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The German government announced on Monday that it intends to acquire 40% of the defence contractor KNDS, a move designed to bolster European arms production in partnership with its NATO and EU ally France.
The decision deepens state involvement in a company whose hardware has become central to Europe’s rearmament efforts.
KNDS was created in 2015 through the merger of Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and France’s Nexter. The French state holds a 50% stake, while the other half belongs to the German family behind Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, whose planned exit has opened the door for Berlin to step in.
Based in Amsterdam, the group reported revenue of €4.4 billion last year and employs more than 11,000 people.
The timing reflects a broader scramble across Europe to expand military spending and manufacturing capacity, as governments weigh the continued threat from Russia’s war in Ukraine against growing doubts about the reliability of the US as a security guarantor.
Berlin framed the investment in explicitly strategic terms, saying it would secure lasting influence over a business it considers vital to European security and defence.
The German government added that the stake would reinforce domestic industrial output, technological independence and the safeguarding of key national security interests and technologies.
In a joint statement, Germany and France said they had agreed on the future strategy and governance of KNDS, which they intend to co-own through arrangements aimed at giving both countries equal shareholdings.
Neither government specified a timeline or the final level at which their holdings would settle, but they stated the agreement opens the way for a possible flotation of KNDS in the near future.
According to people familiar with the matter cited by the Associated Press, the two states plan to trim their stakes to around 30% within two to three years of any listing, while retaining equal voting rights regardless of the size of each holding.
The two governments cast the deal as a joint commitment to building up Europe’s defence industry and armed forces, and to securing the continent’s strategic independence well into the future.
State participation in the firm was first floated by German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius in 2025 as a way to protect strategic expertise and jobs.
Beyond its tanks, KNDS also manufactures the Puma infantry fighting vehicle and the Boxer and Dingo armoured personnel carriers, equipment which is in growing demand as European armies replenish stocks depleted by years of underinvestment and donations to Ukraine’s defence.
Additional sources • AP
Kathrin Ziegler
Stock index futures were down on Monday as traders awaited updates from U.S.-Iran negotiations, with the Middle Eastern country describing the talks as showing “progress.”
Now, here are 4 news stories that broke overnight to watch out for:
U.K. Leadership Shake-Up:
Banks are testing products on fake customers. It’s faster, cheaper, and ethically murky.
Financial institutions are quietly substituting real customers with algorithmic clones to bypass stringent data privacy laws and speed up time-to-market.
Testing a new credit card or AI investment app traditionally takes months of vetting. For bank product developers, the synthetic consumer, who never sleeps or complains to regulators, and costs fractions of a penny to interview, represents a faster, highly attractive alternative, prompting adoption across the industry.
U.S. Bank deploys synthetic audiences to model consumer segments, such as high-net-worth households, and test messaging and refine campaigns before launch. Regulatory sandboxes encourage this practice to keep pace with AI-driven fintech. Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, and UBS are part of the UK FCA’s AI Live Testing initiative, utilizing advanced AI systems to test products and simulate market stressors.
NatWest, Monzo, and Santander, meanwhile, explore synthetic data ecosystems to train AI models, while JPMorgan Chase generates synthetic financial data to simulate market behaviors for risk management and product design.
Industry experts warn that the true challenge is balancing the speed of agentic AI with the need for strong governance.
“Most banking leaders believe agentic AI can move faster if governance weren’t perceived as a constraint. But in practice, governance is what makes these systems deployable at scale. A critical part of that is robust testing against representative ground truth, and synthetic data provides a powerful proxy that enables banks to stress-test products against rare scenarios and edge cases,” said Mudit Gupta, EY Americas Financial Services Consulting AI Practice Leader.
“The trade-off,” he added, “is privacy: synthetic data is often treated as inherently safe when it can still leak sensitive signals through inference and linkage risks. It can also replicate and scale historical biases, embedding them behind a layer of abstraction that makes them harder to detect, audit, and challenge—turning a governance shortcut into a long-term ethical exposure.”
Ultimately, the rush to deploy synthetic consumers offers undeniable speed, but the industry must quickly confront whether these powerful proxies—if not rigorously governed—will fulfill their purpose as a testing shortcut or simply institutionalize Wall Street’s next major ethical crisis.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
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At the time of writing, Brent crude was down 0.91% at $79.12 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude had fallen 0.70% to $75.32 a barrel.
Lower crude prices reflected broader investor sentiment in early trading after Qatari and Pakistani mediators said the first round of negotiations between the US and Iran aimed at securing a final agreement to end the conflict had concluded with “encouraging progress”.
