Air Canada sold a quarter of its frequent flyer program on Tuesday, and it did not give up control of anything. An investor group led by Blackstone and La Caisse is paying C$2.5 billion — roughly US$1.8 billion — for a 25 percent non-controlling stake in Aeroplan Inc., a price that values the loyalty program at C$10 billion. Air Canada keeps 75 percent and continues to run Aeroplan’s strategy, operations and day-to-day management.

The reason a points program commands that kind of money has little to do with flying. Airlines sell miles in bulk to banks, hotel chains and retailers, which then hand them out to cardholders and customers. The airline collects cash the moment the points are sold and only delivers a seat later, if the member ever redeems. It is steady, high-margin revenue that does not move with jet fuel or booking cycles — which is exactly what makes it attractive to a buyer like Blackstone and exactly what makes it useful collateral for an airline that needs money.

Aeroplan has more than 10 million active members and lets them earn or redeem across more than 50 airline partners. Alongside Blackstone and La Caisse, the Québec pension manager formerly known as Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the group includes PSP Investments and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation. Settlement is scheduled for August 17.

The cash has a job waiting for it. Air Canada will use the proceeds to repay a US$1.2 billion bond coming due — about C$1.7 billion — cutting gross debt without drawing down its cash balance, with most of the remainder going toward accelerated share buybacks. The airline said it intends to launch a substantial issuer bid for up to C$800 million of its shares, priced through a modified Dutch auction after the Aeroplan settlement and targeted for completion in September.

The structure matters as much as the price. Air Canada holds the right to buy the stake back between the fifth and eighth anniversaries of settlement, at a price set by a formula that delivers the investors a 6.5 percent internal rate of return net of all distributions. Air Canada will keep consolidating Aeroplan in its financial statements, with the outside stake carried as a non-controlling interest in shareholders’ equity. In plain terms, this looks less like selling a business and more like borrowing against one: the airline takes cash today, the investors take a defined return and a slice of distributions, and Air Canada has a marked path to buying the whole program back.

Chief Financial Officer John Di Bert said the deal unlocks value from Aeroplan while the airline retains operational control, and tied it to Air Canada’s pursuit of an investment grade credit rating. Mark Rutledge, a senior managing director at Blackstone, pointed to the firm’s long-running commitment to investing in Canada. Blackstone, the largest alternative asset manager in the world, oversees more than US$1.3 trillion in assets.

Investors had already moved on the news before it was official. Air Canada shares climbed to their highest level since July 2021 after Bloomberg reported Monday that Blackstone was closing in on a minority interest, and Bank of Nova Scotia analyst Konark Gupta upgraded the stock to sector outperform, arguing the price implied a far richer value for the loyalty business than the market had been assigning it.

Air Canada has been down this road before, in the other direction. Aeroplan was separated from the airline after its 2003 bankruptcy protection filing, went public in 2005, and later became Aimia. The relationship soured, and in 2017 Air Canada announced it would not renew its agreement and would build a competing program — sending Aimia’s stock down 63 percent in a single day. Air Canada then led a consortium with TD, CIBC and Visa to buy the program back for $450 million in cash plus the assumption of roughly $1.9 billion in Aeroplan Miles liability. Seven years later, a quarter of that same program is worth C$2.5 billion.

The timing is not accidental. Air Canada reports earnings Wednesday, and Bloomberg Intelligence has projected an 85 percent year-over-year drop in adjusted net profit, with the carrier squeezed by jet fuel prices driven higher by the war in Iran. An airline heading into a weak quarter with a large bond maturity in front of it has every reason to convert its most durable asset into cash without surrendering it — a playbook U.S. carriers wrote during the pandemic, when Delta, United and American all borrowed billions against their own mileage programs rather than sell equity at the bottom.

BofA Securities, Stikeman Elliott and Deloitte advised Air Canada and Aeroplan; Scotiabank, Kirkland & Ellis and Blake, Cassels & Graydon advised Blackstone. The money lands August 17, the buyback follows in September, and the earnings report arrives Wednesday.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A 50% U.S. tariff lands on roughly $28 billion of Canadian goods on Aug. 19 — wine, hockey sticks, cement and dozens of other products — unless negotiators in Washington can get a package in front of President Trump first. Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are aiming to do exactly that as early as Monday, Aug. 17, two days before the deadline. Nothing is agreed yet; what they are assembling is something concrete enough for the president to accept or reject.

The work continued in Washington on Tuesday. LeBlanc met Greer for the third time in as many weeks, with Canada’s chief trade negotiator Janice Charette also at the table. The meeting ran about an hour, and neither Canadian official took reporters’ questions leaving Greer’s office. LeBlanc said afterward that his side remains at the negotiating table and is working to defend Canadian interests.

The deadline comes from an executive order Trump signed last month. It applies the 50% rate to several categories of Canadian goods over what the administration calls discriminatory Canadian trade policies, covering roughly 5% of Canadian exports to the United States.

The bargain on the table is a straight exchange. Washington wants Canada to drop its counter-tariffs on autos and wants provincial bans on American alcohol lifted, and the two sides are trading proposals on how Canada manages its dairy quotas. Those are the same grievances the administration named when it announced the Aug. 19 tariffs: provinces pulling U.S. alcohol off store shelves, and alleged discrimination against American vehicles and dairy.

In return, Ottawa wants relief from the sectoral tariffs already in force, which cost far more than the goods on next week’s list. Canadian government briefing material puts current U.S. duties at 50% on Canadian steel, aluminum and copper, 25% on autos and trucks, and 10% on lumber. Steel, aluminum, lumber and autos are the four sectors LeBlanc and Charette are pressing on. Those are the Section 232 national-security tariffs, and getting them cut is the reason Canada is at the table at all.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has ruled out a narrow version of that trade. Speaking at an aluminum plant in Saguenay, Quebec, last week, he said he was not interested in a targeted deal disconnected from other sectors, and that any agreement must cover autos, steel, aluminum and forest products. He has framed the goal as getting “all 232s to be addressed.” He has also warned Canada will get tougher if nothing is reached before the new tariffs take effect. Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre set the bar higher still, calling for zero tariffs on softwood lumber, an end to the steel and aluminum duties, a tariff-free auto pact and a full exemption from Buy America rules on infrastructure projects.

Whether Trump takes a package that broad is the open question, and it is why the Aug. 17 meeting matters more than any working-level session. David MacNaughton, Canada’s former ambassador to Washington, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday that the president is the only person who will make the final deal, and that he is not sure Trump is ready right now for the comprehensive agreement the Canadian side wants. Canada arrives with what MacNaughton called a “fairly substantial package.”

For American buyers the exposure is concrete. The United States imported about $382 billion of goods from Canada in 2025, and the new tariffs would apply to close to $20 billion of that, by the U.S. Trade Representative’s count. Beverage distributors, ready-mix and construction suppliers and sporting goods retailers sit on the immediate list; steel and aluminum buyers, auto plants and homebuilders are already carrying the sectoral duties. The international heads of the United Steelworkers and the machinists’ union have written to Greer asking the administration to hold off on the 50% levies.

A larger piece is riding on the same talks. Canada is hoping the negotiations also produce an extension of the North American trade agreement, after the Trump administration declined to renew it in July. Reporting last week indicated Ottawa would prefer to book any tariff relief in side letters rather than reopen the pact itself, and that it expects to accept some level of U.S. metals tariffs — a structure that trades concessions on the irritants for a lower rate without touching the underlying agreement.

Nothing changes at the border before Aug. 19. The rates in effect today are the ones that have been in place for months. What the Aug. 17 meeting decides is whether a 50% wall goes up around a list of Canadian goods that American buyers cannot replace on short notice.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The Senate passed the Common Cents Act on Friday night, and once the House signs off on a small change the senators made, the arithmetic at the register becomes federal law for anyone paying cash. A total ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7 cents gets rounded down to the nearest nickel; a total ending in 3, 4, 8 or 9 cents gets rounded up, and the rounding applies only to cash, and only after taxes and fees are added. Pay by card, check or phone and nothing changes — you are charged the exact amount, down to the cent.

Rounding is an option, not an order. Businesses may round when they cannot make exact change, but they are not required to, and merchants that adopt the practice get legal safe-harbor protection for doing it. That protection is the reason retailers pushed for the bill in the first place.

The problem it solves is one that has been building at cash registers since the Mint stopped striking pennies. Retailers large and small have been warning customers that exact change is unlikely on cash purchases, and they have handled the shortfall inconsistently — some handing out gift cards or free items, others simply rounding the total. Several states and localities bar businesses from rounding cash transactions in either direction, which left a chain operating across state lines with no safe way to do the same thing everywhere.

Evan Armstrong, senior vice president of government affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said more than a dozen states have moved ahead with their own versions of rounding legislation, and the federal bill “gives a singular, uniform approach around rounding” that replaces the patchwork. The National Retail Federation called the measure an overdue step toward letting retailers keep serving cash customers as penny supply and usage dwindle. Sean Kennedy, chief advocacy officer at the National Restaurant Association, said Senate passage delivers “the certainty, consistency, and protection restaurant operators need” at the point of sale.

The vote itself moved fast. Senators cleared the bill Friday evening through a hotline process, polling each member for sign-off so the legislation could advance without floor time. The Banking Committee was discharged by unanimous consent, and the measure passed with an amendment, also by unanimous consent. The change came from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and requires the Treasury Department to notify Congress before discontinuing any currency in the future and to submit a transition plan. Because the Senate altered the text, the House has to vote on it a second time, and retail trade groups are aiming to get the bill to President Trump in September.

The legislation also settles the penny’s status permanently. Treasury would have to end all penny production within a year of enactment, while pennies already in circulation stay legal tender indefinitely. The Federal Reserve would be tasked with limiting disruptions in penny supply during the wind-down. Roughly 114 billion pennies remain in existence, by Treasury’s estimate.

The second half of the bill is about the coin shoppers will be handed instead. The nickel loses money on every strike. It cost 13.31 cents to produce a nickel in fiscal 2025, down slightly from 13.78 cents the year before, and fiscal 2025 marked the twentieth straight year that production costs ran above the coin’s face value. The culprit is copper: a nickel contains very little of the metal it is named for and is roughly 75% copper.

The fix on offer is a cheaper recipe. The bill permits a five-cent coin built with an inner layer of zinc and an outer layer of nickel, with the Treasury secretary allowed to set the exact proportions only after testing shows the new composition cuts cost and, as the text puts it, has “minimal adverse impact on machines designed to accept coins.” That last clause was written in for vending machine operators, convenience store chains and laundromats, whose coin acceptors read a coin’s weight and electromagnetic signature. A copper-nickel five-cent piece must weigh five grams, but the zinc version could weigh anywhere from four to six, giving Treasury room to tune the coin so existing equipment still recognizes it. Zinc ran nearly $7,000 per metric ton cheaper than copper last year, according to the Mint.

Nothing changes in anyone’s pocket yet. The bill permits the new nickel rather than ordering it, and Treasury would still need to test and validate the composition before a zinc-core nickel reaches circulation, putting 2027 at the earliest realistic window. The nickel itself is not going away; a separate bill to eliminate it remains stuck in House committee. The immediate business consequence is narrower and more useful: a single national rule for making change, ending the state-by-state legal exposure that has been hanging over every cash sale since the last penny was struck.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The Justice Department went to court Monday against New York, Connecticut and Vermont, seeking to bar all three states from charging in-state tuition rates to students who are in the country illegally — a filing that puts two of the tri-state area’s public university systems directly in federal litigation.

The complaints challenge state laws, regulations and policies requiring colleges and universities to provide in-state tuition rates to all non-citizens who maintain state residency, regardless of whether they are lawfully present. The department is also asking courts to block the states from enforcing laws that provide financial assistance and scholarships to those students.

“States cannot put illegal aliens over our Nation’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said, adding that the department has now sued every state in the Second Circuit on the issue. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Civil Division said the matter turns on a straightforward reading of federal law — that “colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens” that are unavailable to U.S. citizens.

Monday’s filings bring the total to 17 lawsuits in the campaign, which is run under Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The legal theory, and the counterargument

The government’s position is that these state laws unconstitutionally discriminate against U.S. citizens who do not receive the same reduced rates or scholarships, create incentives for illegal immigration, and conflict directly with federal law. The citizens in question are out-of-state Americans: a student from New Jersey attending a New York public university pays the higher non-resident rate, while a student living in New York without legal status pays the resident rate.

The states’ side of that turns on how the residency test is written. New York, Connecticut and Vermont all extend in-state tuition reductions to every student who meets certain state residency requirements — the benefit keys on where a student lives and went to high school, not on immigration status. Whether that framing survives federal preemption is the question now in front of the courts.

The department has won on this argument before. Five similar suits — in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Illinois — have produced favorable orders. Earlier rulings in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Nebraska permanently enjoined and declared unconstitutional analogous laws granting reduced tuition. Cases have also been pending in Minnesota, Virginia, California, New Jersey and Kansas — which means New Jersey’s turn in this fight is already underway.

The university systems for New York, Connecticut and Vermont did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The enrollment math

The population at issue is small as a share of national enrollment. Roughly 2.4% of all students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities lack legal status, according to an October report from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal. Nearly 28% of them are estimated to hold or be eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program providing temporary work permits and deportation protection to people brought to the country as children.

For public universities, the financial effect of an injunction is not obvious in either direction, and administrators in Albany and Hartford will be modeling both. Non-resident tuition at a state university typically runs two to three times the resident rate. A school that must charge the higher rate to these students either collects substantially more per enrollee or loses them entirely — and for a student paying out of pocket without access to federal aid, the second outcome is the likely one.

Why tri-state employers should track this

The practical exposure runs through the workforce pipeline. Community colleges and regional public universities in New York and Connecticut feed nursing programs, allied health, skilled trades, accounting and teaching — fields where employers across the region are already short-staffed. A ruling that prices a segment of local students out of those programs removes graduates from a labor market that is not currently producing enough of them.

Employers with DACA holders on payroll have a narrower question to consider. Those employees are lawfully authorized to work, and this litigation does not change that. But roughly a quarter of the affected student population overlaps with that group, and any employee currently finishing a degree part-time at a state institution could see their cost of completion change if an injunction issues.

Nothing changes immediately. These are complaints, not orders, and the states will answer before any court rules. But given the department’s record in the earlier cases, institutions in the region would be prudent to model what a reversal costs them — before a judge decides the question for them.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The companies building America’s AI data centers are running into a problem money alone can’t solve: the insurance industry is close to the limit of what it can cover.

That’s the warning from Eric Andersen, president and chief executive of American International Group, who says the data center boom is maxing out property and casualty insurers. The math behind it is simple. A single hyperscale campus can be worth more than a mid-sized city’s entire commercial real estate stock, and it all sits on one plot of land. Markel’s Guenter Kryszon has warned that an individual campus can require $10 billion to $20 billion of property limit — far more than any one insurer will put on a single site.

Andersen has described a project that generates demand across an insurer’s entire product line, saying a data center needs roughly 30 different insurance products from permitting and financing through construction, including marine, liability, cyber and business interruption. He has called the buildout the biggest short-term opportunity the property/casualty industry has. The catch is that opportunity and capacity are now colliding.

The scale explains why. Zurich says the average data center project in its portfolio was worth $150 million five years ago; today it is $3 billion. The insurer has covered more than $350 billion of values across 250 data center projects over the past three years. AM Best counts 4,287 data centers in the United States as of May 2026, with the top 10 states holding 59% of them — Virginia leads with 603, or 14.1% of the national total, followed by Texas with 461.

Insurers normally manage risk by spreading it around. Data centers do the opposite. They pile enormous value into one location, often in states exposed to severe weather, and pack it with equipment that is expensive, scarce and hard to replace quickly. AM Best has flagged business interruption as potentially the most consequential exposure of all, and says the coverage the buildout requires already goes beyond what the traditional property/casualty industry has previously handled.

Power is part of the exposure too. A single modern AI data center can draw as much electricity as roughly 100,000 homes, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research cited by AM Best estimates data centers could consume as much as 12% of all U.S. electricity by 2028.

Andersen’s proposed fix is to widen the pool of money willing to take the risk. He has urged insurers and brokers to bring alternative capital providers — including the insurance-linked securities market — into risks the industry cannot absorb on its own, with data centers as the leading example. Brokers are already building structures to do it. Marsh launched a $75 million excess casualty facility for U.S. digital infrastructure construction in February.

That matters well beyond the insurance business. Lenders financing these projects require coverage before money moves. If insurers cap out on limits or price the risk higher, financing terms tighten and construction timelines stretch — which slows the buildout that hyperscalers and chipmakers are counting on.

AIG’s own quarter shows a carrier being choosier about where it puts capital. On his first earnings call as CEO, Andersen told analysts the market is moving out of a long stretch of broad price increases into a more selective phase where results depend on line-by-line dynamics, with new capacity from excess and surplus lines carriers and delegated underwriting structures pressuring property pricing in particular. In North America, AIG deliberately shrank the property book at its surplus lines unit Lexington in targeted areas, cutting premium retention there by nine points in the second quarter, while growing property where the returns hold up — including through its renewal rights deal with Everest. Andersen said the company is walking away from business that doesn’t meet its underwriting standards.

Andersen took over as CEO on June 1, succeeding Peter Zaffino, who became executive chairman, after joining AIG in February from Aon. His growth plan runs to five points: deploying capital toward the highest returns, using reinsurance efficiently, expanding artificial intelligence, holding expenses and investing in people. AIG is using its own AI tools to speed underwriting and claims, and Andersen said the goal is not fewer employees but employees handling more clients.

AIG grew net premiums written 24% year over year to $5.60 billion in the first quarter, helped by transactions, reinsurance changes and targeted organic growth.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Private equity firms are sitting on record amounts of capital, strategic buyers continue searching for acquisitions, and thousands of Baby Boomer-owned businesses are preparing to change hands. Yet an increasing number of deals are stalling before closing—not because buyers have disappeared, but because many otherwise profitable companies cannot survive modern due diligence.

The market for selling a business has quietly changed. During years of inexpensive financing, buyers often accepted operational imperfections in exchange for growth. Today’s environment is different. Higher borrowing costs, more selective investors and greater scrutiny of financial performance have shifted leverage toward buyers, making clean financial reporting and operational discipline as valuable as revenue growth itself.

Transaction advisers say more deals are being delayed, repriced or abandoned after buyers begin reviewing financial statements, customer contracts, inventory records and internal controls. Businesses that appear healthy on the surface are discovering that undocumented processes, inconsistent accounting, weak reporting systems or unreliable earnings can materially reduce valuation—or end negotiations altogether. (tax.thomsonreuters.com)

The timing reflects broader changes across the mergers-and-acquisitions market. Private equity firms continue managing enormous amounts of committed capital, but higher interest rates have increased financing costs while investors demand greater confidence in earnings quality. Buyers are still willing to pay premium valuations, but only for companies that can demonstrate those earnings are sustainable and well documented.

That shift is changing what creates value inside a business.

For years, owners focused primarily on growing sales, expanding customers and increasing profitability. Increasingly, buyers are assigning equal value to audited financial statements, recurring revenue visibility, documented internal controls, cybersecurity practices, tax compliance and organized corporate records. In many transactions, preparation has become a competitive advantage rather than an administrative exercise.

The implications extend beyond companies currently considering a sale.

Thousands of family-owned manufacturers, distributors, healthcare providers, transportation companies and professional service firms are expected to transition ownership over the coming decade as Baby Boomer entrepreneurs retire. Companies that begin preparing years before entering the market are more likely to preserve valuation than those waiting until a letter of intent has already been signed.

The opportunity is creating growing demand for accountants, CFOs, valuation specialists, cybersecurity consultants and transaction advisory firms that help businesses become “deal ready” long before negotiations begin. What was once viewed as back-office compliance is increasingly becoming part of enterprise value.

The larger business story is not that buyers have become scarce. Capital remains abundant. What has become scarce is confidence.

In today’s acquisition market, buyers are no longer paying simply for a successful business—they are paying for one that can prove its success. As ownership transitions accelerate across Corporate America, the companies commanding the highest valuations may not be those growing the fastest, but those able to demonstrate—with clear records, reliable controls and credible financial reporting—that their performance will withstand the most demanding scrutiny.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Jamie Dimon has put a condition on something most Americans treat as permanent: the dollar sits at the center of the global financial system because the United States has the strongest economy and the strongest military, and it stays there only as long as both remain true.

“If we’re not the strongest military in 25 years and the strongest economy, we won’t be the reserve currency either,” the JPMorgan Chase chief executive said on PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” which aired over the weekend. “The world will be fragmented, and it’ll be very dangerous for us.”

Dimon framed the two as inseparable: to be safe, have the best military in the world, and to have the best military, have the best economy. He noted that reserve-currency status has historically followed the leading power that upholds rule of law and open capital flows, and said that if the U.S. loses its lead through debt, deficits or mismanagement, the status follows.

The trend line is already moving. The dollar accounts for about 57% of global foreign-exchange reserves, down from roughly 70% at the turn of the century. IMF data puts the decline at 72% in 2001 to 57% today.

That is erosion, not collapse, and the distinction matters for anyone doing business in dollars. Reserve-currency transitions run slowly — the British pound’s decline from dominance unfolded across roughly four decades, from the end of World War I to the post-Bretton Woods era, even though American economic supremacy was evident well before any formal shift.

Economists put less weight on the military piece than Dimon does. Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution told Fortune that institutions and economic dynamism — how quickly an economy innovates and reallocates resources — are far more important to reserve-currency status than an economy’s size or military power. He added that weakening U.S. economic and military strength, along with erosion of domestic institutions and geopolitical influence, will hurt dollar dominance, but the absence of any serious rival will prevent the dollar from being displaced as the dominant payment and reserve currency.

Dimon is not making the argument abstractly. His comments come alongside JPMorgan’s $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, aimed at strengthening U.S. domestic manufacturing, energy and defense capacity. He argued corporate America must partner with government on strategic vulnerabilities now, pointing to American reliance on potential adversaries for missile components and rare earths, and said the national interest matters more than his own bank — because if the country does poorly, JPMorgan suffers. He closed with the line that fighting a war is very expensive, and losing one is the most expensive.

For companies and consumers, reserve status is not a matter of prestige. It is why the U.S. can borrow at scale in its own currency, why oil and most commodity contracts settle in dollars, and why American importers face no exchange-rate friction on the majority of world trade. Losing that position would strip Washington of significant geopolitical leverage and push domestic borrowing costs higher, which reaches ordinary borrowers through mortgages and consumer credit.

Some think Dimon’s timeline is generous. Analyst Philip Pilkington argued that fallout from the Iran war could halve it, accelerating a shift toward a multi-polar monetary order within a decade, with energy shocks doing more lasting damage to the postwar financial architecture than the military strikes themselves.

The Federal Reserve continues to affirm the dollar’s strong international standing, and the Atlantic Council puts its share of global reserves near 58%. The U.S. Dollar Index is up 1.42% year to date, down 1.28% over the past month and roughly flat over the year. Market positioning shows continued appetite for gold as a hedge against long-run currency risk.

The debt arithmetic gives Dimon’s warning its edge. Reserve status is what makes large deficits financeable at low cost; large deficits are among the things that could erode reserve status. That circularity is the substance beneath the soundbite, and it is why the CBO’s revised $2.1 trillion deficit and Dimon’s 25-year warning are the same story told at different speeds.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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David Ellison has given California’s attorney general a deadline: agree to settlement talks over the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, or Paramount starts leaving the state.

Ellison told Paramount’s senior executives last week he is prepared to relocate the company — and Warner Bros. too, if the merger closes — unless Attorney General Rob Bonta agrees to negotiate a settlement in the antitrust case brought by 12 states. He said the exit process would begin Oct. 1 if talks have not started, and that the Paramount Skydance board has approved the move. Paramount declined to comment.

Leaving California could save Paramount Skydance roughly $500 million a year in taxes and potentially raise another $4 billion from selling its studio lots. That is the leverage, and it is aimed at a state that counts film production among its signature industries.

The date is not arbitrary. Oct. 1 is when Paramount begins accruing a “ticking fee” payable to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders of $7 million a day. With the antitrust trial scheduled to start March 2, 2027, Paramount would owe roughly $1.2 billion to WBD shareholders by the time that trial is expected to conclude. The fee was written into the deal as a $0.25 per share quarterly accrual beginning after Sept. 30, 2026, alongside a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the transaction fails on regulatory grounds.

If the state attorneys general succeed in blocking the merger, Paramount pays that $7 billion. The March trial date was itself a blow — it means the case may not resolve until next summer or later, with the ticking fee running the whole time. Paramount had asked the judge to start trial Nov. 4, 2026; the states and the Writers Guild asked for April 5, 2027.

Bonta’s answer was blunt. He called the planned exit an attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through, writing on X that Paramount has lost the plot as it keeps losing in court and that the tactic did not work on the eve of the July lawsuit and will not work now. Bonta has not said what concessions would take the suit off the table, but has said any remedy would have to be structural — divestitures — rather than behavioral commitments like production quotas.

The underlying complaint is about market structure. The 12-state coalition alleges a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. would unlawfully reduce competition in basic cable and theatrical distribution, while the Writers Guild’s separate suit argues it would harm the market for writers. Speculation that the states might drop the case if Paramount spun off CNN has been denied by Bonta.

