PayPal inked a deal with two major college athletic conferences to help facilitate the millions of dollars schools will soon start paying their student athletes.
🤝 The partnerships, reached initially with the Big Ten and Big 12 conferences, will kick in July 1. That's when the floodgates open for revenue sharing following a recent court settlement with the NCAA.
💰 The conferences are cashing in. The Big 12's deal is worth $100 million over five years, CBS Sports reported.
📚 Between the lines: PayPal stands to gain from athletes keeping at least some of their money — potentially millions in the aggregate — within the PayPal ecosystem.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asked Congress to remove a controversial "revenge tax" provision of the "big, beautiful bill" after striking a deal on global corporate taxes, he said said Thursday.
Why it matters: The provision worried global investors, as it gives the president the authority to tax foreign holdings of U.S. investments. Some worried it would slow the flow of foreign capital into the U.S.
The world's top 1% accumulated trillions in wealth over the past decade, while life-saving aid faces cuts, according to a Thursday Oxfam International report.
Why it matters: The amount of wealth that the rich amasses around the world could eliminate annual global poverty more than 22 times over.
California's financial overseer inked a $300,000 settlement with bitcoin ATM operator Coinme this week, over charges the company failed to comply with the state's rules for operating the kiosks.
Why it matters: States have been cracking down on the machines (as we told you Tuesday), which give fraudsters an easy way to get paid by victims of cyber crime.
Follow the money: About a 1/6 of the fine will go to a victim who lost over $50,000. The rest will go to the state.
Details: Coinme was fined for failing to limit customers to $1,000 worth of transactions each day. It also did not include the name of the exchange used to determine its prices on the receipt, as the state's law requires.
The latest: Wednesday, the director of the Federal Home Finance Administration, William Pulte, told Fannie and Freddie, the mortgage giants, to bring proposals to consider digital asset wealth when making decisions about loans, according to a post on social media.
What they're saying: "In keeping with President Trump's vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the Great Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage," Pulte wrote.
The crypto industry has a complex political game before it right now, and is largely split on the best strategy to enact the agenda it spent more than $100 million to move in the last election.
The big picture: There are three big moving parts on the table, a stablecoin bill that has passed the Senate; an earlier stage bill to create a broader industry regulatory structure; and the SEC's plan to act whether or not any new laws are passed at all.
America buys a lot of cotton T-shirts from China — $277 million worth in 2023. We also buy a lot of fireworks — $465 million. But buyers of cotton T-shirts will have a lot more options to avoid the burden of tariffs than buyers of fireworks.
The big picture: That's the implication of revelatory new data from consulting firm McKinsey, which calculated a "rearrangement ratio" for hundreds of different goods the U.S. imports from China.
If you want to understand dealmaking in 2025, look at the conventional wisdom and then reverse it.
The year began with great optimism, but the first quarter was quiet.
The second quarter began with "Liberation Day," which was supposed to scare off any remaining animal spirits. Instead, it was followed by a megamerger surge, according to preliminary data released Thursday by LSEG.
Help is…not wanted at the nation's largest federal contractors. Job postings by these employers plummeted this year, per new data from Indeed out this morning.
Why it matters: Elon Musk may be gone from the White House, but DOGE-driven spending cuts are now flowing through the private sector.
JPMorgan Chase shares hit an all-time high Wednesday, leading a financial sector that looks primed for a tech-like rally.
Why it matters: Strategists say a breakout in the financial sector, combined with records across other market segments, would confirm the bull market is back and tariff concerns are dead.
From JPMorgan to HSBC, big banks are rushing to strike a more optimistic tone in their midyear outlooks, with the stock market more than recovered from its April lows.
Why it matters: Strategists are looking past the geopolitical risks and focusing on what really drives stocks: earnings growth.
Boston; Washington, D.C., and Baltimore drivers go the fewest years between reported collisions among motorists from the 200 biggest U.S. cities, per Allstate claims data.
Why it matters: The findings put a little quantitative weight behind some people's strongly held beliefs about the quality — or lack thereof — of their neighbors' driving skills.
