Category: 3. Business

The Trump administration has launched its most direct attempt yet to shut down the top US consumer watchdog, arguing the current funding mechanism behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unlawful.

Attorneys for the administration claimed in a court filing that the agency “anticipates exhausting its currently available funds in early 2026”, setting the stage for it to be dismantled.

The CFPB is legally barred from seeking additional funds from the Federal Reserve, its typical source of funding, the attorneys suggested.

Donald Trump’s officials have tried persistently to close the agency, attempting to fire the vast majority of its workforce. These efforts sparked months of legal wrangling.

The CFPB has returned more than $21bn to US consumers since it was set up, in the wake of the financial crisis, to shore up oversight of consumer financial firms.

The justice department’s office of legal counsel issued an opinion claiming the CFPB cannot draw money from the Fed currently, claiming the “combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System” refers to profits of the Fed, which has operated at a loss since 2022.

Several federal judges have previously rejected that argument used by companies attempting to dismiss lawsuits brought by the agency, reported Politico.

Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget director, said in October that he plans to shut down the agency, and that this would take up to three months.

The claim was criticized by Democrats, given previous contrary statements from the administration, and court decisions blocking the agency from being shut down.

“These comments are particularly concerning given that a federal court has specifically blocked you from illegally shutting down the agency,” wrote Senate banking committee Democrats in a letter to Vought. “Your continued attempts to shutter the CFPB are illegal, and American families stand to pay the price.”

Vought has already suspended most of the agency’s work, as the full DC circuit court of appeals is deciding whether to take the case as a lower court order blocked the firings of about 90% of the agency’s staff.

The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

China’s cybersecurity agency accused the American government of orchestrating the theft about $13 billion worth of Bitcoin, representing China’s most recent attempt to attribute major cyberattacks to the US.

The theft of the 127,272 Bitcoin tokens from the LuBian Bitcoin mining pool that took place in December 2020 marks as one of the largest crypto heists in history. The hack, according to the Chinese National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, is likely a “state-level hacker operation” led by US, citing the quiet and delayed movement of the stolen Bitcoin fits a government-level action rather than a typical criminal behavior.

Delta Air Lines settled a lawsuit that alleged a flight attendant was fired in retaliation for supporting unionization and enduring “sexually assaultive touching” during training.

The flight attendant, Aryasp Nejat, said he was suspended without pay, then fired, for making two pro-union, anti-harassment posts on social media, and was told his sexual harassment allegation would be investigated, but that he never received a follow-up.

The lawsuit, filed in 2024, accused a Delta Air Lines flight attendant who performed uniform inspections on flight attendants during a graduation ceremony, Matthew Miller, of having “engaged in non-consensual, sexually assaultive touching of Nejat with Miller’s hands reaching inside Nejat’s pants close to his genitals and then moving to underneath Nejat’s vest and against Nejat’s chest”.

The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum. Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The settlement represents a step towards accountability and healing after a difficult period in my life, and I really hope that my experience helps highlight to the public, and to especially Delta flight attendants, the importance of having a union,” said Nejat, who works as a flight attendant for a different major airline. “I truly believe that Delta values its anti-union campaign over the legal rights of its flight attendants to organize a union and their legal right to make complaints of sexual harassment.”

Nejat said he planned to use the settlement to cover his law school costs.

Several labor unions including the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the Teamsters are working to unionize 29,000 flight attendants at Delta, currently the largest single-unit organizing campaign in the US.

Delta has strongly opposed the move. The airline has a union representing pilots at the carrier and one representing dispatchers, but not for attendants – unlike other major airlines, where most workers are predominantly union represented.

“One of the reasons that flight attendant unions were originally formed were to root out sexual harassment, assault or sexual exploitation in order to try to get workers to do what you want them to do, to keep them quiet,” said Sara Nelson, president of the AFA-CWA. “These were the original reasons that we organized over 80 years ago, and we first negotiated a seniority list and a due process in that contract that ensured that something like this, at a minimum, that Aryasp wouldn’t have faced the retaliation for the union support but would have had a due process here.”

A Delta Air Lines spokesperson said: “Delta has consistently maintained his claims are without merit and settled to avoid the expense and distraction of litigation. Delta remains committed to ensuring all employees are treated in line with Delta policy and the law.”

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The booming private credit sector is inspiring a rich lexicon of alarm. For some time, market watchers have described the alternative asset class — which has grown to around $3tn globally — as a “ticking time bomb.” Recent turbulence has added to the colourful language. After the collapse in September of US car-parts maker First Brands and auto-lender Tricolor Holdings, which had both taken loans from nonbank financial institutions, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon warned that “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, said last month the bankruptcies could be a “canary in the coal mine”.