Ellison has been countering the theatrical argument directly, securing backing from two of the largest theater chains to support his commitment to release 30 films a year under the combined company. He has also pointed to 90 series planned from Paramount’s television studios in 2026 and a $1.5 billion increase in content investment made before the deal was signed.

Ellison remains confident the $110 billion transaction will close. He had hoped to have completed the takeover by now and instead faces a legal fight that could push the closing into 2027 or unravel it.

For California, the threat lands on a film and television sector already losing production to Georgia, New Mexico and overseas. For shareholders on both sides, the calculation is narrower: every month of delay costs $210 million in ticking fees, and the alternative to closing is a $7 billion check. Moving the headquarters does not address the antitrust claim — it changes who bears the cost of the fight.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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American households owed slightly less at the end of June than they did three months earlier — the first time total household debt has gone down in six years, and only the third such quarter since the last recession.

The New York Fed reported Tuesday that total household debt fell by $13 billion, or 0.1%, to $18.8 trillion in the second quarter. The figure comes from the bank’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, built from a nationally representative sample of Equifax credit records.

The decline is real but slim, and most of it traces to one line: mortgages. Mortgage balances dropped by $74 billion to $13.1 trillion. Every other major category went the other way. Credit card balances rose $21 billion to $1.26 trillion, auto loan balances climbed $28 billion to $1.71 trillion, and student loan balances edged down to $1.65 trillion.

Before reading that mortgage number as households paying down their homes, note the mechanical explanation. The $74 billion decline was attributed to a servicer transfer gap — the reporting lag that occurs when a mortgage is handed from one servicer to another and the balance temporarily drops off the credit file. Those balances are expected to reappear. The headline decline, in other words, rests partly on a bookkeeping delay rather than on borrowers retiring debt.

What is not mechanical is the direction of everything else. Ted Rossman, principal consumer finance analyst at Money Management International, said the last quarter-over-quarter decline was six years ago, and the one before that was more than a decade ago. He tied the slip — alongside GDP growth under 2% and a softer jobs market — to an economy that is slowing, and noted that mortgage balances have now declined quarter-over-quarter only three times since 2016. Households borrow less when they are less confident about income, and when higher rates make new borrowing expensive.

The delinquency picture in the same report cuts two ways, and the split is worth understanding because the two numbers appear to contradict each other.

The broad measure improved. The share of loan balances at least 30 days overdue fell to 4.7%, and some measures of newly delinquent debt declined as well. That is the total stock of late debt across all households — and by that yardstick, most borrowers are keeping current.

The flow into new trouble tells a different story. A greater share of borrowers went at least 30 days late on mortgage payments in the second quarter than in any quarter since 2015, and more went 90 days or more past due on car payments than in any quarter since 2010.

Those two facts fit together. The overall pool of delinquent debt can shrink while the rate of new borrowers falling behind rises, because older delinquencies are being cured, written off or resolved faster than new ones arrive. The aggregate looks stable; the entry rate does not. “Overall, consumer debt and delinquencies are plateauing, not plummeting,” Rossman said, adding that considerable strain remains at the household level. Demand for financial counseling at his organization has grown for five straight years.

For businesses, the practical read is a consumer that has stopped expanding its balance sheet. Auto lenders are the most exposed: balances grew $28 billion in the quarter even as serious delinquencies on car loans hit a 16-year high — more lending into a borrower pool where the weakest tier is failing at rates not seen since the aftermath of the financial crisis. Credit card issuers added balances too, which supports interest income in the near term and raises loss exposure if the labor market softens further.

Retailers and anyone selling big-ticket items should read the mortgage line carefully rather than optimistically. Home equity withdrawal and mortgage refinancing have historically funded renovation, appliance and furniture spending. A quarter in which mortgage balances fell — even partly for technical reasons — is not a quarter in which that channel opened up.

For the Fed, the report lands as one more data point on a slowing but not breaking consumer. Falling aggregate delinquency argues against alarm. Rising entry into delinquency on the two loan types most tied to household cash flow, mortgages and cars, argues that the strain is concentrated and building at the bottom.

The one clean conclusion from Tuesday’s data is that after six years of continuous growth, American household borrowing has stopped rising. Whether that is discipline or exhaustion is what the next two quarters will settle.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The federal budget hole for 2026 grew by $200 billion, and the government’s own scorekeeper points at one cause: the tariff revenue that stopped arriving after the Supreme Court invalidated the program collecting it.

The Congressional Budget Office now projects the fiscal 2026 deficit at $2.1 trillion, according to its Monthly Budget Review released Monday — up from the $1.9 trillion forecast in February, before the court struck down President Trump’s signature tariff program. Federal spending is tracking close to the February baseline, meaning the revision is almost entirely on the revenue side.

CBO estimates tariff and customs-duty collections in 2026 will land $250 billion below earlier projections, a roughly 60% drop that traces directly to the Feb. 20 ruling that the administration lacked authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump has since imposed new import taxes under Section 122 and later Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, but the shortfall stands.

The refund mechanics are the part worth understanding. Duties already collected under the invalidated authority have to be returned to importers, so Customs and Border Protection is paying money out on the same line item that was supposed to bring it in. By July the government was refunding more tariff revenue than it collected — $36 billion in refunds against $26 billion in gross collections, a net outflow of $9 billion for the month. Roughly $100 billion has now been refunded on duties collected under the struck-down authority. About $70 billion of that went out in May and June alone.

The rest of the ledger held up better. Income and payroll tax collections are running about $75 billion above the February baseline, cushioning part of the blow. Through the first 10 months of the fiscal year, federal spending rose $308 billion from a year earlier while tax receipts rose $139 billion, producing a deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion — $169 billion wider than the same stretch of fiscal 2025. Interest costs on the national debt are up 14% year over year.

July’s monthly figure carries a caveat. CBO put the July deficit at $431 billion — $765 billion in spending against $334 billion in revenue, roughly $140 billion worse than July 2025. But timing shifts pulled payments normally due Aug. 1 into July; adjusted for that, the July deficit was $333 billion, only $41 billion larger than a year earlier.

For importers and the banks financing them, the refund flow is a live working-capital event: duties paid over the past year are coming back, improving cash positions for firms that absorbed them, while replacement tariffs under different statutory authorities carry their own rates and their own litigation risk. For bond markets, the read-through is simpler — $200 billion more borrowing than planned, in a year when debt service is already the fastest-growing line in the budget.

CBO has estimated that the February reduction in tariff rates increases primary deficits by about $1.6 trillion over the 2026-2036 period, plus another $0.4 trillion in debt-service costs. That is the longer arc: the tariff program had been scored as a deficit reducer, and removing it reverses the arithmetic across the entire ten-year window.

Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the borrowing level barely scratches the surface of the fiscal deterioration, noting the country is approaching $40 trillion in gross national debt. The national debt has already surpassed the size of the economy for the first time since World War II.

Fiscal year 2026 ends Sept. 30.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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A city outside San Francisco shut off its entire computer network on Friday and has been running its emergency dispatch through the county ever since, after malicious software got inside the systems that route 911 calls.

Suisun City’s council declared a state of emergency at a special meeting at 11 a.m. Saturday, after malicious software infected and compromised the city’s information technology systems at roughly 5:45 a.m. Friday, August 7. The declaration, made under California Government Code 8630, lets the city tap emergency support services quickly and recover the costs it incurs from the incident. The council vote was unanimous. The emergency remains in effect.

The attack hit critical public safety operations — 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and other city services. To contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation, the city took its entire network offline.

Police officers and firefighters have continued responding to emergencies throughout. Suisun City dispatchers are handling calls through the Solano County dispatch center, and officials said there is no imminent threat to the public. The city has about 30,000 residents and sits roughly 45 miles from San Francisco.

The city activated its Emergency Operations Center and is working with federal and state agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, on the investigation. California’s emergency services office is also involved in the investigation and in restoring the systems.

The pattern it fits

This is not an isolated incident, and the wider context is what should concern anyone running a business that depends on public infrastructure. Federal investigators were already on alert after water systems in at least 12 states were targeted. In some cases the attacks disrupted utilities’ ability to remotely monitor and control their systems, forcing operators to switch to manual control. Hackers also gained remote access to equipment including pumps, valves and water-pressure controls. Investigators suspect Iran-backed hackers may be responsible, though the U.S. government has not formally attributed the attacks.

That suspicion sits against the backdrop of a conflict that began in late February and has since spread well past the Persian Gulf. Municipal networks are a soft target by design — they were built for service delivery, not for defense, and the smallest jurisdictions have the thinnest security staffing.

Bipartisan lawmakers have been pressing for more funding and staff for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body that coordinates between agencies, local governments and private operators of essential infrastructure, after cyber incidents affecting water utilities in at least seven states.

What it costs a business

For companies in an affected jurisdiction, the practical exposure runs in three directions.

The first is operational. A city that pulls its network offline stops issuing permits, processing payments, running inspections and answering business licensing questions. Construction schedules slip. Closings get delayed. There is rarely a published timeline for restoration, because the city itself does not know one until forensics finish.

The second is the emergency response itself. Suisun City’s fallback worked — the county absorbed the dispatch load and crews stayed on the street. Not every municipality has a neighboring dispatch center sized to take over. Any business with a physical location should know, in advance, whether its local 911 system has that kind of backup, and what the alternate contact procedure is if it does not. It is a ten-minute question to your local fire department and worth asking before you need the answer.

The third is the lesson from the response. Suisun City did the right thing and did it fast: shut the whole network down rather than trying to isolate the infected portion, and preserve the evidence rather than rushing to restore. That decision costs days of downtime and is almost always correct. Businesses that try to keep operating through an active intrusion routinely lose both the data and the ability to trace what happened.

The declaration mechanism is worth noting as well. California requires the emergency declaration in order for a city to access support services and recoup incident costs. Private companies have an analogous requirement in their cyber insurance policies — notification windows measured in hours, not days, and coverage that can be voided by delay. Most owners discover the terms during the incident. The time to read them is now.

The investigation is ongoing, and the city has released no information on who was behind the intrusion or what was taken. What is already clear is that a town of 30,000 people spent a weekend with its emergency communications running out of a neighboring county’s building — and that a growing number of American municipalities are one bad Friday morning away from the same position.

JBizNews Desk | Suisun City

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Moody’s has put a name to a risk building quietly inside the banking system: nearly every large bank is racing to install artificial intelligence, and nearly all of them are buying it from the same few companies.

The rating agency’s “Bank of the Future” analysis, published in late July, said AI will eventually cut costs and lift revenue across Wall Street and the City of London, with significant risk attached. Most financial firms now depend on a relatively small group of foundation AI model and cloud computing providers — what Moody’s calls a “systemic dependency” — and an outage at a single major provider could ripple across customers and entire sectors at once. Regulators, the agency expects, will sharpen their focus on operational resilience and third-party concentration as adoption deepens.

The distinction from ordinary technology risk matters. A bank typically runs several different suppliers across different systems. With generative AI, many institutions end up relying on the same underlying models, the same cloud infrastructure and the same handful of vendors. One failure then becomes everyone’s failure simultaneously, rather than one bank’s bad week.

The pricing problem

Moody’s also flagged what it termed vendor dependence risk — the prospect that a set of dominant model and infrastructure providers could, over time, control the price of AI services.

The report named OpenAI and Anthropic specifically, noting that both face investor pressure to reach profitability while still running losses — pressure Moody’s believes could eventually hand those vendors leverage over pricing terms with the institutions building on their models.

That is the sequence worth watching. A bank spends two years rebuilding fraud detection, credit decisioning and customer service around a particular model. Switching costs climb with every workflow moved over. Then the contract comes up for renewal, and the bank’s negotiating position is considerably weaker than it was at signing.

Moody’s added that the payoff may be thinner than banks expect: capturing it requires substantial investment, and with so many competitors chasing the same efficiencies, much of the gain gets competed away. Everyone spends, everyone gets faster, and the savings pass through to customers rather than to shareholders.

The deposit risk

One warning is specific to banking, and it should register with anyone who lived through March 2023. Moody’s said AI could make it far easier for depositors to move money into higher-yielding accounts, potentially shifting significant sums in a short period. That puts depositor trust and funding stability directly in scope.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in part because customers could move money out with a phone in their hands faster than the bank could raise liquidity. An AI assistant that continuously monitors rates across institutions and moves cash on its own instruction compresses that timeline further. Moody’s grouped this alongside heightened exposure to data privacy failures, cybersecurity gaps and fraud.

How deep adoption already runs

More than three-quarters of financial services firms in the United Kingdom already use AI, according to a Treasury select committee report. Lloyds Banking Group is the clearest large-scale commitment, with chief executive Charlie Nunn pursuing a £13 billion strategy that includes £2 billion in cost cuts, acknowledging the effect on staff and pledging continued reskilling alongside new hiring.

Moody’s also attached a figure to the displacement question: a one-in-five chance that AI can perform the work of a capable mid-level employee by 2030.

What banks can do about it

The agency did not leave the problem without remedies. Moody’s said banks and insurers can reduce their dependence by keeping control of their own data, applying their considerable experience negotiating technology contracts, using open-source models, and building partnerships rather than single-vendor relationships.

That first item is the one most within reach. A bank’s proprietary data — its lending history, its customer behavior, its fraud patterns — is the asset the model providers cannot replicate. Institutions that keep that data under their own control and portable between systems retain the ability to walk. Those that let it settle inside a vendor’s platform are the ones who will find the renewal conversation unpleasant.

The open-source option has also become materially more credible in the past few months, with capable models now available under permissive licenses that run on hardware a bank already owns. For a mid-sized institution weighing a first AI deployment, that is worth evaluating before signing a long-term commitment to any single provider.

The broader point Moody’s is making is not that banks should slow down. It is that concentration risk is the thing regulators eventually price, and that the industry is building it right now, in plain view, one vendor contract at a time.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The biggest obstacle facing the companies building artificial intelligence is no longer chips or capital. It is the local zoning board — and in a growing number of places, the answer coming back is no.

Opposition to large AI data centers is rising in Republican and Democratic communities alike, with residents raising electricity bills, water supplies, noise and strain on local infrastructure. Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Ohio are all seeing pressure for tighter oversight, project audits, or rules preventing households from absorbing the infrastructure costs these facilities create. With midterm elections approaching, politicians are finding the issue hard to sidestep.

The numbers behind that pressure are substantial. Local opposition blocked or delayed 75 data center projects representing $130 billion in planned construction during the first three months of 2026, according to Data Center Watch — roughly as many projects as were affected across all of 2025. The 2025 total in dollar terms came to $156 billion in delayed or canceled work.

Not a partisan split

The polling is what makes this unusual. A Gallup survey found roughly 70% of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local area — 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans. The internal breakdown is stranger still: conservative Republicans oppose local data centers at a higher rate, 53%, than moderate Republicans, at 44%, putting the most conservative voters closer to Democrats than to the center of their own party.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a chart where conservative Republicans are closer to liberal Democrats than liberal and moderate Republicans are,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Megan Mullin, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, attributes it to something simpler than technology anxiety. “Amid so much partisan division, opposition to data centers seems to be the thing that unites Americans right now,” she said, describing the resistance as rooted in attachment to the places people live.

It is already moving campaigns

In Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, Democrat William Lawrence did not plan to run on data centers, but voters kept raising it. “It wasn’t something that I expected to be part of the campaign last August because data centers weren’t on our radar,” he said. “But there have been four data centers proposed in the district since I declared my candidacy.” He won his primary against two more moderate opponents.

In Wisconsin, calling for a construction moratorium has helped Francesca Hong assemble a broad coalition in the Democratic primary for governor. And two months after OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a large campus in Saline Township, Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed held a rally in front of the site, calling for no further approvals until federal rules are in place.

It cuts against incumbents of both parties. Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, vetoed legislation that would have created the first statewide data center moratorium, saying she did not want to shut the industry out entirely. More than 100 moratorium proposals are circulating around the country.

What it costs the builders

The consequences fall on Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Oracle, whose AI strategies all require extraordinary amounts of physical construction. Developers once treated land, chips and capital as the binding constraints. Community permission is now a fourth. The likely result is slower permitting, higher financing costs, and a strong incentive to build where local officials are openly supportive.

That last point is the practical one for anyone in construction, engineering, utilities or industrial real estate. A project that clears zoning in eight months instead of thirty is worth a premium, and developers are beginning to pay it. Communities that organize a welcome — with clear rules on power costs, tax treatment and water use agreed up front — are moving to the front of the queue.

The complaints cluster around a few concrete items: enormous electricity demand that outruns existing grids and pushes rates up, noise, and public infrastructure rebuilt for the benefit of one very large customer. Non-disclosure agreements around early negotiations have fed the distrust, and residents are skeptical of promised jobs and tax revenue.

There is a structural reason the industry keeps losing these fights. AI has no local constituency. Housing developments have future residents, auto plants have workers, wind farms have environmental groups. A data center employs relatively few people once built, which leaves almost no one in town with a direct stake in seeing it go up.

Whether the coalition holds is a separate question. Researchers note that issues uniting people across party lines tend to fracture once they draw serious political attention, and the midterms will test that. For now, the fastest-growing constraint on the AI buildout is not technical. It is a room full of neighbors with a microphone.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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A slow-moving storm front is parked over Ohio and the wider Midwest today, dumping rain faster than the ground can absorb it and putting a long stretch of the country’s freight and manufacturing belt under flood warnings. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 5:30 a.m. today for four counties in central Ohio — Fairfield, Hocking, eastern Franklin and southwestern Licking — after morning thunderstorms brought heavy rain, with law enforcement reporting flash flooding to the weather service. More storms are expected through tonight, and the strongest are still ahead.

The Midwest and Ohio Valley, including Chicago and Cincinnati, are under an enhanced, or level 3, risk of severe thunderstorms, which has triggered numerous flood warnings and watches from Indiana into western Pennsylvania and Virginia, the weather service said. As of 7 a.m., up to 3 inches of rain had fallen in parts of Ohio.

The mechanism is simple. A slow-moving front is interacting with tropical air, and rainfall rates of 1 to 3 inches per hour are possible in the heaviest downpours. When storms keep re-forming over the same towns, the water has nowhere to go. A flood watch runs through Wednesday morning across dozens of counties in Ohio, Indiana and northern Kentucky, with several rounds of thunderstorms expected and the potential for storms to repeatedly track over the same locations.

The worst of the wind is timed for the back half of the day. The most widespread destructive winds are expected in one or two clusters of storms moving from northern Illinois into Indiana, Ohio and northeast Kentucky this afternoon and evening, with gusts topping 75 mph possible in a few spots. The tornado risk is low, but one or two are possible.

Power already going down

Utilities across the region are running restoration crews for a second straight day. Storms in the Mid-Atlantic knocked out power to nearly 175,000 homes and businesses across four states Monday night, with the bulk of the outages in Virginia, according to poweroutage.us. In northeast Ohio, Monday’s storms brought down wires and trees, forcing road closures and leaving many FirstEnergy customers without service.

For businesses, an outage of a few hours is rarely just an outage. Cold storage, food service, data rooms and any operation running a production line absorb losses that never show up in a weather report — spoiled inventory, halted shifts, and overtime to catch up once the lights come back.

A freight corridor under water

The warning zone sits on top of one of the busiest trucking corridors in the country. Interstate traffic through Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati and Louisville feeds the distribution centers that supply retail across the eastern half of the United States. Flooded on-ramps and closed secondary roads slow deliveries in a way that ripples out for days, because a truck that misses a dock appointment does not simply get the next slot.

The Ohio River runs through the same footprint, and heavy runoff into its tributaries affects barge movement of coal, grain and chemicals. Farmers across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are heading into the final stretch before harvest with fields that have already taken repeated soakings, and standing water on saturated ground does more damage to a crop than a single hard rain.

Why this week is worse than a normal storm

The ground is the problem. The flood threat zone is expected to stay largely unchanged Wednesday and Thursday, and areas already waterlogged from earlier in the week will be even more prone to flooding. Storm totals could top 6 inches where the storms hit more than once — close to double the average August rainfall of 3.43 inches in Cincinnati and 3.75 inches in Charleston, West Virginia. A level 3 of 4 threat of flooding rainfall covers Charleston, Cincinnati and the eastern side of Indianapolis.

The region has been here recently. Torrential rain on July 21 sent creeks in West Virginia to historic levels, washing out bridges and prompting numerous water rescues. Repeat flooding in the same counties raises rebuilding costs and puts pressure on property insurance in markets that were never priced as flood risk.

What to watch

The immediate question is how much rain falls between this afternoon and Wednesday morning, and whether the strongest wind clusters track over metro areas or open country. Businesses in the watch zone should assume power interruptions, plan for staff who cannot safely commute, and hold off on scheduling deliveries into the affected corridors until the front clears. The weather service repeated its standing warning to drivers not to attempt flooded roads, noting that most flood deaths happen in vehicles.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Meta gave away an artificial intelligence model on Monday that is powerful enough to carry out multi-step work on its own and small enough to run on a single graphics card inside an ordinary computer, with no internet connection and no monthly bill to anyone.

The model is called Muse Glimmer, and it comes from Meta Superintelligence Labs, the research group the company built around chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. It has 30 billion parameters — the internal settings that determine what a model knows — and it is built to handle several jobs at once that until now were split across different systems: reasoning through a task in steps, calling outside tools, reading images as well as text, and recovering when something fails partway through.

The part that matters commercially is the price and the license. Meta released the weights — the actual trained model file — under Apache 2.0, a standard open license with no usage restrictions attached. Anyone can download it, run it, change it, and build a paid product on top of it. That is a sharper break than it first appears: Meta’s older Llama models carried the company’s own custom license, which drew years of criticism for conditions such as a cutoff that kicked in once a company passed 700 million monthly users. Glimmer ships with fewer strings than Llama ever did, and it is Meta’s first fully open release since the company moved to the proprietary Muse Spark line in April.

How they made it fit

A 30-billion-parameter model normally needs more than 55 gigabytes of memory to run, which is more than any consumer graphics card offers. Meta compressed the model’s weights down to roughly 4-bit precision, shrinking it to under 20 gigabytes — small enough to leave room for the working memory, the image-reading component, and the speed-up machinery to all operate inside a 24- or 32-gigabyte budget. The practical translation: it runs on a single 24-gigabyte graphics card or a high-end Mac, with no network call at any point.

Speed was the second problem. Language models normally produce text one piece at a time, which drags badly during long chains of reasoning or repeated tool calls, and an agent that takes minutes to decide its next move is not usable for real work. Meta added a technique that lets the model draft ahead in blocks rather than word by word, fast enough to sit inside a live agent loop.

The model was pre-trained on the outputs of Muse Spark, Meta’s larger proprietary system — a method known as distillation, where a big model teaches a small one. Meta then ran two additional training passes, the first to strengthen performance on long prompts and extended reasoning, the second to sharpen its behavior as an agent. Engineers also trained it to retry work it fails on the first attempt rather than simply stopping.

Who it changes things for

A solo developer or an early-stage startup can now run a capable agent on one graphics card with no per-token bill. Mid-sized companies get inference on their own equipment. Regulated businesses — the ones that cannot legally send client data to an outside server — get an agent that can be air-gapped entirely. The model handles more than 100 languages and works with existing agent frameworks. Meta released the weights on Hugging Face along with developer documentation, with tighter integrations for common local-inference tools arriving in the coming days. Ollama, one of the most widely used tools for running models locally, shipped support the same morning.

Meta is framing the release as a competitive argument as much as a technical one, positioning open weights as necessary for American competitiveness against proprietary rivals. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pressed that case publicly on Monday, criticizing closed-model developers and defending distillation as a legitimate path to progress. He also said Meta’s board is adopting a governance structure that will set safety criteria the company will apply to each of its future models.

The competitive picture is narrow. Very few American labs have released open-weight models of this class — OpenAI’s gpt-oss pair from August 2025, Google’s Gemma family under a more restrictive custom license, and Thinking Machines’ Inkling. The closest comparison is gpt-oss, which is also Apache 2.0, but those models are text-only. Glimmer takes different ground: it reads images natively, was trained end-to-end around the agent loop, and ships with its own compressed versions tuned specifically for 24-gigabyte consumer machines.

For businesses weighing what AI actually costs them, that is the headline. The recurring expense in most corporate AI deployments is not the software — it is the metered bill for every request sent to someone else’s data center. A capable model that runs on hardware a company already owns takes that meter out of the equation.

JBizNews Desk | Menlo Park

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Public support is growing for tougher rules on how children access social media, adding new pressure on Meta, Alphabet, Snap and other platforms already facing lawsuits and state-level restrictions over teen safety.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday found that 61% of Americans support stronger government oversight of social-media companies, while 66% favor age-verification requirements designed to keep children under 16 off major platforms.

The numbers matter because age verification is moving from a political talking point into a potential operating requirement for some of the largest advertising businesses in the world.

If platforms are forced to verify a user’s age before granting access, companies would need new identity systems, privacy safeguards and parental-consent procedures. Those changes could raise compliance costs while reducing the number of younger users available to advertisers.

The issue is already moving through courts and state legislatures. Meta faces a major trial this week involving claims from multiple states that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed young users while keeping them engaged for longer periods.