A memorandum of understanding signed last week includes a commitment to reach a final agreement within 60 days, an end to fighting on “all fronts” – including in Lebanon – and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Asian stocks were mixed on Monday, with markets in Japan and South Korea trading higher, while US futures traded lower.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6% to 72,364.82 after reaching a new all-time high of 72,831.73 during intraday trading, helped by technology stocks fuelled by enthusiasm over the global artificial intelligence boom.
Japan’s SoftBank Group, the multinational investment holding company with a strong AI focus, rose 2.4%, while chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron gained 2.3%.
South Korea’s Kospi added 0.4% to 9,084.37 and was trading near record highs, led by AI-related shares. Memory chip maker SK Hynix surged 4.7%.
“We’re seeing another strong market today,” Neil Newman, managing director and head of strategy at Astris Advisory Japan, said. He cautioned that the Japanese market was “probably getting a little stretched” from an investor’s point of view, “especially with what’s going on in the Middle East”.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 1% to 23,690.86, while the Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.2% higher to 4,098.01.
Additional sources • AP
The U.S. Department of Justice — make that the U.S. Department of “Justice” — is sniffing around Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
This is widely seen as a throw-me-in-the-briar-patch gift from President Trump, coming as California’s governor edges ever closer toward a 2028 run for the White House. The presumed effort to cut down a political foe could instead boost Newsom’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination, or so it’s being suggested.
After all, look at how Trump’s verbal bludgeoning elevated former Rep. Adam Schiff. The House has typically been a dead end for lawmakers seeking statewide office in California. Today, the former Burbank congressman and Trump tormentor is a United States senator.
In truth, however, it’s far too early to say how the investigation of Newsom and his wife plays out politically, not least because it’s unclear whether there’s merit to the probe or if it’s merely a fruitless search-and-destroy mission by Trump’s Department of Retribution, Vengeance and Settling Old Scores
Beyond that, the first ballots of the 2028 campaign won’t be cast for roughly a year and a half. The Democratic National Convention, where the party will install its nominee, doesn’t begin for another 778 days.
Your friendly political columnist won’t resort to that hoariest of cliches about such-and-such duration being a lifetime in politics. But for some perspective, let’s go back 778 days.
President Joe Biden was running for reelection and about to challenge Trump to a pair of early debates. Trump was sequestered in a New York City courtroom being prosecuted on 34 felony counts.
A lot happened in the weeks and months that followed, including Biden’s self-immolation on the debate stage and Trump’s criminal conviction. A lot more will happen in the weeks and months to come. There’s no telling what. But it’s safe to say the fight for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination will not be decided by anything that’s taken place in June 2026.
Still, Newsom is once again sunning himself in the national spotlight and for that he has Trump to thank.
With his exquisitely tuned political antennae, the governor jumped out front of the president by announcing last week the feds were targeting him and his wife. (Naturally, Newsom’s revelation was accompanied by a rage-bait email — subject line: “Because I am thinking of running for president” — that denounced the “political witch hunt” and asked for money.)
“After calling for my arrest last year, Donald Trump directed his Department of Justice to investigate me,” Newsom said in a 4 ½-minute, direct-to-camera video that framed the investigation before prosecutors had the chance. “And just in the last week, I’ve learned his campaign has reached my own home: To get me, he’s coming after my wife, Jen.”
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Newsom and his wife both adamantly denied any wrongdoing and, of course, they must be presumed innocent until and unless proven otherwise.
But there was something a bit disingenuous about the governor’s chivalrous defense. Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker who calls herself California’s “First Partner,” is no mere housewife baking cookies and holding teas, in the famous words of Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Hold the outrage, folks, this is not some retrograde criticism of career-seeking women.)
Among her many public-facing activities, Siebel Newsom heads The Representation Project, a nonprofit focused on challenging gender stereotypes. The organization has faced criticism for accepting donations from companies that lobby the governor, so it’s not unreasonable to ask whether those interests have improperly sought to influence Newsom by giving money to Siebel Newsom’s causes.
My Times colleagues reported that an investigation related to Siebel Newsom has been underway for about a year and was launched by federal prosecutors in Sacramento based on whistle-blower information provided in California. It was not, their source said, the result of a directive out of Washington.
A second probe, they reported, is related to Newsom’s ex-chief of staff, Dana Williamson, who pleaded guilty last month to bank and wire fraud involving a scheme to steal campaign funds from Xavier Becerra, the Democratic candidate for governor.
The problem with all this federal sleuthing is the utter lack of credibility attached to Trump’s Justice Department. Which is what happens when you turn the department into an arm of Trump’s malevolent fiefdom and deploy its prosecutors as henchmen targeting the president’s perceived enemies.
