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      As Trump Attacks D.E.I., Wall Street Worries

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      Goldman Sachs will drop a demand that corporate boards of directors include women and members of minority groups as financial firms backpedal from D.E.I. promises.Wall Street has not typically been accused of doing too much for women and minority groups. The financial services industry, after all, is one in which more major banks are named after the Morgan family than led by a female chief executive.So it meant something over the past half-decade or so when the biggest names in finance said, over and over again, that they would pour dollars and effort into lending to, hiring, promoting and working with underserved communities.And it means something else now, as many of those much-promoted policies and practices are being scrubbed to be sure they don’t wind up in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion.The retreat includes white-collar investment banks, consultancies, mutual funds and stock exchanges. The latest was Goldman Sachs, which said on Tuesday that it would drop a quota that forced corporate boards of directors to include women and members of minority groups. Others on Wall Street are curtailing efforts to recruit Black and Latino employees.One international bank, BNP Paribas, even hit the brakes on programming new events for next month’s International Women’s Day.This pullback has thus far been less overt than, say, in the technology industry, whose executives have made public displays of their support for President Trump’s anti-diversity initiatives. And some financial firms had started to make changes long before the election — opening programs aimed at minority candidates to all, for example.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      36 Hours After Russell Vought Took Over Consumer Bureau, He Shut Its Operations

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      The agency had been one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators, with the power to issue rules on mortgages, credit cards, student loans and other areas affecting Americans’ financial lives.The day before Linda Wetzel closed on her retirement home in Southport, N.C., in 2012 — a cozy place where she could open the windows at night and catch an ocean breeze — the bank making the loan surprised her with a fee she hadn’t expected. Ms. Wetzel scoured her mortgage paperwork and couldn’t find the charge disclosed anywhere.Ms. Wetzel made the payment and then filed an online complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bank quickly opened an investigation, and a month later, it sent her a $5,600 check.“My first thought was ‘thank you.’ I was in tears,” she recalled. “That money was a year or two of savings on my mortgage. It was my little nest egg.”Ms. Wetzel’s refund is a tiny piece of the work the bureau has done since it was created in 2011. It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.It may no longer be able to carry out that work.President Trump on Friday appointed Russell Vought, who was confirmed a day earlier to lead the Office of Management and Budget, as the agency’s acting director. Mr. Vought was an author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for upending the federal government that called for significant changes, including abolishing the consumer bureau.In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.The bureau “has been a woke & weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals for a long time,” Mr. Vought wrote Sunday on X. “This must end.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bitcoin Price Surges to a Milestone: $100,000

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      The price of a single Bitcoin rose to six figures for the first time, an extraordinary level for a 16-year-old cryptocurrency once dismissed as a sideshow.In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, an early cryptocurrency enthusiast, used Bitcoin to buy two pizzas from Papa John’s. He spent 10,000 Bitcoins, or roughly $40 at the time, in one of the first purchases ever made with the digital currency.It has turned out to be the most expensive dinner in history.On Wednesday, the price of a single Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, a remarkable milestone for an experimental financial asset that had once been mocked as a sideshow and a fad. The total cost of those pizzas today: $1 billion.Bitcoin now stands as arguably the most successful investment product of the last 20 years. The value of all the coins in circulation is $2 trillion, more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase. The motley assortment of hackers and political radicals who embraced Bitcoin when it was created by an anonymous coder in 2008 have become millionaires many times over. And the invention has spawned an entire industry anchored by publicly traded companies like Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and promoted by celebrities, athletes and Elon Musk.Even the president-elect says he is a believer. During the campaign, Donald J. Trump marketed himself as a Bitcoin enthusiast, vowing to create a federal stockpile that could push its price even higher.