Analysts are taking note. To extend the roach analogy, they are asking whether recent problems in private credit are isolated pests or signs of an infestation. For now, calm prevails. The tremors in the US auto industry are being blamed largely on company-specific factors. There is some comfort that, despite rapid growth, private credit still accounts for a small fraction of outstanding corporate debt in America. Lending is often channelled through funds with limited redemption risks and moderate leverage, according to Fitch Ratings. In the US, broader economic conditions — from falling interest rates to healthy corporate balance sheets — are also expected to provide support.

But even if the risks of an imminent systemic shock appear limited, recent warnings have at least drawn attention to several troubling trends that investors and supervisory bodies should watch closely.

First, the real economy’s exposure to private lending — though small — is rising. In the US, loans to non-depository financial institutions account for more than 10 per cent of total bank loans, almost three times the exposure a decade ago, according to Moody’s. A particular concern is insurers’ growing investments in the opaque asset class, which could leave policyholders exposed if things go wrong. Efforts by private lenders to ease access for retail investors widens vulnerabilities further, while increased involvement in data centre financing ties the market more closely to the artificial intelligence boom.

Second, questions about lending standards are mounting. As the Financial Times reported on Monday, the rise of smaller, specialist rating agencies has sparked fears that private capital groups are “shopping” for the most favourable credit scores. Others point to the growing use of “payments-in-kind” — which allow borrowers to defer interest payments — as evidence of mounting strain and weakening loan quality. Fraud suspicions connected to some of those “cockroach” incidents are evidence of poor underwriting standards, critics say.

Third, although the global economy has shown resilience, it remains fragile. As it is, some investors worry that narrow spreads in public credit markets fail to capture real default risks. The uncertainty surrounding US President Donald Trump’s policy agenda adds to the unease. His administration’s push for broader financial deregulation could fuel further risk-taking just as signs of froth in both equity and credit markets are becoming harder to ignore.

Today’s boom in private markets has its roots in the tighter regulation placed on banks following the global financial crisis. That has channelled more credit through the less transparent and less regulated shadow banking system. Private markets have since played an important role by raising competition with traditional lenders, extending credit to innovative businesses and widening investment opportunities. Banks are even calling for looser rules to counter their surge. But as more money floods into the sector, vigilance must also keep pace. Regulators need to push for greater transparency and better data sharing across jurisdictions to monitor lending standards and economic linkages. Investor scrutiny will be just as vital. Indeed, even if recent warnings seem overblown to some, the risks they highlight are real and growing.

Removing carbon from the atmosphere will now be necessary to avoid catastrophic tipping points, one of the world’s leading scientists has warned, as even in the best case scenario the world will heat by about 1.7C.

Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is one of the chief scientific advisers to the UN and the Cop30 presidency, said 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide needed to be removed from the air every year even to limit global heating to 1.7C (3.1F) above preindustrial levels.

To achieve this through technological means, such as direct air capture, would require the construction of the world’s second biggest industry, after oil and gas, and require expenditures of about a trillion dollars a year, scientists said. It would need to be done alongside much more drastic emissions cuts and could also have unintended consequences.

Rockström was among several leading climate experts who spoke at a first public event for the Science Council, which was set up as an advisory body by the Belém Cop30 presidency.

In the next five to 10 years, they said the world would overshoot the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement.

This already happened temporarily in 2024, but UN scientists do not consider the goal breached until the trend is confirmed over an average of 10 years combined with forecasts of the following 10 years, said Thelma Krug, the coordinator of the council.

Another member, Chris Field of Stanford University, said that despite the overshoot, the world should retain the 1.5C target because the longer and higher the world remains beyond that, the greater the risk of more dangerous tipping points in the Antarctic, Greenland, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest. It is thought that many coral reef systems will already have passed that point of no return at 1.5C of heating.

Tim Lenton, a tipping point expert at Exeter University, outlined the range of risks that are already close. Still greater dangers lie ahead, he warned, particularly if there is a collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation system of ocean currents.

“This would trigger other tipping points,” Lenton warned. “We must do everything we can to prevent this.”

Field said 200bn tonnes of carbon dioxide would have to be removed from the atmosphere to cope with every tenth of a degree rise.

At the most, he said this could cope with two-tenths of a degree, but even this would be slow, expensive and could bring a wide range of unintended consequences.

There are a range of options for capturing carbon. The most effective and cheapest is growing forest, which costs about $50 for every tonne of CO2, but means the land cannot be used for other purposes such as agriculture. The most expensive is direct air capture, an industrial process that has never been used at scale, which costs at least $200 per tonne. In between are riskier strategies such as ocean fertilisation, which could disrupt marine ecosystems.

