Andrew here. We’re focused on the scramble to salvage Republicans’ major policy bill and how it could affect business and the economy. We’ve also got more on the New York mayoral race moves by business leaders and reporting by Danielle Kaye on the financial health of Saks Global.
A.I. is also on our minds. Check out some fun excerpts from an interview with Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, conducted by my colleagues Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of The Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast. And Sarah Kessler finds out how the C.E.O. of Twilio uses A.I.
ministration — are making it harder to salvage the legislation, which corporate America is closely watching, in time.
Here are the latest big changes:
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The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan official who is reviewing whether the legislation complies with the chamber’s budget rules, rejected a provision that would limit states’ ability to get more federal Medicaid funds. (For the wonkily minded, they relate to a “provider tax” loophole that nearly all states use.) Critics of the bill say it could lead to the shuttering of many rural hospitals.
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The administration directed lawmakers to remove the so-called revenge tax, which would have raised taxes for many companies based in countries that impose a global minimum tax or additional taxes on American tech giants. Business lobbyists have argued that it would chill international investment in America. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had reached international agreements exempting U.S. companies from the global minimum tax.
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The Senate parliamentarian also asked lawmakers to rework a 10-year moratorium on the enforcement of state laws regulating artificial intelligence, according to Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee.
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Here’s a running list of other provisions the parliamentarian has rejected. Still unaddressed: the tax changes at the core of the legislation.
Trump is turning up the heat on lawmakers. The White House held an event on Thursday to rally support for the legislation, at which the president praised the “hundreds of things” to like about the bill.
Trump has also been calling up individual senators, according to Punchbowl News.
Whether or when that happens is unclear, however. Republican leaders are seeking to salvage many of the provisions with wording tweaks. (They’ve already done so with proposed cuts in federal funding for food assistance programs.) But Senator John Thune, the majority leader, has said that the chamber won’t override the parliamentarian’s rulings.
Meanwhile, lawmakers still disagree on key provisions like caps on deductions for state and local taxes. And it’s unclear whether House Republicans will approve whatever the Senate decides on.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Eric Adams meets with potential big-money backers. Dan Loeb of the hedge fund Third Point, Shayne Coplan of the prediction market Polymarket and Rob Wiesenthal of the aviation company Blade were among those who attended an event with the New York mayor on Wednesday about possibly donating to his re-election campaign, The Times reports. On the corporate leaders’ minds: stopping the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the likely Democratic mayoral candidate.
The U.S. and China say they’ve made progress on a trade framework. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that both sides had confirmed terms of an agreement struck in recent weeks meant to lead to a formal trade deal, including a loosening of restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earth materials. A Chinese government representative said that progress had been made, potentially easing concerns about the path to a deal.
Uber is in talks to get back into business with Travis Kalanick. The ride-hailing giant may help finance its co-founder’s bid to buy the U.S. operations of Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous vehicle company, The Times reports. An agreement — despite Kalanick having been ousted from Uber eight years ago this month — underscores the company’s concerns about competition from self-driving car services like Waymo.
Saks at a crossroads
Saks Global’s deal last year to buy Neiman Marcus, a longtime rival, was meant to be a transformative event for luxury retail. Bond investors were drawn to the $2.7 billion agreement, praising it as a way to save costs and bolster the two department store giants.
But creditors and vendors are now jittery as the company struggles to prove that it’s on the right track, with an important debt payment on the horizon, Danielle Kaye reports.
A $120 million interest payment is due on Monday. It’s tied to a $2.2 billion five-year bond that Saks issued to finance the Neiman deal. Some investors have doubted that Saks would make the payment, but a person close to the company told DealBook that the company would meet the Monday deadline.
Gary Wassner, the C.E.O. of Hilldun, a finance company that guarantees orders for dozens of brands that ship to Saks, agreed. “I am very confident that it will be paid on time,” Wassner told DealBook, citing conversations with the company.
But the challenges run deeper than one payment, retail analysts say. On a call with creditors in May, Saks said it had an adjusted loss of more than $100 million last fiscal year. S&P Global Ratings has put Saks on negative credit watch over concerns about its liquidity.
The bonds tied to the Neiman Marcus deal, due in 2029, have tanked in value since the transaction closed. “It’s unprecedented for brand-new debt to be viewed this suspiciously, this quickly,” Mark Cohen, the former head of retail studies at Columbia Business School, told DealBook.
Vendor relationships have been strained, too. For months, brands that sell to Saks have raised alarms about withheld payments. In February, the company told suppliers how it planned to pay them back, with all past-due payments to be paid in 12 installments starting in July.
Saks says it’s confident about its finances. “We feel like we are setting this balance sheet the right way,” Marc Metrick, the retailer’s C.E.O., told DealBook. “I think people need to see that, and I’m looking forward to showing them.”