“This is a huge problem,” Randall Eliason, former chief of the Public Corruption Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, told Politico. “In any political corruption prosecution, the defense almost always claims it is a ‘political witch hunt,’ that prosecutors are targeting him or her for some political reason.
“The best defense to that has always been [the Justice Department’s] tradition of independence from politics and long track record of pursuing corruption cases based only on the facts and law, without regard to political considerations,” Eliason said. “The Trump administration has abandoned that independence without even trying to hide it.”
The probe of Newsom and his wife presents more questions than answers.
It’s grody, but not criminal on its face, for lobbyists to curry favor with the governor by throwing cash at his wife’s endeavors — if, in fact, that’s been the case. Special interests spending money to gain access and influence is about as common in Sacramento and other capitals as statues, domed buildings and manicured lawns.
So why then are the feds investigating Newsom? Why now? Is there any fire, or is it all a lot of smoke?
Perhaps most important, where can you turn to get an impartial answer?
WASHINGTON — In congressional races across the country, a new crop of super PACs is taking to the air with millions of dollars worth of advertisements to sway voters.
“President Trump said it best, ‘Celeste Maloy will never let you down,’” says one advertisement supporting the Utah Republican representative in her upcoming primary election.
“Standing up to big pharma, fighting for local jobs, Val Hoyle doesn’t back down,” says an ad backing the Oregon Democratic representative ahead of her primary victory last month.
The super PACs have nondescript names — such as Jobs and Democracy PAC and American Mission — and the text is so generic that it almost seems to have been created by artificial intelligence.
That isn’t so far off the mark. The AI industry has funded the ads.
One network of super PACs is linked to Anthropic, maker of the popular AI tool Claude, and the other to Open AI, maker of ChatGPT.
They have been among the most prolific political spenders so far in the 2026 midterm elections, splashing out more than $37 million to date to influence races across the country and making the groups among the biggest outside spenders so far in congressional races. That number could grow exponentially as campaign season heats up closer to the November election — and as the Silicon Valley giants prepare initial pubic offerings that are poised to raise billions of dollars for the companies and their executives.
The AI political spending boom comes as emerging technology companies have become increasingly “comfortable with using their power to achieve a political goal,” said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public policy executive and founder of Chamber of Progress, a technology trade group with a progressive orientation.
The leading AI companies have a history.
Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI employees who were concerned that the company was less focused on its original mission to safely harness the power of AI.
The companies are now the leading drivers of the burgeoning AI industry, and their competing views about how the technology should be regulated are playing out in a wide-ranging political ad spending war that has targeted congressional races in big cities and rural areas alike.
OpenAI thinks AI should be regulated solely at the federal level.
Anthropic calls for more stringent regulation and supports efforts by states such as New York and California that have passed more aggressive AI laws.
The groups spending in these races are super PACs, which are able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in federal races thanks to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In some races, the AI-backed political groups have spent more than the candidates they are backing.
“There was no way as a grassroots person that I could compete with that kind of money,” said Al Olszewski, whose opponent in a Montana Republican congressional primary beat him by 30 points after getting a boost from $877,000 in ads from a super PAC backed by OpenAI’s co-founder. “I got crushed.”
The AI behemoths have emphasized that they are independent from the political groups.
One group counts $25 million in support from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, alongside $100 million tied to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, which holds a large stake in OpenAI. The global policy chief for OpenAI was reportedly involved in conceiving the group.
The other side has gotten $20 million from Anthropic and millions more from donors whose identities are not public.
This anonymous political cash is commonly known as dark money, and its prevalence is growing.
(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; source photos courtesy of the Tech Oversight Project)
“This has become very normalized now,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending. “In 2024, we tracked over $1 billion in dark money.”
That total was $350 million higher than the previous presidential election.
The political activity of these AI companies and executives reflects a dramatic shift from how emerging technology companies have historically engaged with politics.
Google, for example, didn’t hire its first in-house Washington lobbyist until after the company had gone public in 2005.
“I think that for a long time, the tech industry lobbying strategy was just ‘leave us alone,’” Kovacevich said.
He sees the spending by these AI-linked super PACs as following the recent playbook developed by the cryptocurrency industry, which has funded the only network of political groups that has spent more on congressional races this year than those linked to OpenAI.
“I think what the crypto industry realized was that there’s no substitute for building up political power,” Kovacevich said.
The political stakes for these technology companies are significant.