      Note: As of 10 p.m. Eastern on Dec. 4Source: Investing.comBy The New York TimesBitcoin began as “essentially an experimental hobbyist project,” said Finn Brunton, the author of a 2019 book about the history of cryptocurrency. “To see where it is now is to see a really impressive feat.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Biggest Takeaways From the DealBook Summit With Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and More

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      Serena Williams, Jerome H. Powell, Jeff Bezos and other leaders across business and technology discussed artificial intelligence, inflation, the media and what the world would look like under a second Donald J. Trump presidency.Mr. Bezos, for one, thinks the president-elect has “a good chance of succeeding.”Elon Musk wasn’t in the room, but he was present throughout at the DealBook Summit. The speakers were largely optimistic about his efforts in the new administration.The event, hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of DealBook, has taken place since 2011.Here are five main themes:Inflation is still an issue, but there’s a chance for growth.Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said the economy was in a “very good place.” Inflation has come down, and the labor market has rebounded. The big takeaway for investors: The central bank can afford to be more cautious when it considers lowering interest rates, Mr. Powell said. (The next Fed meeting will be Dec. 17-18.)Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel and a top donor to the Republican Party, placed the blame for inflation squarely on the Biden administration, which, he argued, “put this country on an inflationary path that was unprecedented in our lifetime.” Mr. Powell has “had to deal with cleaning up the mess,” he added.Former President Bill Clinton said inflation was the “fundamental problem” that helped Mr. Trump return to the White House.“The average person had not really lived through something like this for 40 years, since the ’70s,” Mr. Clinton said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      World Bank Warns of Record Debt Costs for Developing Countries

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      The World Bank warned in a new report that poor countries will be stuck in economic “purgatory” without debt relief.Soaring inflation saddled developing countries with a record $1.4 trillion in debt servicing costs last year, the World Bank said in a report published on Tuesday, detailing the precarious state faced by the world’s most vulnerable economies since the pandemic.As central banks around the world raised interest rates to slow rising prices, poor countries with already high debt burdens saw the interest payments on the money that they owed to creditors balloon. While principal balances held steady at around $951 billion, interest payments jumped by a third, to $406 billion. That has left more countries facing fiscal crises and struggling to avoid default.“These facts imply a metastasizing solvency crisis that continues to be misdiagnosed as a liquidity problem in many of the poorest countries,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, wrote in the report. “It is easy to kick the can down the road, to provide these countries just enough financing to help them meet their immediate repayment obligations. But that simply extends their purgatory.”More than a dozen sovereign nations defaulted on their debt in the last three years, and more than 30 of the world’s poorest countries have experienced “debt distress,” according to the United Nations. In 2023, Belarus, Ghana, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Zambia were all in default, according to Fitch Ratings.Global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been working with international lenders to help developing countries restructure their debt, but the process has been slow and painstaking. China, the world’s largest creditor, has been particularly reluctant to alter the terms of its loans as it grapples with its own economic challenges.The Biden administration has been critical of China’s lending practices. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen described them as “opaque” in an interview with The New York Times in October in which she called for accelerating debt relief. She also raised the idea of helping nations find new sources of borrowing by creating coordinated aid packages for “high-ambition countries” that want to invest in clean energy projects.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Warren Stephens, Billionaire Investment Banker, for U.K. Ambassador

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      Warren Stephens, an investment banker and billionaire who donated to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s rivals before eventually supporting him in the 2024 race, was tapped as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Britain on Monday.The selection of Mr. Stephens for the ambassadorship, a plum posting that often goes to one of the largest donors to presidential campaigns, was in part a nod to the American Opportunity Alliance, a big-money network of Republican donors in which Mr. Stephens plays a leadership role. Mr. Trump and the alliance had a tense relationship at times over the course of his campaign.In 2016, Mr. Stephens, the chief executive of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank based in Little Rock, Ark., gave $2 million to a group dedicated to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination. During the most recent election cycle, he backed other Republican presidential candidates, including Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.Beginning in April, after it became evident that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Mr. Stephens donated over $3 million to support his campaign, according to federal campaign finance reports. He also donated $3.5 million to Mr. Trump’s super PACs in 2019 and 2020 during his re-election campaign.During his first term, Mr. Trump named another financial backer of his campaign, Woody Johnson, as ambassador to Britain.In a statement posted on social media, Mr. Trump praised his new pick for “selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist.”“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” the president-elect said. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”Theodore Schleifer More

