



Andrew here. The text messages I received from workers at 345 Park Avenue on Monday were chilling: “We’re huddled in place,” one wrote. Another felt trapped, and some even piled couches against doors. The gunman stormed a building — home to Blackstone, the N.F.L., KPMG and Rudin Management — before he killed himself and others, including a Blackstone executive, Wesley LePatner, the firm said.
This shooting again brought gun violence to corporate America’s doorstep, after a gunman killed UnitedHealthcare’s C.E.O., Brian Thompson, in December. While the investigation into Monday’s shooting continues, the authorities have found a note in which the gunman mentioned the N.F.L. and blamed football for his mental illness. He had a license to carry a gun in Nevada.
This tragedy raises critical questions about security in New York, mental health and gun control. It also forces us to consider the role businesses should play in trying to influence solutions for these issues. In the past two years, the answer has largely been silence. Most companies remain quiet, afraid to offend policymakers, some customers, or even employees. But silence is a choice — and right now, it may be worth re-evaluating.
A battle over the Justice Dept.’s antitrust cops
When President Trump took office in January, many corporate leaders hoped that he would make Washington more business friendly. That’s largely happened — except when it comes to antitrust.
Tensions over how the Justice Department reviews mergers appear to be reaching a boiling point. The fight is drawing attention from both the right-wing agitator Laura Loomer and from C.E.O.s trying to figure out how to navigate deals through Washington, especially after an unexpected settlement of a case over a major tech deal.
The latest: CBS News reports that Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, who were top deputies to Gail Slater, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, were fired on Monday. The reasons for their dismissals aren’t clear, but sources cited insubordination, CBS News adds.
Speculation about disagreements over antitrust policy burst into public view last month. Chad Mizelle, the acting associate attorney general who signed a settlement ending the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s takeover of Juniper Networks, pressed for the agreement, sources told CBS News.
Though the Justice Department’s lawsuit argued that the transaction “risks substantially lessening competition” in the “critically important” networking sector, the settlement reached with Hewlett Packard Enterprise required only modest concessions.
The fight briefly drew the fury of Loomer, the influential provocateur who has Trump’s ear. On X, she accused Mizelle of forcing the settlement on Slater’s team “against their will.”
Loomer also claimed, without citing evidence, that some of the Trump-allied consultants whom HPE had hired were paid $1 million each “for their influence peddling.” (Trump allies including Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz have been working for HPE, according to filings and news reports.)
That said, Loomer has since deleted her X post about the settlement.
What is the Trump administration’s antitrust policy? CBS News reported that some in the administration were unhappy with Slater’s approach, and that business leaders have pushed back against her efforts to prevent companies from communicating with the administration via Trump-aligned lobbyists and consultants.
Others have questioned whether antitrust policy is being shaped by political concerns, pointing to the resolutions of reviews into the Omnicom-Interpublic, T-Mobile-UScellular and Paramount-Skydance deals. “Being overridden by people who know less about antitrust, about the competitive concerns, but more about the political priorities of the Trump administration — that’s really troubling,” Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor and antitrust specialist at Vanderbilt University, told DealBook.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Union Pacific agrees to buy Norfolk Southern for $85 billion, including debt. The cash-and-stock deal would create the nation’s first coast-to-coast rail network, spanning some 50,000 miles across 43 states. The companies are betting that the Trump administration will bless a transaction that would put around two-fifths of rail freight in the hands of one operator.
President Trump wants Rupert Murdoch deposed within 15 days. Lawyers for the president asked for an expedited deposition of the 94-year-old as part of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over an article in the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal about the president’s connections with Jeffrey Epstein. (They cited the media mogul’s advanced age.) Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned associate of Epstein, is appealing to the Supreme Court to overturn her sex-trafficking conviction.
Harvard is said to be open to spending millions to end its Trump dispute. The school has signaled that it is willing to meet a Trump administration demand to spend up to $500 million to settle the White House’s accusations over various issues, including those about its handling of antisemitism on campus, The Times reports. Columbia last week agreed to pay $200 million to resolve a similar dispute, but Harvard is skeptical of that agreement’s provision for an outside monitor to oversee the settlement.
Big Tech fallout
The preliminary trade deal between the U.S. and E.U. leaves major unresolved questions, especially for Big Tech.
With tech rules largely absent from the agreement, U.S. giants may be wondering whether they can rely on Washington to shield them from European regulators’ fines and enforcement actions over antitrust or content rules, David Meyer reports.
“Unless this potential agreement addresses the E.U.’s systematic non-tariff attacks on American technology companies, it will be a significant missed opportunity,” Hilal Aka, a policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit Washington think tank that advocates for the industry, wrote on Monday. Aka noted that Brussels last year levied nearly $7 billion in fines against U.S. tech companies.
A recap: Meta has called on the Trump administration to defend it against what it said was discriminatory European enforcement, and the government has said that it sees tech crackdowns as an issue that could prompt U.S. tariffs. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has essentially paused a long-awaited case against X, reportedly to avoid upsetting trade negotiations.
European commentators call the deal a rare win in negotiations.
“The E.U. can legitimately claim to have preserved its regulatory autonomy,” Simon Nixon, a billionaire entrepreneur, wrote on Monday about the deal. Benjamin Haddad, a European affairs minister, echoed that sentiment, and wrote on Monday on X that the bloc should push for new taxes on digital services.