“AI policy is far from settled,” said Asad Ramzanali, the former deputy director for strategy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration and the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration banned foreign nationals from using the most powerful AI model developed by Anthropic — and even banned the company’s own employees from it — which forced the company to restrict access for all users.
The two super PAC networks have largely shied away from producing ads that mention AI and have mostly chosen to avoid competing against each other in the same races.
There’s one big exception.
In the marquee Manhattan Democratic congressional primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), each side has spent millions of dollars.
While the field includes Kennedy scion and social media star Jake Schlossberg and former Republican turned Trump critic George Conway, the target of all the AI-backed spending has been Alex Bores, a former Palantir data scientist who now serves in the New York state Assembly.
New York congressional candidate sponsored a state measure Bores requiring major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents.
(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)
That’s because Bores sponsored a state bill, known as the RAISE Act, that requires major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents. The bill was signed into law in December 2025.
The ads sponsored by the group tied to OpenAI, which has spent more than $7.5 million in the race, paint Bores as someone who can’t be trusted.
They cite his support from other tech billionaires, including former crypto mogul and convicted financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose super PAC spent $100,000 to support Bores in 2022 when he first ran for New York Assembly.
“Is that really who should be shaping AI safety for our kids?” one ad asks.
An ad sponsored by the Anthropic-backed network, which has also spent more than $7.5 million supporting Bores, makes the case that the bill he sponsored is exactly why he should be elected.
“As a computer engineer, Alex Bores saw how dangerous unregulated AI could be and he wrote New York’s RAISE Act to put real safeguards on A.I. and hold big tech accountable,” the ad says.
The AI ad barrage in New York has even included what might be considered a kumbaya moment in the ad wars — another super PAC created to support Bores is most heavily backed by both an employee of Anthropic and an employee of OpenAI, who both focus on AI safety.
The group, Dream NYC, has spent more than $1.7 million supporting Bores.
Bores and fellow New York State Assemblymember Micah Lasher have been atop the most recent polls in the race ahead of the June 23 primary.
A general view of businesses in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
For voters in many parts of the country, the debate over AI policy has played out locally as a debate over the massive data centers required to power the technology.
In Utah, a proposed data center in Box Elder County, backed by “Shark Tank” television personality Kevin O’Leary, has generated controversy because of questions about its impact on resources in the drought-prone state and its environmental effect on the nearby Great Salt Lake.
In the state’s most competitive Republican congressional primary — the vast, newly drawn 3rd Congressional District — both candidates expressed concerns about how the project has been developed and called for greater transparency in this plan and for future data centers in the state.
Utah congressional candidates Phil Lyman and Celeste Maloy in a debate on June 1. A super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $920,000 to support Maloy.
(Rick Egan / Pool / The Salt Lake Tribune Via Associated Press)
Despite their similar position on the project, a super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $950,000 to support Maloy, who is running in the new district after the boundaries of her old district changed.
“It’s a lot of money to throw at a race,” said her opponent, Phil Lyman, a former conservative Republican state Representative who ran to the right of Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in an unsuccessful primary challenge in 2024.
Lyman insists he is no AI skeptic.
“I’m not anti data centers, I’m pro-transparency,” he said. “I think the future is bright with AI.”
The group said it is backing Maloy because it sees her as “someone who’s worked the issue” of AI regulation and who “has demonstrated leadership” with Republicans in Congress.
Maloy’s campaign didn’t respond to request for comment.
Utah congressional candidate Phil Lyman speaks during a Cottage Meeting at the SunRiver Community Center Ballroom in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
But Lyman suspects the group’s support for Maloy ahead of their June 23 primary has more to do with old-fashioned politics than any emerging technology.
One of the two co-founders of the political group is Chris Stewart, Maloy’s predecessor in Congress.
“Everything that they’re doing feels very coordinated,” Lyman said. “It makes you wonder if he’s still really controlling that seat.”
Several senior executives sold shares in American Express, Dell, Lowe’s, Take-Two Interactive, and Broadcom, while directors and executives at Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, SoFi Technologies, Abbott Laboratories, and MercadoLibre made purchases, potentially signaling varied insider sentiment across these companies.
The Playboy brand lives on long after the magazine died
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After Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week that the U.S. Department of Justice may be investigating his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, media and pundits pounced on millions in charity payments he has solicited for nonprofits, including ones she is involved in.
Those donations, known as “behested payments,” aren’t illegal in California, but, long before Newsom started asking for them, many have found them unsavory — with good cause. A behest, after all, is by definition a command or at least a strong suggestion.
Anytime a politician is commanding money, regardless of the purpose, there is at least the appearance that the giver — Meta, Google, Blue Shield for example — may expect something in return.