For technology companies, the financial risk extends beyond fines. Restrictions on minors could reduce daily usage, advertising impressions and future user growth, particularly for platforms that depend on younger audiences to establish long-term habits.

There is also a privacy tradeoff. Stronger age verification may protect children, but determining a user’s age often requires collecting additional personal information, including government identification, biometric estimates or third-party verification.

That creates a difficult policy balance: lawmakers want platforms to know whether a user is a child without forcing companies to collect more sensitive information than necessary.

For advertisers and businesses that depend on social-media marketing, the larger issue is whether the rules remain fragmented by state or eventually become national. A patchwork of different age limits and verification standards would increase compliance costs and make targeted advertising more complicated.

Public opinion is now giving lawmakers more room to act. If support for age verification continues to hold across party lines, the question for social-media companies may shift from whether stricter rules are coming to how quickly they can adapt without damaging growth.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Major clothing retailers are expanding repair, resale and sewing services as more consumers look for ways to keep clothes longer rather than continuously replacing them.

Uniqlo, Zara and Levi Strauss are among the brands pushing clothing repair further into the mainstream, with programs ranging from low-cost in-store fixes to mail-in repairs and sewing workshops aimed especially at younger shoppers.

The shift is partly about sustainability, but it is also increasingly about household economics.

For consumers, the appeal is simple: repairing a shirt, jacket or pair of jeans can cost far less than replacing it.

Uniqlo’s U.S. RE.UNIQLO Studios offer stitching, patching, taping and button replacement on eligible Uniqlo clothing for $5 per repair. The company has been expanding the concept as part of a broader push to keep garments in use longer.

Zara offers repairs through its U.S. Pre-Owned platform. Customers can select an item and the repair needed online, then send it for servicing. Zara says repairs can take as long as 14 days and charges $9.99 for shipping in addition to the cost of the repair itself.

Levi Strauss is taking a somewhat different approach.

The denim company launched its Wear Longer Project this year, targeting high-school students with workshops that teach basic sewing and clothing-repair skills. Levi’s also operates Tailor Shops in selected stores where customers can repair, customize and alter denim.

Other major retailers including H&M and Primark have been experimenting with repair workshops, resale and clothing-care programs as well.

The trend reflects a change in how retailers are trying to reach younger consumers. For decades, much of the apparel business depended on convincing customers to replace clothing frequently. Repair services essentially encourage the opposite behavior — but they can also keep shoppers connected to a brand for longer.

Retailers are betting that a customer who repairs a favorite pair of jeans or jacket may become more loyal to the company that helped extend its life.

There is also a growing resale business behind the strategy. Zara’s Pre-Owned operation includes repair, resale and donation, while other fashion companies are building their own secondhand marketplaces instead of leaving that business entirely to platforms such as eBay, Depop and Poshmark.

The economics are not easy. Clothing repair requires skilled labor, and repairing a cheap garment can sometimes cost nearly as much as manufacturing another one. That is one reason repair services historically remained concentrated among expensive outdoor, denim and luxury brands.

But retailers now see another benefit: shoppers are increasingly sensitive to price.

If consumers begin viewing a $5 repair as an alternative to another $40 or $60 purchase, clothing companies have an opportunity to remain part of the transaction even when customers are spending less on new merchandise.

For shoppers, that means something relatively unusual is returning to mainstream retail: instead of being told to throw worn clothing away and buy another one, some of the world’s biggest fashion companies are now offering to fix it.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Families are spending less per child on back-to-school shopping this year once inflation is accounted for, and the largest retailers have responded by cutting prices on the items every classroom list requires. The reason parents are squeezing that budget shows up elsewhere on the receipt: the grocery bill is still climbing.

Walmart is offering its lowest prices since 2019 on 14 of the most common school supplies found on classroom lists nationwide, with some items starting at 25 cents. The retailer is also running 1,300 more price rollbacks than it did during last year’s back-to-school season.

It has the traffic to match. Seventy-seven percent of parents named Walmart as a back-to-school destination, well ahead of Target at just over 40% and Amazon at nearly 39%.

Deloitte’s annual survey of more than 1,200 parents puts expected spending at $557 per child for K-12 students, down $13 from a year ago and roughly 6% lower after adjusting for inflation. The total back-to-school market is estimated at $30.4 billion.

Parents shopping primarily in stores expect to spend $521 per child, compared with $614 for online shoppers. Mass merchants are expected to capture 80% of planned spending, with value for the money emerging as the deciding factor across channels.

Different surveys produce different dollar estimates. Jones Lang LaSalle put spending at $489 per child and rising, while PwC found parents expecting to spend an average of $922 across a broader basket of purchases. But the surveys agree on the larger behavior: households are watching prices closely.

Inflation remains a concern for 64% of parents in JLL’s survey, while nearly 69% say saving money is a top priority.

The most revealing number may be elsewhere in Deloitte’s findings. Fifty-seven percent of consumers said they expect the economy to get worse in the coming months, the highest share since 2020.

Parents are also delaying purchases, with spending expected to peak in late July and early August. For retailers, that means families who know they must eventually buy school supplies are increasingly waiting to see whether another promotion appears before the deadline arrives.

The pressure is easier to understand when the school-supply budget is viewed alongside the grocery bill.

Grocery prices have risen about 3.4% since January 2025, but some staples families buy every week have increased far more. Coffee is up roughly 35%, ground beef 23%, steak 21%, sugar and sweets 9%, chicken breast 5.3%, and fruits and vegetables 5.2%.

Bread, bacon and eggs have become cheaper over the same period, with egg prices retreating sharply as the bird-flu-driven shortage eased.

But falling egg prices do relatively little for the overall household budget. Eggs represent only about 0.8% of the typical grocery basket, compared with roughly 4.7% for beef and 10% for fruits and vegetables. A large decline in one highly visible item can therefore coexist with a grocery bill that remains considerably higher overall.

The Agriculture Department’s July forecast calls for grocery prices to rise approximately 2.7% during 2026 and restaurant prices around 3.5%. Prices in eight of the 15 food categories it tracks are expected to increase faster than their 20-year averages.

Beef remains one of the largest pressure points. Beef and veal prices were 11.8% above year-earlier levels in June and are forecast to finish 2026 about 10.7% higher. Fresh vegetables were 9.9% more expensive.

For a family spending $1,000 to $1,400 a month at the supermarket, even a modest increase means roughly another $40 a month for essentially the same basket.

That is close to the entire year-over-year reduction in back-to-school spending for one child.

The money did not disappear. It moved to the supermarket.

For retailers, the competitive lesson is becoming clearer. Price leadership is doing much of the work this season, and it is concentrating traffic rather than distributing it evenly.

Four out of every five back-to-school dollars are expected to go to mass merchants, while Walmart alone is attracting roughly three-quarters of surveyed shoppers.

For independent retailers and specialty stores, competing directly with a 25-cent notebook is unlikely to work.

The opportunity is in what the big-box price war does not easily provide: fitting and sizing for shoes and uniforms, school-specific supply bundles, extended hours immediately before classes begin, specialized merchandise and delivery for parents who waited until the last minute.

The spending difference between channels is also important. Online shoppers expect to spend $614 per child compared with $521 for in-store shoppers. The higher-value customer is increasingly the one buying from a screen, giving smaller retailers a channel where convenience and specialization can compete with sheer purchasing power.

Back-to-school spending will continue into September through replacements, dorm purchases and classroom replenishment.

But the character of this year’s shopper is already clear: parents still have money to spend, but they know exactly what it buys — and increasingly will drive past one store to save a few dollars at another.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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For many businesses, the next major cost increase won’t come from wages, tariffs or interest rates. It will arrive when insurance policies come up for renewal.

Commercial insurance premiums have risen steadily across multiple lines of coverage as insurers respond to larger catastrophe losses, rising litigation costs, cyber threats and higher rebuilding expenses. What was once viewed as a routine operating expense is increasingly becoming a strategic issue influencing investment decisions, expansion plans and even where companies choose to operate.

The shift is extending well beyond property insurance.

Manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers, transportation companies, real estate owners and professional service firms are all facing higher premiums for property, liability, directors and officers (D&O), cyber insurance and umbrella coverage. Businesses with clean claims histories are discovering that broader industry risks—not just their own performance—are driving renewal prices.

Climate risk is changing the economics of insurance.

Hurricanes, floods, wildfires, severe storms and other natural disasters have generated record insured losses in recent years, forcing carriers to reassess pricing models and reduce exposure in some regions. In several states, insurers have limited new policies, increased deductibles or withdrawn from high-risk markets altogether, leaving businesses with fewer options and higher costs.

Cybersecurity has become another major driver.

Ransomware attacks, data breaches and business interruption claims continue pushing cyber insurance premiums higher, while insurers increasingly require stronger security controls before issuing or renewing policies. Multifactor authentication, endpoint monitoring, employee training and incident-response planning are rapidly becoming underwriting requirements rather than optional best practices.

The impact is changing boardroom decisions.

Companies planning new facilities, acquisitions or geographic expansion are increasingly evaluating insurance availability alongside labor, taxes and financing. In some industries, higher insurance costs are beginning to influence where projects are built and how much capital businesses are willing to commit.

The consequences extend into lending as well.

Banks and private lenders frequently require borrowers to maintain specified insurance coverage. As premiums increase, debt-service costs effectively rise even when interest rates remain unchanged, placing additional pressure on cash flow for property owners and operating businesses alike.

For insurers, the environment presents both opportunity and risk.

Higher premiums can improve profitability, but only if pricing keeps pace with increasingly expensive claims. Companies that accurately measure emerging risks may strengthen earnings, while those that underestimate catastrophe exposure or cyber losses could face renewed pressure on underwriting results.

The broader business story is that insurance is no longer simply protecting assets after something goes wrong. It is becoming a larger factor in corporate capital allocation, site selection and enterprise risk management. Businesses that actively reduce operational risk, strengthen cybersecurity and improve resilience may increasingly find those investments paying for themselves through lower insurance costs and greater access to coverage.

In the years ahead, insurance may no longer be viewed as just another overhead expense. It is becoming a competitive advantage for companies that can demonstrate they are better risks than everyone else.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Trump Media & Technology Group reported a sharply wider second-quarter loss Monday as declines in the value of its digital-asset and equity holdings overwhelmed modest growth in revenue.

The parent of Truth Social posted a $238.1 million net loss, compared with a $20 million loss a year earlier. The company recorded roughly $190.4 million in unrealized losses tied to digital assets, pledged digital assets and equity securities during the quarter. 

Revenue rose 89% to $1.7 million, helped by advertising, Truth+ subscriptions, management fees and the newly launched Truth API. But the increase remains small relative to the scale of the company’s investment losses. 

The second-quarter result brought Trump Media’s first-half loss to $644 million, compared with $51.7 million in the same period last year. 

The company has also begun pulling back from parts of its earlier crypto expansion. It recently terminated planned ventures with Crypto.com and Yorkville tied to a proposed digital-asset treasury strategy, while management shifts attention toward monetizing Truth Social and completing its planned merger with nuclear-fusion company TAE Technologies. 

That merger represents an unusually large strategic shift. Trump Media has committed $300 million ahead of a proposed transaction valuing the combined fusion venture at roughly $6 billion, even though commercial fusion power remains unproven. 

For investors, the quarter highlights the difference between operating performance and balance-sheet exposure. Trump Media’s core media revenue grew, but the company’s results are increasingly being driven by the market value of investments outside its original social-media business.

That means future earnings could remain highly volatile even if Truth Social itself grows. Large digital-asset positions can generate substantial reported gains when markets rise and equally large losses when they fall.

The company is effectively becoming a hybrid of media, digital assets, financial services and speculative energy investment — making its quarterly results less dependent on advertising revenue and more dependent on the value of assets and businesses far removed from its original platform.

JBizNews Desk | Sarasota

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The federal government moved today to write the trucking industry’s English requirement directly into the rulebook, so that a driver who cannot read a road sign or answer an inspector’s questions must be pulled off the road — and so that no future administration can quietly reverse it.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposed rule was published in the Federal Register this morning under Docket No. FMCSA-2026-0826, with a 60-day comment window. Comments are due by October 9, 2026.

Here is the mechanic of it in plain terms. The English requirement itself already exists and has since the 1930s. What has been missing is a regulation saying what an inspector must do when a driver fails. That instruction has lived in a separate handbook — the out-of-service criteria maintained by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, an inspectors’ group — which is guidance, not law, and can be rewritten at any time. The proposal moves the consequence into the regulations themselves, adding a new paragraph to the driver-qualification rule stating that a driver in violation must be placed out of service immediately.

That distinction is the whole point of the rulemaking. States that take federal motor carrier safety grant money must keep their own laws compatible with the federal regulations — so once the requirement is codified, states have to adopt it regardless of how the inspectors’ handbook is amended later. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy framed it as insurance against reversal, saying the codified version would prevent future administrations from weakening the standard the way the Obama administration did.

The enforcement history explains the urgency. A 2016 policy memo told federal personnel to cite drivers for English violations but not to park them, mirroring the inspectors’ group having dropped the violation from its criteria the year before. That reversed after an April 28, 2025 executive order directing the agency to rescind the memo and get the violation restored to the out-of-service list, which the safety alliance voted to do effective June 25, 2025. The alliance then petitioned the agency in October 2025 to put the requirement into regulation — the petition this proposal grants.

The numbers show what changed at roadside. In the first half of 2025, before the switch, 7,812 English violations were written nationally and only 33 produced out-of-service orders. From June 25, 2025 through March 19, 2026, inspectors wrote 60,399 violations and issued 19,045 out-of-service orders. The Transportation Department now puts the total pulled off American roads at more than 26,000.

The one carve-out involves the Mexican border. Drivers working strictly inside the designated commercial zones along the U.S.-Mexico border are cited but not parked. The proposal narrows that exception: if paperwork — bills of lading, dispatch records, interchange receipts — shows the trip continues past the zone, the driver goes out of service. Of roughly 41,563 violations written inside those zones during the enforcement period, the agency estimates about 16 percent would have drawn an out-of-service order under the tighter test.

For carriers, that is the cost line. The agency projects roughly 9,000 additional out-of-service orders a year in the border zones, and prices the disruption at about $800 per truck per day for an average two days to find a replacement driver and get the freight moving — $14.4 million annually across the industry. The agency is explicitly asking shippers and carriers to comment on whether that estimate is right and what the knock-on effect is on shipping costs and delivery times.

Worth noting for anyone reading it as a new burden: the agency’s position is that it is not adding a requirement at all. The English standard has been on the books since the Interstate Commerce Commission wrote it in December 1936, effective July 1, 1937, and the proposal codifies enforcement practice already in effect rather than creating a new obligation. The agency also says the rule sits comfortably inside the USMCA framework, since the standard applies to every driver operating in the United States regardless of nationality.

What comes next is the comment docket, then a final rule. The agency has said it will retrain federal and state inspectors on the border-zone test once a final rule publishes — roughly 100 federal border inspectors and 1,900 state enforcement personnel. Until then, the roadside practice stays as it has been since last summer: fail the interview or the road-sign check, and the truck stops.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Joint Base Charleston was formally renamed Joint Base Lindsey Graham Monday in honor of the late South Carolina senator and longtime Air Force veteran, giving one of the state’s most important military installations the name of a lawmaker who spent decades advocating for U.S. defense and the base itself. 

The Charleston-area installation is home to more than 50 military commands and operates the largest fleet of C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft in the United States. The renaming follows a directive signed in late July by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, who cited Graham’s service in Congress and the military. 

Graham served more than 30 years across the Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, retiring as a colonel in 2015. He also spent more than three decades in Congress and became one of Washington’s most prominent advocates for defense spending and military readiness. 

The decision also reflects Graham’s direct ties to South Carolina’s defense economy. Over the years, he supported federal investment in military infrastructure and programs tied to the Charleston region, including funding benefiting the base and nearby aerospace operations.

The installation plays an outsized role in the state’s economy. Beyond military personnel, it supports contractors, logistics companies, housing demand and the broader aerospace supply chain around Charleston.

The renaming is therefore more than symbolic. It permanently links Graham’s name to one of South Carolina’s largest defense and transportation hubs and to a sector that has become central to the state’s economic growth.

JBizNews Desk | Charleston

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The IRS has answered one of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding the new Trump accounts—and the decision removes what could have become a paperwork headache for millions of families. By creating a gift-tax safe harbor, the Treasury Department has effectively confirmed that most grandparents can contribute to a grandchild’s account without filing a federal gift tax return, provided they stay within several important limits.

The guidance, issued June 29 as Revenue Procedure 2026-25, eliminates uncertainty that had surrounded one of the centerpiece savings provisions created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Rather than creating an entirely new reporting system, the IRS folded qualifying Trump account contributions into the same annual gift-tax framework families already use, allowing most contributions to proceed without additional filings.

Why the Question Mattered

Trump accounts, created under Section 530A of the Internal Revenue Code, allow children under 18 to build long-term savings through tax-advantaged accounts that function similarly to traditional IRAs. Children born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, also qualify for a one-time $1,000 federal contribution, while annual contributions from parents, grandparents and others are generally capped at $5,000, with that limit indexed for inflation after 2027.

The uncertainty centered on one technical issue.

Because the money generally cannot be accessed until the child reaches age 18, tax professionals questioned whether contributions represented a future-interest gift—a category that normally does not qualify for the annual federal gift-tax exclusion. Without IRS guidance, even relatively small contributions could have required families to file Form 709, creating a compliance burden far larger than any potential tax liability.

That prospect carried enormous administrative implications. Millions of Trump account elections had already been filed, while only a fraction of that number of federal gift-tax returns are normally submitted each year. Treasury concluded the reporting burden would overwhelmingly fall on families who would never owe gift tax because of the federal lifetime exemption.

What the Safe Harbor Requires

The new guidance treats qualifying Trump account contributions as completed gifts eligible for the annual exclusion, eliminating the need to file a federal gift-tax return in most situations.

To qualify, all of the following conditions must be satisfied during the calendar year:

• The donor must be an individual rather than a trust, corporation or other entity.
• Contributions must be made in cash, including checks or electronic transfers.
• Contributions must occur before the child reaches age 18.
• Total gifts from the donor to that child—including Trump account deposits, cash gifts, 529 plan contributions and other transfers—must remain below the 2026 annual exclusion of $19,000.
• The donor cannot otherwise be required to file a federal gift-tax return that year.

Although no return is required under the safe harbor, the IRS expects families to retain records documenting their contributions and eligibility.

The Hidden Catch

The relief is not automatic if a donor exceeds the annual exclusion.

A grandparent who contributes $5,000 to several grandchildren’s Trump accounts may not need to file any paperwork. But if that same grandparent later gives one grandchild enough additional gifts during the year to exceed the annual exclusion, the donor must file a federal gift-tax return—and the Trump account contributions made during that year are reported along with the other gifts.

The safe harbor also applies to generation-skipping transfer tax treatment, an important consideration for grandparents. However, married couples planning to elect gift-splitting should seek professional advice because filing a return to split gifts removes them from the safe harbor.

Opening an Account Is Different From Funding One

The IRS guidance addresses contributions—not the initial creation of the account.

Opening a Trump account requires a separate election filed through the tax system by the individual claiming the child as a dependent, which in most cases is a parent. Grandparents generally contribute only after the account has already been established.

Coordination is essential because the annual contribution limit applies collectively across all contributors. A grandparent who contributes the full amount early in the year could unintentionally prevent parents or an employer from making additional qualifying contributions.

What It Means for Families and Advisors

The new guidance does more than simplify tax reporting. It removes one of the largest compliance uncertainties surrounding Trump accounts and allows financial advisors, accountants and estate planners to incorporate them into long-term wealth transfer strategies with far greater confidence.

The conversation now shifts away from whether grandparents must file gift-tax returns and toward coordinating contributions efficiently within the annual limits. For families building multigenerational financial plans, that certainty may prove just as valuable as the tax benefits the accounts themselves provide.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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U.S. seaports handled 2.5 million twenty-foot-equivalent units of containerized imports in July, the fourth-highest July total on record, as retailers and manufacturers rushed goods into the country ahead of a new round of tariffs.

The surge reflects a familiar strategy: bring merchandise in before import costs rise.

China remained the biggest source of U.S. containerized goods, with imports from China climbing to 873,129 TEUs, the highest monthly volume in a year. That matters because Chinese-made goods remain deeply embedded in U.S. retail inventories, from electronics and furniture to clothing and household products.

The July rush came as the U.S. tariff structure shifted again. A 10% global tariff expired in late July and was replaced by tariffs of as much as 12.5% on imports from 60 countries, increasing the incentive for companies to move merchandise before the higher duties took effect.

Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot and other major retailers account for a significant portion of the goods entering U.S. ports, meaning much of July’s cargo is destined for American stores, warehouses and consumers.

For shoppers, the important question is what happens after the warehouses are full.

Front-loading merchandise can temporarily shield consumers from tariff increases because retailers have inventory purchased under the earlier cost structure. It does not eliminate the higher cost once companies need to reorder.

That means the impact may arrive gradually. Retailers can absorb part of a tariff through lower margins, pressure suppliers for concessions, change sourcing or raise prices. Most large companies use some combination of all four.

The timing is particularly important because much of the merchandise arriving now will support back-to-school, fall and holiday sales.

Despite July’s huge volume, imports were still 4.3% below the near-record level reached in July 2025. Through the first seven months of 2026, container imports were down about 0.9% from a year earlier while remaining well above pre-pandemic levels.

Shipping analysts also expect the import rush to begin fading. Companies moved their traditional peak shipping season earlier to get ahead of tariffs and supply-chain disruptions, leaving fewer goods that still need to arrive later in the year.

The consumer takeaway is that packed ports today can mean well-stocked shelves tomorrow — but not necessarily lower prices.

Retailers have stocked up before the newest tariffs hit. Once those inventories turn over, shoppers could get a clearer picture of how much of the additional import cost companies intend to absorb and how much they intend to pass along.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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Apple is testing memory chips made by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies as the artificial-intelligence boom drives up prices and tightens supplies of components used in iPhones, Macs and other consumer electronics.

The discussions center on using CXMT chips in devices sold in China. Apple has also sought U.S. government clearance to purchase from the company, which has drawn scrutiny in Washington over national-security concerns and its role in China’s semiconductor expansion.

The move does not mean Apple has selected CXMT as a supplier. Testing is part of the qualification process, and Apple has not publicly confirmed that it will use the chips in commercial products.

But the fact that Apple is evaluating a Chinese memory supplier shows how dramatically the global chip market is being reshaped by AI.

Data centers are consuming enormous quantities of memory and storage components, forcing consumer-electronics manufacturers to compete for capacity with companies building AI servers. That demand has pushed memory prices higher and made additional sources of supply more valuable.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has already acknowledged that rising memory and storage costs are pressuring the company, with Apple preparing to pass some of those increases through to product prices.

CXMT has become increasingly important in the global DRAM market as China pours money into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The company is expanding production and has gained market share in conventional memory even as U.S. restrictions seek to limit China’s access to advanced chipmaking technology.

That creates a difficult policy question for Washington.

The U.S. wants American technology companies to reduce their dependence on Chinese semiconductor suppliers. At the same time, AI-driven shortages are making Chinese manufacturing capacity increasingly attractive to companies trying to control costs.

For Apple, the issue is especially sensitive because China remains both a major manufacturing base and one of its largest consumer markets.

Using CXMT components only in Chinese-market devices could help Apple contain costs without immediately restructuring its worldwide supply chain. It could also give Apple additional leverage when negotiating with existing memory suppliers including Micron, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

The wider message for consumers is that AI infrastructure spending is no longer affecting only the companies building data centers.

The competition for chips is moving downstream into phones, computers and other everyday electronics — and could ultimately show up in the prices consumers pay.

JBizNews Desk | Cupertino, California

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The rush by U.S. retailers and manufacturers to bring goods into the country ahead of higher tariffs and shipping costs is beginning to fade, setting up a slowdown in container imports through the rest of the year even as stores remain stocked for the holiday season.

A new Global Port Tracker forecast from the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates says cargo volumes at major U.S. ports should remain elevated in August before declining steadily during most of the remainder of 2026.

The reason is timing.

Companies pulled shipments forward earlier this year to avoid a new round of U.S. tariffs and higher fuel surcharges tied to the war with Iran. Goods that ordinarily would have arrived in late summer or fall instead landed months earlier.

The slowdown therefore does not necessarily mean Americans suddenly stopped buying. It means businesses already imported some of the merchandise they would normally be bringing in now.

That distinction matters for interpreting port traffic.

Retailers account for roughly half of U.S. container imports, and years of pandemic disruptions, tariff changes and geopolitical shocks have made large companies increasingly sophisticated about moving inventory early when they see costs or supply risks rising.

The traditional “peak shipping season” once arrived in late summer and early fall as retailers prepared for the holidays. This year, Global Port Tracker believes the busiest month may already have occurred in May.

August imports at the major ports covered by the report are forecast at about 2.2 million twenty-foot-equivalent containers, down 4.2% from a year earlier. Volumes are then expected to decline through most of the rest of the year, although they are still forecast to remain above 2025 levels.

For consumers, the encouraging part is inventory.

