Pope Francis died on Monday. His loss, of course, is a loss for the world. If you’ll indulge me for just a moment, I’d like to relate his life and his views to what’s happening right now in the business and policy world.
At the end of 2019, I went to the Vatican to interview him. You might ask why a business journalist would have done that? At the time, C.E.O.s and corporate leaders of all faiths were coming regularly to tell him about their plans around E.S.G. Uniquely, they went to seek his approval.
Many people have suggested E.S.G. was virtue-signaling, or marketing. But having personally witnessed these interactions, I can tell you that many business leaders saw it as much more than that. Efforts in the U.S. to completely eliminate E.S.G. and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — the idea of inclusive capitalism — is something that no doubt would have deeply troubled him.
Francis and business
As the world reckons with the passing of Pope Francis, one part of his legacy that is clear is his outreach to — and critiques of — the global business community.
From the outset of his priesthood, steeped in Jesuit theology, the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio always emphasized the concerns of the poor. But as a globe-trotting ambassador for Roman Catholicism, Francis frequently met with global business leaders, building bridges while also admonishing what he saw as the excesses of modern capitalism.
(That’s in addition to his meetings with national political leaders, most recently with Vice President JD Vance on Sunday, which came after the pontiff criticized anti-immigration policies in what was seen as a rebuke of the Trump administration.)
Francis met frequently with corporate leaders, including tech moguls like Tim Cook of Apple and Eric Schmidt, formerly of Alphabet; financial chiefs including Brian Moynihan of Bank of America and Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone; and leaders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP.
He also entered alliances with big businesses, including blessing a group focused on environmental causes, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican, which worked with companies worth trillions in market value.
The pope praised elements of modern business. He described the internet as a “gift from God” in 2014, examined the promises of artificial intelligence and described business broadly as a “noble vocation.”
His willingness to reach out concerned some critics, who worried that his theological roots would make him antagonistic toward capitalism.
But Francis consistently reminded corporate leaders not to forget the poor. “We must never allow the culture of prosperity to deaden us, to make us incapable of ‘feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and sensing the need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own,’” he wrote in a letter to the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, in 2016.
Last year, he told a group of entrepreneurs that “a little philanthropy” wasn’t enough to offset business’s obligations to the needy.
Francis’ focus on climate issues included pushing energy C.E.O.s and their investments to work toward a lower-carbon future. “We do not have the luxury of waiting for others to step forward or of prioritizing short-term economic benefits,” he said in 2019.
He also warned about how A.I. might widen global inequality and contribute to a “growing crisis of truth in the public forum.” In an address to the Davos meeting this year, Francis said, “Human dignity must never be violated for the sake of efficiency.”
Will the next pope follow that approach? Francis elevated many of the cardinals who will select his successor, though some have been skeptical about his efforts to engage with the secular world. Front-runners for the throne of St. Peter, according to the online prediction market Polymarket, include Cardinal Pietro Paolin, who’s seen as a continuity candidate; and Luis Antonio Tagle, who is regarded as being in Francis’ theological mold.
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Also of note: Francis also overhauled the Vatican’s finances. That included stripping a powerful office of significant financial assets after years of dubious investments had prompted a corruption investigation.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration reportedly plans to freeze more funding for Harvard. Federal officials are weighing whether to halt another $1 billion for health research at the school, according to The Wall Street Journal, after already cutting off more than $2 billion. The escalation follows a report by The Times that Trump officials blamed a mistake for sending Harvard a list of demands many had criticized as overreach. The fight could have economic implications for the Boston area, where the university has an outsize presence.
Big Tech backs the White House Easter Egg Roll. With hundreds of guests expected to gather Monday on the South Lawn for the annual event, they’ll see plenty of amenities sponsored by big companies, including Amazon, Meta and YouTube. It’s the latest effort by corporate giants to spend money to curry favor to the Trump White House; another reminder came when President Trump disclosed that his inaugural committee had raised $239 million, shattering records.
Warner Bros. scores another box office win, with an asterisk. “Sinners” collected an estimated $46 million in North American ticket sales this weekend, a solid performance for an R-rated horror movie rooted in Black culture. But Hollywood executives worry about the movie’s cost and a precedent it may have set: Its rights revert to the director, Ryan Coogler, after 25 years, a condition that had scared off other studios from making the film.
Sell America
President Trump’s trade war has completely upended investment flows, with global investors selling off U.S. stocks and corporate and government bonds at a clip unlike anything Wall Street has seen in recent years.
Some calm returned to the corporate and government bond markets late last week. But analysts are warily eyeing Trump’s next moves, fearing that his protectionist policies and threats against federal institutions could re-accelerate money flows out of the United States, hitting the dollar especially hard.
The latest: S&P 500 futures this morning point to another lackluster trading session. The benchmark index is down nearly 7 percent since Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2. Yields on long-dated Treasury notes and bonds have jumped, too, and the dollar hit a three-year low last week.
That signals that investors have lost confidence not onlyin these traditional safe-haven bets, but perhaps also in the American economy.