It may seem absurd that the Trump administration could be investigating Newsom for questionable ethics, when Trump has hawked everything from crypto-coins to sneakers from the Oval Office. But the problem Newsom now faces is that behested payments are actually skeevy, and legal or not, they make an excellent target for pummeling the presidential contender. Especially because some of the charities are tied to his wife.
“The Newsom case has blown it wide open, but this has been an issue for years,” Sean McMorris told me. He’s the transparency, ethics and accountability program manager at Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that has been raising alarms over behested payments for more than a decade.
McMorris said that while these payments don’t violate any laws, they are “ripe for abuse” because companies and people likely aren’t ponying up cash just to be good citizens. If you or I called up PG&E and asked them to give a few million to our favorite cause, I doubt we’d have much luck, even if it involved kittens, puppies or small children in need.
The entire system, McMorris points out, “doesn’t really work unless you’re shaking down people who you know need things from you as a politician.”
Jerry Brown used behested payments to get millions for charter schools he supported. Lesser luminaries such as mayors (including Antonio Villaraigosa, Eric Garcetti and Karen Bass, just to name the last three in L.A.) have used them for all kinds of stuff from jobs programs to fixing up official residences.
And it’s far from a Democratic thing. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, used them to pay for travel and after-school programs. Republican James Gallagher, who recently won a congressional seat, used them to fund computers for schools while he was in the state Legislature. Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones has raised millions, including helping to get $800,000 in donations to fund a replica of a historic ship for the maritime museum in his San Diego district.
Trump himself could be considered king of behested payments, with his corporate-paid ballroom and birthday bash.
Literally, folks, find me a politician with an itty-bitty bit of clout, and I’ll show you a trail of behested payments stretching through their pet projects. For that reason alone, it’s unlikely that California legislators will take any action to curb them, especially now when doing so would appear as a criticism to Newsom and Democrats in general.
And, to be fair, behested payments can do a lot of good. Newsom supercharged behested payments during the pandemic, raising hundreds of millions for programs to get Californians through that social disaster.
For that reason and others, not all experts find them terribly troubling. Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor with an expertise in election and governance issues, points out that money in politics is nothing new and at least behested payments are (mostly) required to be acknowledged. Anything over $5,000 and the politician has to report it to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, which keeps a public database.
That makes behested payments far more transparent than, say, dark money donations to a mysterious political action committee. And at least the money is going to a good cause, be it historical ships or computers for kids.
“I actually don’t think that they’re the evil mechanism that other people do,” Levinson said. “I mean, my feeling is like, let’s live in reality, right? People are going to want to give as much money to or close to powerful people as possible, and I think that we have a choice between money going to independent expenditure groups or political committees or going to nonprofits.”
So behested payments in and of themselves might not be much of a headache for Newsom. But some of the payments Newsom solicited went to nonprofits Siebel Newsom is involved with, and which have paid her a salary. That proximity is uncomfortable for many of us. There is no distinction for a behest given to a charity with direct ties to the politician, but maybe there should be.
Still, salaries being paid by behested payments also aren’t illegal, and it’s been done before, even by Newsom. Villaraigosa was paid through behested funds for his work as the state “infrastructure czar” back in 2022. Bass considered paying former L.A. Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff through behested-funded nonprofits for his work after the recent fires before public scrutiny pushed him to forgo the funds.
None of that is to say the Newsoms are off the hook in a federal investigation. Newsom’s office said that along with the FBI, agents from the IRS have been knocking on doors and asking questions. All of us — probably the Newsoms included — will just have to wait to see if the fine-tooth combs of the feds pick up any dirt.
If there is any lesson to be learned at this point, it’s about ambition and hubris. Behested payments are easy money for California politicians and business as usual — everyone does it. But maybe they shouldn’t. It’s not black or white.
Newsom is learning quickly what it means to have a powerful enemy like Trump, one who has shown he will use the full power of the American government for his own purposes. One who can tip the scales and slide white to gray and gray to felony.
Federal investigators do not like to come up empty-handed, and the wink-wink nature of behested payments creates just that kind of ambiguity that provides reasonable cause for investigation — a self-inflicted vulnerability that surely has every California politician nervous.
WASHINGTON — More than $350 million from President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has been quietly directed to White House security, an allotment that Democrats warn appears to be helping fund his new ballroom project — despite the president’s insistence that no taxpayer dollars would be used.