The National Retail Federation says retailers should be well stocked for the holiday shopping season because so much merchandise arrived early. That reduces the immediate risk of empty shelves even as fewer containers arrive later this year.

But bringing goods in early does not make the added costs disappear.

Freight companies say ocean shipping prices are likely to remain elevated because fuel and canal surcharges do not automatically fall when cargo demand softens. Importers also must eventually absorb the tariffs that motivated much of the front-loading in the first place.

That creates a second-stage question for retailers: how much of those higher costs can they absorb themselves, and how much will eventually be passed to shoppers through higher prices?

The ports are beginning to slow, but the economic impact of the import rush is still moving through warehouses, stores and ultimately consumer prices.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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Dexcom raised its full-year sales outlook after demand for continuous glucose monitors continued expanding among people seeking a simpler alternative to repeated finger-prick testing.

Continuous glucose monitors use a small wearable sensor to measure glucose levels throughout the day and send readings to a smartphone, receiver or compatible insulin device. Unlike traditional testing, users do not need to puncture a fingertip each time they want a reading.

That convenience is helping CGMs move from a specialized product for insulin-dependent patients toward a more common tool across diabetes care. Rising awareness, broader insurance coverage and new devices aimed at people who do not use insulin are expanding the number of potential users.

Dexcom now expects 2026 revenue of $5.18 billion to $5.25 billion, lifting the low end from its previous range of $5.16 billion to $5.25 billion. The revised outlook represents anticipated growth of approximately 11% to 13% from 2025.

For consumers, stronger demand can create a mixed outcome. Higher sales may support more production, wider pharmacy availability and continued investment in smaller or longer-lasting sensors, but it does not guarantee lower out-of-pocket prices.

Insurance coverage remains one of the biggest factors determining access. Some plans cover continuous monitors broadly for people using insulin, while requirements can be stricter for patients with Type 2 diabetes who manage their condition through medication, diet or exercise.

Coverage rules have gradually expanded as research has shown that real-time glucose information can help patients understand how meals, activity, stress and medication affect their blood sugar. Seeing those changes immediately can make the information easier to act on than a small number of isolated finger-stick readings.

Dexcom has been targeting that larger population through Stelo, its over-the-counter glucose sensor designed for adults who do not use insulin. Because it can be purchased without a prescription, Stelo gives consumers another path to glucose monitoring outside the traditional insurance and physician-approval process.

That broader access also shifts more of the cost directly to consumers. Over-the-counter availability can remove prescription barriers, but buyers may still need to pay the full retail price if their insurance plan does not cover the device.

A redesigned Stelo app introduced this year uses artificial intelligence to help users identify patterns in their glucose readings. The company is positioning those insights as a way to make large amounts of health data more understandable rather than leaving consumers to interpret every spike and decline on their own.

Such features could make glucose monitors more useful for people who are new to the technology, though automated insights do not replace medical advice. Users still need to understand the device’s instructions, limitations and safety warnings before making treatment decisions.

Competition is intensifying as Dexcom, Abbott Laboratories and Medtronic seek a larger share of the growing market. Rivalry could encourage longer sensor life, simpler insertion, better smartphone integration and lower manufacturing costs.

Price competition has been slower because reimbursement systems differ by insurer, pharmacy benefit manager and country. Consumers can face sharply different costs for the same device depending on their health plan, deductible and eligibility requirements.

Dexcom’s G7 platform remains central to its growth. The wearable sensor provides readings without routine finger-stick calibration and is designed to connect with compatible smartphones and diabetes-management systems.

Longer-lasting sensors are becoming particularly important because each replacement creates additional cost and inconvenience. Extending wear time can reduce the number of sensors a patient needs annually, although total savings depend on how manufacturers and insurers price the product.

Profitability also improved during the quarter. Dexcom reported net income of $249.1 million, up from $179.8 million a year earlier, while adjusted earnings reached 70 cents per share.

Higher margins give the company more room to fund manufacturing expansion, product development and clinical studies. Dexcom ended June with approximately $1.95 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.

The company is also studying whether continuous monitoring can benefit people with Type 2 diabetes who do not take insulin. Positive results could influence physicians, insurers and government programs deciding how broadly the devices should be covered.

That reimbursement decision may ultimately matter more to consumers than quarterly sales growth. A monitor that is available but unaffordable offers limited value, particularly for patients already paying for medications, physician visits and other diabetes supplies.

Employers and health plans are also watching whether expanded CGM use lowers long-term medical spending by helping users avoid emergency treatment, hospitalization and complications associated with poorly controlled blood sugar.

Proving those savings could accelerate coverage. Without strong evidence, insurers may continue restricting access to patients considered at highest medical risk.

The next major consumer test will be whether rising competition and production scale begin reducing the cost of continuous monitoring. Until then, Dexcom’s higher forecast shows that demand is growing faster than the system’s ability to make the technology equally affordable for every patient who could benefit.

JBizNews Desk | San Diego, California

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Starting with contributions made in 2027, the federal government will deposit money directly into the retirement accounts of low- and moderate-income workers — up to $1,000 a year, matching half of what the worker puts in.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2026-48 on Friday, announcing they intend to propose regulations for the Saver’s Match program, which begins in 2027. The notice lays out the anticipated rules and opens the program to public comment.

The match works out to a maximum of 50% on the first $2,000 of qualified retirement contributions made to an employer-sponsored plan or an individual retirement account, capped at $1,000 annually. Payments go out starting in 2028, based on contributions made for the 2027 tax year. The program was enacted as part of the SECURE 2.0 Act and replaces the Saver’s Credit for retirement savings contributions.

Why the switch matters

The difference between a credit and a match is the whole point, and it is easy to miss.

The Saver’s Credit reduced the tax a person owed. For the workers the program was written for — households with modest incomes who often owe little or no federal income tax after the standard deduction — a credit against zero is worth zero. Millions of eligible people got nothing from it.

The Saver’s Match is not a reduction in tax. It is cash paid into the retirement account itself. IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank J. Bisignano said the program “makes saving easier and more rewarding by providing a direct federal contribution” to an eligible taxpayer’s account. A worker who puts $2,000 into a 401(k) or IRA in 2027 gets $1,000 added on top in 2028, whether or not they owed a dime in tax.

For an hourly employee weighing whether to sign up for the company plan, a 50% return on the first $2,000 — before any employer match, before any market gain — changes the arithmetic considerably.

The website piece

The notice also starts implementation of Executive Order 14403, “Promoting Retirement-Savings Access for American Workers by Establishing TrumpIRA.gov,” signed April 30. The order is aimed at raising awareness of the match and steering people toward retirement vehicles offering low-cost, diversified, index-based investment options.

Treasury will launch TrumpIRA.gov on January 1, 2027. The site is meant to provide information on high-quality, low-cost individual retirement accounts, with particular attention to workers who have no employer-sponsored plan available to them. Treasury and the IRS expect the site to list financial institutions that offer IRAs, accept Saver’s Match contributions, and meet other criteria.

That listing is a live commercial question for banks, credit unions and brokerages. Treasury and the IRS said more information for IRA providers wanting to appear on the site will be available later this year. Being on a federal government page directing millions of first-time savers toward an account is meaningful distribution, and firms that want it will need to meet whatever criteria the final rules impose.

What employers and advisors should do now

Comments on the Saver’s Match are due by October 5, 2026. The notice identifies the specific issues on which comment is particularly sought and includes full instructions for filing. Anyone administering a plan, or advising clients who will be eligible, has roughly eight weeks to weigh in on rules that are still being written — including eligibility criteria and income thresholds.

For small business owners in the tri-state area running a 401(k) or SIMPLE plan, the practical opportunity is enrollment. Plan participation among lower-paid staff is chronically weak, and the usual objection is that the money is needed now. A guaranteed federal dollar for every two dollars contributed is a substantially better answer than anything an employer could previously offer at that wage level, and it costs the company nothing.

The timing is worth marking on the calendar plainly: nothing changes for the 2026 tax year. Contributions made during 2027 are the first ones that count, and the money reaches accounts in 2028. Between now and then, the rules that determine who qualifies are still open — which is exactly why the comment window matters.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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U.S. businesses became more productive in the second quarter while labor costs rose more slowly than expected, a combination that could help companies protect margins without adding workers at the pace normally associated with economic growth.

Nonfarm business productivity increased at a 1.4% annualized rate from April through June, the Labor Department reported Thursday, more than double the 0.6% economists had expected. Productivity was 2.2% higher than a year earlier, extending a broader improvement that has accelerated as companies invest in automation, software and artificial intelligence.

The significance is in the cost side of the report. Unit labor costs rose just 1.3% during the quarter, below the 2.1% economists expected, while hourly compensation increased 2.7%. Businesses were therefore able to pay workers more without seeing labor costs rise at the same rate because each hour of work produced more output.

For employers, higher productivity is one of the few ways to improve margins without raising prices, cutting wages or reducing headcount.

The numbers help explain a labor market that has become unusually resistant to layoffs even as hiring slows. Companies are producing more with their existing staffs, reducing the need to add workers aggressively while also giving employers less reason to cut experienced employees.

Initial unemployment claims reinforced that picture Thursday. New claims rose by just 1,000 to 199,000 last week, remaining at historically low levels even as job openings and hiring have cooled.

Artificial intelligence may be starting to play a role, although economists cannot yet isolate how much of the productivity improvement comes directly from AI. Businesses have spent heavily on software, data centers and automation with the expectation that workers can eventually produce more without equivalent increases in labor hours.

The benefit is not flowing evenly to employees. Labor compensation accounted for 52.9% of nominal output in the second quarter, down from 53.7% in the first quarter and the lowest share in the government series dating to 1947. A growing portion of the gains from higher productivity is therefore accruing to companies and investors rather than being immediately reflected in worker compensation.

For the Federal Reserve, stronger productivity is potentially important because it allows wages and economic output to grow without automatically creating the same inflation pressure. But it does not eliminate the problem: nonlabor costs, including energy, equipment and other inputs, remain elevated.

The larger business question is whether companies can continue producing more with roughly the same workforce. If they can, the U.S. economy could keep expanding even with slower hiring — but workers may increasingly find that economic growth no longer translates directly into more job openings.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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For months the debate inside the Federal Reserve has been whether to raise interest rates, not cut them, because energy costs tied to the Iran war have kept inflation stuck above target. This morning’s jobs report scrambled that. Employers cut workers in July instead of adding them, and raising rates to slow an economy that is already shedding jobs is a much harder case to make. BlackRock’s Rick Rieder, who oversees the firm’s global fixed income business, made exactly that argument on Bloomberg television hours after the numbers landed, calling the report unremarkable and pointing to a productivity boom he believes is doing the Fed’s inflation work for it.

The data came out at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Total nonfarm payroll employment fell by 23,000 in July, against an average monthly gain of 34,000 over the prior twelve months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Forecasters had expected a gain of 83,000. May was revised down by 66,000 and June by 37,000, leaving employment across the two months 103,000 lower than previously reported.

The unemployment rate fell, but not for a good reason. It slipped to 4.1% as the labor force participation rate dropped to 61.4%, the lowest in more than five years. Household employment fell by 87,000, and the jobless rate declined only because 264,000 people left the labor force altogether. Outside the Covid period, participation is at its weakest since the mid-1970s, and the employment-to-population ratio fell to 58.9%, a level last seen in May 2014. Average hourly earnings are up 3.2% over the year.

Traders repriced within minutes. Fed funds futures put the odds of a September rate increase at 40%, down from 55% before the release. CME’s FedWatch gauge showed September hike odds at 44% and October at 58.3%. The probability that the Fed simply holds in September climbed to 60% on FedWatch, up from 45% a day earlier and from roughly one-in-three a week ago; on the prediction platform Kalshi, hold odds reached 65%.

Bonds moved with them. The two-year Treasury note, the maturity most sensitive to Fed expectations, fell 8 basis points to 4.16%, and the ten-year dropped 6 basis points to 4.61%. The dollar index slipped 0.5% to 99.43, while the yen strengthened to 157.20 after earlier trading near a level that had traders discussing intervention. The 30-year yield eased 2 basis points to 5.189%. Stocks climbed, extending an already strong week.

Rieder’s skepticism about tightening is not new. In BlackRock’s third-quarter outlook, he said his base case was no rate hikes this year, though he would not entirely rule out a move in September, and advised staying conservative on interest-rate exposure — what he called dynamic patience in fixed income. He also argued that markets misread Chair Kevin Warsh’s reduced forward guidance as a source of volatility, and expects the opposite: higher real rates with less turbulence than investors have grown used to. Rieder manages $2.7 trillion in assets and was himself a candidate for the Fed chair nomination that went to Warsh.

The hawkish case has not disappeared. The FOMC left its target range at 3.50% to 3.75% on July 29, with nine members in favor of holding and three preferring an immediate quarter-point increase. Warsh reiterated that the Fed’s definition of price stability remains 2%, signaling that a long run of above-target inflation is not something policymakers intend to accept. June consumer prices ran at 3.5% year over year, with energy pressure from the Middle East the central driver. Oil topped $100 a barrel last month.

That makes next Wednesday the real test. July consumer price data is due August 12, and Morgan Stanley Wealth Management chief economic strategist Ellen Zentner said the weak payrolls print eases pressure on the Fed for September but that the inflation numbers will decide it — a hot reading could keep hike calls alive even with a cooling labor market.

For businesses and households, the practical effect of today’s move is cheaper benchmark borrowing costs at the margin, since the ten-year Treasury sets the tone for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt. For employers, the message is less encouraging. Government payrolls, mainly local education, fell by roughly 53,000 in July, and leisure and hospitality shed 40,000, while retail trade lost 19,000, concentrated in warehouse clubs and supercenters. Averaged across the past year, the economy has been adding about 34,000 jobs a month — a pace with very little cushion if the Fed ends up tightening into a slowdown.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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U.S. carriers are quietly setting limits on where federal immigration officers can operate inside their terminals, as a wave of gate-area detentions turns a policy fight into a commercial problem with measurable costs.

Southwest Airlines, the Dallas-based carrier at the center of the most widely circulated incidents, has told its workforce to demand paperwork before cooperating. The airline said it has given employees guidance to ensure appropriate legal documentation is presented by law enforcement agencies before any interaction in gate areas, while maintaining that it complies with applicable state and federal law. That is a narrow statement, but for an industry that typically declines to comment on law enforcement activity at all, it amounts to a public boundary.

The incidents driving it have been unusually visible. A video showing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining a woman as she tried to board a Southwest flight in Colorado has been viewed more than a million times, prompting travelers to say they would cancel bookings and boycott the carrier. A separate arrest took place on a jet bridge at Denver International Airport on July 20 as a passenger attempted to board. Weeks earlier, on July 14, agents detained Southwest flight attendant Lorenzo Thompson at Nashville International Airport as he returned from a work trip. Homeland Security said Thompson entered the country lawfully in April 2021 with permission to remain six months and stayed past that authorization; supporters say he had an active asylum case. Transport Workers Union Local 556, which represents more than 21,000 Southwest flight attendants, said it is providing legal counsel and monitoring the case.

The airline’s response to questions about the arrests was that federal screening gives the Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security access to passenger information. That is the part carriers cannot control, and it is the part reshaping the calculus. Passenger information flows from airline booking systems to the screening agency for vetting, and that vetting now includes a hand-off to immigration authorities — with records on more than 31,000 travelers supplied for possible enforcement through February 2026. Officials have disputed the characterization, with a senior screening agency official telling a House Homeland Security hearing that the agency does not transmit passenger information but instead assists in checking against existing records.

The operational footprint has widened considerably. Immigration officers have been deployed to at least 15 airports under a data-sharing arrangement with the screening agency. Attorneys report the arrests are occurring more frequently, part of a broader effort to lift arrest numbers toward an administration target of roughly 2,000 a day, and now extending to travelers with expired visas rather than only those under removal orders. That expansion moves enforcement from a narrow category into one that touches a far larger share of the flying public — and, by extension, ticket sales.

Trade groups have already shown they will fight when the revenue math turns against them. Seventeen industry organizations, including Airlines for America, the U.S. Travel Association and the Cargo Airline Association, urged Homeland Security to avoid actions carrying operational and economic consequences, warning that changes at a small number of gateway airports would ripple across the country and hit travelers, cargo shipments and supply chains. Airlines for America warned separately that drawing down customs staffing could have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries. The International Air Transport Association told Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that eliminating customs processing at Newark Liberty would force carriers to reroute international flights and absorb substantial costs reshuffling aircraft, crews and schedules.

Some operators have exited the business entirely. Avelo Airlines ended its Homeland Security charter contract for deportation flights and closed its Mesa Gateway base in Phoenix, saying the program delivered short-term benefits but not enough consistent revenue to justify its operational complexity and cost. Denver’s city council voted 11-1 to reject a contract expansion for Key Lime Air, an operator that flew 83 immigration flights in a single month.

The commercial exposure is what distinguishes this from earlier rounds of the immigration debate. Carriers hand over passenger data because federal rules require it, then absorb the reputational damage when that data produces an arrest at their own gate, on camera, with their logo in the frame. Guidance requiring agents to produce documentation before approaching a boarding line is the one lever airlines hold — and they are now pulling it.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The Department of Government Efficiency officially closed on July 4, but the White House office it was built on top of never went anywhere — and according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released this week, that office can keep doing the same kind of work with no new authorization required.

Here is the distinction that matters. Trump’s executive order created a temporary body called the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which expired on July 4 as scheduled. That same order also permanently renamed an existing White House office — the U.S. Digital Service — as the U.S. DOGE Service. Only the temporary piece had an expiration date written into it. Because the order never called for shutting down the permanent entity, congressional investigators concluded that the office and staff placed at federal agencies could keep advancing the same initiatives after the temporary organization ended.

For companies that hold federal contracts, leases, or grants, that is the operative finding. The apparatus that spent the past eighteen months canceling contracts, terminating leases, and clawing back grant money was not dismantled on July 4. Only its temporary shell was. The broader U.S. DOGE Service continues to exist.

The report also puts numbers on a workforce that has never been fully counted. Investigators identified at least 206 people who worked for the cost-cutting effort while holding positions in the Executive Office of the President between January 20, 2025 and January 31, 2026, a figure that excludes staffers not assigned to that office. At least 128 of them had left those positions by the end of January. At least 27 were special government employees, a category that caps service at 130 days in any one-year period and permits outside employment. That mix is where the watchdog flagged conflict-of-interest risk, since special government employees can hold outside jobs and financial stakes while working for the government.

Getting even that much proved difficult. The Executive Office of the President said DOGE personnel received the same ethics and records-management training as everyone else in the office, but declined to hand over the training records or the financial disclosures themselves. Ten executive branch agencies either responded late or not at all. Neither the Executive Office of the President nor the Office of Personnel Management responded to requests to verify the report’s accuracy. The Office of Government Ethics told investigators it has not reviewed an Executive Office of the President ethics program since 2023. The ethics office also indicated it has no plans to examine the initiative’s activities, on the reasoning that it cannot review a program that no longer exists — precisely the gap the report identifies, since the entity that remains is the one nobody is examining.

This lands alongside a separate accounting review that has been circulating in Washington this week. The watchdog found that the effort did not follow its own stated method for calculating most of the savings it claimed from terminated contracts, could not supply enough information to verify the method behind 96 percent of its reported grant savings, and overstated lease savings by more than $80 million. In one case, a claimed $1.7 billion in savings was attributed to a single Pentagon health contract that was never actually canceled. The $110 billion reviewed covers only contracts, grants, and leases; the public total of $215 billion includes asset sales, workforce reductions, and regulatory changes, and has not been updated since January 1. Both reviews were requested by Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

The business consequences of the original push are already visible in hiring data. Federal headcount fell by more than 350,000, and agencies have since begun rebuilding — over 104,000 federal positions were advertised in the first five months of 2026, with some agencies reinstating employees after concluding the cuts had hit operations they could not do without. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was cited in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing as one such case. Contractors who lost work in the first round are now bidding on rebuilt requirements at the same agencies.

More than a dozen lawsuits tied to the initiative’s actions are still pending, meaning the legal question of what was properly canceled remains open regardless of what happens administratively. The White House budget proposal in April requested $35 million for the U.S. DOGE Service, though lawmakers noted at the time that the effort had largely been wound down. Amy Gleason, who served as acting administrator, has since moved to lead a health technology office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

For federal vendors, the practical takeaway is that a shutdown announcement is not the same as a shutdown. The office remains funded, staffed, and unreviewed.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Jerusalem is preparing to tear up the ground beneath its most famous marketplace and put in new pipes, wiring and roofing while every stall stays open for business. The Mahane Yehuda market, the covered maze of produce stands, butchers, bakeries, spice sellers, cafes and bars that Israelis simply call the shuk, is set for a NIS 54 million upgrade — roughly $17.8 million — funded jointly by Israel’s Tourism Ministry and the Jerusalem municipality. Construction is scheduled to begin in October 2027. Nothing is being dug up today; what exists now is a finalized plan and a budget.

The work is basic and overdue. Crews will replace the market’s electricity, water and sewage systems, lay new flooring, install new lighting, and rebuild the roofing that covers the market’s main lanes. It is the first overhaul of this scale in more than three decades, according to Tali Friedman, who chairs the market’s Merchants Association and has run culinary workshops there for close to twenty years.

The engineering challenge is the part that matters commercially. The plan calls for the market to keep trading throughout, with work moving street by street rather than closing the whole site.

“We are going to start with the main street in the middle of the shuk, and after that, move on to the other streets, one by one,” said Ariel Baziz, a Jerusalem City Council member from the Hitorerut party involved in the project. He said planners are working to keep businesses trading through the construction.

The reason for that insistence is payroll. Friedman puts the market at more than 450 businesses employing roughly 10,000 people, citing the association’s internal figures. On the busiest Fridays before Shabbat, she said, as many as 100,000 people pass through. A shutdown of even a few weeks would strip income from hundreds of family-run operations that carry no cushion. Every storefront is to get an accessible entrance during the work so it can keep serving customers, even if the timeline stretches as a result.

The project was driven by the late Eyal Haimovsky, who served as chief executive of the Jerusalem Development Authority. It will not fix two of the market’s most persistent complaints: severe crowding and a chronic shortage of parking. A pilot program closing one lane of Agrippas Street on Thursday nights and Fridays to widen pedestrian space has not convinced merchants, Friedman said, because the closure blocks bus access for shoppers who have no other way in.

A market that changed businesses

The commercial case for spending public money here rests on what the shuk has become. For most of its nearly 150-year history it was Jerusalem’s central grocery — fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, cheese, bread. Around 2007, acclaimed restaurants including Machneyuda opened and a nightlife economy took hold. Locals credit the earlier opening of Cafe Mizrahi, launched during the Second Intifada when the market was emptying out, with proving that the model could work.

That transformation turned a produce market into one of Israel’s most visited attractions, and it created the tension the renovation now has to navigate. The market runs 24 hours: delivery trucks arrive from 4:30 a.m., retail trade runs through the day, bars open in the evening and may serve until 3 a.m., when street cleaners hose down the lanes.

The friction point is around 6 p.m., when the night trade starts up alongside vendors still selling groceries. “There is an ongoing conflict between the people who come for nightlife and those who are shopping for vegetables or fish,” Baziz said. Jerusalem’s District Court recently overturned a policy on noise limits in the area, ruling that the shuk does not qualify as a residential zone after police seized speakers from several venues. The municipality is now negotiating a long-term agreement with vendors on music hours.

The ownership structure is what makes the upgrade possible at all. Individual stalls are privately owned, but the municipality controls the market area itself — unlike the neighboring Clal Center, where collective ownership has left the building effectively frozen for years.

The authenticity question

Merchants are split on whether infrastructure spending addresses the real risk. “Besides the physical renovation, there are questions of culture, security, and management,” said Yaron Tzidkiyahu, whose family opened Tzidkiyahu Delicatessen in 1967.

Luxury housing is going up around the market under Jerusalem’s urban renewal push, much of it marketed to overseas buyers on the strength of its proximity to the shuk — buyers unlikely to become regular customers, according to culinary guide Harry Rubenstein. He argues the market’s disorder is the product. Visitors, he said, come for the noise, the crowds and the mismatched stalls, not for uniformity.

That is the balance planners are being asked to hit: rebuild what is underneath without smoothing over what is on top.

JBizNews Desk | Jerusalem

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The share of U.S. economic output going to workers fell to a record low in the second quarter, even as productivity continued to rise, widening the gap between how much businesses are producing and how much employees are receiving from that growth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said labor’s share of nominal gross domestic product dropped to 52.9%, down from 53.7% in the first quarter and the lowest level since the government began tracking the measure in 1947. 

The decline came as nonfarm productivity rose at a 1.4% annualized rate in the second quarter, more than twice what economists had expected. Output is increasingly being supported by automation, artificial intelligence and other technology investment without a matching increase in labor costs. 

For businesses, the immediate benefit is greater output without the same pressure to expand payrolls.

Unit labor costs rose just 1.3% during the quarter, while hourly compensation increased 2.7%. That combination helps margins, particularly for companies already investing heavily in software, automation and AI. 

The broader issue is where the productivity gains ultimately flow. When output rises faster than compensation, a larger share of the economic benefit accrues to corporate profits and owners of capital rather than employees.