“We worry that the recent de-dollarization trend does have more to run,” George Saravelos, global head of FX Research at Deutsche Bank Research, told DealBook. The growth-sapping effects of tariffs are one reason global investors are shying away from the U.S., he said.
But Saravelos also pointed to Trump’s “unwind of the post-World War II order,” in which the U.S. built strong global alliances and in return foreign investors became reliable buyers of Treasury bonds and dollars.
The “buy-America” trade is looking shaky. Global investors reduced their U.S. stock holdings by a record amount over the past two months and plan to sell even more in the future, a Bank of America survey of fund managers noted last week.
That should worry the White House and Wall Street. As of year end, non-U.S. investors held roughly $18 trillion of U.S. stocks and $7 trillion in American bonds, according to Saravelos.
There is the potential for “huge negative dollar flows” should market volatility persist, Saravelos wrote in a research report last week.
Then there are Trump’s attacks on Jay Powell. Advisers have warned the president that attempts to fire the Fed chair or undermine the central bank’s independence could destabilize the markets. Yet Trump appears unfazed, telling reporters last week, “If I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast, believe me.”
At least one Republican senator opposes any effort to fire Powell: “I don’t think the president, any president, has the right to remove the Federal Reserve chairman,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, told The Financial Times.
Ultimately, the bond market could be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. He has played down the stock market’s swoon, telling Americans to “be cool.” But he’s watching the gyrations of the bond market; he owns at least $125 million in bonds himself.
In pausing his most expansive tariffs earlier this month, Trump acknowledged that the slump in the bond market had put investors on edge.
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In other trade news: Beijing has warned it will retaliate against any nations that negotiate deals with the U.S. “at the expense of China’s interests.” And here’s how the tariffs are affecting the battle between Coke and Pepsi.
“It’s like appointing someone who believes the world is flat to be in charge of NASA.”
— Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers’ Union, a conservative lobbying group, about Peter Navarro. The Times takes a look at how Navarro, a longtime antiglobalist, has gone from being a fringe voice to being an architect of President Trump’s revanchist trade policy.
dealbook series: how tariffs are impacting U.S. business
‘The U.S. is no longer on our list’
We asked DealBook readers how tariffs had affected their companies. We’re featuring a response from Kai Seim, founder of Seim & Partner, an engineering firm based in Germany that helps develop fiber and 5G networks. The company employs about 50 people in Germany and about a dozen in the Philippines.
Seim had considered opening an office in the U.S. but decided against it after seeing the chaotic business environment. He writes:
We opened a subsidiary in the U.S. shortly before Covid, but we had to close in 2022 because of heavy losses from the pandemic.
When we opened the U.S. branch, our first customer was a data center developer in Indiana. We did high-level planning for a mobile backhaul network linking mobile sites in Indiana. Our plan was to grow this business further. For a telecom engineer like me, the U.S. is an interesting market. I had already worked there earlier in my career, and I ran an engineering department in New York. So it was my desire to internationalize our business in a known country.
Last year, we started thinking about reopening in the U.S. We would have invested more than $2.5 million a year by hiring about 10 workers. But we decided not to, as we would be facing an environment which seems to be out of control. The rule of law has eroded. We lost trust in the legal, the political and the financial system. Why earn U.S. dollars? Euros are far better, or yen, or Philippine pesos.
Asian countries will be the focus of our next steps. The U.S. is no longer on our list despite our sympathy for the country, its culture and its people.
DEALBOOK WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU
We’d like to know how the tariffs are affecting your business. Have you changed suppliers? Negotiated lower prices? Paused investments or hiring? Made plans to move manufacturing to the U. S.? Or has it helped your business? Please let us know what you’re doing.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Chinese state-backed investors are reportedly pulling back from American private equity firms. (FT)
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Lazard hired Patrick McHenry, a Republican and former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, as a senior adviser on geopolitical matters. (WSJ)
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“Why Big Law Firms Aren’t Standing Together Against Trump’s Assault” (NYT)
Politics, policy and regulation
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“The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say” (NYT)
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The United Arab Emirates plans to use artificial intelligence to help write laws. (FT)
Best of the rest
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California is taking Hollywood for granted and risks losing the entertainment industry to places such as Britain, according to Ben Affleck and others. (Business Insider, NYT)
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“Man Versus Machine as China Shows Off Humanoid Robots in Half-Marathon” (WSJ)
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Is Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase right about meetings? (FT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder of DealBook, the flagship business and policy newsletter at The Times and an annual conference.
Ravi Mattu is the managing editor of DealBook, based in London. He joined The New York Times in 2022 from the Financial Times, where he held a number of senior roles in Hong Kong and London.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is an editor for the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business and how workplaces are changing.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Lauren Hirsch covers Wall Street for The Times, including M&A, executive changes, board strife and policy moves affecting business.
Edmund Lee covers the media industry as it grapples with changes from Silicon Valley. Before joining The Times he was the managing editor at Vox Media’s Recode.
The post The Legacy of Pope Francis’s Business Diplomacy appeared first on New York Times.
