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    Judge Blocks New U.S. Rule Limiting Credit Card Late Fees

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    Set to take effect on Tuesday, the rule would save households $10 billion a year in “junk fees,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said.In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that a new federal rule would cap fees on late credit card payments at $8 a month, estimating that the change would save American households $10 billion a year.On Friday, a federal judge in Fort Worth temporarily blocked the rule, siding with bank and credit card company lobbyists who contend in a lawsuit that it is unconstitutional.The rule was scheduled to take effect on Tuesday. Now, the lobbyists can continue their legal fight in U.S. District Court before Judge Mark T. Pittman, who granted the preliminary injunction.The consumer bureau’s new rule would limit issuers to an $8 fee unless they could show that more money was needed to cover their collection costs. The bureau estimated that the rule would apply to more than 95 percent of all outstanding credit card balances.The Federal Reserve previously aimed to significantly limit credit card late fees in 2010. But a loophole in its rule, which permitted adjustments for inflation, allowed banks and credit card companies to charge an average of $32 a month in late fees, according to the consumer bureau.In announcing the new rule, Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director, said it would end “the era of big credit card companies hiding behind the excuse of inflation when they hike fees on borrowers and boost their own bottom lines.” President Biden backed the rule, saying, “The American people are tired of being played for suckers.”Two days later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the American Bankers Association and the Consumer Bankers Association — whose boards of directors include executives from Bank of America, Capital One, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase — in suing Mr. Chopra and his bureau. Three Texas business associations are also plaintiffs. More

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      Court Temporarily Halts S.E.C.’s New Climate Rules

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      Two fracking companies had challenged requirements that some businesses disclose more information about the risks they face from climate change.A federal court on Friday temporarily halted new rules from the Securities Exchange Commission that require public companies to disclose more about the business risks they face from climate change, siding with two oil and gas companies that criticized the requirements as costly and arbitrary.Approved by the S.E.C. this month, the rules require some publicly traded companies to disclose their climate risks, and how much greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Industry groups, as well as their political allies, have filed numerous lawsuits challenging the regulation.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents a wide cross-section of industries, filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit this week to stop the rules, calling them unconstitutional. Ten Republican-led states have also sued to stop the rules.The emergency stay granted by Fifth Circuit judges on Friday came in a case brought by two fracking companies, Liberty Energy and Nomad Proppant Services. “There is no clear authority for the S.E.C. to effectively regulate the controversial issue of climate change,” the two companies wrote in their petition. They were “arbitrary and capricious,” the two companies said, and violated the First Amendment, which protects free speech, by “effectively mandating discussions about climate change.”In addition, the rules would cost companies “irreparable injury in the form of unrecoverable compliance costs,” they said.Climate disasters, including extreme weather like hurricanes, floods and drought, are taking a rising toll on people as well as businesses around the world. In 2023, the United States experienced a record 28 weather and climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion each, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last year that losses tied to climate change could “cascade through the financial system.”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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      Biden Makes His Business Case in the State of the Union Address

