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    Bitcoin Hits Record High, Recovering From 2022 Meltdown

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    Bitcoin’s price surged above $68,800, breaking the record the digital currency set in November 2021 when the crypto industry was booming.Bitcoin hit a record high of about $68,800 on Tuesday, capping a remarkable comeback for the volatile cryptocurrency after its value plunged in 2022 amid a market meltdown.Bitcoin’s price has risen more than 300 percent since November 2022, a resurgence that few predicted when the price dropped below $20,000 in 2022. Its previous record was just under $68,790 in November 2021, as crypto markets boomed and amateur investors poured savings into experimental digital coins.“This is just the beginning of this bull market,” said Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto company Anchorage Digital. “The best is yet to come.”Bitcoin’s recent surge has been driven by investor enthusiasm for a new financial product tied to the digital coin. In January, U.S. regulators authorized a group of crypto companies and traditional finance firms to offer exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.s, which track Bitcoin’s price. The funds provide a simple way for people to invest in the crypto markets without directly owning the virtual currency.As of last week, investors had poured more than $7 billion into the investment products, propelling Bitcoin’s rapid rise, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.The price of Ether, the second-most-valuable digital currency after Bitcoin, has also risen this year. Its increase has been driven partly by enthusiasm over the prospect that regulators may also approve an E.T.F. tied to Ether.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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      At BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, Millions of Investors Are Getting a Voice

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      BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard have opened up voting on environmental, social and management issues. It’s not true shareholder democracy, but it’s progress.Index fund investing has swept the world. In December, for the first time, U.S. investors entrusted more money to index funds than actively managed funds, in which a manager picks stocks or bonds for you.There’s a good reason for the index funds’ popularity. For most people, owning a little piece of the entire market, which you can do at low cost with an index fund, has been more profitable than buying and selling securities, either on their own or through a manager.But the relentless growth of index funds has come at a cost. One significant problem is that the most diversified funds own shares in every publicly traded company in the market, and if you don’t like a company, or its specific policies, you’re stuck. You couldn’t even exercise your vote on issues you thought were important because until recently, the fund managers insisted on doing that for you.Well, that’s been changing in a big way.BlackRock announced this month that it was expanding an experimental program to give investors six flavors of policy choices — like a focus on climate change or a preference for religious values — in votes on corporate issues. State Street already has a similar program underway, and Vanguard is tiptoeing into this kind of voting choice, too.All told, the three giant fund companies have given scores of millions of investors, with $4.6 trillion in assets, a way of expressing their views on corporate issues. This is certainly an improvement. And it could eventually lead to profound changes throughout corporate America, even as it eases some ticklish problems for the big index fund companies.The ProblemsIn the view of scholars like John Coates, the author of “The Problem of 12: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything,” the growth of index funds has had the unintended consequence of diminishing shareholder democracy.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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      BlackRock, JPMorgan and State Street Retreat From a Climate Group

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      BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and State Street are quitting or scaling back their ties to an influential global investment coalition.BlackRock, which has been criticized for its embrace of environmental considerations in investing, was among the firms that scaled back or withdrew from a climate coalition.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesA $14 trillion exit Climate hawks have long questioned the financial industry’s commitment to sustainable investing. But few foresaw JPMorgan Chase and State Street quitting Climate Action 100+, a global investment coalition that has been pushing companies to decarbonize. Meanwhile, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, scaled back its ties to the group.All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.The retreat jolted the political landscape. Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who compared the coalition to a “cartel” forcing businesses to cut emissions, called for more financial companies to follow suit. And Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, accused the firms of “caving into the demands of right-wing politicians funded by the fossil-fuel industry.”The companies say they’re committed to the climate cause. JPMorgan said it had built an in-house sustainable investment team to focus on green issues. And BlackRock will maintain some ties to the coalition: It has transferred its membership to an international entity.A recent shift by Climate Action raised red flags. Last summer, the group shifted its focus from pressuring companies to disclose their net-zero progress to getting them to reduce emissions.State Street said the new priorities compromised its “independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company management.” And BlackRock, which has become a political lightning rod over its embrace of climate considerations in investing, said those tactics “would raise legal considerations, particularly in the U.S.” (Hence the transfer to an overseas division.)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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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life

