There’s a lot of epidemiological data about breastfeeding in particular reducing the risk of triple negative breast cancer. But also just it’s plausible because as you can imagine, there’s a lot of interaction between the baby and the…
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The Federal Reserve’s top banking supervisor plans to shrink the Washington-based board’s staff by 30 per cent, amid a push by the Trump administration to deregulate the financial sector.
Michelle Bowman, the Fed’s vice-chair for supervision, on Thursday unveiled a proposal to lower the headcount of the central bank’s supervision and regulation department from 500 to roughly 350 employees by the end of 2026.
An email sent to staff, seen by the Financial Times, said the central bank would try to lower headcount “as much as possible through natural attrition, retirements, and by offering a voluntary separation incentive to all S&R division employees, with details to come in the following weeks”.
The email also highlighted Bowman’s plans to reshape the unit “to operate with a flatter organizational structure and fewer management layers”.
The lay-offs will only affect staff based at the Fed board, and not the 12 regional Feds, where most of the central bank’s supervisors work.
The changes come as the Trump administration pushes the Fed and other US financial regulators to ease rules affecting American lenders.
Elizabeth Warren, the most senior Democrat on the powerful Senate Banking Committee, which oversees the Fed, accused the central bank of “recycling” a regime that contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis.
“The agency is now gutting its supervision and regulation staff, while granting big banks their deregulatory wish list. The Fed is actively undermining American financial stability at a moment when Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to our economy,” Warren said.
“We all know what happened the last time we let Wall Street run rampant, and I’m deeply concerned American families will pay the price once again.”
Bowman is one of five candidates on Treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s shortlist to become Fed chair when Jay Powell’s second term at the helm of the central bank ends in May 2026. US President Trump has said he plans to announce his replacement for Powell by the end of this year.
The regulatory changes the Fed is considering could enable banks to lower their capital ratios enough to offer US borrowers an additional $2.6tn in lending capacity, according to consultancy Alvarez & Marsal.
Bessent has also criticised the Dodd-Frank legislation, which was introduced after the global financial crisis of 2008 and expanded the Fed’s supervision and regulation responsibilities, for giving the central bank too much control over US lenders.
“The core problem is structural: the Fed now regulates, lends to and sets the profitability calculus for the very banks it oversees,” Bessent said in an International Economy magazine article in September. “This is an unavoidable conflict that blurs accountability and jeopardizes monetary policy independence.”
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Amazon has made its first financial disclosures since the disastrous outage suffered by its cloud computing division that brought everything from smart beds to banks offline.
In spite of the global outage, Amazon Web Services has continued to grow, and this quarter reported a 20% increase in revenue year over year. Wall Street estimated that AWS would bring in $32.42bn in net sales in the third quarter, with the company reporting actual revenue of $33bn.
“AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement accompanying the earnings report.
The strong third-quarter earnings, which exceeded analysts’ expectations, led the company’s stock to spike up about 9% in after-hours trading.
The earnings report highlighted Amazon’s desire to compete with competitors that have managed to capitalize more aggressively on the AI boom. Amazon’s stock has lagged behind some rivals in big tech, and its e-commerce business has been more susceptible to the effects of the Trump administration’s sweeping and unpredictable tariff policies than firms more focused on software.
The tech company, worth some $2.4tn, revealed that it easily beat Wall Street expectations through growth in its cloud computing services. Market analysts had predicted that Amazon would report $1.58 earnings per share and a net sales revenue of $177.82bn. The company reached $180.17bn in revenue and $1.95 earnings per share.
AWS has faced increasing competition from alternative providers such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, with the latter’s partnership with OpenAI and reports of strong growth in its cloud business driving up its share price.
Yet AWS is still a backbone of much of the modern internet, with an inadvertent show of its power taking place earlier this month when a glitch in the company’s cloud computing took websites, apps, tech products and critical communications systems, such as electronic hospital records, offline. The outage affected millions of people and lasted hours, underscoring how reliant many parts of everyday life are on Amazon’s products.
At Amazon headquarters, the company confirmed plans earlier this week to lay off 14,000 corporate workers, while further job cuts are expected throughout the company. The tech company publicly announced the cuts in a post on its website titled “Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations”, which referenced advancements in AI and claimed the company wanted to “operate like the world’s largest startup”.
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“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” Amazon’s post stated. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”
Jassy suggested in a blog post earlier this year that the company’s investments in AI would mean that Amazon needs “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today”.
“Monse’s rebirthing and expanding itself, thanks to Intel.”
That’s how the fashion company’s co-creative director Fernando Garcia described its latest alliance. He and his co-creative director Laura Kim helped launch the Intel…
Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Coinbase shares ticked up nearly 3% Thursday as the digital assets company posted better-than-expected financial results, largely fueled by a resurgence in retail and institutional crypto trading on its platform, even as tokens are now just one of several assets at the center of its “everything exchange” vision.
In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Coinbase net income rose to $432.6 million, or $1.50 per share, from $75.5 million, or 28 cents per share, a year ago. Earnings topped the consensus estimate of $1.10 per share reported by LSEG.
Revenue rose to $1.87 billion from $1.21 billion in the same quarter last year, and was higher than analysts’ expectations of $1.8 billion.
Revenue tied to transactions rose to $1 billion, up 37% from the second quarter.
The centralized crypto exchange’s beat came amid a resurgence in crypto trading fueled by U.S. federal regulators’ continued efforts to ratchet back regulations on digital assets firms under President Donald Trump. Also, steadying trade relations between the U.S. and China during the summer months improved investor sentiment.
Coinbase also benefited from a marked increase in revenue linked to institutional activity on its platform following its nearly $3 billion acquisition of derivatives exchange Deribit.
Consumer trading activity on the platform jumped to $59 billion, up 37% from the previous quarter. Transaction revenue from retail brought in $844 million, marking a 30% increase quarter-over-quarter.
On the institutional side, Coinbase notched $135 million in revenue on transactions in the third quarter, marking a 122% increase from the previous quarter, while trading volume from institutions on the exchange came in 22% higher quarter-over-quarter at $236 billion for the third quarter.
Although Coinbase notched considerable gains from crypto-related transactions, CEO Brian Armstrong told investors tokens are just one component of the company’s “everything exchange” strategy unveiled earlier this year.
“The ‘everything exchange’ is really central to the next chapter of what we’re building,” Armstrong said during the company earnings call. He said the company increased the number of tradable assets on its platform to 40,000 from 300 in the third quarter. “Now we’ve been heads down working on the next pieces of that, because we think that every asset class is going to come on chain, and our customers are asking for this, too,” he said.
As part of the strategy, Coinbase is integrating prediction markets, tokenized equities and other offerings into its platform. The exchange’s widening focus is paramount to its future growth as the market for all kinds of digital assets becomes not only larger, but more competitive amid regulatory tailwinds, according to Armstrong.
“We’ve spent a lot of time getting regulatory clarity … and that’s starting to bear fruit, which is great. It’s growing the [total addressable market] of crypto,” Armstrong said. “But it does mean that lots of new competition is coming in, and so we need to make sure we’re executing well.”
Noor Nanji