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      The president took credit for strong job growth and his legislative agenda that’s boosted investment in infrastructure and clean energy projects.“I will make no apologies.”Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images.Biden picks his battles President Biden delivered a State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday night that was filled with dramatic moments, meant in part to jump start his 2024 re-election campaign.He also used the speech to press his economic priorities, from bolstering American manufacturing to extending his climate efforts. How far he advanced his causes, however, remains to be seen.Mr. Biden defended his record on the economy. He took credit for falling inflation and strong job growth, and listed promised benefits from his sweeping legislative agenda, including infrastructure, clean energy (even if he did acknowledge, “we’re still going to need oil and gas for a while”) and manufacturing laws that will pour trillions into the economy.He also urged Congress to back initiatives including raising a billionaires tax on the wealthy; expanding a measure in the Inflation Reduction Act that caps the cost of insulin at $35 a month; renewing the expanded child tax credit; and expanding Medicaid and affordable child care.He baited Republicans over social welfare programs. Mr. Biden accused some Republicans of threatening Social Security and Medicare, implying they wanted cuts in exchange for a deal to raise the debt ceiling. (That claim requires a bit of context.) Several lawmakers shouted in response; one, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, yelled “Liar!”Mr. Biden responded that he had somehow gotten unanimity on the issue. “We all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” he said, leading a bipartisan round of applause for seniors.He kept up pressure on ripe political targets. Though Mr. Biden didn’t directly address the Chinese spy balloon incident, he pledged to make America more competitive and less reliant on China. “I will make no apologies that we are investing to make America strong,” he said. “Investing in American innovation — in industries that will define the future, and that China’s government is intent on dominating.”Mr. Biden also called out tech companies, demanding stricter limits on their collection of personal data, and oil giants, which he accused of raking in record profits from high energy prices instead of using their huge coffers to increase domestic production.How much cooperation Mr. Biden will get from Republicans and business is unclear. In Republicans’ rebuttal, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas accused him of perpetrating a culture war. Corporate America was more circumspect: Suzanne Clark, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, reiterated her group’s support for the infrastructure law, but urged Biden to focus on striking more trade agreements and pulling back from what she said was overregulation.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The U.S. trade deficit balloons to $948 billion. The export-import gap jumped 12 percent in 2022, to a record, as Americans continued to spend more on imported goods than travel and entertainment. Trade data also showed growing deficits in goods with the likes of Mexico and South Korea, as manufacturers seek bases outside China.Microsoft announces A.I.-powered consumer internet tools. The tech giant promised versions of its Bing search engine and Edge browser that incorporate chatbots, drawing on a partnership with the ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Microsoft’s ambitions may be bigger: It’s reportedly planning to create software to let companies make their own ChatGPT-powered chatbots.Zoom plans to lay off 15 percent of its staff. The videoconferencing company acknowledged it had hired too many people during its pandemic boom, and needed to retrench as growth has slowed. Its C.E.O., Eric Yuan, said he plans to cut his salary for the coming fiscal year by roughly 98 percent and forgo a bonus.A former Coinbase employee pleads guilty to insider trading. Ishan Wahi, who was a product manager at the crypto exchange, had been accused of tipping his brother and a friend about tokens it planned to list, bringing about $1.5 million in illegal profit. He’s the first crypto insider to admit insider trading.Chobani’s founder urges U.S. companies to fund recovery efforts for the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, has partnered with the Turkish Philanthropy Funds to aid in recovery from the quake, which has a death toll above 11,000. He told DealBook that he has personally donated $2 million to the cause.Jay Powell sees a “bumpy” path ahead America’s red-hot labor market suggests that the world’s biggest economy may yet avoid recession. But this same dynamic has also thrust the Fed into a policy conundrum, with pressure for higher interest rates to tamp down inflation.In a question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday, the Fed’s chair, Jay Powell, said he could see “the very early stages of disinflation,” but added that the easing in prices was likely to follow a “bumpy” path, particularly with hiring and wage growth proving strong.January’s jobs data surpassed the Fed’s forecasts. Mr. Powell said last Friday’s knockout nonfarm payroll report, which announced that employers added 517,000 new jobs last month, was “certainly strong — stronger than anyone I know expected.”Other data offered more encouraging signs for the U.S. economy. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker forecasts that the U.S. will grow by 2.1 percent in the first quarter; it was predicting 0.7 percent a week ago. And even bearish economists are dialing down their gloomy expectations: “A potential recession in 2023 will likely be short and shallow,” Jeffrey Roach, the chief economist for LPL Financial, wrote to investors on Tuesday, while Goldman Sachs economists this week lowered their estimate of the likelihood of a U.S. recession to 25 percent.Investors were relieved that Mr. Powell gave no hint of a sudden shift in the Fed’s strategy. He reiterated that the central bank planned to keep raising borrowing costs to rein in consumer spending. That was enough to reassure investors that no big policy changes were coming soon: The S&P 500 rallied after his comments, snapping a two-day losing streak.A hedge fund catches meme fever Hudson Bay Capital Management has emerged as the mystery backer of Bed Bath & Beyond’s bold plan to cash in on its meme-stock cachet to raise $1 billion in emergency funds and avert bankruptcy.The hedge fund’s involvement in the deal highlights the meme-stock frenzy’s pull on big institutions. Shares in the struggling retailer, which has closed 400 stores in the past year as revenues slide, are up nearly 86 percent in the past month in extremely volatile trading that’s been largely influenced by day-traders betting on its survival. But the stock nearly halved on Tuesday, after the company announced it would sell a flood of new shares, which will dilute existing shareholders.Hudson Bay has underwritten the initial $225 million worth of shares that Bed Bath & Beyond is selling. It plans to underwrite another $800 million over time, if certain unspecified “conditions are met.” Hudson Bay also receives warrants to buy further stock at an advantageous price, which could prove lucrative if the retailer were to turn its business around.The deal with Hudson Bay came together within the past several weeks, two people familiar with the negotiations told DealBook. Late last month, JPMorgan Chase, which gave Bed Bath & Beyond a lifeline last summer by expanding its credit line, froze the retailer’s credit accounts after deeming the company in breach of the terms of its debt. As Bed Bath & Beyond raced to find cash to pay its debts, it had also been preparing for a bankruptcy — and possible liquidation — if the needed funds didn’t arrive.Whether this only buys Bed Bath & Beyond a temporary reprieve remains to be seen. “The fundamental story for Bed Bath & Beyond is so broken at this point,” said David Silverman, a retail analyst at Fitch Ratings. “I don’t know that a short-term cash infusion that could buy them a few months, a couple of quarters, is going to change their fate.” The Wedbush Securities analyst Seth Basham seconded that opinion, cutting the stock price target to zero.“U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’” — Brett Stuart, founder of the research firm Global AgriTrends, is worried about disease risks from China’s high-density pig farms, which in some cases pack the animals into tower blocks.Adam Neumann opens up about his next act Since leaving WeWork, Adam Neumann has (largely) kept quiet about his future plans, including Flow, a venture that Andreessen Horowitz invested $350 million in last year. But he is finally revealing more about the start-up, via a talk he gave to an Andreessen Horowitz-organized conference in November.The main — if still vague — takeaway is that Flow owns and operates apartment buildings that aim to persuade tenants to stay longer by making them “feel” as if they’re owners rather than renters. (How is left unsaid.) Mr. Neumann used plumbing to illustrate the business advantages of this approach, according to Bloomberg:An important element of the business proposition is that renters who stay longer are more profitable, Neumann said. His theory is that people who feel a sense of ownership will stick around.The plunger factor would be an added benefit for Flow. “If you’re in an apartment building and you’re a renter and your toilet gets clogged, you call the super,” he said. “If you’re in your own apartment, and you bought it and you own it and your toilet gets clogged, you take the plunger.” That’s the difference, he said, “when feeling like you own something.”THE SPEED READ DealsApollo is reportedly in talks to buy a stake in CS First Boston, the investment bank that will be spun out of Credit Suisse. (WSJ)Carlyle is said to be in negotiations to buy Cotiviti, a health care tech company, from Veritas Capital for nearly $15 billion. (Bloomberg)Oaktree Capital and other hedge funds have snapped up Adani Group bonds in recent days, restoring investor confidence in the beleaguered Indian conglomerate. (Bloomberg)PolicyMarty Walsh, the U.S. labor secretary, reportedly will step down to lead the N.H.L. players’ union. (Daily Faceoff)Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said he wants to make 16 the minimum age to be allowed on social media in the U.S. (NBC News)Russia’s government is said to be pressuring the central bank to loosen fiscal policy as it enters the second year of its invasion of Ukraine. (Bloomberg)Best of the restAmerican start-ups laid off over 3,000 workers last month, up 1,700 percent from a year ago. Relatedly, Washington now has more tech vacancies than Silicon Valley. (Insider, WSJ)“The Secret Saudi Plan to Buy the World Cup.” (Politico)Voice actors say they’re increasingly being asked to sign away the rights to their voices — so they can be duplicated by A.I. (Vice)How Nestlé’s bet on a breakthrough treatment for peanut allergies went south. (Bloomberg Businessweek)LeBron James now owns the N.B.A.’s scoring record. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Before He Takes On ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Ron DeSantis Should Read His Karl Marx

