. More than 14 million shares changed hands on Thursday and nearly 22 million were exchanged Friday, far exceeding the 30-day average volume of about 8.3 million shares.
Traders swapped more than 17 million shares on Monday.
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Trump, a main draw for Truth Social users and many retail investors in the company, said earlier in September that he will not sell his stake. The stock price briefly shot up after his remarks.
Other early investors have made no such promises. They include ARC Global, a sponsor of the blank-check firm that took Trump Media public, and United Atlantic Ventures, an entity controlled by two former contestants on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.”
ARC and UAV owned nearly 11% of outstanding DJT shares, Trump Media said in a regulatory filing in early September. But ARC’s stake may have grown after a Delaware judge ruled on Sept. 16 that Trump Media breached an agreement with the sponsor and owes it more stock.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) shakes hands with former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Sept. 10, 2024.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris substantially outraised and outspent former President Donald Trump in August, ending the month with more cash to fund her final sprint to the November election, according to new filings from the Federal Election Commission.
The Harris campaign raised over $189 million in August, more than quadruple the $44 million sum that the Trump campaign brought in.
Those figures reflect fundraising specifically for the candidate’s main campaign accounts and do not include donations to the other branches of their political operations.
The Harris campaign announced earlier this month a total $361 million August haul from campaign donations joint with the Democratic National Committee and fundraising committees. That dwarfed the $130 million raised between the Trump campaign and its joint fundraising committees.
These figures do not factor in September donations, including the Harris campaign’s $47 million cash bump from nearly 600,000 donors in the 24 hours following the first and possibly only Harris-Trump debate.
The Harris campaign on Saturday accepted an invitation from CNN to hold a second debate on Oct. 23, but Trump has so far staunchly maintained that he will not do a rematch.
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The new FEC filings depict a steady surge of donor enthusiasm for Harris, even as the initial hype of Democrats’ July candidate swap tempered. The entire Harris political operation raised $310 million in July after President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and endorsed her to take over the Democratic ticket.
Harris has also flipped the donation gap to Democrats’ favor, erasing the fundraising lead Trump and Republicans had before Biden dropped out.
Since then, the Harris campaign has been outspending Trump with an advertising blitz across television and digital platforms, along with along with other campaign expenses.
Harris and the DNC jointly spent $258 million in August, well above the $121 million that Trump and the RNC disbursed, according to FEC filings.
“As we enter the final stretch of this election, we’re making sure every hard-earned dollar goes to winning over the voters who will decide this election,” Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release earlier this month.
Heading into the final sprint of the presidential race, the Harris team ended August with $404 million in cash on hand, outpacing the $295 million war chest reported by Trump’s operation.
The Trump campaign assured that its donations will carry it through the rest of the race.
“The Trump-Vance campaign has momentum for the final stretch of the race,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement. “These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement.”