The big question: How urgently E.U. regulators will continue to police, tax and fine American tech firms — and would such actions prompt President Trump to retaliate?
The deal could also affect Europe’s semiconductor industry. Intel last week dealt a blow to the E.U.’s Chips Act program, an initiative to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in Europe, by canceling plans for new factories in Germany and Poland. But Ursula von der Leyen, the commission’s president, said on Sunday that American chips would “help power” some of Europe’s largest A.I. data centers and “help the U.S. to maintain their technological edge.”
“The U.S. will benefit from the E.U.’s planned A.I. compute expansion,” Julia Hess, a senior policy researcher at the think tank Interface, told DealBook.
The deal also calls for a 15 percent tariff on European semiconductor exports to the U.S., but no tariffs on chip-making equipment — a market dominated by Europe’s ASML, whose shares soared on Monday.
This suggests that the commission, which has called for a “Chips Act 2.0” may now emphasize favoring chips equipment manufacturing, a sector in which Europe has a competitive edge.
Where will the next trade deals emerge?
The S&P 500 is on a six-day winning streak, the dollar is rallying and the bond market has been calm as optimism grows over a détente in President Trump’s trade war.
But is it too premature to celebrate?
Inside the numbers: The deals with the E.U., and Japan over the past week are big, but plenty more are unresolved. “Trading partners accounting for 56 percent of U.S. imports have not yet reached a deal,” David Mericle, an economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note on Monday.
Here’s what to watch for:
On China: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox News on Monday that U.S. negotiators this week in Stockholm were pursuing an extension that would avert tit-for-tat tariffs coming into effect next month. The big question: Will China extract more concessions, as it has done with chips imports?
India: Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, told CNBC on Monday that “more negotiations” were needed to reach a deal with New Delhi before Trump’s self-imposed Aug. 1 deadline, when tariffs are slated to jump to 26 percent.
Others: Negotiations with some big ones, including Brazil, Canada, Mexico and South Korea, are pending. Koo Yun-cheol, South Korea’s finance minister, is set to meet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said that the talks were “are at an intense phase,” but acknowledged that some tariffs were inevitable.
Economists are tallying the costs. Trump’s tariffs have pushed the U.S. effective tariff rate to roughly 17 percent — its highest level since the 1930s — according to Yale University’s Budget Lab.
That’s expected to eat into corporate profits, raise inflation and dent growth. A new era of U.S. protectionism will eventually “reverberate through the entire global trading system,” Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University, told The Financial Times.
The Treasury Department’s debt balancing act
With the national debt already sky-high and poised to keep ballooning, what’s normally a routine quarterly government notice — the Treasury Department’s borrowing plan update known as the refunding announcement — is grabbing Wall Street’s attention.
Investors are eagerly awaiting insights into the mix of short- and longer-term debt that the department plans to issue, which would have big implications for government borrowing costs, Danielle Kaye reports.
The details: The announcement, scheduled for Wednesday, is the second of President Trump’s second term. The department will outline the mix of three-year and 10-year notes and 30-year bonds that it intends to issue — and project auction sizes for each over the coming months.
On Monday, Treasury said it expected to borrow more than $1 trillion in debt during this quarter. That’s $453 billion more than its April forecast, largely because of what it said were “the lower beginning-of-quarter cash balance and projected lower net cash flows.”
A ballooning budget deficit has made this more noteworthy. The new Republican tax and spending law is expected to add more than $3 trillion to the national debt, according to Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper.
At the same time, the Fed has been shrinking its holdings of Treasuries. There’s also a looming maturity wall, with trillions of dollars in many short-term notes coming due this year. “All of these factors come together,” Michael Pugliese, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, told DealBook, “and you’re going to need more issuance somewhere.”
What’s the right mix? Before being chosen as Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent criticized the Biden administration’s approach to issuing debt, which favored issuing short-term bills compared to longer-term securities. But so far, the Trump administration has largely continued that approach, Pugliese said.
Analysts largely do not expect major policy shifts this week, or even for several quarters. Even if the Treasury’s outlook for longer-term debt sales stays the same, however, that would mean a growing reliance on short-term bills to meet the need for debt issuance.
“They’re trying to minimize the cost to the taxpayer,” Pugliese said, because issuing more long-term notes would mean locking in higher borrowing costs. Bolstering longer-term debt could also raise Treasury yields, which would indirectly affect an array of consumer borrowing costs, including mortgage rates.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
Shareholders of Wise, the payments company, backed a plan to shift its primary listing to the U.S. from Britain. (FT)
J.J. Spaun won the U.S. Open with a bizarre putter from L.A.B. Golf. Then a private equity firm bought the equipment maker for more than $200 million. (WSJ)
Tech and artificial intelligence
C.E.O.s say that A.I. has helped them cut staff, and they’re eager to let investors know it. (WSJ)
“JPMorgan says fintech middlemen like Plaid are ‘massively taxing’ its systems with unnecessary pings” (CNBC)
Best of the rest
A lobbyist for Instant Pot tried to win over President Trump with a new line of devices emblazoned with “Make America Great Again.” It backfired. (NYT)
“Apple Is Shutting a Store in China, Its First Closure in the Country” (NYT)
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