That can be positive for margins and investment in the short term, but it also raises a longer-term consumer question. Household spending still depends on wages, and an economy in which productivity gains are not translating proportionately into worker income can eventually make it harder for consumption to keep pace with business output.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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A Delta Air Lines flight bound for Orlando returned to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport minutes after takeoff Saturday morning and was evacuated on a taxiway, sending passengers down emergency slides.

Delta said Flight 2204 departed Atlanta on August 8 carrying 199 passengers and six crew members. The flight crew declared an emergency after fumes were reported in the cockpit and returned to Atlanta as a precaution.

The aircraft took off shortly before 7:30 a.m. and landed safely around 8 a.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA said it will investigate.

What happened after landing made the incident more serious than a routine turnback.

Rather than taxiing to a gate, the crew ordered an evacuation while the Boeing 757 remained on the taxiway. Emergency slides were deployed, first responders surrounded the aircraft and passengers were later bused back to the terminal.

Delta said one passenger and one crew member sought medical attention.

Why the Slide Evacuation Matters

An emergency-slide evacuation carries its own risk of injuries and is generally used when crews determine that getting passengers off the aircraft immediately is safer than keeping them aboard.

Smoke or unexplained fumes in the cockpit can create that calculation because pilots may not immediately know whether the source is electrical, hydraulic, engine-related or something else — or whether conditions could worsen.

Delta said the aircraft is undergoing a maintenance inspection and passengers are being rebooked to Orlando. The airline apologized to customers and said the crew followed established procedures in returning to Atlanta.

The cause of the fumes has not been established.

An Aging but Valuable Aircraft

The aircraft involved was a Boeing 757, a model that remains important to Delta despite its age.

Boeing stopped producing the 757 in 2004, meaning every example still carrying passengers is now more than two decades old.

Delta remains one of the world’s largest operators of the aircraft.

Airlines have kept 757s flying because the jet occupies an unusually useful position in their fleets: it combines narrowbody economics with strong runway performance and enough range for routes that can include transcontinental and some transatlantic service.

Replacing that combination has proven difficult, helping extend the operating lives of aircraft that otherwise might have been retired years ago.

Cockpit and cabin fume events can have numerous causes, including engine oil or hydraulic fluid entering the aircraft’s air supply or electrical components overheating.

There is currently no evidence establishing any of those as the cause of Saturday’s incident.

Delta’s maintenance inspection and the FAA investigation will determine what happened.

The Cost of an Emergency Turnback

The immediate financial impact for Delta is relatively contained.

Nearly 200 passengers must be reaccommodated, the aircraft remains unavailable while maintenance crews inspect it, and the deployed emergency slides must be serviced and repacked before the jet can return to service.

The larger question is what caused the fumes.

A faulty individual component could mean a relatively quick repair. A problem requiring broader inspection of aircraft systems could keep the jet grounded longer.

There is no indication at this point that the incident represents a fleet-wide problem.

For an evacuation involving more than 200 people aboard, two people seeking medical attention is also a relatively limited injury count.

The airplane landed safely. Passengers and crew got off. And investigators now have an intact aircraft to determine what caused the cockpit fumes.

For an aviation emergency, that is the outcome crews train for.

JBizNews Desk | Atlanta, Georgia

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Leopold Aschenbrenner borrowed roughly four dollars for every dollar his investors gave him, put it all into artificial intelligence stocks, and watched those stocks fall. His lenders then asked for their money back — all of them, at once. To pay them, he sold nearly his entire stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount. Days later, he wired $400 million into a private company.

That is where the story stands this weekend, and the sequence is worth walking through slowly, because it is one of the fastest rises and falls Wall Street has produced.

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, raised $225 million in July 2024 from Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub chief Nat Friedman, and investor Daniel Gross. His fund, Situational Awareness, ended that year with $254 million in assets and reported $13.7 billion by its first-quarter 2026 filing. By the start of July it stood at $45 billion, and the fund had gained more than 1,000 percent since launch. Aschenbrenner is 25 and had never traded professionally before starting it.

Then came the margin calls.

A margin call is what happens when a lender who financed your position sees the collateral drop and demands cash immediately. There is no negotiating and no waiting for the market to recover. Situational Awareness had used as much as 400 percent leverage and concentrated its holdings in AI infrastructure names including SK Hynix and CoreWeave. Its top disclosed positions — Nebius Group, SanDisk, Micron and CoreWeave — each lost more than 35 percent of their value. Lenders across Wall Street called in their collateral at the same time, and Aschenbrenner cut a deal with Citadel to sell most of the public book, which cleared his debts and let him keep the fund’s private holdings. Assets finished at roughly $10 billion.

One number in that account needs care. The $45 billion figure was never $45 billion of investor money. It counted borrowed capital alongside it. When the lenders were repaid, a large portion of what disappeared was debt unwinding rather than client wealth vaporizing. Investors took real losses, but the actual split has not been disclosed, and the widely repeated “$35 billion wiped out” framing overstates what changed hands.

The new investment closed Tuesday and added $400 million to a private company the fund had already backed with $100 million last month, bringing the total to $500 million in about a month. Sequoia partner Alfred Lin confirmed on Bloomberg television Thursday that the money went to a Sequoia portfolio company, declining to name which one. What remains of the fund is concentrated in private technology stakes including Anthropic, Fluidstack and MatX.

In a letter to investors, Aschenbrenner said the fund did what it needed to do to survive, pledged to draw lessons from it, and noted that the bulk of his own money sits in the fund alongside his backers’. He offered one-on-one calls to any investor who asked.

Whether the $400 million works cannot be judged yet. It went into a private company with no share price and no public mark. Nobody will know for years.

What is already clear is the part that transfers to any business, at any size.

Aschenbrenner was not wrong about artificial intelligence. Demand for AI infrastructure is real, the buildout is real, and his thesis produced a four-figure percentage gain before it broke. He was right about direction and still came within days of losing the entire operation — because borrowed money does not wait for you to be proven right. A lender who financed your inventory, your equipment or your building has the same power a Wall Street prime broker has: when the value of what backs the loan drops, the call comes immediately, regardless of how sound the underlying business is.

That is the difference between being correct and surviving long enough to collect on being correct. Leverage collapses the distance between a bad quarter and the end of the company.

The open question now is whether Aschenbrenner has absorbed that. He is deploying half a billion dollars into the same corner of the market that nearly finished him, weeks after it happened. He would call that conviction. His lenders spent last week calling it something else.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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New Yorkers now pay more for electricity than residents of 47 other states. The state’s average residential price hit 29.93 cents per kilowatt-hour in May, 62.3 percent above the U.S. average, with only Hawaii and California charging more. The figures were published Thursday in the Empire Center’s monthly energy bulletin, drawn from federal Energy Information Administration data. New York ranked fourth a month earlier.

The gap is widening. Between April and May, New York’s price rose 1.6 percent while the national average fell 2.1 percent. Over twelve months, New York prices climbed 12 percent — double the pace of the national increase.

For businesses, the comparison with competing states matters most. New York’s rates run nearly double Florida’s and more than 80 percent above Texas’s. New Jersey households paid 23.27 cents per kilowatt-hour and Pennsylvania 21.55 cents. None of New York’s neighbors — Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Vermont — paid more.

Electricity is a fixed cost no operator can negotiate away.

A bakery running ovens, a warehouse running refrigeration, a manufacturer running a line — each pays roughly 60 cents on the dollar more for the same kilowatt than the average American competitor, and close to double what a Texas rival pays. That difference compounds monthly and lands in margins and shelf prices.

Empire Center President Zilvinas Silenas tied the ranking to state policy. “If this is affordability, New Yorkers cannot afford it,” he said, arguing the state’s energy rules have pushed costs up for years. He also pointed to the difficulty of siting new generation, saying New York has made it very hard to build power plants of any kind. The environmental group Earthjustice has countered that the causes are more complicated than plant closures alone.

Supply pressure sits behind the numbers. New York’s grid operator warned that rising demand paired with shrinking fossil-fuel generating capacity could produce outages in New York City, prompting state regulators to demand a reliability plan from Con Edison. Con Edison is raising rates on customers this year. Tight supply and rate increases arriving together is the arithmetic of the ranking.

Natural gas shows a milder version of the same pattern. New York households paid $22.74 per thousand cubic feet in May against a national average of $19.83, a premium of 14.7 percent, placing the state 19th nationally. Gas prices were down 2.3 percent from a year earlier even as the national figure rose 3.1 percent — but since 2019, New York’s average has climbed 62.5 percent against 55.4 percent nationwide.

One caveat belongs on the electricity figures. The state averages are approximations, calculated from residential sales revenue and volume rather than actual retail rates. They track direction and scale reliably; they are not a reading of any single customer’s bill.

The direction is what should concern employers.

New York has been separating from the national market for several years, and the May data shows it separating faster. Every month the state adds to that gap raises the cost of operating here relative to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Texas and Florida — states actively recruiting the businesses paying those bills.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Berkshire Hathaway’s second-quarter report shows the clearest shift yet under Greg Abel: the company’s enormous cash pile is finally moving.

Berkshire ended June with $365.5 billion in cash and Treasury holdings, down from nearly $400 billion at the end of March. That roughly $34 billion drop marks the first meaningful drawdown of the mountain of money Warren Buffett spent years building while refusing to chase expensive deals.

Abel, who took over as chief executive in January after Buffett stepped back from day-to-day leadership, deployed the money across stocks, buybacks and acquisitions.

Berkshire bought roughly $10 billion of Alphabet shares, making Google’s parent one of the conglomerate’s largest holdings. Net stock purchases across the portfolio totaled about $19.8 billion for the quarter.

The company also spent roughly $4.5 billion repurchasing its own shares, its biggest quarterly buyback in five years.

That figure matters because Berkshire does not run a conventional buyback program. It only repurchases shares when management believes the stock is trading below the company’s intrinsic value, and it does not commit to spending a fixed amount.

Abel had said in March that Berkshire had resumed buying back its own stock after more than two years on the sidelines, but first-quarter repurchases totaled only about $234 million.

The second quarter showed a much bigger commitment.

Most of the repurchases took place in June.

Investors still do not know everything Berkshire bought. The quarterly filing indicates the company added more than $21 billion of commercial, industrial and other stocks, but the full list will not be disclosed until a separate portfolio filing later this month.

Profit More Than Doubles

Berkshire reported net income of $25.67 billion, or $17,868 per Class A share, more than double the $12.37 billion earned a year earlier.

That number, however, is heavily influenced by movements in Berkshire’s massive stock portfolio.

Accounting rules require the company to include unrealized investment gains and losses in reported earnings, which can cause large quarterly swings even when Berkshire’s operating businesses have changed little.

The year-earlier quarter also included a $3.8 billion writedown tied to Berkshire’s Kraft investment.

Operating earnings provide a cleaner view of how the businesses themselves performed.

By that measure, Berkshire earned $12.98 billion, up from $11.16 billion a year earlier.

Manufacturing, service and retail businesses generated $4.47 billion in earnings, up from $3.60 billion.

BNSF Railway earned $1.56 billion, compared with $1.47 billion a year earlier. Fuel costs rose sharply, but stronger volumes and improved operating efficiency helped offset the increase.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy earned $891 million, up from $702 million. Retail electricity demand increased 3.1%, including gains at MidAmerican Energy and NV Energy.

GEICO Becomes the Weak Spot

Insurance was the biggest drag on the quarter.

Underwriting earnings across Berkshire’s insurance operations fell 13.1% to $1.73 billion, while insurance investment income declined to $3.06 billion from $3.37 billion.

The sharpest deterioration came at GEICO.

Pre-tax underwriting profit fell 45.4% to $994 million from $1.82 billion a year earlier.

GEICO’s combined ratio — a key measure of claims and expenses against premiums collected — worsened 7.7 percentage points to 91.2%.

The reason was simple: more claims, and more expensive claims.

Bodily-injury claim frequency rose roughly 5% to 7% in the first half of the year, while the average cost of those claims increased about 10% to 12%.

In practical terms, GEICO is seeing both more accidents and higher settlement costs.

Foreign-exchange movements also helped Berkshire’s year-over-year comparison. The company recorded $326 million in currency gains during the quarter versus $877 million in losses a year earlier.

Berkshire Is Spending Again

The more important story may be what is happening to Berkshire’s balance sheet.

For years, Buffett accumulated cash while repeatedly saying he could not find enough large investments at prices he liked.

That pattern is now changing.

Berkshire has also moved billions into acquisitions, including OxyChem and homebuilder Taylor Morrison.

The Taylor Morrison transaction closed July 24 for roughly $6.8 billion in cash.

Even after the stock purchases, buybacks and acquisitions, Berkshire still holds $365.5 billion in cash and short-term investments.

The cash pile remains enormous.

But for the first time in years, the defining story at Berkshire is no longer how much money it refuses to spend.

Under Abel, it is how quickly some of that money is beginning to move.

JBizNews Desk | Omaha, Nebraska

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Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, Band-Aid, Neutrogena, Listerine and Zyrtec, said Thursday that inflation, tariffs and currency pressures are squeezing margins even as sales return to growth — a sign that consumers could continue seeing pressure on prices and promotions across everyday medicines and personal-care products. 

The consumer-health company reported second-quarter net sales of $4.1 billion, up 3% from a year earlier, while organic sales rose 1.6%. Adjusted earnings per share increased 7% to 31 cents, but the results narrowly missed Wall Street expectations as higher input costs and trade-related expenses weighed on profitability. 

The pressure matters because Kenvue sells products that sit directly in household medicine cabinets and bathroom shelves.

Brands such as Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec, Pepcid, Band-Aid, Neutrogena and Listerine give the company broad exposure to consumer spending on products that are often purchased regardless of economic conditions. That also means cost increases can quickly show up through higher shelf prices, fewer discounts or smaller promotional offers.

Kenvue said inflation and foreign-exchange movements continued to pressure margins, while tariffs added another layer of cost across parts of its supply chain. The company has been using productivity savings, supply-chain efficiencies and selective pricing to offset those pressures. 

The company’s results also show that shoppers have not stopped buying. Kenvue delivered its third consecutive quarter of net and organic sales growth, with gains across every segment and region. Chief Executive Kirk Perry said the company is continuing to invest behind its brands while cutting costs and simplifying operations. 

For consumers, the important question is what happens next. If tariffs and input costs remain elevated, Kenvue and its competitors may have less room to rely on promotions and may increasingly protect margins through pricing, packaging changes or tighter product assortments.

Kenvue is also in the middle of a planned roughly $40 billion acquisition by Kimberly-Clark, a transaction expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combination would bring together some of the largest brands in consumer health, personal care and household essentials under one corporate structure. 

That makes the company’s cost pressures especially relevant beyond investors. Millions of households buy Kenvue products every week, and even modest price increases across medicines, skincare and first-aid products can add up quickly.

The second-quarter results suggest demand remains resilient. The harder challenge is whether Kenvue can absorb higher costs without pushing more of them onto consumers.

JBizNews Desk | Summit, New Jersey

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Nobody hit all six numbers in Saturday night’s Powerball drawing, pushing the jackpot even higher after the largest drawing of the year failed to produce a grand-prize winner.

The winning numbers drawn Saturday, August 8, were 5, 9, 35, 54 and 63, with Powerball 7.

The jackpot had climbed to an estimated $863 million by drawing time as ticket sales surged. With no ticket matching all five white balls plus the Powerball, the estimated jackpot for the next drawing has now risen to $905 million.

The next winner will face one of the biggest financial decisions imaginable: take roughly $391 million immediately or collect the full advertised jackpot through an annuity.

The cash option for the next drawing is estimated at approximately $391 million before taxes. The larger $905 million figure represents the annuity value, paid through an initial payment followed by 29 annual payments that increase over time.

Saturday’s drawing still produced several major winners. Tickets matching the five white balls without the Powerball can be worth $1 million, or $2 million when the qualifying Power Play option applies.

The jackpot has been building through repeated drawings without a grand-prize winner, turning what began as a much smaller prize into one of the largest lottery payouts currently available in the United States.

Powerball is played across 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The odds of matching all six numbers and winning the jackpot are approximately 1 in 292.2 million.

The next Powerball drawing is Monday night.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general early Saturday by a vote of 50-49, giving President Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer permanent authority over a Justice Department he has already been running on an acting basis since April.

The vote came after 4 a.m., with a late-night session running into the early hours ahead of a scheduled Senate recess. Two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, joined every Democrat in opposing him. Blanche moved into the acting role in April after Trump forced out Pam Bondi, whom the president faulted for the department’s lack of action against his political opponents.

Blanche said afterward that he was “deeply honored by the trust and confidence” Trump had placed in him, noting he becomes the nation’s 88th attorney general and thanking senators for staying late to finish the process.

The Fight Was Not Where It Looked

The obstacle was not Democratic opposition, which was never in doubt. It was rare Republican pushback that left the nomination genuinely in question.

The sticking point was a $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund inside the department. The fund grew out of a settlement between Trump and the IRS over the leak of the president’s tax returns, and was intended to pay people who claimed the federal government had been turned against them. After the fund drew legal challenges, Blanche gave a verbal assurance it was not moving forward — but Republican Judiciary Committee members John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both leaving Congress, demanded it in writing and held up the committee vote until they got it.

Blanche had been confirmed as deputy attorney general on a party-line vote in March of last year, but lost Republican support for the top job after a series of decisions that drew skepticism from members of his own party. Support from Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy late in the week put the count over the line.

Senator Adam Schiff of California, the most vocal Democratic opponent, argued Blanche has never shed his identity as Trump’s personal defense lawyer and would not act independently of the president.

What It Means for Companies

Blanche now holds formal authority over the department’s 93 U.S. attorneys, its Antitrust Division, national security prosecutions and department-wide litigation strategy — a workforce of more than 100,000 people.

For business, the practical exposure sits in prosecutorial discretion. The Antitrust Division decides which mergers get challenged, which industries draw civil or criminal competition probes, and how hard the government pushes on pricing, labor-market and digital-platform conduct. On the white-collar side, the choices that matter to a general counsel are cooperation credit, whether individual executives are charged alongside the company, whether monitorships are imposed as part of settlements, and how foreign bribery and sanctions-evasion cases are prioritized.

Those decisions move real numbers. Charging policy shifts affect legal reserves, the timing of announced deals, risk-factor disclosures and board compliance spending — most acutely for companies already under investigation and for banks, defense contractors, technology firms and multinational manufacturers operating in heavily regulated markets.

The turnover itself is a factor. Two confirmed attorneys general in roughly eighteen months, with a four-month acting stretch in between, is the kind of churn that makes enforcement standards harder to plan around.

What to Watch

The one-vote margin leaves Blanche without political cushion. Democrats are expected to demand oversight of politically sensitive prosecutions, while Republicans continue pressing the department to investigate what they describe as the weaponization of federal law enforcement — the same subject that nearly sank his confirmation.

The early signals will come from personnel appointments, whether any pending merger challenges are dropped or expanded, and the first corporate charging decisions filed under his signature rather than in an acting capacity.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Saturday that every officer and agent working in the field will be carrying a body camera by the end of August — a month earlier than the agency’s own timeline from days ago, when it said the nationwide rollout would be finished by the end of September. The hardware is already bought and paid for, and the money went to one American company.

ICE spent $30.9 million in July on body camera equipment from Axon, the Arizona firm best known for making Tasers, according to federal spending records. The two purchases were placed through an existing government contract dating to 2023. Houston alone has received more than 800 cameras, and officers there have already begun training.

What Triggered the Spending

The purchases did not come out of a routine budget cycle. The buying began one day after an ICE officer fatally shot a 25-year-old motorist in Maine, and the accelerated rollout follows the July shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. A series of fatal shootings by officers carrying out the administration’s immigration enforcement push has increased pressure from Congress for the kind of record body cameras produce.

Timing matters here for a second reason: ICE did not buy body cameras even after receiving a $75 billion funding infusion in the 2025 policy bill and beginning to hire thousands of new officers.

The money to equip the force was available for roughly a year before the orders were placed.

The Catch on the Footage

Buying the cameras and releasing what they record are two separate questions, and the agency’s policy answers the second one in its own favor.

ICE’s body-worn camera policy specifies that any public release of footage must be in the agency’s best interests, and includes provisions allowing ICE leadership to withhold or indefinitely delay footage following serious injuries or deaths in custody. In plain terms: the cameras will roll, but the agency decides whether the public ever sees the video, and there is no fixed deadline forcing its hand.

Acting Director David J. Venturella defended the restrictions, saying they are meant to protect investigations and privacy and are consistent with federal law and with the practices of other federal law enforcement agencies. He said the agency was “committed to transparency and accountability” and on schedule to finish the rollout this month.

The Pushback

Christopher Schneider, a sociology professor at Brandon University in Canada, told the Associated Press that selective release of footage is common practice at law enforcement agencies but is rarely written so plainly into policy.

Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff under President Biden and helped run the agency’s earlier camera pilot program, said deploying the technology was never technically difficult and accused the agency of dragging its feet. He argued that cameras should have been issued when the administration expanded mass arrests and traffic stops, and that acting only after several shootings and congressional pressure amounts to a political response rather than a safety measure.

There is also a precedent problem. ICE’s sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, has still not released footage of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott told lawmakers the video was part of an ongoing investigation and would be made public when appropriate.

Why It Matters for Business

For Axon, this is a fast, large federal order booked through a contract already in place — no new competition, no procurement delay. A workforce that is still hiring in the thousands means recurring demand not just for the cameras themselves but for the cloud storage, evidence management software and licensing that come attached to them.

That subscription tail is the more durable part of the business, and a federal agency of ICE’s size expanding its officer count is exactly the customer profile that drives it.

For taxpayers, the arithmetic is simpler: tens of millions of dollars are buying a visual record of federal immigration enforcement, and the agency holding the cameras is also the one deciding what the public gets to watch.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The Pentagon has told America’s biggest weapons makers they have three weeks to come back with a plan for building missiles faster — and it is not asking for improvements at the margins. Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg gave contractors 21 days to submit plans, writing in a memo dated Wednesday that “years-long development cycles are not acceptable.” The memo directs companies to lay out “significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

The reason is arithmetic. The war with Iran, now in its sixth month, has been fought largely with air-defense interceptors that cost millions of dollars each and take years to build, against drones and rockets that cost a fraction of that. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report published July 27 found the United States had burned through roughly a third of its Patriot interceptors and about half of its THAAD missiles since the war began, and the same analysis flagged the cost imbalance between expensive interceptors and cheaply built Iranian drones. By CSIS’s count, the military has fewer than 1,000 Patriot interceptors and fewer than 250 THAAD interceptors on hand.

American contractors are already being paid to fix that, and the sums are historically large. The Army last week awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $58.6 billion to produce Patriot interceptors, and on August 3 the department signed a pair of seven-year framework agreements with Northrop Grumman worth a combined $3 billion, making Northrop a second supplier of Patriot rocket motors and expanding its output of THAAD structural components. L3Harris signed its own seven-year framework the prior week, which the company said would let it triple propulsion components for the Patriot. RTX, Raytheon’s parent, has a similar arrangement to lift Tomahawk cruise missile output from roughly 60 a year to eventually 1,000.

The Pentagon is no longer trying simply to replenish missiles. It is trying to rebuild the industrial system that produces them.

The production targets behind those contracts are steep. The department wants to triple capacity for the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor and quadruple capacity for THAAD, working toward a long-term procurement goal of nearly 14,000 Patriot and THAAD interceptors. Officials said they are now dealing directly with component suppliers rather than going only through prime contractors, pushing money toward tooling, plant upgrades and workforce so the higher rates can be sustained. Lockheed is aiming to build 2,000 PAC-3 MSE interceptors a year by the end of 2030.

The choke point is not final assembly. It is solid rocket motors, a single-source bottleneck that has capped interceptor output for years and cannot be widened by writing a bigger check alone. “Building the Arsenal of Freedom requires robust, dynamic supply chains at every level of the industrial base,” said Michael Duffey, the under secretary for acquisition and sustainment. Adding a second motor supplier is the department’s answer, and it is why the newest agreements run seven years rather than one — suppliers will not build new plants on a demand signal that expires.

Inside the administration, the shortage has become a political argument as much as an industrial one. President Trump said Thursday on Truth Social that the country holds “massive amounts” of munitions and that large volumes are being manufactured and delivered as needed. A department official, Jarred Conley of the Defense Innovation Unit, told Al Jazeera on Saturday that “we have sufficient munitions for the task at hand.” Officials have invoked the Defense Production Act to speed manufacturing, and Feinberg has held repeated meetings with contractors pressing for faster timelines.

Chief spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed the memo is authentic and framed it as a continuation of existing policy rather than an emergency measure. He said the document will inform the fiscal 2028 budget request going to Congress and is consistent with the push to rebuild the defense industrial base.

The biggest uncertainty is no longer whether Washington wants more missiles. It is whether Congress will fund production quickly enough for industry to build the factories, equipment and workforce needed to make them.

That is where the money question lands. Framework agreements are nonbinding — they signal intent and unlock supplier investment, but they are not appropriations. Whether the production ramp described in this week’s memo actually gets built depends on a divided Congress approving the defense spending to pay for it, and the budget cycle Parnell referenced does not begin until fiscal 2028. Contractors weighing whether to pour concrete for new motor lines are being asked to move now on funding that has not yet been voted.

