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➚ BUY: Prime. US shoppers spent a record $14.2 billion on Amazon Prime Day(s) this week, according to Adobe, 11% more than last year. Amazon captures 60% of all online spending during its annual flash sales, versus 40% on a given day.

➘ SELL: Subprime. Credit-card losses are rising at big banks. “We’re watching the intent to pay very closely,” said Mark Mason, CFO of Citi, where losses on retail cards have doubled since the end of 2022.

Meta may buy stake in Ray-Ban owner…Brookfield readies a millennial CEO-in-waiting … Scientific “red flags” around Sam Altman’s nuclear startup… China’s supply-side economics… Ceasefire hopes lift Israeli markets… Yen gets short-lived lift as Tokyo intervenes…

Biden donors ‘in revolt’

THE SCOOP

Joe Biden met privately in Las Vegas Wednesday with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the film producer and a top campaign adviser, who conveyed a warning: The president’s donors’ patience is wearing thin, and their cash soon will, too.

Katzenberg, one of Biden’s closest counselors and a conduit to moneyed circles in media and finance, told the president that major donors, doubtful of his ability to win in November, have all but stopped writing the kind of big checks that sustain campaigns in the home stretch, people familiar with the meeting said.

After this story was published, Katzenberg said in a statement that it was a “misread of a private meeting” and that he and Biden “talked about everything from the convention to new ads. And by the way, we will raise the money we need to run a winning campaign.”

Democratic donors have been privately wringing their hands for weeks, but it had been unclear until now whether their concerns had made it to a president whose inner circle has shrunk as calls for him to drop out have grown louder.

The Biden campaign had $240 million on hand at the end of the second quarter, versus Trump’s $285 million, and that was before the debate kicked off concerns about his ability to run and win.

“This I can confirm,” James Carville, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns including Bill Clinton and a respected voice among donors, told Semafor. “Donors in revolt.”

The freeze extends beyond Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to the web of Super PACs and outside groups that make up the party’s infrastructure. “It’s a crisis,” said a top Democratic fundraiser. “The money isn’t moving.”

Biden’s loudest critics have come from Hollywood, not from the Democratic Party’s other coastal donor base on Wall Street. After George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times, actors Rob Reiner and Michael Douglas, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel all expressed concern about the president’s chances. (“We are in fuck city,” Emanuel said earlier this month at the Aspen Ideas Festival).

BEN’S VIEW

Biden’s campaign isn’t at immediate risk of running out of cash. But the final months of presidential races are dominated by expensive television campaigns in swing states — made all the more necessary by Biden’s inability to communicate regularly himself.

Money, rather than polling or political support, is typically the trigger for a campaign’s death spiral. Now Biden is edging toward the brink.

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Semiconductor stocks tumbled yesterday after Donald Trump said Taiwan, where a majority of advanced chips are manufactured, should pay for its own defense. (Strong earnings from the largest manufacturer, TSMC, this morning has buoyed the sector’s stocks somewhat.) The US has long sold arms to Taiwan, and has ramped up its help as China saber-rattles in the region. Government data shows that the US imports nearly half of its key device chips from Taiwan, a growing economic vulnerability that the $50 billion CHIPS Act is trying to address.

Sixth Street Partners is hiring a new CFO who will only add to Wall Street speculation about the investment firm’s next steps. A veteran JPMorgan banker, Mark Feldman guided the IPOs of Apollo, Ares, TPG, and Carlyle, and more recently the merger that produced Blue Owl, a competitor to Sixth Street in the red-hot world of private credit.

Credit has replaced equity as the jewel of private investing, and Sixth Street’s brand of complex, go-anywhere lending is especially en vogue. The firm invested in avocado farms, made a mint saving Airbnb during the pandemic, and was the first financial firm to own a professional sports team, in San Francisco’s women’s soccer club.

CEO Alan Waxman told Fortune in April that an IPO is “not on radar.” But the siren song of a public listing has been hard for asset managers to resist: Everyone gets rich, and firms get a stock to use as currency for acquisitions, an edge in the race to build financial superstores. Blue Owl went public in 2021, and another competitor, HPS, is on its way.

Playing FTSE: New UK rules meant to woo corporate stock listings to London go into effect at the end of this month. The changes, introduced by the Conservatives but being driven forward by Britain’s new Labour government, give founders more power and remove requirements for shareholders to approve certain transactions. They’re aimed at stemming the tide of tickers from London to New York and Amsterdam, and attracting listings from developing countries whose domestic exchanges are increasingly competitive (Mumbai led the world in IPOs last year).

“It’s an important moment for the UK to … make sure that the UK capital markets offering is compelling,” Charlie Walker, the London Stock Exchange’s deputy CEO, told my colleague Prashant Rao. Last year, London saw the fewest IPOs since 2010, according to EY, even as US listings rebounded.

Diversity initiative: Deere, whose green tractors are a symbol of the American heartland, is the latest company to publicly backpedal from corporate diversity and inclusion efforts. No more corporate parade floats or “socially motivated messages” in company policies, it announced on X, where an activist campaign had ramped up pressure. That follows Tractor Supply, which said last month it’s cutting all DEI roles and will stop sponsoring Pride festivals and reporting some diversity data.

Meanwhile, Microsoft cut a DEI team, whose leader said in an internal email seen by Business Insider that such efforts are “no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020,” when racial-justic protests put pressure on companies to step up their efforts. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of S&P 500 companies with a chief diversity officer rose from 240 to 370, according to executive search firm Russell Reynolds. But DEI jobs peaked that year, according to the Washington Post, and fell 13% between 2022 and early this year. The corporate backpedaling is happening in quieter ways, too: Starbucks recently replaced “representation” goals with “talent” goals in awarding executive bonus incentives.

Yo quiero Taco Bell: There’s a vibrant black market for artwork stolen from the walls of Taco Bell locations across the US. More than 20 years ago, the fast food chain commissioned artist Mark T. Smith to create artwork for its restaurants. He came up with a set of eccentric pieces designed with acrylic, crayon, and cut paper — some of which, according to Artnet, have been stolen and are going for up to $8,500 on eBay. “I think it’s really cool,” Smith said. “There is this whole subculture of collecting and trading and stealing.”

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