Good morning. Andrew here. Trump accounts are now live. As we previewed in a scoop in May, a major shift in the investment program just took place, allowing executives to donate shares that could be held by program participants. It remains unclear how the Treasury Department decided on the move without congressional approval. Under guidance by the I.R.S., the Trump accounts explicitly define an “eligible investment” strictly as “any mutual fund or exchange traded fund.” However, Treasury officials may be leaning on a catchall provision that is included in the statute. It allows for investments that meet “such other criteria as the secretary determines appropriate.” Gwynne Shotwell, the president and C.O.O. of SpaceX, and her husband, appear to be among the first to take advantage of the new rule, donating essentially more than two million shares. That would be worth at least $320 million based on the company’s current stock price. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Seeing redIt’s a fair bet that the U.S.-Belgium World Cup soccer game tonight will be talked about for years. To the delight of sponsors, broadcasters and oddsmakers, the biggest stars appear set to play and the buzz is sky-high, even by World Cup standards. In a twist that has sent shock waves through the soccer world and beyond, FIFA yesterday reversed the suspension of Folarin Balogun, the top scorer on the U.S. team, after he had received a red card last week that would have disqualified him from tonight’s showdown. It’s not a done deal. The Royal Belgian Football Association is appealing Balogun’s reinstatement, The Athletic reports, citing anonymous sources. There is precedent for such decisions, as Cristiano Ronaldo fans can attest to. But what sets this apart is how President Trump, with the help of a soccer-loving hedge fund manager, asked FIFA to get Balogun back on the pitch. As The Times reports: Shortly after Mr. Balogun’s red card, senior Trump administration officials, including Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House task force on the World Cup, engaged lawyers to help the U.S. Soccer Federation try to appeal, despite FIFA’s rules against such appeals, according to two of the people familiar with the call. The fallout:
The controversy puts Trump’s relationship with FIFA’s president in the spotlight. Trump called the president, Gianni Infantino, last week after the red card and appealed for a review, The Times reports. A reminder: Infantino has built a cozy relationship with Trump, presenting him with the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” in December and renting space for the soccer organization in New York at Trump Tower. FIFA is expected to bring in nearly $9 billion in tournament revenue this year, though host cities may end up in the red. It also puts attention on a hedge fund magnate and major donor to U.S. Soccer. Scott Goodwin, a French-born founder of Diameter Capital Partners, helped bankroll the salaries of U.S. Soccer coaches, including Mauricio Pochettino. (He recruited Ken Griffin, the billionaire investor, to put up money too, he recounted in a 2025 podcast interview.) According to The Times, Goodwin informed Trump officials about unsubstantiated accusations that the referee who gave Bagolun the red card was involved in match fixing in Brazil. Trump mentioned that in his call with Infantino.
Oil prices slip as traders eye a surge in supply. Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, dropped this morning, after the oil producing cartel known as OPEC Plus announced yesterday that it would modestly increase production. Some analysts forecast a sharp drop in prices, a move that could take pressure off central bankers battling inflation. Chip stocks are again in focus. SK Hynix, the South Korean chip maker, is expected to begin trading in the U.S. this week, part of a $29 billion listing that would rival Saudi Aramco’s 2019 I.P.O. in size. And tomorrow, Samsung is expected to report a major bump in preliminary quarterly operating profit to around $55 billion. The performance of chip makers is increasingly driving the artificial intelligence trade. Merger talks heat up in the chemicals sector. Solstice Advanced Materials, which spun out of Honeywell last year, is in talks with Element Solutions for a tie-up to create a chemicals giant worth around $27 billion, The Financial Times reports. Shares of Element, which makes products chip makers use, have been booming lately. Crypto falls, Trump still winsCryptocurrencies are extending their modest rebound this morning, with Bitcoin trading around $63,000. But there’s little joy for traders in more volatile memecoins, including those connected to President Trump and his family. Three tokens — the $TRUMP memecoin, which the president has promoted on social media; $Melania, a coin tied to the first lady; and $WLFI, a token sold by World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto business — are under pressure again this morning. Their protracted slump continues to heap scrutiny on the president’s push into crypto, which has enriched him and his family and cost investors billions. The latest tally: Roughly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin, which began trading shortly before his inauguration last year, have lost money through the end of June, The Times reports, citing data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. How much? About $3.8 billion. But Trump has done fine. His crypto profit last year was $636 million, padding his business earnings of roughly $2.2 billion over the same period, according to financial filings revealed last week. Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of The Times note: The odds were always in his favor. Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin. Governance watchdogs are alarmed. One government ethics expert called Trump’s gains, which are extraordinary for a sitting president, an “exploitation of public power for private financial gain.” Investors are irritated, too. Nicholas Pinto, an avid crypt trader who lost money on the $TRUMP memecoin, told The Times that Trump “is leveraging the power of being president to launch currencies, when he seems trustworthy in the public’s eye.” He added: “It is kind of incredible. It is almost a legal scam.” The president, who has also bet heavily on the tech and other stocks, has played down the furor. “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting,” he said last week. The recent attention has failed to lift the Trump memecoin trade.
“I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into.”— David Chalmers, a philosophy and neural science professor at N.Y.U., on the upsurge in hiring of philosophy majors by artificial intelligence labs. One, Amanda Askell of Anthropic, helped write a 23,000-word constitution that plays a key role in the “moral formation” of the company’s Claude model.
FireworksTemperatures are forecast to dip today in parts of the Northeast, but the relief is expected to be short-lived. That’s after a blistering heat wave over the holiday weekend disrupted several events tied to America’s 250th birthday celebration. This offers a powerful reminder of how intense heat can affect the economy. The weather upended many Fourth of July festivities:
Triple-digit temperatures spiked up and down the Eastern Seaboard, with some 185 million people under heat alerts over part of the long weekend. The extreme weather caused spot electricity prices to surge more than 240 percent in New England and to double in New York City. Storms roiled parts of the Midwest and the Northeast, leaving some 1.3 million people without power. Commuters and holiday travelers were affected. NJ Transit and Amtrak had to cancel or delay trains last week when 72 million people were expected to travel. Deadly temperatures have slammed Europe, too, where wildfires are raging again. Analysts at ING and Allianz have been calculating the economic effect of repeated heat waves on the continent. The numbers are staggering. Extreme heat costs the U.S. economy on average $100 billion annually, according to a new study by Vivid Economics and the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan research group. That is approximately the combined annual budgets of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A notable takeaway from the report: The current figure of $100 billion in annual losses in the United States is purposefully conservative. It focuses solely on worker productivity and how heat chips away at it, and doesn’t factor in issues like heat’s effects on tourism, infrastructure, health care costs and energy costs. The losses will increase as climate change worsens — to approximately $200 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times |