The company also said it was making “significant headway” in rebuilding vendor relationships.
It recently announced $350 million in new financing to help bolster its liquidity. And the company is in talks with bondholders about potentially borrowing an additional $600 million, which would replace that previously stated commitment, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
Saks’ troubles come amid struggles for retail. Tariffs, combined with falling consumer sentiment that’s led to a pullback in spending, continue to weigh on the industry, including the luxury space.
Patrick Collison on the dollar, A.I., TV shows and more
As the co-founder and C.E.O. of the payments giant Stripe, Patrick Collison thinks a lot about a wide range of fast-growing technologies, including crypto and A.I.
In a live interview with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of “Hard Fork,” a Times tech podcast, Collison shared his thoughts on some of them. Here are lightly edited and condensed excerpts; check out the full interview on the latest episode of “Hard Fork” here when it publishes on Friday.
How A.I. agents, software that can take actions on a user’s behalf, will interact with money:
Obviously, the sort of initial conception of Bitcoin was that we’re going to throw off the shackles of the monetary tyranny and oppression that we’re sort of subjected to and liberate ourselves with this new currency. And look, Bitcoin has obviously garnered a lot of traction, but a majority of cryptocurrency transactions today are in stablecoins, are dollar-denominated.
I think it might be the case with stablecoins. What actually happens is, rather than overthrowing the dollar, it actually enables people outside the U.S. to access the dollar in ways they couldn’t previously. I think this is the biggest thing that’s actually underappreciated by people here in America — which is for outsiders, lots of currencies are not a great thing to hold savings in, or not a good thing to transact in.
On what Collison wishes A.I. agents could do that they currently can’t:
Reason over scientific literature. It gets tripped up in the paywalls.
On how A.I. can transform media consumption:
Reading the A.I. summary — I think it can be useful. I think it has a powerfully inoculating effect. Like, I think long-form, lots-of-episodes TV is a waste of time. But it’s very tempting, right? You watch an episode and you’re like, “Oh, geez, I really want to know what happens here.”
And so I discovered a couple of years ago, obviously, that the solution is you immediately go to Wikipedia and read the entire summary of the season, and then you’re cured of the desire to watch any more episodes. So there is a therapeutic benefit to A.I. summaries.
“If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family.”
– Eric Trump, one of President Trump’s sons, to The Financial Times. Critics have accused the family of minting money via crypto — including a memecoin linked to the president — and other ventures that have benefited from his father’s political standing.
Talking A.I. with Twilio’s C.E.O.
Every week, we’re asking C.E.O.s about how they’re using generative artificial intelligence. Khozema Shipchandler, who leads the cloud communications company Twilio, says he uses it as a teacher and to help filter customer service and sales inquiries. The responses have been lightly edited and condensed.
How do you use A.I. in your work or personal life?
A.I. tools are a great way to learn. For me, it starts out with a simple prompt, like “teach me about quantum computing.” And based on what it spits out, there’s an opportunity to go deeper. That’s useful both when I’m behind a laptop, but also, many of these also are very fluent in voice prompts, so if you’re in the car, when you’re just trying to kill time, you can have a conversation.
What direction have you given your team on how to use A. I.?
There was a lot of early experimentation to see if there were ways to handle our increasing growth and higher volume with the same work force. A.I. is awesome at that, its ability to deflect calls, to deflect incoming inquiries. I would say it was a resounding success.
And then we used it for incoming sales inquiries. Instead of having to parse literally thousands of inquiries that come in every day — sometimes from people who don’t even know what we do — our frontline sales reps can attach themselves to qualified leads, and sales productivity goes up as a result.
We’re using those two examples as our showcases and really encouraging others to experiment.
On the hiring side, the question that is now — if not, the No. 1 question, certainly in the top five — is, “How are you using A.I. to improve how you’re doing your job?”
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Unilever has reportedly agreed to pay $1.5 billion for the Dr. Squatch brand, representing another big bet by the consumer goods conglomerate on men’s grooming. (FT)
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Meta is said to be in talks to buy PlayAI, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to create voices. (Bloomberg)
Politics, policy and regulation
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Nike said it expected that tariffs would cost it an additional $1 billion in its current fiscal year. (CNBC)
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“Trump Threatens to Sue The Times and CNN Over Iran Reporting” (NYT)
Best of the rest
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“Crypto Industry Moves Into the U.S. Housing Market” (NYT)
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Xiaomi, the Chinese electronics giant, said it received more than 200,000 orders in three minutes for a new electric car set to cost less than a Tesla Model Y. (Business Insider)
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Anna Wintour is — and isn’t — stepping back from Vogue. (NYT)
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.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Danielle Kaye is a Times business reporter and a 2024 David Carr Fellow, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post What Business Is Watching in Negotiations Over Big Policy Bill appeared first on New York Times.