Krug said the IPCC has started a new study on different mechanisms for carbon removal. Rockström told the Guardian he would like the Cop30 presidency to put carbon removal in its declarations to focus attention of the risks and costs ahead.

He said Potsdam Institute modelling had shown that, even with ambitious carbon removal and strong government actions to reduce emissions, it was still only possible to limit heating to between 1.6C and 1.8C. Even this would require far stronger policies to reduce fossil fuel emissions than those currently adopted by governments, which would allow the world to heat by at least 2.7C.

Despite the enormous costs involved, he said the alternative was more devastating droughts, fire storms and suffering.

“Every tenth of a degree matters,” he said. “We are seriously seeing that we are heading at high speed towards a dead end. Scientists continue publishing papers but we are getting nervous. We are seeing really worrying signs,” he said.

Scientists want the prevention of tipping points to be included in the global stocktake of the Cop process. Lenton told the Guardian he welcomed the fact that the UN’s main climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has started studying these risks. He emphasised there were also positive tipping points, when social, economic or technological drivers could push change towards a more stable climate.

He said the Cop30 presidency’s willingness to engage was a good sign, though the political circumstances elsewhere in the world were making action difficult.

“I’d love to think this Cop could be its own tipping point,” he said. “It should be, in the sense that the tipping point risks are staring us in the face now, particularly, for example, with the coral reef collapse and the Amazon around us suffering extraordinary droughts and fires.

“There won’t be a new legally binding agreement, but the Cop presidency might put together some new alliances that take into account the tipping point risks and the potential for positive tipping point change. I think that could be the best outcome to hope for.”

One country that will not be part of any new alliance is the United States, which under president Donald Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement again, and is one of four countries – along with Afghanistan, Myanmar and San Marino – not to register a single delegate at the summit.

Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, expressed relief at the absence of the US, addressing Trump with the words “Ciao bambino!”.

“I think it actually is a good thing,” she told reporters. “They won’t be able to do their direct bullying.

“Honestly, the decarbonisation of the global economy is irreversible,” she said. “Momentum is building into the point where it is simply unstoppable, with or without the US.”

Meanwhile, Ethiopia was named as the expected host of Cop32 in 2027, but the host of Cop31 next year remains uncertain, with neither of the two bidders, Australia and Turkey, showing any sign of backing down.

When taking apart competitors’ vehicles, as is standard practice in the automobile industry, Farley said the company found Ford’s Mustang Mach-E had about 1.6 km, or nearly a mile, more wiring than a Tesla Model 3. When it took apart vehicles from its Chinese competitors, the findings were similarly surprising.

“I was very humbled when we took apart the first Model 3 Tesla and started to take apart the Chinese vehicles. When we took them apart, it was shocking what we found,” Farley said on an upcoming episode of the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast, first reported on by Business Insider. 

Farley said the revelatory findings convinced the company to make a change. The legacy carmaker, known for ushering in the age of the automobile with its Model T, first launched in 1908, has struggled to compete in recent years, especially with the pace of innovation in electric vehicles being led by Chinese automakers.

In 2022, the CEO created a new division called Model E, in part to help Ford innovate on electric vehicles. The division lost more than $5 billion in 2024, but Farley noted on the podcast he knew diving into EV innovation was going to be “brutal business-wise.” 

“My ethos is, take on the hardest problems as fast as you can and do it sometimes in public because you’ll solve them quicker that way,” Farley said, emphasizing the need for shareholders to have insight into Ford’s EV operations.

Still, EV sales in the U.S. have jumped in 2025, partly as consumers looked to buy before the federal EV tax credit expired at the end of September. While EV sales hit an all-time-high in the third quarter, according to Cox Automotive, Farley said on Ford’s third-quarter earnings call last month that EVs will only make up 5% of the U.S. car market in the near term. 

Farley is also sounding the alarm about Chinese competitors. Last week, Farley told CBS Sunday Morning Chinese car companies pose an “existential threat” and have the capacity to take over the North American market and put homegrown automakers out of business.

Still, Ford has doubled down on its EV investments. In August, the company said it would pour $5 billion into EV production by changing up its manufacturing process and also revamping its Kentucky plant that produces its F-Series Super Duty trucks. The plan is reportedly to create a $30,000 electric pickup truck for the average person anticipated to be released in 2027. 

“We can’t walk away from EVs, not just for the US, but if we want to be a global company, I’m not going to just cede that to the Chinese,” Farley said on the podcast.

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