For the companies, the deadline lands in early September. For investors and suppliers across the defense base — machine shops, chemical producers, electronics makers feeding Lockheed, Northrop, RTX and L3Harris — the memo is the clearest signal yet that the government intends to buy at wartime volumes for years, not months. The open question is whether the industrial base can add capacity faster than the war consumes it.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Consumers are still spending on travel, transportation and convenience services even as household budgets remain under pressure, with Airbnb, Lyft and Instacart all reporting stronger-than-expected demand Thursday.

Airbnb said second-quarter revenue reached $3.61 billion, ahead of Wall Street expectations, and raised its full-year growth outlook to at least the mid-teens. North American booking growth accelerated to its strongest pace in nearly three years, helped by major events including the FIFA World Cup.

The results suggest travelers are becoming more selective rather than pulling back entirely. Consumers may be cutting spending in some discretionary categories, but they continue to prioritize trips and experiences they consider worth the cost.

Lyft reported revenue of $1.84 billion, up 16% from a year earlier, while gross bookings rose 23% to a record $5.50 billion. The company also said roughly 30% of North American rides were connected to partnerships including DoorDash and United Airlines.

That partnership growth matters because ride-hailing companies are becoming more deeply integrated into travel, delivery and loyalty programs rather than relying only on customers opening an app and ordering a standalone ride.

Instacart also delivered stronger guidance, forecasting third-quarter gross transaction value of $10.30 billion to $10.55 billion, above Wall Street expectations. Consumers continued ordering groceries online even as they shifted toward cheaper products and smaller baskets.

The common thread across all three companies is not unlimited consumer strength. It is continued willingness to pay for services that save time, provide convenience or support experiences people still value.

For businesses, that distinction matters. Consumers remain highly sensitive to price, but demand has not disappeared. Companies that can demonstrate clear value are still finding room to grow even while households remain cautious elsewhere.

Airbnb shares jumped in after-hours trading, while Instacart also rose sharply following its report. Lyft gained more modestly.

The broader consumer picture remains uneven, but Thursday’s results offered another sign that spending is rotating rather than collapsing.

JBizNews Desk | San Francisco

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A multistate salmonella outbreak tied to fresh jalapeño peppers has sickened 345 people across 27 states, sending 36 people to hospitals and forcing restaurants and distributors to pull affected produce from their supply chains.

Federal health officials have linked the outbreak to jalapeños grown in Sinaloa, Mexico, and distributed in the United States by Coast Citrus Distributors. Illnesses have been reported from June 19 through July 20. No deaths have been reported.

The peppers were supplied to restaurants, including locations operated by Chipotle Mexican Grill and QDOBA, rather than being shipped directly to grocery stores. Both chains stopped using the implicated peppers after investigators traced illnesses back through the food-distribution system.

For restaurants, the damage from a food-safety outbreak can extend well beyond the cost of throwing away one ingredient.

A restaurant typically buys produce through distributors that aggregate food from multiple farms and growers. That makes fresh ingredients inexpensive and widely available, but it can also make tracing contamination complicated. Investigators must work backward from sick customers to restaurants, distributors, packing facilities and eventually the farm where the produce originated.

That process can take weeks.

Chipotle has particular reason to move aggressively. The company spent years rebuilding consumer trust following earlier foodborne-illness outbreaks, and its shares have come under pressure as investors evaluate whether the latest incident could affect customer traffic.

The financial risk is not limited to one restaurant chain. Produce distributors can face recalls and destroyed inventory, growers can lose access to customers, and restaurants that never served contaminated food can still suffer if consumers begin avoiding an entire category of cuisine or ingredient.

That is already becoming a broader concern for the restaurant industry. The salmonella investigation comes as the U.S. is simultaneously dealing with a large cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to other produce, increasing consumer attention to fresh-food safety.

Salmonella commonly causes diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps and can become more serious for young children, older adults and people with weakened immune systems.

For businesses, however, the immediate lesson is supply-chain visibility.

When one pepper can move from a Mexican farm through a distributor and into restaurants across dozens of states, food safety increasingly becomes a logistics and traceability issue as much as a kitchen issue.

Federal and state investigators are continuing to track the affected distribution network and identify whether additional businesses received implicated jalapeños.

JBizNews Desk | Atlanta

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Washington moved twice on Friday against the plumbing Iran uses to move money without touching a bank — first the crypto exchanges, then the network of Dubai and Hong Kong front companies that convert the regime’s oil revenue into usable currency.

The method is simpler than it sounds. Iranian money leaves the country as digital tokens or as invoices written on a shell company’s letterhead. Either way, no Iranian name appears on the transaction, and no American bank sees it coming. Treasury’s answer is to name the middlemen so that everyone else’s compliance software will catch them.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control designated two digital asset exchanges along with the operator of a multi-country network of front companies handling illicit cryptocurrency activity and sanctions evasion. Treasury said Iranian actors used unlicensed or lightly regulated platforms to move large volumes of digital assets, running the proceeds through corporate networks and a large online gambling operation that hid where the money came from before it reached the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and regime insiders.

At the center is Siavash Kayvanpour, born in Iran, holding additional citizenship from Dominica and Afghanistan and living in the United Arab Emirates, who runs the Shelbit Exchange through a Republic of Georgia company. Guard Corps wallets sent more than $1 million in digital assets to Shelbit addresses, more than $2 million moved from Shelbit back to Guard Corps addresses, and addresses controlled by Kayvanpour sent over $2 million to Nobitex, the Iranian exchange Washington blacklisted in June. His companies designated alongside him span the Emirates and Poland, including a Dubai firm trading commercially as Shelbit Exchange that stayed open after Emirati regulators took enforcement action against it in January 2025 and again in July 2026.

The gambling angle is the detail that will travel. Shelbit serviced a large Persian-language gambling network run by two Iranian influencers living abroad, and tens of millions of dollars of that network’s digital assets were laundered through the exchange — while the operators, convicted of illegal gambling in Iran in 2023, kept access to Iranian online payment systems the central bank tightly controls.

The second exchange named, Aban Tether, was designated for operating in Iran’s financial sector after processing millions of dollars in transactions with the previously blacklisted Nobitex, Wallex, Bitpin and Ramzinex. OFAC built the case with IRS Criminal Investigation, and the State Department is offering up to $15 million for information that disrupts Guard Corps financing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department would pursue these networks “whether in dollars, rials, or crypto.”

The companion action went after the older machinery. OFAC targeted networks across several countries that let Iran’s rahbar banking system move hundreds of millions of dollars, marking its eighth action this year against the shadow banking apparatus. Two Dubai exchange houses anchor it: Titan Exchange, which held tens of millions on behalf of Iran’s Shahr Bank as of early 2026, and Alps International, which enabled hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions in multiple currencies this year. The mechanics were spelled out plainly — invoices generated on a chosen shell company’s letterhead, then payments run through that shell’s bank accounts. Shell firms in Hong Kong and Singapore were designated for carrying the transfers, and a Shahr Bank employee was named for coordinating currency conversions with Russia’s sanctioned VTB Bank. Bessent said the system “is buckling under Economic Fury.”

For American and foreign firms, the consequence sits in the fine print. Foreign financial institutions that knowingly handle significant transactions for anyone designated Friday risk secondary sanctions, and OFAC can bar or restrict their correspondent accounts in the United States. Any bank, payment processor or exchange with Gulf or Hong Kong trade exposure needs its screening lists updated today, because OFAC enforces on a strict liability basis — intent is not a defense.

The timing is the story’s second half. Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office that a Strait of Hormuz agreement had not been reached, describing it as “sort of open right now” while saying he is personally involved and it could come soon. Bessent has said a 30-to-60-day ceasefire could land within a day or two. Friday’s designations say something different about sequencing: pressure is still being added, not unwound, and nothing lifts until OFAC formally delists or licenses it.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The next obstacle to expanding a factory, building a data center or opening a semiconductor plant may have nothing to do with labor, taxes or financing. Increasingly, it is whether the local electric grid has enough capacity to supply power.

Across the United States, utilities are receiving record requests for electricity from artificial intelligence data centers, advanced manufacturing facilities, battery plants and industrial projects. The surge is exposing a growing reality: economic development is beginning to outpace the infrastructure needed to support it.

For decades, businesses assumed electricity would always be available when a project was approved. That assumption is changing.

Utilities across multiple regions are reporting unprecedented requests for new connections, with some large industrial customers facing multi-year waits before sufficient transmission lines, substations or generation capacity can be built. In some cases, projects are being redesigned, delayed or relocated because power simply cannot be delivered on the desired timeline.

The demand is coming from several directions at once.

Artificial intelligence has dramatically increased electricity consumption as hyperscale data centers expand computing capacity. At the same time, domestic manufacturing incentives have triggered a wave of investment in semiconductors, electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals and advanced industrial production—all of which require substantial and reliable power supplies.

That convergence is transforming the utility industry.

Electric companies are accelerating investment in transmission networks, substations and grid modernization while seeking regulatory approval for billions of dollars in infrastructure spending. Engineering firms, electrical equipment manufacturers, transformer suppliers, construction companies and grid technology providers are all experiencing stronger demand as utilities race to expand capacity.

The challenge extends beyond generating more electricity.

Transmission infrastructure has become one of the largest bottlenecks. Building new high-voltage lines often requires years of permitting, environmental review, land acquisition and regulatory approvals. As a result, new generation projects can be completed long before electricity can actually reach the businesses that need it.

For Corporate America, power availability is becoming part of site selection.

Companies evaluating locations for new facilities increasingly ask not only how much electricity costs, but whether it will be available when construction is complete. Access to dependable power is joining workforce availability, transportation infrastructure and tax policy as one of the most important factors influencing billion-dollar investment decisions.

The implications reach financial markets as well.

Utilities that successfully expand infrastructure may benefit from decades of regulated investment opportunities, while manufacturers of transformers, switchgear, grid automation systems, electrical components and transmission equipment are positioned to benefit from one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in years.

The broader business story is not simply that America needs more electricity. It is that economic growth is increasingly becoming dependent on infrastructure that was designed for a different era. The companies and regions capable of delivering reliable power fastest may become the biggest winners in the next wave of industrial investment, while those unable to expand capacity risk watching jobs and capital flow elsewhere.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The biggest shift in business lending isn’t happening at your local bank. It’s happening behind closed doors, where private investment funds are increasingly replacing traditional lenders as the primary source of financing for middle-market companies.

What began as an alternative financing market after the 2008 financial crisis has evolved into one of the fastest-growing segments of global finance. As banks face tighter capital requirements, commercial real estate exposure and higher regulatory costs, private credit funds are stepping into the gap, providing billions of dollars in loans directly to businesses that once relied almost exclusively on banks.

The market has expanded to more than $2 trillion globally and continues attracting record levels of institutional investment from pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds seeking higher returns than traditional fixed-income investments. Major asset managers including Blackstone, Apollo, Ares, Blue Owl and KKR have rapidly expanded their private credit businesses, transforming what was once a niche product into a core pillar of corporate finance. 

The change is reshaping how companies grow.

Unlike banks, private credit lenders often move faster, structure customized loans and are willing to finance transactions that fall outside conventional banking standards. Businesses frequently accept higher borrowing costs in exchange for greater flexibility, quicker approvals and fewer financing conditions.

For regional banks, the trend presents a long-term challenge.

Commercial lending has historically been one of banking’s most profitable businesses. As more borrowers migrate toward private lenders, banks face increasing pressure to replace lost loan growth while navigating stricter regulation and higher funding costs. The result is a financial system where an expanding share of business credit originates outside the traditional banking sector.

Regulators are paying close attention.

Unlike banks, many private credit funds operate outside the same capital and liquidity framework that governs federally insured financial institutions. As the industry expands, policymakers are increasingly examining whether systemic risks could migrate from the regulated banking system into private markets, particularly if economic conditions weaken or defaults begin rising. 

For businesses, the implications are significant.

The financing conversation is no longer simply about interest rates. Companies increasingly have multiple sources of capital competing for their business, allowing borrowers to negotiate structures that better fit acquisitions, expansion plans, recapitalizations and succession strategies.

The broader shift reaches beyond lending. It represents a fundamental redistribution of financial power. For generations, banks served as the primary gatekeepers of corporate credit. Today, that role is increasingly shared with private investment firms managing enormous pools of institutional capital.

The winners will not necessarily be those charging the lowest rates. They will be the lenders capable of moving quickly, understanding complex businesses and providing capital when traditional financing becomes more difficult. As private credit continues expanding, America’s financial system is quietly evolving from one dominated by banks to one where private capital increasingly determines which businesses receive the funding to grow.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Jamie Dimon is personally calling chief executives across banking, energy, water, telecommunications and transportation to enlist them in an industry coalition built around the risks advanced artificial intelligence poses to the systems those companies operate.

The JPMorgan Chase chief executive is urging corporate leaders to join a U.S.-focused group addressing AI risk as American business rapidly adopts the technology, according to two people familiar with the effort. Dimon has reached out directly to CEOs at large and regional banks and at information technology firms, expanding a group JPMorgan helped found called the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure.

The outreach began in July and has reached more than 40 companies spanning financial services, energy, water, utilities, telecommunications, airlines, railroads and other technology-dependent critical infrastructure industries. Calls with prospective members are planned for August, and the alliance has not yet disclosed results from the initial approach.

From Cyber to AI

The alliance is not new — its focus is.

JPMorgan was among the founding members alongside Mastercard and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and the organization was created to coordinate against cyber, geopolitical and physical threats to critical infrastructure operators. It is now being repositioned with artificial intelligence at the center.

Dimon said in a statement that he is proud to support the work, noting that alliance leadership identified AI as a priority years ago and began convening critical infrastructure companies around the issue.

The initiative aims to build a shared understanding of how AI is being used, what risks it creates and what safeguards are needed, and to work with the Trump administration on those questions. The revamped alliance is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Water Systems Made It Urgent

The catalyst was not theoretical. Recent cyberattacks on water systems in Minnesota and other states have sharpened the need for information sharing across industries, the sources said.

Municipal water utilities are among the softest targets in American infrastructure — thousands of small operators, thin IT budgets, aging control systems, and no equivalent of the regulatory apparatus that forces banks to harden their defenses. When AI tools lower the skill threshold required to find and exploit those weaknesses, the exposure is not limited to the utility that gets hit.

That interconnection is the argument for a cross-sector group rather than a series of industry-specific ones. A compromised grid operator becomes a bank problem. A disrupted rail network becomes an energy problem.

Why It Matters That It’s Dimon

Dimon’s position at the head of the largest U.S. bank places him at the intersection of finance, technology, cybersecurity and government policy, and his voice carries unusual weight in corporate America. He has been among a small group of chief executives publicly warning about the risks of advanced AI systems.

He has spent years discussing AI’s capacity to transform business operations while growing more vocal about what happens when capable systems reach the wrong hands.

The significance of the move is structural. AI safety discussions have largely been conducted by AI developers — model evaluations, red-teaming exercises, voluntary commitments among a handful of labs. What Dimon is assembling is a coalition of the companies that would absorb the damage rather than the ones building the technology.

That shifts the conversation from what models can do in testing to what happens when they are pointed at a water treatment plant, a payment network or a dispatch system.

The Washington Angle

Working with the administration is an explicit goal of the effort. The alliance has also stressed the importance of public-private cooperation, framing the protection of systems Americans depend on as a shared responsibility at a moment of rising cyber threats.

The federal posture on AI has leaned toward acceleration and away from restriction, which leaves operators of critical systems to determine their own standards. A forty-company coalition setting shared expectations for AI deployment in essential infrastructure would function as de facto industry policy — written by the firms that carry the operational risk rather than by regulators or by the labs.

More than 40 companies have been approached since the outreach began. Whether they sign on, and what they agree to, will say a great deal about how seriously corporate America has begun taking the downside of the technology it is racing to adopt.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Two Federal Reserve banks are preparing to survey the private credit industry directly, an attempt to bring visibility to a $1.3 trillion financing market that has grown up almost entirely outside the reach of banking supervision.

The Dallas and New York Federal Reserve banks will launch a pilot survey of the estimated $1.3 trillion private credit market after the third quarter closes, the New York Fed said in a statement Wednesday. The two banks described the effort as exploring lending trends in the U.S. private credit direct lending market.

The New York Fed said the survey will produce insight into credit availability, how credit is being provided, how lending standards are evolving in private credit, and what all of it means for the broader economy and for monetary policy.

Segmenting by Borrower Size

The design of the survey signals what the central bank actually wants to know.

It will divide the market into three tiers based on borrower size: an upper middle market covering companies with more than $100 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization; a middle market spanning $30 million to $100 million in EBITDA; and a lower middle market below $30 million.

That structure matters because the risk profile is not uniform. Lending to a company generating $150 million in EBITDA is a fundamentally different exercise than lending to one generating $20 million, and until now regulators have had limited ability to distinguish between the two in aggregate data.

Initial findings are expected in early 2027.

Why the Fed Is Looking Now

Private credit is a post-2008 creation. It emerged as a way to finance private equity buyouts when bank lending contracted after the financial crisis, then expanded into a primary source of debt for riskier businesses, pulling in capital from investors hunting yield.

The growth has been extraordinary. The U.S. market went from roughly $500 billion to $1.3 trillion over five years, reaching a scale comparable to the markets for bank loans and corporate bonds. Industry figures put it higher still — an LSTA survey of member firms pegged the U.S. private corporate credit market above $1.5 trillion, surpassing both the broadly syndicated loan market and the high-yield market.

The sector remains small relative to traditional banking, but it has drawn persistent concern over the quality of lending standards and the absence of transparency.

Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman framed the issue plainly in congressional testimony earlier this year, describing private credit as a small share of bank lending categories but calling it opaque enough that the central bank needs more information from the institutions it regulates.

The Banking Connection

The reason this is a supervisory question rather than an academic one is that banks are not actually on the sidelines.

Credit lines extended by the largest U.S. banks to private credit vehicles rose roughly 145% between 2020 and 2024, reaching about $95 billion. Moody’s has estimated U.S. bank exposure to private credit at roughly $300 billion, part of more than $1.2 trillion in loans to non-depository financial institutions overall.

Banks lost origination share to private lenders and responded by financing them instead. The credit risk moved off bank balance sheets; the counterparty risk did not entirely follow.

Stress Is Already Showing

The timing of the survey is not accidental. Investors have accelerated redemption demands this year from business development companies — the publicly traded funds that hold much of this debt — driven by worries about competition, declining returns, and fears that artificial intelligence will disrupt the software businesses many of these funds have financed.

Some funds have limited withdrawals in response, a dynamic that has drawn comparisons to earlier liquidity episodes in less-transparent corners of finance.

What It Means for Middle-Market Borrowers

For the thousands of mid-sized American companies now financed through direct lending rather than bank credit, the survey has practical stakes.

Private credit became the default option for businesses that were too small for the syndicated loan market and too leveraged for a traditional bank. Speed and flexibility were the selling points — a direct lender can close in weeks with a covenant package negotiated one-on-one.

If the Fed’s findings prompt tighter standards, either through regulation or through banks pulling back their financing lines, the cost and availability of that capital changes for borrowers who now have few alternatives.

Global private credit assets grew from roughly $158 billion in 2010 to nearly $2 trillion by mid-2024, and Moody’s projects the market could double past $3 trillion in assets under management by 2028.

The Fed has decided it can no longer afford to be measuring a market that size from the outside.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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American Airlines is changing one of its most valuable frequent-flyer perks, with elite AAdvantage members on several premium domestic routes no longer automatically jumping from the Main Cabin directly into Business Class when complimentary upgrades clear.

Starting August 25, eligible travelers booked in Main Cabin on certain aircraft offering Premium Economy will generally be upgraded first into Premium Economy rather than Business Class. The change affects select transcontinental and Hawaii routes where American sells three distinct cabins. 

For frequent flyers, that turns what could have been a lie-flat Business Class seat into a much smaller upgrade.

Travelers who purchase Premium Economy can still qualify for complimentary upgrades into Business Class when space is available. That creates a clearer hierarchy: Main Cabin passengers compete for Premium Economy, while travelers already paying for Premium Economy get access to the more valuable Business Class upgrade. 

Routes affected include some of American’s highest-value domestic services, including transcontinental flights linking New York with Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with selected service to Hawaii. American has been expanding Premium Economy across more aircraft and routes, giving the airline another cabin it can sell separately rather than treating it simply as a step on the way to Business Class. 

The change fits a broader airline strategy of protecting premium seats for paying customers. Business Class cabins can generate substantially more revenue than economy seats, particularly on long transcontinental flights, giving airlines an incentive to sell those seats rather than release them as complimentary upgrades.

American’s own AAdvantage rules continue to provide status members with complimentary upgrades on eligible North American flights when seats are available, but the cabin into which passengers are upgraded increasingly depends on the aircraft and ticket purchased. 

For consumers who spend heavily with American or its credit-card partners to earn elite status, the change reduces the potential payoff on some of the airline’s most desirable routes. A complimentary Premium Economy seat still provides additional space and service, but it is far different from the lie-flat seats, premium meals and airport experience offered in Business Class.

The bigger shift is what American is signaling about loyalty: elite status still provides upgrades, but the airline increasingly wants travelers seeking its most expensive seats to pay for a premium cabin first.

JBizNews Desk | Fort Worth, Texas

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Under Armour cut its annual sales outlook Friday after North American revenue dropped 9%, offering another sign that consumers are becoming more selective about spending on athletic clothing and footwear as inflation and economic uncertainty pressure household budgets. 

North American revenue fell to $609.8 million in the quarter ended June 30. Companywide revenue declined 3% to $1.10 billion, while international sales rose 5%, leaving weakness in Under Armour’s largest market as the central problem facing the brand. 

For consumers, the slowdown could mean more competition, promotions and pressure on brands to prove their products are worth the price.

Under Armour now expects full-year revenue to decline by a mid-single-digit percentage, worse than its previous forecast for only a slight decrease. The company said persistent inflation and broader economic uncertainty are making consumers more cautious about discretionary purchases. 

Chief Executive Kevin Plank is simultaneously trying to move Under Armour away from competing primarily through discounts. The company has been reducing its product assortment by roughly 25% and concentrating investment on training, running and team sports, with newer footwear aimed partly at younger consumers. 

That creates a difficult balancing act. Under Armour wants to rebuild the brand around fewer, more desirable products and protect pricing, but weakening U.S. demand can force retailers and manufacturers to use promotions to move merchandise.

The company’s gross margin nevertheless improved to 54.1%, helped in part by approximately $70 million in tariff refunds incorporated into its outlook. Under Armour maintained its adjusted operating-income forecast despite lowering its revenue expectations. 

The consumer signal extends beyond Under Armour. Other apparel companies have also reported softer U.S. discretionary spending as shoppers prioritize necessities and become more demanding about price, quality and value.

For Under Armour, the challenge is especially important because North America remains its largest market. A 9% decline there means the company’s turnaround increasingly depends on convincing cautious shoppers to pay for new products without relying heavily on markdowns.

For consumers, that competition can work in their favor. If athletic brands struggle to generate traffic, shoppers could see more promotions and better deals even as companies try to preserve premium pricing on their newest products.

JBizNews Desk | Baltimore, Maryland

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Iran has taken delivery of roughly 300 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from Russia and China over the past several weeks — weapons light enough for a single soldier to carry and lethal enough to knock down a helicopter, a drone or a low-flying aircraft. The shipments crossed the Caspian Sea in five small consignments, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps then distributed the launchers to military sites, urban centers and border regions, with some passed along to allied armed groups outside Iran’s borders.

The account comes from Iranian opposition figures — Kurdish and Ahwazi Arab leaders — who described the transfers to the US-funded Arabic-language outlet Alhurra in a report published this week. They say Tehran moved during recent ceasefire periods to rebuild an air defense network badly damaged during the war. The claims have not been independently verified, and Iran has not addressed them.

What makes the delivery significant is not its size but its price. A shoulder-fired launcher costs a fraction of what it can destroy. The Chinese systems reportedly involved — the QW-12 and FN-16 — were covered by a deal valued at roughly $60 million to $70 million for 300 to 400 units, or well under a quarter-million dollars apiece against aircraft that run into the tens of millions. That arithmetic is the reason these weapons keep reappearing in every conflict where a weaker side faces a stronger air force.

The reported deployment map is where the business consequences begin. Sources placed the missiles around Tehran, in Kermanshah and Isfahan, near the Iraqi Kurdistan border, and along the Strait of Hormuz. That last position sits directly over the world’s most important oil chokepoint, through which roughly a fifth of global petroleum passes daily. Naval escort work in the Gulf depends heavily on helicopters and drones flying low over tanker traffic — precisely the targets these systems were built to hit. Tanker owners and their underwriters price that risk into every voyage, and war-risk premiums on Gulf routes have been among the fastest-moving costs in shipping since the conflict began.

The second commercial exposure is civil aviation. The report said additional shoulder-fired missiles were moved over the past two weeks to Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq. Weapons that leave a state arsenal and enter a militia inventory are no longer tracked, and airlines and their insurers treat that distinction seriously. Commercial carriers have already been detouring around large stretches of Iranian and Iraqi airspace, adding flight hours, fuel burn and crew cost to Europe-Asia routings. Every credible report of loose air-defense missiles under a flight corridor extends those detours and the expense attached to them.

