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Shares in banks and credit card firms have fallen after US President Donald Trump called for credit card costs to be capped.

On Friday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that interest rates on cards should be limited to 10% for one year from 20 January. He did not specify how such a cap might be introduced or whether such a move would be legally enforceable.

UK bank Barclays, which has a sizeable US card business, saw its shares fall 3.5%, while US firms such as American Express, Visa and Mastercard were also lower in early trading.

US banking associations say capping rates will make it harder for people to access credit and be “devastating” for millions of families and small businesses.

The average interest rate for credit cards in the US is roughly 20%.

In his statement on social media, Trump called for limiting it to 10%, reviving an idea he had put forward during his 2024 presidential campaign.

“Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%,” he wrote. “Please be informed that we will no longer let the American Public be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card Companies.”

On Sunday, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said credit card companies would be “in violation of the law” if they did not comply with his demands.

American Express’s share price fell by 4% while Visa and Mastercard’s stock dropped more than 2%. Other US lenders including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America also saw their shares open more than 1% lower.

Forcing companies to lower their lending rates rate would “upend the basic economics of the industry,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

“Most banks would respond by cutting credit limits, closing riskier accounts, and scaling back rewards programmes, because they simply couldn’t cover losses at that price point.”

Nearly half of US households in 2022 carried credit card debt, according to the most recent survey of consumer finances by the Federal Reserve.

It found that those with a balance owed more than $6,000 (£4,454) on average – which, with interest rates around 20%, translated into roughly $100 in monthly charges.

The idea of capping credit card rates has won support from an unlikely coalition of lawmakers, uniting those on the far-left, such as Bernie Sanders, with populists that back Trump’s MAGA agenda.

But the path to bringing the proposal into force is unclear.

Similar plans have languished in Congress. The administration has also pushed to reduce the role of agencies that have regulated such issues in the past.

“Begging credit card companies to play nice is a joke,” Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren said on X.

“I said a year ago if Trump was serious I’d work to pass a bill to cap rates. Since then, he’s done nothing but try to shut down the CFPB [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau]”.

Analysts said executive action by the White House would likely meet with legal challenge from the industry, which has had success in the past fighting regulation in the courts.

A joint statement from five US banking bodies said they shared the president’s goal “of helping Americans access more affordable credit”.

However, they added that the proposed cap would “reduce credit availability and be devastating for millions of American families and small businesses who rely on and value their credit cards, the very consumers this proposal intends to help”.

“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives.”

Early last year, Sanders and fellow US senator Josh Hawley had introduced bipartisan legislation which aimed to cap interest rates on credit cards at 10% for five years, but it has yet to make it into law.

In April 2025, the Trump administration moved to throw out a regulation capping credit card late fees at $8. The rule had been brought in by President Joe Biden’s administration as part of a crackdown on “junk fees”.

News Summary:

• NVIDIA and Lilly bring together a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of scientists, AI researchers and engineers to address the hardest problems in drug discovery.
• The co-innovation lab infrastructure will be built on the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform and the NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture.
• NVIDIA and Lilly will pioneer robotics and physical AI to accelerate and scale medicine discovery and production.

J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference—NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company today announced a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI to tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry.

The lab brings together Lilly’s world-leading expertise in discovering, developing and manufacturing medicines with NVIDIA’s leadership in AI, accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with top AI model builders and engineers from NVIDIA, allowing them to work side by side to generate large-scale data and build powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using NVIDIA BioNeMo™ as the critical platform.

“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA and Lilly are bringing together the best of our industries to invent a new blueprint for drug discovery — one where scientists can explore vast biological and chemical spaces in silico before a single molecule is made.”

“For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients,” said David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly. “Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with NVIDIA’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it. By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we’re creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone.”

Building a Continuous Learning System for Drug Discovery

The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another.

Harnessing access to unprecedented compute for the industry, massive, high-quality data generation and NVIDIA BioNeMo as the platform to accelerate drug discovery, the teams will focus on building next-generation foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry.

The new initiative expands on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer and intends to harness investments in next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin.

The AI factory Lilly announced last fall, which is the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry, will train large biomedical foundation and frontier models for identifying, optimizing and validating new molecules with exceptional speed and accuracy. It will also support new and advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging and scientific AI agents.

Beyond drug discovery, NVIDIA and Lilly will explore opportunities to apply AI across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations to integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics and digital twins.

The use of physical AI and robotics in the AI factory will also help Lilly enhance its capacity to manufacture high-demand medications and strengthen supply chain reliability. With NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Servers, Lilly can create digital twins of its manufacturing lines to model, stress test and optimize entire supply chains before making physical changes in the real world.

Supporting Global Leadership in Biomedical Discovery

NVIDIA leads in open-source AI, empowering companies with the models, data and tools needed to develop real-world AI systems. In addition, the NVIDIA Inception program provides startups with access to technical mentorship, as well as NVIDIA software and compute.

Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform, provides biotech companies with access to select Lilly models for drug discovery built on decades of Lilly’s proprietary data. TuneLab will include NVIDIA Clara™ open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow offering.

The co-innovation lab will provide NVIDIA and Lilly’s startup ecosystems and researchers with deep expertise and scale of computing resources.

The lab’s work is expected to begin in South San Francisco early this year.