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      With their new majority, House Republicans are planning to take on “woke capitalism.”“Republicans and their longtime corporate allies are going through a messy breakup as companies’ equality and climate goals run headlong into a G.O.P. movement exploiting social and cultural issues to fire up conservatives,” Bloomberg reports. “Most directly in the G.O.P. cross hairs is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is under pressure from the likely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to replace its leadership after the nation’s biggest business lobby backed some Democratic candidates.”I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “the entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.That the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, railed this week against the “raw exercise of monopolistic power” by Apple, for example, has much more to do with the cultural politics of Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, than any real interest in the power of government to regulate markets and curb abuse. (In fact, DeSantis argued in his book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” that the Constitution was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process” and stop any popular effort to “undermine the rights of property.”)Nonetheless, there is something of substance behind this facade of conflict. It is true that the largest players in the corporate world, compelled to seek profit by the competitive pressures of the market, have mostly ceased catering to the particular tastes and preferences of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the American public. To borrow from and paraphrase the basketball legend Michael Jordan: Queer families buy shoes, too.Republicans have discovered, to their apparent chagrin, that their total devotion to the interests of concentrated, corporate capital does not buy them support for a cultural agenda that sometimes cuts against those very same interests.Here it’s worth noting, as the sociologist Melinda Cooper has argued, that what we’re seeing in this cultural dispute is something of a conflict between two different segments of capital. What’s at stake in the “growing militancy” of the right wing of the Republican Party, Cooper writes, “is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” It is the patriarchal and dynastic capitalism of Donald Trump against the more impersonal and managerial capitalism of, for example, Mitt Romney.To the extent that cultural reactionaries within the Republican Party have been caught unaware by the friction between their interests and those of the more powerful part of the capitalist class, they would do well to take a lesson from one of the boogeymen of conservative rhetoric and ideology: Karl Marx.Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.But that’s a subject for another day and a different column.For now, I’ll simply say that the problem of “woke capitalism” for social and political conservatives is the problem of capitalism for anyone who hopes to preserve anything in the face of the ceaseless drive of capital to dominate the entire society.You could restrain the power of capital by strengthening the power of labor to act for itself, in its own interests. But as conservatives are well aware, the prerogatives of workers can also undermine received hierarchies and traditional social arrangements. The working class, after all, is not just one thing, and what it seeks to preserve — its autonomy, its independence, its own ways of living — does not often jibe with the interests of reactionaries.Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda. Play within those restraints, goes the bargain, and you can do whatever you want. Put differently, the right doesn’t have a problem with capitalism; it has a problem with who appears to be in charge of it.There is even a clear strategy at work. If you can stamp out alternative ways of being, if you can weaken labor to the point of desperation, then perhaps you can force people back into traditional families and traditional households. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot stop the dynamic movement of society. It will churn and churn and churn, until eventually the dam breaks.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