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      Last year, for a column I was writing about the power that large asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard exert over the global economy, I called up Vivek Ramaswamy. He was delighted to hear from me.I don’t mean this as self-aggrandizement. Ramaswamy was set to start Strive, an asset management company he hoped would take on the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world, and was about to publish his second book, so he had good reason to court media attention. Still, I found his enthusiasm noteworthy; as a journalist who covers Silicon Valley, I’m used to chatting up smooth-operator entrepreneurs eager for coverage, but Ramaswamy’s media hustle was of a different order.He told me I could call him anytime I’d like to bounce ideas off a “thought partner.” He sent me a PDF of his upcoming book — “No one has seen an advance copy yet” — and followed up to ask, seemingly earnestly, for my thoughts on his thesis. And when I joked, in my piece, that the title of his first book, “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” sounded “as if it had been formulated in a lab at Fox News to maximally tickle the base and trigger the libs,” he texted me with an explanation that he suggested I append to the published column:My publisher (Hachette) and I selected the book title long before the word “woke” had become weaponized in the culture wars. Today, I mostly don’t even use that word anymore; it’s not part of my vernacular today. It was suggested to me as a title by a self-identified “far-left” friend in early 2020. The word took on a different valence between then and late 2021 when my book was published. I just wanted you to know that, since I saw you mused about the etymology of the title in your piece. It certainly wasn’t cooked up in a Fox News lab, and in all honesty the goal wasn’t to trigger anyone. If anything, my goal with the book was to provide a unifying voice across culturally fraught questions, and I think most left-wing readers of the book would agree that it was at least clear I tried to do that.Maybe that was all really the case. But I got the impression that he was also trying — a little too hard — to paint himself in a light that he thought might appeal to a lefty Times columnist.In the wake of his breakout performance at last month’s Republican primary debate, much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness — is it a bug that could prevent him from winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination, or is it the feature that could help him secure it? But what I found striking about Ramaswamy, both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing.Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind, and it probably offers far more upside than down. Incessant, glad-handed striving has already made Ramaswamy a wealthy man. According to a report in Politico this year, his campaign said he’s ready to put more than $100 million into his presidential bid, but because this latest side hustle feeds so neatly into his other projects, it’s hardly clear that the run will be so costly. Measured in name recognition, the expansion of his network or future moneymaking opportunities, running for president could well add to his riches.Take Strive, the management company he co-founded. In “Woke, Inc.,” Ramaswamy lamented what he saw as the pollution of capitalist principles with social justice activism. Rather than focus on the bottom line, he argued, the leaders of America’s largest corporations had allowed their employees and other elites to goad them into adopting what he said are costly political stances on race, gender, climate and other charged issues.This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking position on the right — combating corporate wokeness is basically Ron DeSantis’s whole thing. But whereas DeSantis’s fixation on all things woke is primarily a vehicle for his political ascent, Ramaswamy saw in wokeness a larger opportunity. He would write a book and guest essays assailing corporate E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) practices, and he was also considering a political run, but to really “move the needle,” he told me, would also require taking on “the asset management ideological cartel.” And backed with a reported $20 million from billionaire investors and tech entrepreneurs he’d courted, among them Bill Ackman and Peter Thiel, he started Strive.That’s not a lot of money with which to take on the giants of asset management — BlackRock and Vanguard each manage trillions in assets — but Ramaswamy’s hustle was unceasing. Three months after it opened for business, Strive announced that it had already attracted $500 million in investments for its anti-woke E.T.F.s, or exchange-traded funds. In June it reported $750 million in assets under management, and this week it reported crossing the $1 billion mark. That’s minuscule compared with the giants, but its growth is significant; in July, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman noted that it took J.P. Morgan two years to reach $1 billion in assets after it started offering E.T.F.s in 2014.