The apportionment of funds, which the White House’s Office of Management and Budget made late Friday, comes from two accounts that were intended to provide the U.S. Secret Service with extra money for hiring and training in the aftermath of last year’s assassination attempts on the president, according to Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. The shift was made days after Congress rejected a $1-billion request for the White House in a Homeland Security bill that Trump signed into law and as the ballroom project is tangled in legal challenges.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, whose panel initially drafted the security funding, said Thursday he was unaware of the allocations.
“The president said that it was all going to be paid for with private money,” said Grassley (R-Iowa). “And that’s what the country expects.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, charged that Trump’s actions are potentially illegal.
“After repeatedly telling the American people that zero taxpayer dollars would be spent on his gold-plated ballroom boondoggle, now Trump appears to be using a smoke and mirrors tactic,” Merkley said in a statement.
“Trump has proven that he can’t be trusted to follow the law,” Merkley said. “He only cares about wasting taxpayer money on his vanity projects.”
Trump has faced setbacks in his attempts to build the ballroom on the White House grounds, where he ordered the demolition of the storied East Wing to make way for it.
Touring the construction site last month, Trump called the development a “gift” to the American people. He has repeatedly said that it is being paid for by donations — which has also run into ethics questions from watchdogs concerned about potential corruption and conflicts of interest.
Congress refused the Trump administration’s request for $1 billion for the ballroom last month. The administration wanted the money as part of a Homeland Security bill, but Republican and Democratic lawmakers rejected efforts to tack it on. It became politically toxic at a time when Americans are reeling from inflationary high costs of living.
The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the price tag for the project has ballooned to $600 million, according to a project summary prepared by the contractor, with more than half of that funding coming from taxpayers. Roll Call first reported on the apportionment of new funds for White House security.
At its core, arguments are swirling over how much of the White House project is to bolster security underground, with bomb shelters and a medical facility, and how much of the costs are related to the president’s promised 999-seat ballroom on top.
A spokesman for the White House said that Trump and donors are funding some $400 million for the ballroom development, and that the coordination with the Secret Service had been noted in the initial announcement of the project.
“The East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the President, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets,” said White House spokesman Davis R. Ingle in a statement.
He said the events over the past weekend, including an alleged attack plan targeting the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House, proves why the project is needed.
“President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for Presidents for generations to come,” he said.
Government lawyers have argued that the project includes critical security features to guard against a range of threats, such as drones and missiles.
The White House has said in court documents that the East Wing project would be “heavily fortified,” including bomb shelters, military installations and a medical facility underneath the ballroom. The Secret Service told senators last month that $220 million of the White House’s $1-billion request would go to harden the ballroom addition, with bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies, chemical and other systems.
The rest of the money would go for other security improvements, according to a document provided to Senate Republicans, including $180 million for a new, “long overdue” White House visitors screening facility.
The shifting funds are certain to ignite growing concerns in Congress over the separation of powers, and the president’s use of federal funds allocated by lawmakers.
The money comes from Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts bill that the president signed into law last summer. It provided more than $1 billion for Secret Service resources, including “personnel, training facilities, programming, and technology; and performance, retention, and signing bonuses.”
The provision was uncontested at the time, even as Democrats voted against the broader bill. Democrats said they did not challenge this section or try to strip it out from the package.
Under the Constitution, only Congress has the specific authority to allocate funds across the federal government, including the executive and judicial branch operations.
While the president holds the power to sign — or veto — those appropriation bills, once the funding becomes law, it largely must stand.
Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.
A veteran dealmaker takes the helm as large-cap M&A shows signs of a selective recovery.
JPMorgan Chase, the global leader in investment banking revenue, has named Anu Aiyengar global chair of Investment Banking and M&A, signaling a renewed emphasis on dealmaking as a pillar of its investment banking strategy.
As part of a broader divisional shift, the bank also named Dorothee Blessing, Kevin Foley, and Jared Kaye as co-heads of Global Investment Banking, while Charles Bouckaert succeeds Aiyengar as global head of M&A.
The changes come as deal activity shows signs of recovery after nearly two years of sluggish momentum. Dealogic estimates that global deal announcements reached nearly $2 trillion by May 11. That’s a 33% increase from the same period last year.
Still, observers note that the current cycle is far from a repeat of the free-flowing deal market of 2021. Higher financing costs have made boards more disciplined about price and timing, while closer regulatory scrutiny from antitrust watchdogs in both the U.S. and Europe has raised the financial and reputational cost of getting large transactions wrong.
“This has not been a full-spectrum, feel-good rally. It has been a highly selective one, skewed toward strategic, large-cap deals,” said Marc Cooper, CEO of Solomon Partners. “Deals valued at $5 billion and up accounted for more than half of all volumes. That distinction matters.”
