United States
Companies
Polymarket CEO has phone seized by FBI.
Biden admin pushes to support Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s US plants before Trump admin enters.
Regulation
A new research paper published suggests that 75% of US adults are overweight or obese (subscription). As the NY Times suggests this has wide-reaching implications for US health, medical costs and regulation.
CFTC awards $4m to two whistleblowers.
FTC goes after advance cash app Dave for deceiving customers.
Canada
The Federal Government has ordered a CRTC review of service reselling on the Rogers, Bell and Telus networks.
China
The Chinese government has “prepared powerful countermeasures” to prepare itself for a potential trade war with the US. It is not a good sign for global trade flows.
EU
Shell won an appeal against an order made in 2021 that would have forced it to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
International
France and Argentina withdrew from the COP29 summit (subscription), presumably for very different reasons, but the withdrawals highlighted increasing division on fighting climate change. The shrunken G7 delegations, which the FT indicated “did not bode well for a strong new global finance goal” were interpreted by us as a welcome downsizing given the fact that the total number of attendees still topped 65,000.
US natural gas exports to EU could mollify expected tariff strategies from the incoming Trump administration.
Switzerland
Credit Suisse “ran out of trust” is the conclusion reached by Duncan Mavin in a very interesting essay on the bank’s demise published by Reuters. While the author’s conclusion that the “industry doesn’t learn from its mistakes” is debatable, what the essay certainly seems to highlight is that banking is still a “reputation” game first and foremost. The essay and efforts by bankers to still the reputational crisis that engulfed the bank brought to mind one of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quotes, published in Poor Richard’s Almanack all the way back in 1750: “Glass, China, and Reputation, are easily crack’d, and never well mended.”
United Kingdom
Planned pension reforms likely to create pension megafunds in the UK. These funds are expected to deliver billions of pounds of investment in the UK economy.