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      The Markets Cheer Trump’s Treasury Pick, Scott Bessent

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      Investors seemed to signal their approval for Scott Bessent as a safe choice to implement the president-elect’s economic agenda.Stocks and bonds are gaining on Monday, as investors seem to cheer the pick of Scott Bessent to run the Treasury Department.Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesA steady hand Stocks and bonds are rising on Monday, and the dollar is down. On the first trading day since Donald Trump chose the billionaire financier Scott Bessent as his pick for Treasury secretary, investors seem to be signaling they like the choice.The hedge fund mogul is seen as a steady hand to enact the president-elect’s economic vision — and, just as important, oversee the $28 trillion Treasuries market. “Investors prefer orthodoxy, predictability, and coherence from economic policy; there were fears that some of the candidates may not possess those attributes. Bessent does,” Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a research note on Monday.The Key Square Group founder overcame serious opposition from some in Trump’s inner circle. Elon Musk derided Bessent as a “business-as-usual choice” and threw his weight behind Howard Lutnick, the C.E.O. of Cantor Fitzgerald. When Trump tapped Lutnick to lead the Commerce Department instead, Bessent was left to fight it out against the likes of Mark Rowan, the boss of Apollo Global Management, the private equity giant.Bessent won a “knife fight” to get the nod. On Wall Street, a document was circulated suggesting that his Key Square hedge fund had underperformed the booming markets. Bessent’s ascent is notable in that he doesn’t appear to have been on Trump’s radar during his first administration.His background as a former Democratic donor who worked with George Soros, a villain for the right, has also been scrutinized. (Interesting fact: Bessent furnished the progressive billionaire financier with key data that prompted Soros to make one of his most famous trades: shorting the British pound.) Some Trump backers, including Palmer Luckey, the defense tech entrepreneur, worried about Bessent’s commitment to the president-elect’s America-first agenda.Investors appear to have fewer qualms. Bessent gets high marks as a fiscal conservative and a champion of growth — at Key Square, he told clients that Trumponomics would usher in an “economic lollapalooza” — through deregulation and lower taxes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      High-Yield Savings Accounts Are Still a Good Deal

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      Interest rates have been falling, but deposits are earning more than inflation.You’ve probably been discouraged to see the interest rate on your high-yield savings account fall during the past couple of months. But your money is still earning much more than it would in a traditional savings account — and more than inflation.Rates paid on cash in savings accounts have been dropping since the Federal Reserve began cutting its key interest rate in September as inflation cooled. The central bank cut rates again, by a quarter point, at its meeting this month, and another cut in December is seen as likely, though not certain because of a recent uptick in inflation.Banks are following the Fed’s lead in gradually reducing interest rates. Even so, the rates paid on federally insured high-yield savings accounts, many offered by banks that operate solely or mostly online, are still beating inflation, which was 2.6 percent on an annual basis in October.“High-yield savings accounts are still attractive relative to traditional savings accounts,” particularly for emergency or “rainy day” funds that savers want to be able to tap into quickly, said Alan Bazaar, chief executive and co-chief investment officer at Hollow Brook Wealth Management in Katonah, N.Y.Online banks were offering rates of 4 percent or higher this week, compared with a national average rate of just 0.56 percent for all types of savings accounts, according to the financial site Bankrate. If you put $5,000 in a savings account for a year at the average rate, you’d earn just $28, compared with about $200 with a high-yield account. (At some of the biggest national banks, which are offering just 0.01 percent, you’d end up with a measly 50 cents.)Just a few years ago, savers were getting 1 percent on their deposits at best, so 4 percent is nothing to scoff at, said Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate. High-yield accounts can also be attractive for funds needed in the not-so-distant future — say, for a child heading to college or for retirees looking to set aside cash for living expenses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More