Against this backdrop, Aiyengar’s appointment suggests JPMorgan sees senior dealmaking expertise as a defining advantage in the current market. The firm expects the dealmaking veteran to work closely with senior clients as boards decide whether to move forward with transactions or wait for better conditions.
Since joining JPMorgan in 1999, Aiyengar has advised on more than $1 trillion in transactions. She became sole head of the bank’s global M&A franchise in 2023, making her the only woman leading M&A at a major Wall Street house at the time.
Her move also carries symbolic weight in an industry where senior dealmaking roles remain dominated by men. In 2025, Business Insider named her the top U.S. M&A banker on its Rainmakers list, making her the first woman to hold the No. 1 position.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
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Elon Musk’s space and AI firm secured first-time ratings from Moody’s, Fitch and S&P Global on Thursday, a milestone that places its debt firmly in investment-grade territory and could allow it to borrow more cheaply as it funds a vast expansion.
The endorsements arrive less than a week after the company’s record IPO, which raised around $85.7 billion (€73.8bn) in the largest initial public offering in history.
Moody’s assigned SpaceX a Baa1 long-term issuer rating with a stable outlook. In its report, the agency pointed to the firm’s “exceptional franchise strength” as the world’s leading orbital launch provider and operator of Starlink, the largest low Earth orbit satellite broadband network.
The rating is also slightly higher than Tesla’s Baa3. Reacting to the news in a reply on social media, Elon Musk wrote: “Tesla’s credit rating is ridiculously low to be honest.”
According to Moody’s, Starlink has become SpaceX’s primary cash flow generator, underpinning improving scale, wider margins and a gradual shift away from more cyclical launch revenue.
Moody’s also set out the risks. It said the rating was constrained by the heavy execution and financial demands of SpaceX’s large-scale AI buildout, marked by high capital intensity, sustained negative free cash flow and an uncertain range of returns.
The agency highlighted the company’s dependence on the next-generation Starship V3 vehicle, warning that technical setbacks or delays could pressure long-term growth.
It further pointed to elevated governance risks tied to SpaceX’s controlled structure and concentrated voting power, which it said limit independent board oversight and leave the firm heavily reliant on a single individual, Elon Musk.
However, Moody’s still projects strong revenue and earnings growth through 2028, driven chiefly by Starlink, which counted 12 million subscribers as of early June, alongside an expected turning point in the AI division.
The agency cited recent third-party compute deals with Anthropic and Google worth a combined $75 billion (€65bn) as evidence of that potential.
As for the other credit agencies, Fitch issued a BBB+ long-term issuer default rating, also with a stable outlook, citing the company’s commanding lead in commercial launch, where it has delivered more than 80% of global mass to orbit since 2023.
Meanwhile, S&P Global assigned a BBB rating with a stable outlook, weighing the strength of the launch and connectivity businesses against the risks of the nascent AI segment and the company’s substantial capital needs.
The ratings did little to steady the stock on Thursday.
SpaceX closed at $185, down more than 18% from the high of $225.6 it reached on Tuesday, when its valuation briefly topped $3 trillion (€2.6tn).
The shares fell as low as $172 during the session before paring losses, as investors weighed whether the company’s lofty valuation had run too far.
The retreat has reshuffled SpaceX’s standing among the world’s corporate giants. The company now ranks once again as the sixth most valuable listed firm by market capitalisation, having given back some of the ground it gained earlier in the week.
On Tuesday, it had overtaken Amazon to claim fifth place, and at its intraday peak, it briefly leapfrogged Microsoft into fourth before this week’s slide pushed it back down.
Even after surrendering some of those gains, SpaceX sits among the most valuable companies on the planet just a week into its life as a public firm, and the investment-grade verdict from all three major agencies marks a notable shift in how financial markets judge a business that spent years operating as a privately funded rocket maker.
A Swedish transport authority is recommending a vote against the Europe-wide rollout of Tesla’s (TSLA) supervised self-driving software, unless the U.S. EV maker disables its ability to exceed legal speed limits, Reuters reported, citing a regulatory letter.
In a previously unreported
Aura Minerals board approves up to $200M share and BDRs buyback program
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OpenAI, Anthropic—trillions in wealth are locked in private markets. Banks want in.
With valuations of nonpublic companies reaching record levels on the back of the AI boom, private-market access is increasingly becoming the defining battlefield for client acquisition in private banking.
Consider SpaceX’s public debut earlier this month. It was the largest initial public offering in history, adding $75 billion to its roughly $15.85 billion pre-IPO cash position and creating a market capitalization of over $1 trillion. Once OpenAI and Anthropic go public, the combined valuation of all three companies could be well over $3 trillion.