Behind the shipments sits a much larger procurement program. Iran signed an agreement in Moscow in December committing Russia to deliver 500 Verba launch units and 2,500 accompanying missiles over three years, at a cost of about €500 million — roughly $584 million at the time. Deliveries under that contract are scheduled in three batches running from 2027 through 2029, though some units may have arrived ahead of schedule. The Verba entered service in 2014 and is regarded as among the most capable systems of its kind, carrying a three-spectral seeker that makes it harder to defeat with standard aircraft countermeasures.

Getting the hardware into Iran is itself an industry. A procurement network sanctioned by the Treasury Department in May ran through Hong Kong, Belarus and Dubai, while a later reported deal moved through a different Hong Kong company and a route through Pakistan. For freight forwarders, shipping lines and trade-finance banks, that pattern translates into heavier counterparty screening across ordinary container traffic, since the cargo in question travels in small volumes inside otherwise unremarkable shipments.

Beijing has rejected the allegations. When earlier versions of the story surfaced in April, a Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington said China had not supplied weapons to either side and called the reporting inaccurate, urging Washington toward de-escalation instead.

The rebuilding effort follows months of losses. Iranian short-range air defenses were shredded during five months of American and Israeli strikes that exposed how vulnerable its fixed military installations were. Portable launchers are Tehran’s answer to that vulnerability: they cannot be bombed in place because they do not stay in place. For American and Israeli air operations, the practical effect is that low-altitude flying over Iran becomes more expensive in aircraft, in crews and in the countermeasure systems that will now be in higher demand across the defense supply chain.

For markets, the near-term signal to watch is not the missile count. It is whether Gulf war-risk insurance rates and regional airspace closures widen in response — the two channels through which a weapons transfer in the Caspian ends up in the price of energy and the cost of a flight.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Ralph Lauren raised its annual revenue forecast Thursday after quarterly sales beat Wall Street expectations, with growth in China topping 40% and North American sales also advancing strongly. The stock jumped about 7% after the results. 

The company reported quarterly revenue of $1.96 billion, ahead of the roughly $1.87 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings reached $4.59 a share, also above forecasts. Asia sales rose 24%, while North America increased 13% and Europe gained 7%. 

The bigger story is that Ralph Lauren is outperforming much of the luxury sector by selling aspiration without relying only on the very top end of the market.

The company has spent years moving away from heavy discounting and toward a more premium image, while still offering products across a wide enough price range to attract younger shoppers. That has helped it capture demand from consumers who want luxury branding but are not necessarily shopping at the same price points as traditional European fashion houses.

China has become especially important. Ralph Lauren said growth there exceeded 40%, helped by stronger brand awareness and events such as its first Polo Cup in Beijing. The performance stands out at a time when many global luxury companies have struggled with softer Chinese spending and weaker tourism. 

The North American numbers matter just as much. With sales up 13% in its largest market, the company is showing that affluent U.S. consumers are still spending selectively on premium apparel and accessories even as broader discretionary spending remains uneven.

For retailers and consumer brands, the lesson is increasingly clear: pricing power is strongest when it is backed by brand strength rather than constant promotions.

Ralph Lauren’s results suggest that companies able to protect their image, reduce discount dependence and stay relevant with younger customers can still grow even when the wider luxury market is under pressure.

JBizNews Desk | Consumer & Retail

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Protein-coffee company Javvy is exploring a sale that could value the business at about $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as demand for high-protein foods and drinks accelerates alongside the rapid adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. 

The South Carolina-based company has hired Houlihan Lokey to run an early-stage sale process. No deal is guaranteed, but the valuation being discussed is striking for a brand founded only in 2020. Javvy is generating nearly $300 million in annual revenue and has expanded into major retailers including Walmart, Target and Sprouts Farmers Market. 

What makes the story bigger than coffee is the way weight-loss drugs are beginning to reshape the packaged-food market.

GLP-1 users typically eat less, which initially looked like a threat to food manufacturers and restaurants. But it is also creating demand for products that deliver more protein and nutrition in smaller portions. Javvy’s protein coffee sits directly in that shift, offering caffeine and 10 grams of protein per serving in a format consumers already use daily. 

That gives strategic buyers a reason to pay attention. Large beverage and food companies are looking for faster-growing categories while many traditional packaged-food brands struggle with weak volumes and price-sensitive consumers. A company positioned around protein, convenience and weight-management trends can therefore command a premium even without decades of brand history.

The potential $1 billion valuation would equal a little more than three times Javvy’s reported annual revenue, underscoring how aggressively investors are pricing companies tied to health, functional beverages and changing eating habits.

Javvy also illustrates how quickly digital consumer brands can move into mainstream retail. The company says it now reaches roughly one in every 44 U.S. households and sells a product every seven to eight seconds. 

The deal process is still preliminary. But if Javvy attracts a buyer near the valuation being discussed, it would offer another sign that the GLP-1 economy is beginning to create winners far beyond pharmaceutical companies.

JBizNews Desk | Consumer & Deals

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Warner Bros. Discovery reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter revenue Thursday as its film studio and traditional television businesses both deteriorated, underscoring the pressure facing entertainment companies even as streaming continues to grow.

Total revenue fell to $8.72 billion, below the roughly $9.29 billion analysts expected. Studio revenue dropped 39%, while advertising revenue declined 22% as weaker box-office performance and the absence of NBA games weighed on results. 

The studio decline was driven in part by a tougher comparison with last year’s slate and disappointing performances from releases including Mortal Kombat II and Supergirl. At the same time, the television business faced heavy competition from the FIFA World Cup for both viewers and advertising dollars. 

The contrast inside Warner is becoming sharper: traditional media is shrinking while streaming is doing more of the work.

Streaming revenue rose 10%, helped by HBO Max’s international expansion and original programming. That growth was strong enough to show where the company’s future value increasingly sits, but not yet large enough to offset the decline in studios and legacy television. 

Warner still posted a surprise adjusted profit of 6 cents a share, helped by a 23% reduction in operating expenses. That means management is cutting costs fast enough to protect earnings even while top-line pressure remains significant. 

The results arrive as Warner moves deeper into a proposed $110 billion merger with Paramount Skydance. Britain cleared the transaction Thursday, leaving U.S. litigation as the major remaining obstacle. Twelve states are seeking to block the deal, with a federal trial scheduled for March 2027. 

For investors, that makes Warner increasingly difficult to value as a standalone media company. The operating business is still being dragged down by declining television economics and inconsistent film performance, while the merger offers a separate path toward greater streaming scale and cost savings if regulators ultimately allow it.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Kraft Heinz lifted its full-year sales forecast Wednesday after a quarter that beat Wall Street on both lines — and the improvement it is celebrating is that sales are shrinking less than expected rather than growing.

Quarterly net sales came in at $6.26 billion, down 1.4% from a year earlier but ahead of the $6.12 billion consensus, which had implied a 3.6% decline. Adjusted earnings of 56 cents a share fell 18.8% year over year while topping the 53 cents analysts forecast.

The company now expects organic sales to decline between 0.5% and 2.0% for the full year, an improvement over prior guidance of a 1.5% to 3.5% decline, with adjusted earnings per share of $2.03 to $2.09.

Spending Its Way Out

Chief Executive Steve Cahillane said results exceeded expectations across U.S. retail, global away-from-home and emerging markets, and that improving share performance gave the company confidence to raise its sales outlook. He announced an additional $100 million in incremental investment, bringing the 2026 total to roughly $700 million, arguing that the brands respond when the company spends behind them and that accelerating now positions the business better heading into 2027.

That money goes into marketing, sales, research and development, product superiority and pricing initiatives, with marketing spending reaching at least 6% of net sales.

The cost of that strategy is visible immediately. Operating income fell 18.4%, and the company booked a $7.4 billion non-cash impairment charge. Operating margin dropped 350 basis points. Shares slipped roughly 1% in premarket trading to $26.37.

For the third quarter, the company expects organic sales down 1% to 2.5% and adjusted operating income down 23% to 25%.

The Volume Problem

The strategic pivot underneath the numbers is the part worth watching for anyone tracking the packaged food sector.

Management is moving away from defensive pricing toward volume-led growth, using the $700 million to lift consumption rates and market share. The approach to pricing is described as surgical — focused on price-pack architecture and opening price points rather than broad cuts to base prices.

For several years, the entire packaged food industry papered over declining volumes by raising prices. Revenue held up while households bought fewer units. That trade has run out of room. Consumers have traded down to private label, shrunk basket sizes and stopped absorbing increases.

Kraft Heinz appears to have concluded that the only durable fix is getting units back into carts — and that it will cost several hundred million dollars in near-term profit to try.

There is early evidence it is working at the margin. Market share trends have stabilized, with a first-half decline of 30 basis points against losses of 90 basis points in early 2025.

North America Down, Overseas Up

The regional split explains the raised guidance. Improved coffee and ready-to-drink pricing plus 10.4% growth in emerging markets covered a 2.7% sales decline in North America. The Heinz brand grew 12% in emerging markets on distribution and consumption gains.

The full-year outlook assumes inflation running slightly above 4% and includes an expected 100-basis-point headwind tied to changes in federal food assistance benefits.

That last item is a real signal about the domestic consumer. When a company building a turnaround has to carve out a full percentage point of sales for reduced government food assistance, it is describing a customer base operating with less money for groceries.

Costs Ahead

Chief Financial Officer Andre Maciel flagged a specific risk for later this year. The company’s hedges on energy and edible oils extend through most of 2026, but protection on certain resins and metals expires around the middle of the third quarter. As those roll off, he said, the company expects greater exposure to spot prices in the fourth quarter.

Packaging costs, in other words, are about to reprice at whatever the market offers — in a period when energy-linked inputs have been climbing.

Year-to-date free cash flow reached $1.7 billion with 123% conversion, up 27 points from a year ago on favorable working capital changes. Net leverage held at 3.0 times, and the company returned $949 million to shareholders in dividends.

Cahillane, who took over in January, has pushed the portfolio toward protein-heavy foods and electrolyte drinks aimed at shoppers focused on health. He said the company is ahead of plan and focused on returning to volume-led, sustainable and profitable growth.

The word doing the work in that sentence is volume.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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eBay’s marketplace is growing faster as consumers lean into refurbished goods, collectibles, authenticated luxury products and secondhand fashion, giving the company fresh momentum at a time when many households remain selective about discretionary spending.

The company said second-quarter gross merchandise volume rose 15% from a year earlier to $22.4 billion, while revenue increased 15% to $3.13 billion. eBay now expects third-quarter revenue of $3.07 billion to $3.12 billion, above Wall Street expectations. 

The biggest driver is what eBay calls its “focus categories” — areas where it offers more specialized services such as authentication, warranties, condition standards or enthusiast-oriented inventory. Those categories include collectibles, motors, fashion and refurbished products.

For consumers, the shift means a larger supply of lower-cost alternatives to buying new.

Chief Executive Jamie Iannone said focus categories, consumer-to-consumer sales and re-commerce each grew about 20% and together now represent roughly 70% of eBay’s merchandise volume. That mix is important because it positions eBay differently from general-purpose retail platforms built primarily around new goods. 

The company is also expanding deeper into secondhand fashion through Depop, the resale platform it acquired this year. eBay said Depop is helping bring in younger shoppers and sellers while adding inventory that had not previously been available through the broader marketplace.

That strategy fits a larger consumer shift. When prices for new apparel, electronics and other discretionary products remain elevated, used and refurbished goods can become more attractive. Buyers get access to lower price points, while households can generate cash by reselling items they already own.

The opportunity is especially significant in electronics. eBay’s refurbished program includes products sold with condition standards, warranties and return protections, giving consumers an alternative between buying brand-new merchandise and taking the greater risk of an ordinary used-item transaction.

For sellers, faster marketplace growth also means a potentially larger audience for everything from smartphones and sneakers to watches, handbags and collectibles.

eBay expects third-quarter merchandise volume to grow 10% to 12%, including roughly 2.5 percentage points of contribution from Depop. The company also raised its expected full-year revenue growth rate, including the acquisition.

The broader takeaway for consumers is that resale is moving further into the mainstream. eBay is increasingly betting that shoppers looking to stretch their budgets will consider refurbished, authenticated and pre-owned products not as a fallback, but as a regular part of how they shop.

JBizNews Desk | San Jose, California

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A New Mexico judge ruled late Thursday that Meta must pay $567 million into a fund the state will use to treat and protect young people harmed by Facebook and Instagram — money that comes on top of $375 million a jury already ordered the company to pay in March. Added together, the two rulings put Meta on the hook for $942 million, and they mark the first time any American state has taken a social media company all the way through trial and won.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid created the fund after a two-phase trial found that Meta failed to protect young users and violated New Mexico’s consumer protection law. He described the fund as necessary given how widely the harm had spread and how complicated the fix would be. Most of the money — $420 million — goes to treatment services for young people, with the balance directed toward prevention, awareness campaigns, screening and related costs spread over the next five years.

The mechanism here is worth understanding, because it is not an ordinary fine. The state pursued a public nuisance claim, the same legal theory used against lead paint manufacturers and opioid distributors. Under that doctrine, the remedy is not a penalty for past conduct but an abatement order — a court directive requiring the company to clean up the condition it created. That distinction is why the ruling reaches into how the apps actually work.

Meta must keep improving its age-detection tools in New Mexico using artificial intelligence, and it has two years to attempt to build a dedicated model that predicts when a user is under 13. The company must also work with schools or a child safety organization to create a portal where school staff can report accounts that appear to belong to children under 13, and it must delete personal data it has already collected on those users. The judge further ordered Facebook and Instagram to add banners and information screens explaining the safety tools available to users. Meta has to report to the court twice a year on how the work is going.

In his ruling, Biedscheid wrote that while Meta is not the only company involved, its platforms are a significant contributing factor to the youth mental health crisis in New Mexico, and he pointed to expert testimony establishing a causal link between social media use and that crisis.

The jury phase in March had already gone badly for the company. Jurors found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about predators operating on its platforms. They identified thousands of violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a maximum penalty of $5,000, and the company said it disagreed with the verdict and intended to appeal. Attorney General Raúl Torrez brought the case in 2023 after his office ran an undercover operation using accounts posing as users under 14. Torrez called Thursday’s decision a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child.

For a company Meta’s size, the check itself barely registers. The full $942 million is a small slice of the roughly $60 billion in profit the company booked in 2025. Investors treated it accordingly, sending the stock down less than half a percent in after-hours trading Thursday to $589.44.

The real exposure is what comes next, and it is substantial. More than 40 states have sued Meta over child safety, and New Mexico is the only one whose case has reached trial so far. Later this month, Meta goes to federal court in Oakland to face the first four of 29 states that sued together in 2023, alleging the company knowingly built features that get children hooked. Eight more states filed in their own courts, including Tennessee, where a trial is already underway. Separately, families have brought suits against Meta alongside TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube.

That pipeline is what makes a $942 million ruling in a state of two million people matter to shareholders. Laura Edelson, a Northeastern University professor who studies social media, called the New Mexico outcome the first of many dominoes, noting that Congress is not going to ban social media — but that states have now found a workable way to hold companies accountable when product design causes harm.

If other courts follow the same route, the cost to Meta will not be measured in penalties. It will be measured in the engineering, verification and oversight requirements that get bolted onto its products, state by state, each one chipping away at the frictionless sign-up model the business was built on.

JBizNews Desk | Santa Fe

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Fox’s advertising revenue surged 78% to $1.92 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter, powered by the FIFA World Cup and showing just how valuable live sports have become as traditional television audiences continue to fragment.

Fox held the exclusive U.S. English-language broadcast rights to the tournament, which drew record audiences. Nearly 63 million U.S. viewers watched Spain defeat Argentina in the final, making it the most-watched World Cup match ever in the country. 

The tournament also created something broadcasters value almost as much as ratings: additional commercial inventory.

New hydration breaks effectively divided matches into more advertising windows, allowing Fox to monetize the same game more aggressively without adding another event to its schedule.

That helped lift total quarterly revenue to $4.21 billion, well above the roughly $3.64 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings reached $1.79 a share, also beating Wall Street estimates, and Fox shares rose more than 5%. 

The results illustrate a widening divide inside the media business. Scripted entertainment can be watched later, skipped or spread across multiple platforms. Major live sporting events still gather millions of viewers at the same moment, making them increasingly scarce advertising inventory.

That scarcity gives broadcasters pricing power.

Fox is also using sports as a customer-acquisition tool for its digital businesses. Its Fox One streaming service recorded 2.8 million sign-ups in June, its strongest month since launch, while Tubi revenue increased 35%. Management said the World Cup produced stronger subscriber acquisition and retention than expected. 

The challenge is that sports rights are expensive and getting more expensive. Networks must generate enough advertising, subscriptions and distribution revenue to justify increasingly large rights payments.

For now, Fox’s quarter shows why broadcasters continue bidding aggressively.

In a media market where audiences are increasingly difficult to assemble, live sports remain one of the few products capable of delivering tens of millions of consumers to advertisers at the same time.

JBizNews Desk | Media & Advertising

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The cost of protecting against a sharp move in the dollar climbed Thursday as traders positioned for Friday’s employment report without the usual level of guidance from the Federal Reserve about what could come next.

Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has deliberately moved away from the central bank’s longstanding reliance on forward guidance, arguing that officials should avoid signaling a rate path when economic conditions are changing quickly. The Fed formally dropped forward guidance from its policy statement in June, and Warsh has continued with shorter statements and fewer clues about future rate decisions. 

That has made individual economic reports more powerful.

When markets have a relatively clear sense of where the Fed is headed, companies and investors can hedge currencies around a narrower range of expected outcomes. When the Fed leaves more uncertainty, every major inflation or employment report has greater potential to move interest rates and the dollar.

For businesses with overseas revenue or expenses, that uncertainty has a direct price.

Currency options effectively operate as insurance against an unfavorable exchange-rate move. When expected volatility rises, those options become more expensive. That means importers, exporters, manufacturers and distributors can face higher hedging costs before the underlying currency has moved significantly at all.

The Fed’s quieter communication strategy is therefore changing an ordinary operating expense for companies doing business internationally.

The immediate test is Friday’s July employment report. Economists expect payroll growth of roughly 80,000 following a 57,000 increase in June, with unemployment around 4.2%.

A stronger report could reinforce expectations that the Fed will keep rates elevated or consider another increase, potentially strengthening the dollar. A weak report could push rate expectations and the dollar in the opposite direction.

The yen is particularly sensitive.

The dollar traded around ¥158 on Thursday after extraordinary intervention by the United States and Japan last week to support the Japanese currency. The joint operation marked the first coordinated U.S.-Japan yen intervention in nearly three decades. 

The intervention showed how seriously both governments view disorderly currency moves. The yen’s weakness has been driven partly by the large difference between U.S. and Japanese interest rates, which encourages investors to borrow cheaply in yen and place money in higher-yielding dollar assets.

That strategy, known as the carry trade, can become unstable when the yen suddenly strengthens. Investors may be forced to unwind leveraged positions quickly, creating volatility across currencies, bonds and equities.

Japan’s changing interest-rate environment adds another layer. Stronger wages are giving the Bank of Japan greater room to continue raising rates, which could narrow the U.S.-Japan rate gap and reduce the incentive to remain heavily positioned against the yen.

Japanese investors have also begun reducing some U.S. debt exposure. They sold a net ¥4.67 trillion, or about $29.6 billion, of U.S. government, agency and local-authority debt during the first quarter, the largest quarterly sale in nearly four years. 

That matters because Japan remains one of the largest foreign sources of demand for U.S. debt. Reduced overseas buying can add upward pressure to Treasury yields, which eventually feeds through to mortgages, business loans and other borrowing costs.

For now, the market is waiting on one number.

Friday’s jobs report will provide the first major test of the Fed’s less predictable communication strategy — and determine whether traders were right to pay more for protection.

— JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to eliminate the rule that prevented any one television-station owner from reaching more than 39% of U.S. television households, removing a restriction that for decades shaped how large broadcast companies could grow.

The 2-1 decision matters because the cap was not simply a regulatory percentage. It directly influenced dealmaking.

A broadcaster that approached the 39% threshold could still buy additional stations, but often only by selling other properties, restructuring ownership or relying on regulatory exemptions. That limited how aggressively companies could assemble national station portfolios even when the economics of a transaction otherwise worked.

Removing the cap changes that calculation. Broadcasters can now think about scale nationally without automatically running into a federal ownership ceiling.

The FCC said the restriction no longer reflects the competitive environment facing local television stations. Traditional broadcasters now compete for viewers and advertising against streaming services, social-media platforms, digital video companies and technology firms that were never subject to the same ownership limits.

That shift has steadily weakened the commercial logic behind treating local television as an isolated market. A station group with greater national reach can spread programming, technology, advertising sales and administrative costs across more markets, potentially making each station more profitable.

It can also make station portfolios more valuable.

For an acquirer, the ability to buy a large group of stations without immediately divesting assets can increase the strategic value of both individual stations and entire broadcasting companies. Larger groups may also have more leverage when negotiating advertising, retransmission fees and programming contracts.

The decision arrives as consolidation is already reshaping local television. Nexstar’s acquisition of Tegna demonstrated how valuable national scale has become in a business where local stations increasingly need size to compete with much larger digital platforms.

There is still a legal question hanging over the FCC’s move. Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez argued that Congress, not the commission, has authority over the national ownership threshold. That could leave the rule vulnerable to court challenges or future congressional action.

For now, however, the commercial message is clear.

A regulatory ceiling that once determined how large a U.S. television-station group could become has effectively disappeared, potentially setting up a new round of broadcast mergers and acquisitions.

For station owners, private-equity firms and media companies, the change could mean more buyers, larger deals and higher strategic valuations for local television assets.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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President Donald Trump has been picking up the phone to Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, speaking with him by telephone a number of times since Warsh was sworn in this spring, according to people familiar with the conversations. The two have talked multiple times since Warsh was confirmed in May, with the president asking about Warsh’s forecasts and views rather than pressing him toward any particular decision, one person said, speaking anonymously to describe private discussions. Two others described the contact as irregular and infrequent, and it is not clear whether monetary policy itself has come up.

The calls were first reported Thursday by the Wall Street Journal and picked up by Bloomberg. People familiar with the pattern said the president calls in bursts — several times in a single week, then nothing for stretches — and has sought Warsh’s read on how the war with Iran and the buildout of artificial intelligence are hitting the economy. Interest rates themselves have not been part of those discussions since Warsh’s Senate confirmation, according to people cited in the reporting.

The White House said the president has been deliberate about leaving the new chairman room to work. Spokesman Kush Desai said Trump has repeatedly stressed that he is giving Warsh the space he needs to restore confidence in Fed decision-making, and has reaffirmed both the chairman and the central bank’s independence, while retaining the right to voice his own views. The Fed declined to comment.

Here is why business owners and borrowers care about something as ordinary as a phone call. The Federal Reserve sets the short-term interest rate that ripples through nearly every price of credit in the country — business loans, mortgages, car notes, credit card balances. The institution was built so that the officials setting that rate do not answer to whoever occupies the White House, on the theory that borrowing costs decided for political convenience eventually show up as higher inflation. Presidents appoint the chairman and the Senate confirms him, but day-to-day contact between the two offices has traditionally been kept sparse and formal. Calls and meetings between presidents and Fed chairs have happened before, though historically they have been rare.

What makes the current arrangement worth watching is that the two men are publicly on opposite sides of the rate question.

Warsh took over from Jerome Powell in May when Powell’s term expired. Trump nominated him after a year of hammering Powell for not cutting rates fast enough. Warsh, 55, served as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, becoming the youngest governor in the institution’s history at 35, and came to the job from the Hoover Institution and Stanford’s business school after calling openly for a shakeup of how the central bank runs.

That shakeup has not yet produced the cheaper money the president wants. At its July 29 meeting the Fed left its benchmark rate in a range of 3.5% to 3.75%, the fifth straight meeting without a change. The vote was 9-3, with the presidents of the Cleveland, Minneapolis and Dallas regional banks dissenting in favor of raising rates a quarter point. That was the most dissents pointing in a single direction since September 2016. Inflation has stayed high largely because of the Iran war and the spike in energy prices that came with it.

Trump’s public reaction to that decision was measured. Asked at the White House whether he was disappointed, he said Warsh is “fantastic, but he’s got a board,” describing the committee as political and inclined to keep rates where they are.

Warsh has been rewriting how the Fed talks to the outside world, shortening its post-meeting statements and stepping back from the practice of telegraphing where rates are headed. He told reporters the Fed has no quick fix for inflation and said he welcomed the internal argument at the July meeting. He also acknowledged that the reduced signaling has moved the bond market, where the 10-year Treasury yield climbed from about 4.50% in mid-June to 4.64% just before the rate decision.

For companies waiting on financing, the practical picture is unchanged by the reporting. Rates are sitting near 3.6%, and about three-quarters of traders expect a rate increase in September — a move up, not down. The next Fed decision comes in September, and the calls, however frequent, have not altered the direction the committee is leaning.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Boeing’s relationship with federal regulators continues to normalize, but the FAA is making clear that routine oversight is back in full force. The agency has proposed mandatory inspections of passenger-seat installations on hundreds of Boeing 737 Max aircraft, a move that highlights the difference between ordinary regulatory scrutiny and the systemic manufacturing failures that once defined the program.