“It is a rare feat for any indie issuer to hit $1 billion in first year,” Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, told Bloomberg News of Strive’s accomplishment. “Ramaswamy’s wealthy backers helped a lot, and running for president probably can’t hurt, either.” You think?Ramaswamy no longer works at Strive. Via email, the company told me that he was the executive chairman of the board and ran day-to-day operations until February, when he stepped down to run for president.But he still has a huge interest in its success. In an S.E.C. filing last month, Ramaswamy is identified as the company’s majority shareholder. In a financial disclosure form filed in June, Ramaswamy valued his stake in Strive at over $50 million — a remarkable amount for a company that’s just about a year old, where he worked for just months. His disclosure listed his stake in Roivant Sciences, a biotech company he was previously the chief executive of, at over $50 million as well. (Forbes recently calculated Ramaswamy’s net worth at around $950 million.)Looking back on my exchange with Ramaswamy, I find it interesting how hard he pushed back on his association with the word “woke”; he hasn’t shied away from it on the campaign trail. In February, when he announced his candidacy in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote that “America is in the midst of a national identity crisis” and that “the Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance.”But his current comfort with “woke” works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base, whether in the general election or in hopes of expanding his Rolodex for whatever side hustle comes next, I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear.Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Big Tech and the Fed

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      Some tech companies’ earnings are flagging, in what could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve.Still big.Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat tech earnings say about the economy The long-booming bottom lines of major tech companies are all of a sudden smaller than expected. That might be a good thing. Big Tech sailed through the pandemic with its profits mostly intact. The fact that some firms’ results are now flagging could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve, which is trying to engineer a slowdown as it fights the nation’s worst bout of inflation in four decades.The big question for investors, and perhaps the Fed, is whether the profits of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and the other tech giants, along with corporate America in general, have fallen enough.Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, kicked off what appears to be a disappointing round of quarterly reports for the U.S.’s largest tech companies yesterday. Meta will release its results this afternoon, with Apple and Amazon rounding out Big Tech’s earnings announcements tomorrow.Microsoft’s profits, while below expectations, were still up. Sales of its signature software products, like Office, rose 13 percent. Its cloud services were up 40 percent. And LinkedIn, the professional social network Microsoft bought in 2016, grew 26 percent from a year ago, continuing to benefit from the tightest job market in decades.Alphabet’s sales rose 13 percent. In another good sign for the economy, the jump was driven by better-than-expected sales in its core Google search engine business, while results were mixed elsewhere. A jump in expenses and an exit from its Russian-related businesses caused profits to slump 14 percent.The results were positive enough for investors. Alphabet’s shares rose nearly 5 percent on the earnings news to $110. Microsoft’s shares jumped $10, or nearly 4 percent, to $262. Executives at both companies said they saw evidence of a weaker economy. “We are not immune to what is happening in the macro broadly,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said on a call with analysts. Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, told analysts that a pullback in spending by some advertisers reflected “uncertainty about a number of factors.”Few are betting that the earnings reports will change the Fed’s approach. Its policymakers are meeting this week, and they are widely expected to continue raising benchmark interest rates. While central bankers “will likely acknowledge a recent weakening in economic momentum, the Fed will likely feel the need to appear resolute in battling inflation until there are clear signs that it is abating,” wrote David Kelly, the chief global strategist of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, in a note to clients earlier this week.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Kraken, the crypto exchange, is under investigation for possible sanctions violations. The Treasury Department is looking into whether Kraken illegally allowed users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens. Shares of Coinbase, a larger crypto exchange, plunged yesterday after reports that the S.E.C. was investigating whether it allowed trading in unregistered securities. Cathie Wood’s Ark funds reportedly dumped Coinbase shares yesterday for the first time this year.Antitrust legislation aimed at Big Tech may be off the table for now. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told donors at a Capitol Hill fund-raiser yesterday that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which he had promised to bring to a vote this summer, lacks the support needed to get it to the Senate floor, Bloomberg reported. The bill’s bipartisan backers have been pressuring Schumer to act fast, before midterm elections that could change the balance of power in Congress.One America News, once a dependable Trump promoter, is struggling to survive. The network is being dropped by major carriers and faces a wave of defamation lawsuits for its outlandish stories about the 2020 election. OAN’s most recent blow is from Verizon, which will stop carrying the network on its Fios television service this week. It is now available to only a few thousand people who subscribe to regional cable providers.Teva Pharmaceuticals reaches a tentative $4.25 billion settlement over opioids. The proposed settlement, which is with some 2,500 local governments, states and tribes, would end thousands of lawsuits against one of the largest producers of the painkillers during the height of the opioid epidemic.Florida’s largest utility secretly funded a website that attacked its critics. Florida Power & Light bankrolled and controlled The Capitolist, a news site aimed at Florida lawmakers, through intermediaries from an Alabama consulting firm, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. The site claimed to be independent, but it advocated rate hikes and legislative favors in efforts that were directed by top executives at the utility.BlackRock downshifts on E.S.G. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, slashed its support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues this year, backing only 24 percent of such resolutions in the proxy season that ended in June, down from 43 percent in the previous period. The firm, which has long led the conscious investing movement, said this year’s proposals were “less supportable” and cited new regulatory guidance that opened the door to a broader range of policy-related proposals.The firm has criticized overly “prescriptive” resolutions. In a May memo, BlackRock signaled that Russia’s war in Ukraine was straining global energy supplies and shifting its calculations. “Many climate-related shareholder proposals sought to dictate the pace of companies’ energy transition plans despite continued consumer demand,” wrote the firm’s global head of investment stewardship, Sandy Boss. She noted that shareholders generally supported fewer environmental and social proposals this year as well, voting for 27 percent of resolutions, down from 36 percent in the previous proxy period.Opposition to E.S.G. is mounting. The environmental, social and governance investment push has been labeled “woke capitalism” by critics and is under fire from executives like Tesla’s Elon Musk, major investors like Bill Ackman and Republican politicians. In a speech yesterday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 hopeful, said that big government and big business were together advancing a “pernicious woke agenda.”E.S.G. supporters say critics may have a point. Andrew Behar, C.E.O. of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, agrees that many supposed E.S.G. investments don’t reflect true sustainability — with ever more capital directed toward the idea and many funds failing to live up to their promises. Behar argued that more corporate disclosures — which anti-E.S.G. groups oppose — would help to ensure that green investing actually works. He argues that critics also ignore a key financial incentive driving investor interest: knowing and lowering the costs of environmental issues throughout company operations, including risks from changing weather and the transition to more sustainable models. “We don’t have an E.S.G. problem,” Behar told DealBook. “We have a naming problem.”“I quit Starbucks. I had to. I just didn’t feel like that was justifiable. It’s like a small car payment.” — Fontaine Weyman, a 43-year-old songwriter from Charleston, S.C., on changing her coffee habits. Many Americans are dealing with the fastest inflation of their adult lives across a broad range of goods and services.Instagram tries to explain itself Instagram responded yesterday to criticism from some of its most popular users, including Kylie Jenner, about new features that made it more like its top rival, TikTok, the fast-growing video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, said that it was experimenting with several changes, and that he knew users were unhappy. “It’s not yet good,” he said of some of the tweaks in a video post. He stressed Instagram’s commitment to photos, the app’s original focus, but said, “I’m going to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.”Reels, a short-video product, is one of the six main investment priorities at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, according to an internal memo last month from Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer. Cox said that users had doubled the amount of time they spent on Reels year over year, and that Meta would prioritize boosting ads in Reels “as quickly as possible.” Last week, Instagram announced that almost all videos in the app would be posted as Reels.The changes come as Meta heads into a new phase. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, has cut costs, reshuffled his leadership team and made clear that low-performing employees will be let go, writes The Times’s Mike Isaac. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on a call late last month. In recent months, profit at Meta has fallen and revenue has slowed as the company has spent lavishly on augmented and virtual reality projects, and as the economic slowdown has hurt its advertising business.The high-profile complaints about Instagram’s revamp started in recent days, when Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul with 361 million Instagram followers, shared an image on the site that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”“PRETTY PLEASE,” Kim Kardashian, Jenner’s half sister and the seventh-most-followed Instagram user, echoed in a later post. Yesterday, Chrissy Teigen, a model and author with 39 million followers, responded to Mosseri in a tweet, saying, “we don’t wanna make videos Adam lol.”Companies have reason to listen when social media stars speak up, writes The Times’s Kalley Huang. In 2018, after Snapchat overhauled its interface, Jenner tweeted: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me….” Within a week, Snap, the app’s parent company, had lost $1.3 billion in market value.THE SPEED READ DealsThe activist investor Elliott Management reportedly has a stake in Paypal and is pushing it to cut costs faster. (WSJ, Bloomberg)Twitter shareholders will be asked to vote on Elon Musk’s potential acquisition in September. (Bloomberg)PolicyThe Senate advanced an industrial policy bill that includes more than $52 billion in subsidies for chip makers building U.S. plants. (NYT)The short seller Carson Block is being sued over a $14 million award from the S.E.C. that raised questions about the agency’s whistle-blower program. (Bloomberg)After Apple launched a “buy now, pay later” service, the top U.S. consumer finance regulator warned Big Tech about undermining competition in the sector. (FT)A federal judge ruled that Uber doesn’t have to offer wheelchair-accessible cars in every city. (The Verge)Best of the restCredit Suisse, which reported larger second-quarter losses than expected, replaced its C.E.O. (FT)Customers are paying billions of dollars in fees for “free” checking. (Bloomberg)The default settings in Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft products that you should turn off right away. (NYT)This man sells mud to Major League Baseball. (NYT)“The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets” (NYT)R.I.P., Choco Taco. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More