OpenAI filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission June 8 for a confidential IPO. And Anthropic said Claude Code’s run-rate revenue has more than doubled since the beginning of 2026, underscoring how much wealth creation is taking place outside public markets.
“Much of the current innovation and growth is happening within private markets,” said David Frame, CEO of J.P. Morgan’s Global Private Bank. “Clients are increasingly seeking these opportunities,” he added.
According to a recent Titanbay/Campden Wealth report, the average ultra-high-net-worth investor (UHNWI) holds 20% of their portfolio in private equity, double the level two years earlier, and plans to raise that figure further.
Likewise, 86% of wealth advisers plan to increase private-market investments this year, with 47% raising allocations specifically to venture capital and growth, according to Hamilton Lane’s 2026 Global Private Wealth Survey.
The booming demand has led to a wave of new initiatives from banks and asset managers. In September 2025, Bank of America and Merrill launched the Alts Expanded Access Program for UHNWIs with a net worth of $50 million or more.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management launched its first-ever green private equity strategy, the North Haven Private Assets Fund, in May 2025. DBS Private Bank partnered with Hamilton Lane to launch PATH for Asian clients, while Goldman Sachs announced plans to invest $1 billion in T. Rowe Price to expand wealth-channel access.
But as interest in private equity rises, experts warn that private banks could be caught between long-term wealth building and growing demand for riskier assets. “There’s a dichotomy in the market,” George Walper, managing principal of CEG Insights, said. “Wealthy investors want more exposure to alternatives, to private markets—meaning more risk. At the same time, they want to be cautious and protect their assets.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
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The Bank of England left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 3.75% on Thursday, extending a pause that began in December 2025, as policymakers weighed the inflationary fallout from the Iran war against signs of resilience elsewhere in the economy.
Governor Andrew Bailey and fellow Monetary Policy Committee members were widely expected to keep rates on hold and maintain a broadly neutral stance on future policy moves.
The decision came a day after official figures showed UK inflation holding steady. Consumer prices rose 2.8% year-on-year in May, unchanged from April and below economists’ expectations of 3.0%, leaving the headline rate at its lowest level since early 2025.
However, the stable reading masked diverging trends beneath the surface. Transport costs accelerated sharply to 6.8%, driven by higher fuel prices and rising air fares, while food inflation eased to 2.2% and housing costs continued to moderate.
Though inflation remains above the bank’s target of 2%, the figure raised hopes that the upward pressure on prices emanating from the spike in oil and gas prices after the start of the Iran war on 28 February may have been less than anticipated.
Andrew Bailey, the bank’s governor, said the recent fall in oil prices has been “encouraging” while noting they are still higher than before the war.
“Whatever happens in the future, the higher energy prices of the past four months mean there’s already some inflationary pressure in the pipeline,” he said. “The Bank’s job is to make sure that doesn’t turn into sustained inflation above our 2% target.”
Analysts also cautioned that inflation could still accelerate later this year, as higher household energy bills feed through to prices. Lindsay James, investment strategist at Quilter, said: “Whilst inflation was below expectations in May and currently under 3%, it is still likely to jump closer to 4% later in the year due to the coming impact of a higher energy price cap.”
James added that while oil prices have retreated from recent highs, they remain above last year’s levels, suggesting underlying inflation pressures have not fully disappeared.
The decision to hold the key interest rate was not unanimous, with two of the nine Monetary Policy Committee members voting for a quarter-point rate increase, reflecting concerns that higher energy costs could still feed through into broader inflation pressures.
Thursday’s labour market release painted a mixed picture.
The unemployment rate dipped unexpectedly to 4.9% in the three months to April, down from 5.0% in the first quarter, yet payrolled employee numbers fell over the period, pointing to an underlying loss of momentum even as the headline jobless rate improved.
Wage growth, a metric the Bank of England watches closely for signs of persistent price pressure, held firm, with regular pay excluding bonuses rising 3.4% on the year.
“The labour market is still continuing to lose momentum, with the latest figures showing a further cooling,” stated Richard Carter, head of fixed interest research at Quilter Cheviot.
Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, struck a similar note, cautioning that “it’s clear that the labour market is not out of the woods yet,” though he added that the mixed data buys the committee more time to wait and see how the economy evolves.
The combination of cooling headline inflation, a softening jobs market and still-robust pay growth underscores the bind facing the committee. Strong earnings keep alive the risk of so-called second-round effects, where higher wages feed back into prices, even as hiring loses steam.