The Federal Aviation Administration published a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register on July 27 covering the 737-8, 737-9 and 737-8200. If finalized, the proposal would require operators to inspect passenger-seat track fittings throughout affected aircraft and correct any improperly installed assemblies before they create a safety risk.

The Safety Concern

The FAA’s concern is straightforward: passenger seats that are not fully engaged with the aircraft’s floor tracks could detach during severe turbulence, heavy loading or an emergency landing. Beyond the immediate risk of injury, a loose seat could block an aisle during an evacuation, turning a maintenance defect into a potentially life-threatening emergency.

Although the proposal stems from a reported installation issue, the FAA concluded the condition could exist on other aircraft built to the same design standard, prompting it to extend the inspection requirement across the broader fleet.

The Business Impact

The proposal affects 453 aircraft and requires inspections of approximately 69 passenger-seat assemblies per airplane. The FAA estimates the total inspection cost at just over $2.65 million.

Financially, however, the maintenance expense is not the story.

The directive places responsibility on airlines because operators—not manufacturers—are responsible for maintaining aircraft in an airworthy condition. Whether carriers ultimately recover those costs from Boeing becomes a commercial matter rather than a regulatory one. Boeing said it had already issued inspection guidance to airlines in December 2025 and supports making those procedures mandatory.

For airlines, the larger challenge is operational. Scheduling inspections across hundreds of aircraft during periods of heavy travel can temporarily reduce fleet availability even when the repair itself is relatively inexpensive.

Boeing’s Regulatory Recovery Continues

The timing is particularly notable because it comes as Boeing continues rebuilding its standing with federal regulators.

Earlier this month, the FAA restored the company’s authority to issue airworthiness certificates across all 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner aircraft—responsibility the agency reclaimed following the 2019 Max accidents and later production-quality concerns involving the 787.

Rather than immediately returning certification authority, the FAA spent months alternating certification responsibilities with Boeing, comparing inspection results before concluding the company’s manufacturing performance had reached the required standard. The agency has emphasized that audits, factory inspections and oversight of Boeing’s safety culture will continue.

That broader regulatory backdrop changes how investors are likely to interpret the latest proposal.

Stronger Operations Overshadow Routine Oversight

The seat inspection notice arrived just as Boeing reported second-quarter earnings that showed continued operational improvement despite ongoing financial challenges.

Revenue rose to $24.6 billion, commercial aircraft deliveries increased 14 percent from a year earlier, and the company’s order backlog reached a record $715 billion, representing more than 6,200 commercial airplanes. Boeing also generated $631 million in free cash flow, its strongest quarterly delivery performance since 2018.

Investors focused on improving production rates and cash generation, sending shares higher following the earnings report despite another quarterly loss.

What It Means for Business

For airlines, the proposal is primarily a maintenance scheduling issue rather than a major financial burden.

For Boeing, the significance lies in what the FAA’s action does not represent. Unlike the structural, certification and manufacturing failures that dominated headlines in recent years, this proposal reflects routine regulatory oversight of an identified maintenance concern—precisely the type of issue aviation regulators regularly address across the industry.

That distinction matters.

The FAA is no longer responding to a crisis that questions whether the 737 Max should remain in service. Instead, it is carrying out the day-to-day oversight expected of any mature commercial aircraft program. Against the backdrop of restored certification authority, rising production and record backlog, the proposal suggests Boeing has entered a different phase of its recovery—one where ordinary regulatory scrutiny, rather than extraordinary intervention, is becoming the norm.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Senate investigators have obtained a copy of the iPhone Dr. Anthony Fauci used while running the government’s Covid-19 response, adding a potentially significant cache of records to a widening congressional inquiry. The Department of Health and Human Services transferred the device to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. According to Johnson’s spokesperson, the phone was used by Fauci during his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The disclosure landed hours before a separate escalation. On Thursday morning, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5, with two additional no votes by proxy, to approve a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress. The vote fell along party lines, with all Democrats opposed.

What the Contempt Vote Does

The resolution follows Fauci’s July 29 appearance before the committee under subpoena, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times and declined to answer any question posed to him.

Ordinarily, a committee contempt resolution advances to the full Senate before any referral to prosecutors. Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told CBS News he intends to bypass that step and send the resolution directly to the Justice Department as a referral. Under the standard route, a floor vote would be subject to the filibuster; if the Senate did vote to hold Fauci in contempt, the Justice Department would decide whether to prosecute. A conviction carries penalties of up to $100,000 in fines and one to 12 months in prison.

Paul framed Thursday’s vote narrowly. He told the panel the question before it was “whether to hold a witness responsible for his contempt toward Congress” — not, he said, Fauci’s pandemic policies or public statements.

The Pardon Is the Legal Crux

The dispute turns on an unusual legal question, and it is worth spelling out because both sides are making a coherent argument.

Fauci received a pardon from President Joe Biden covering any offense from Jan. 1, 2014, through Jan. 19, 2025 — a grant Biden described as preemptive, given Republican scrutiny of Fauci. Republicans argue that immunity removes the risk of self-incrimination, and therefore removes the basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment. If you cannot be prosecuted, the reasoning goes, you cannot incriminate yourself.

Democrats counter that the protection survives the pardon. Ranking member Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., wrote to colleagues that a federal pardon does not extinguish Fifth Amendment protection where a witness still faces a “real and appreciable” risk of federal or state prosecution. That argument has practical weight: at least four Republican-led states have opened their own investigations into Fauci, and the 2025 pardon would not shield him from prosecution over anything said in present-day testimony.

Peters also warned of precedent. He argued that punishing a witness for asserting a constitutional protection would give future witnesses grounds to refuse to appear at all, and that they would cite this vote as justification. Democrats attempted repeatedly to table or postpone Thursday’s vote and were blocked by the Republican majority.

Fauci has characterized the inquiry in blunt terms. In his opening statement last week, he said Paul has “an unhinged obsession” with him and suggested the hearing was convened to trap him into lying under oath.

Why the Phone Matters

A device copy is materially different from a document production. Paper records are curated — someone decides what is responsive and what is not. A phone image captures text messages, call logs, app data and deleted-but-recoverable material in one pass, without an intermediary selecting what investigators see.

The phone follows an earlier transfer that reshaped the inquiry. Paul’s committee released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s personal journals covering 2019 to 2022. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he located the files on government servers after an eight-month search and handed them to Paul and Johnson. The entries chronicled Fauci’s media appearances and interactions with journalists and public figures, alongside his concerns about the virus and frustrations with the federal response.

More may be coming. Paul and Johnson have received millions of additional Fauci-related pages from government servers and continue to press for more. Johnson said publicly that he hopes the device will answer questions Fauci declined to address at last week’s hearing.

The Unresolved Question Underneath

The investigation’s central allegation — that U.S.-funded research in Wuhan contributed to the pandemic’s emergence — remains contested rather than settled. A 2025 World Health Organization report, produced over three years by the 27-member Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, addressed the question directly, and its conclusions have not ended the debate in Washington.

For business readers, the durable takeaway sits slightly to the side of the political fight. This case is becoming a working test of how federal records law applies to personal devices used for official business, and of whether a pardon can be leveraged to compel testimony. Both questions have implications well beyond public health — for any executive, contractor or agency official whose work communications live on a personal phone.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Anduril Industries is in advanced talks to build a drone boat production site at Sparrows Point, the 3,300-acre former Bethlehem Steel complex in Baltimore County, in a deal that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and return shipbuilding work to one of the East Coast’s largest deep-water industrial sites.

The defense manufacturer has signed a memorandum of understanding with the operators of the yard, according to reporting published Monday by The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the discussions. The facility would handle both manufacturing and on-water testing of the company’s unmanned surface vessels.

No lease has been signed, and the people cautioned that the talks could still fall apart. The office of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has been involved in the discussions, and any agreement would likely carry state incentives to offset Anduril’s costs. A spokesman for Moore declined to comment. A spokesman for Tradepoint Atlantic, which owns Sparrows Point, did not respond to requests for comment.

The site’s recent history is one of reinvention. Investors began acquiring the former Bethlehem Steel property in 2014 for redevelopment and renamed it Tradepoint Atlantic. It now hosts fulfillment and logistics operations for retailers including Amazon and Home Depot, and two years ago it served as the staging ground for rerouted cargo traffic and wreckage recovery after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse — a role that demonstrated the site’s deep-water capacity under emergency conditions. Its shipbuilding past runs deeper still: a 32,000-ton vessel launched at Sparrows Point in 1956 was at the time the largest cargo ship in the country.

Geography is a substantial part of the appeal. A Baltimore-area production site would put Anduril’s boat manufacturing within reach of Washington and of the Coast Guard’s largest shipyard, making testing and integration with the Coast Guard fleet considerably simpler, one of the people familiar with the matter said. That proximity matters for a product line still working its way through certification and fielding.

Anduril’s maritime operation is young and geographically thin. The company revamped a Seattle shipyard for low-rate production, and prototypes of the vessel it is developing with South Korea’s HD Hyundai Heavy Industries are being built in Korea. It also holds a partnership with United Kingdom-based Kraken Technology Group. A Maryland facility would be its first East Coast production capacity for the category.

The push comes despite a recent setback. Anduril lost a Navy competition for medium-size drone boats, an award that left out several bidders and prompted defense-technology executives to take complaints to Congress and, in some cases, to sue the government. Anduril is not among the companies suing.

Entering unmanned surface vessels also puts a large, well-capitalized manufacturer into a field crowded with startups competing for Navy work — including BlackSea Technologies, already based in Baltimore. Anduril has expanded into nearly every corner of defense contracting, from jets to submarines to counterdrone systems, and it now arrives in a market where smaller firms have been the incumbents.

The capital behind the expansion is considerable. Anduril closed a $5 billion round in May at a $61 billion valuation, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, and has been working to roughly double capacity across its weapons-systems production. Reuters reported on July 24 that the company is in talks for a further raise that could value it near $100 billion, potentially structured in two tranches. That balance sheet is what makes a nine-figure commitment to an idle industrial site plausible.

Demand is the other half of the equation. Drone boats have moved from experiment to fielded capability for militaries worldwide — Ukraine used them to significant effect against Russian forces in the Black Sea, and the U.S. military’s own wartime debut came in the conflict with Iran, where autonomous vessels built by Saronic recovered two Apache crew members after their helicopter was shot down and carried out strikes on Iranian shipping and submarine infrastructure. Surveillance, however, remains the dominant use.

For Maryland, the calculation is straightforward. Sparrows Point employed generations of steelworkers and shipbuilders before the industry left, and the redevelopment that followed has leaned heavily on warehousing and logistics — sectors that generate volume but comparatively modest wages. Advanced manufacturing at scale would change that mix, and it would do so on a site that already carries the berthing, rail access and acreage that took a century to assemble and cannot be easily rebuilt elsewhere.

Whether it happens turns on terms that have not been agreed. The memorandum of understanding is a framework, not a commitment, and the incentive package that would likely accompany any deal has yet to surface publicly. What the talks confirm is that the Navy’s appetite for uncrewed hulls has outrun the handful of small yards currently building them, and that the search for capacity has turned toward the industrial waterfronts the country stopped using.

JBizNews Desk | Baltimore

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Booking Holdings told investors this week that elevated airfares and thinned-out flight schedules will keep weighing on international travel through the third quarter, even as the online travel giant beat expectations across every major line of its second-quarter results.

The Norwalk, Connecticut company said its outlook assumes the indirect effects of the Middle East conflict — higher flight ticket prices, reduced flight capacity on certain routes, and softer long-haul international demand — will persist through the current quarter. It continues to expect pressure on inbound travel to the region, while demand from travelers booking within the Middle East has largely returned to normal.

Chief Executive Glenn Fogel said travel demand held up remarkably well even with airfares and capacity constraints pressing on long-haul routes, and the numbers back that up — the drag is showing up in where people go, not whether they go.

The Quarter Itself Was Strong

Adjusted earnings came in at $2.54 a share against consensus near $2.43 to $2.45, with revenue up 8.1% year over year to $7.35 billion, ahead of the $7.19 billion analysts expected. Adjusted EBITDA reached roughly $2.6 billion, a 9% increase, and adjusted earnings per share climbed 15%, helped by buybacks that pulled the share count down 6%.

Shareholders got the largest quarterly return in company history. Booking sent back $4.1 billion in the quarter, including $3.7 billion in repurchases, bringing first-half buybacks to $7.4 billion. The board also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.42 a share, payable September 30 to holders of record on September 11, with $14.5 billion still authorized for repurchases as of June 30.

Management raised the target for annual savings from its transformation program to $650 million from $550 million, with most of the additional $100 million expected to land in 2027.

Domestic Holds, International Sags

The split in the results is the real story for anyone watching consumer travel spending.

Domestic room nights grew at high-single-digit rates worldwide, while international room nights rose only slightly under continued pressure on long-haul trips. The U.S. market posted high-single-digit growth; Europe, Asia and the rest of the world each grew at mid-single-digit rates.

That is a familiar pattern when airfares spike. Travelers do not cancel the trip — they shorten the flight. Weekend drives, regional hops and domestic hotel stays absorb demand that would otherwise have gone transatlantic or transpacific.

Booking trimmed its full-year gross bookings outlook, attributing the change mainly to weaker growth in flight ticket sales. For the full year, the company still projects gross bookings, revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at high-single-digit rates on a reported basis, with adjusted earnings per share rising in the low-to-mid-teens. On a constant-currency basis, management said the outlook matches its original plan despite months of conflict-related disruption.

Fares May Not Come Back Down

The airfare pressure Booking is describing is not solely a war-driven phenomenon, and that matters for how long the drag lasts.

Carriers are still flying tighter schedules than before the pandemic in some markets — fewer routes, reduced frequency, and in certain cases aircraft or staffing limits — while leaning harder on dynamic pricing that adjusts fares in real time. Airlines are also releasing fewer discounted seats and holding the lowest fare classes for shorter windows, so the cheap inventory sells out faster.

The structural shift runs deeper still. Delta has told investors that cheaper fuel will not necessarily translate into cheaper tickets, citing premium demand, tighter capacity and shrinking budget competition. Ultra-low-cost carriers have pulled roughly 30% of their capacity out of the industry, leaving fewer inexpensive seats and giving the largest airlines room to hold fares where they are.

For Booking, that means the headwind may outlast the conflict that triggered it.

AI in the Cost Line

One bright spot came from the company’s technology spending. Booking reported a double-digit reduction in customer service cost per booking from its AI initiatives, along with improved developer productivity, while customer satisfaction scores held up. Management also flagged ongoing search-engine pressure across consumer internet as a headwind to direct traffic, though it represents a small share of overall room nights.

The company’s mobile app share reached the high 50% range on a trailing twelve-month basis, up from the mid-50s a year earlier.

Shares traded around $194 this week, within a 52-week range of $150.14 to $231.80.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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OpenAI and its subsidiary Statsig agreed Tuesday to pay $3.2 million and change how they recruit for certain technology jobs after the Justice Department alleged that their hiring process favored foreign workers while making it harder for Americans to apply.

The settlement covers fewer than 10 positions, but the size of the penalty turns the case into a warning for companies using the federal permanent-labor-certification process to sponsor employees for green cards. Employers must demonstrate that qualified U.S. workers are not available, and the government said OpenAI and Statsig instead created barriers that discouraged domestic applicants.

According to the Justice Department, some positions were not posted on the companies’ public career websites, applicants were required to submit paper applications rather than use the electronic process available for ordinary openings, and certain jobs were advertised through late-night radio announcements.

OpenAI denied wrongdoing but agreed to pay $1.2 million in civil penalties and establish a $2 million back-pay fund for U.S. workers who may have been affected. The company must also post qualifying positions publicly, accept electronic applications, revise its employment policies, train staff and submit to federal monitoring.

The financial cost is modest for OpenAI, but the compliance implications extend across the technology industry. Companies cannot treat federally required recruitment as a technical exercise designed only to preserve sponsorship for an existing employee. The hiring process must give American applicants a genuine opportunity to find the position, apply through practical channels and receive fair consideration.

The settlement also raises the risk for employers whose immigration recruitment differs sharply from their normal hiring practices. Requiring mailed applications for sponsored positions while accepting digital résumés for comparable jobs can itself draw scrutiny, particularly when the role is not displayed where the company ordinarily advertises vacancies.

The case arrives as Washington increases pressure on companies accused of using immigration programs to bypass American workers. For businesses that rely on foreign talent, the message is not that sponsorship must stop, but that every step used to establish a shortage of qualified domestic applicants must withstand government review.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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Renewable fuels have stopped costing American refiners money and started making it. Valero Energy’s Renewable Diesel segment delivered $717 million in operating income in the second quarter, reversing a $79 million loss in the same quarter a year earlier, while its Ethanol segment posted $318 million against $54 million. Renewable diesel margin climbed to $879 million from $54 million, and operating income per gallon sold swung to $2.06 from a loss of 32 cents.

That is a complete inversion of the business as it stood two years ago, when the same category was the line item refiners apologized for on earnings calls.

The Mandate Did It

The turn is regulatory, not technological. Federal blending requirements set a volume of renewable fuel that must enter the national fuel supply, and refiners who blend more than their obligation can sell the resulting compliance credits to those who blend less. When the required volumes rise, the credits get scarce and the price rises with them.

D4 credits cover biodiesel and renewable diesel; D6 credits cover corn ethanol. Their prices have climbed more than 80 percent this year to over $2 each. Roughly 2.02 billion credits were generated under the standard in May, up nearly 4 percent year over year, with 9.66 billion generated across the first five months of 2026.

The mechanism cuts both ways for the industry. Refiners with blending capacity earn on the credits. Refiners without it buy them at whatever the market demands. Forty small refinery exemption petitions remain pending at the EPA, and how those are resolved will determine how much obligated volume actually gets enforced.

The Wider Recovery

Valero is not alone. HF Sinclair’s renewable diesel operation posted a $133 million profit in the first quarter after a $17 million loss a year earlier, and Phillips 66 sharply narrowed losses in its renewable fuels division. Phillips 66 reports second-quarter results today, with consensus estimates around $7.68 per share against a far weaker year-ago quarter.

The contrast with 2024 is stark. Chevron idled two Midwest biodiesel plants that year over poor market conditions, and Vertex Energy halted renewable diesel production at its Mobile, Alabama refinery to return to conventional fuels. Capacity built during the expansion of the early 2020s ran into demand that never materialized at the volumes projected, and the writedowns followed.

What changed is not that demand caught up on its own. It is that the government wrote a floor under it.

The War Complicates The Picture

Diesel prices have risen 46 percent since the war with Iran began, and with supplies tight, conventional diesel currently offers stronger short-term returns than expanding renewable output. A refiner with flexible processing capacity has a live choice each month between maximizing conventional diesel at war-inflated prices and running renewable feedstock for credit revenue.

That choice caps how far the renewable recovery can run. The mandate guarantees a minimum, not a ceiling, and if conventional margins stay where the conflict has pushed them, production is likely to sit near the compliance floor rather than climbing well above it.

Feedstock costs are the other constraint. Strong demand for soybean oil combined with reduced soy crushing capacity could push feedstock prices higher, which would discourage biodiesel and renewable diesel production. Renewable diesel economics are essentially a spread between feedstock in and credit-inclusive product value out, and the input side is exposed to an agricultural market with its own weather and trade risks.

What It Means Locally

For tri-state readers, the credit market is not abstract. New York City’s bioheat law steps up the biodiesel content required in heating oil over the coming years, and heating oil distributors serving the five boroughs and surrounding counties buy into blends whose cost tracks the same D4 credit market now trading above $2. Credit prices that have risen more than 80 percent this year flow through to what building owners pay next heating season.

Regional fuel distributors with blending capability sit on the favorable side of that trade. Those buying finished blended product do not.

Valero produced $5.6 billion in operating cash flow for the quarter and returned $2.6 billion to shareholders while holding its roughly $2 billion capital spending plan for 2026. The company guided to about 335 million gallons of renewable diesel sales in the third quarter. That is a business generating cash, not a business being rebuilt — and the difference between those two descriptions is the whole story.

JBizNews Desk | Houston

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Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet have committed approximately $1.09 trillion to future lease payments, largely for data centers still under construction or not yet operational.

The obligations are disclosed in regulatory filings but generally do not appear as lease liabilities until the facilities are ready for use. That means the financial scale of the AI buildout is far larger than standard balance-sheet figures suggest.

The five companies currently report about $285 billion in recognized lease liabilities. Their pending commitments are nearly four times that amount.

Microsoft leads with approximately $329.1 billion, followed by Meta at nearly $279 billion, Oracle at roughly $260 billion, Amazon at $137.2 billion and Alphabet at $85.2 billion.

The commitments extend beyond annual capital spending. Many run for 15 years or longer, locking companies into payments even if AI demand slows, technology changes or major customers reduce spending.

The structure allows technology companies to expand faster without paying the full cost of each data center upfront. Developers secure land, electricity and construction financing, while Big Tech signs long-term leases for the finished capacity.

Oracle carries the clearest risk. Its pending lease commitments are nearly seven times its recognized lease liabilities, while the company already has substantial debt and negative free cash flow from infrastructure spending.

Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet have stronger balance sheets, but their commitments still show that the AI race is increasingly being financed through long-term contracts rather than only cash spending.

Meta faces a different challenge because much of its infrastructure supports its own advertising and AI products rather than a large public-cloud business. Its returns therefore depend heavily on internal revenue growth.

The commercial case remains strong. Cloud revenue continues rising rapidly, and Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all said customer demand exceeds available computing capacity.

The danger is that companies are making decade-long commitments based on assumptions that AI use will keep growing at extraordinary rates.

More efficient models, cheaper chips, electricity shortages or slower corporate adoption could reduce demand while lease payments remain fixed.

The $1.09 trillion total does not represent hidden misconduct. It shows how accounting rules and financing structures can delay when major obligations appear on company balance sheets.

Big Tech is no longer experimenting with artificial intelligence. It is signing contracts that assume the boom will continue well into the next decade.

If demand holds, the leases will support one of the largest infrastructure expansions in corporate history. If it does not, they could become the AI boom’s most expensive legacy.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The Trump administration’s agreement to finance Alaska’s Ambler Mining District while taking an ownership stake in the company developing it is creating a model that could reshape how Washington supports strategic industries. Instead of simply approving a project, the federal government is positioning itself to profit from it.

The framework was established in October 2025 when the U.S. Department of War, using Title III of the Defense Production Act, agreed to invest $35.6 million in Trilogy Metals in exchange for an initial 10% ownership stake, with warrants that could increase its position if key milestones are met. The transaction’s closing deadline was extended from May 31 to July 31, 2026, to allow completion of final documentation. 

At the center of the agreement is the Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile industrial road connecting the mineral-rich Ambler Mining District to Alaska’s Dalton Highway. The district contains one of America’s largest undeveloped deposits of copper, zinc, lead, cobalt and silver—minerals considered critical for defense manufacturing, electric grids and advanced technologies—but currently lacks road access. 

What makes the arrangement unusual is the government’s dual role. Washington is both a financial investor and one of the principal authorities overseeing permits that determine whether the project proceeds. That combination of regulatory authority and financial interest has attracted close attention from lawyers, investors and mining executives because it represents a significant departure from traditional federal permitting.

The investment also provides Washington with meaningful influence over Trilogy Metals. Beyond its equity position, the agreement allows the Department of War to appoint an independent director to Trilogy’s board for three years. The company also faces restrictions on taking on more than $1 billion in third-party borrowings without federal approval through early 2029. South32, Trilogy’s joint venture partner, agreed to sell millions of shares to the government while granting a long-term option to acquire additional shares once the Ambler road is completed. 

That structure creates an incentive rarely seen in modern American infrastructure policy. If the road is built, the government’s investment becomes substantially more valuable. In effect, Washington’s financial return is tied directly to the success of a project whose regulatory future it also helps shape.

Ambler appears to be part of a broader strategy rather than a one-time transaction. The administration has expanded direct federal participation in critical mineral projects, including investments involving MP Materials, while proposing a multibillion-dollar critical minerals reserve intended to strengthen domestic supply chains and reduce dependence on foreign producers. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has also suggested the federal government could invest directly in construction of the Ambler Access Road itself. 

Investors have responded enthusiastically. Trilogy Metals shares surged more than 200% after the original announcement, and additional permitting milestones later pushed the stock higher. The market has effectively treated federal participation as a powerful de-risking event, assigning higher valuations to companies receiving direct government backing. 

Federal permitting has continued moving forward. The Arctic Project received FAST-41 status after a Clean Water Act permit application was filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, establishing an accelerated and more transparent federal review process. Congress has also reauthorized the Defense Production Act, preserving the legal authority supporting the government’s strategic investment program. 

The proposal continues to face significant opposition. Environmental organizations and many Indigenous communities argue the road would disrupt migration routes used by the Western Arctic Caribou Herd while affecting subsistence hunting and fishing across northwest Alaska. Those objections remain unresolved and could continue to generate legal challenges as permitting advances.