Business

➚ BUY: American Airlines is cracking down on line-cutters. Those trying to board ahead of their assigned zones will trip alarms meant to shame.

➘ SELL: Boeing lost $6.2 billion last quarter due to a strike that shows no signs of ending, as machinists rejected an offered 35% pay raise.

⇌ HOLD: Southwest reported better-than-expected earnings and handed hedge fund Elliott five of the eight board seats it wanted. Chevron’s former CEO also joins the expanded 13-person board.

Final WSJ, FT polls give Trump slim edge… The lone trader behind big Trump wagers… This is the century’s best stock market… PE fees at record lows… Japan’s “punycorns”...

Elon Musk accused Democrats of pumping cash into the economy in a last-minute bid for votes. He reposted on X a chart showing that the US national debt rose sharply over the past few weeks — $450 billion since mid-September. This happens almost every year, under both parties. The federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, so some benefits are paid and Treasury does a little intergovernmental housekeeping.

Warren Buffett won’t endorse political candidates, and warned about deepfake impersonators “Anything they see with my image or my voice, it just ain’t me,” he told CNBC. X’s conservative blue-checks spread a false claim earlier this month that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had endorsed Trump. Taylor Swift publicly endorsed Harris last month after Trump reposted an AI-generated endorsement on Truth Social.

Buffett’s statement, posted to Berkshire Hathaway’s website, dashes lingering hopes from Democrats. The billionaire had supported Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, lending his name to the latter’s efforts to raise taxes on the rich.

Goldman Sachs and Apple will pay $89 million after the US consumer-financial watchdog found they bungled key pieces of their joint credit card. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is also banning Goldman from launching any new cards for now.

The real lesson here isn’t for Goldman, which has already taken its lumps in consumer banking and is getting out of the credit-card game as fast as it can.

The lesson is for big tech companies, which once thought they could outsource the heavily regulated part of financial services to banks and keep the customer for themselves. Other Silicon Valley giants have had fintech dreams flame out: Amazon and Google checking accounts, Facebook’s crypto payments system, Libra. And Apple now has a CFPB fine on its record.

Full disclosure: My byline is on all those stories. At the time — the late 2010s — there really was a sense that big tech would, if not eat banking, then relegate it to a white-labeled utility that would maintain the accounts and do the paperwork while the customer interacted with Facebook or Google. With billions of users, their reach was infinite and their cost to acquire customers essentially zero. And there was an argument that tech companies had to take a run at financial services: They were so big that it didn’t make sense to move into a new category unless it was enormous.

Their financial plays mostly failed; we’ll see how it goes for Amazon in healthcare.

“We have to get out of this bad situation where bad numbers create a bad mood and a bad mood leads to even worse numbers.”

—German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his country’s economy, which is in recession

John Paulson is a hedge-fund investor and a Trump adviser and surrogate.

Joseph Zeballos-Roig: You’ve said that Mr. Trump would use “reasonable tariffs” to boost US manufacturers. He has talked about a tariff in the 10% to 20% range. Do you think that’s reasonable?

John Paulson: It’s a good number. We have about $3 trillion of imports. So 15% on $3 trillion would produce $450 billion in revenue. It makes sense to have the bulk of the tariffs targeted to industries that are subject to unfair trade competition and to industries that are strategic, both for industry and defense.

So you believe he would veer in a more targeted direction, instead of the universal tariff he’s talked about?

I do think so, yes.

Something that’s been brought up in this campaign by both sides is the need to bring down costs. Is a tariff a tax on consumers?

It would result in higher import prices. But on the other hand, it supports domestic manufacturing, so you get more jobs, more investment in the US, more taxes. [Trump] did raise tariffs, particularly on China, and that did not result in increased inflation. So you have to look at the totality of the program.

Are you concerned about retaliatory tariffs?

It’s time for us to retaliate against the unfair trade practices we’ve been receiving and act in a reciprocal fashion. Look at Tesla. When Tesla wanted to sell cars to China, it wasn’t allowed. They forced Tesla to build a factory in China to sell cars in China. We don’t have any similar restrictions on foreigners exporting their cars here. The result is huge trade deficits.

Fannie and Freddie are still in conservatorship. Would you expect a second Trump administration to take steps to release them?

I would expect either administration to release [them] from conservatorship. The conservatorship was supposed to be temporary, to allow time for both Fannie and Freddie to rebuild their capital. They have, between them, approximately $150 billion of capital, and are coming close to the point where they could be returned to the private sector. [Their regulator has said they need $250 billion to $300 billion.]

The benefit to either administration is… that the government will be the big winner, because the government owns about 90% of the equity. So as they ultimately sell that equity over time, that produces large gains for the government.

Have you spoken to the former president about it?

I have not. It’s important, but a relatively small item in the overall agenda.

Oracle was indeed behind a 2018 campaign to keep Amazon from winning a lucrative Defense Department contract. The origins of a dossier, alleging that a Pentagon official who had done past consulting for AWS was steering the contract its way, were always a bit of an open secret. But Oracle has ducked questions about it for years, until its lawyer was asked in a recent deposition that my colleague Reed Albergotti dug up.

The campaign, which was aggressive even by traditional standards of corporate mudslinging, never went anywhere. Neither did the $10 billion project, known as JEDI. The story is worth reading in full (it involves alleged ties to Russian oligarchs) and is my second-favorite story of solving a corporate whodunit that Semafor has published, behind this one.

Sharp investors know where to find real insights— and they’re in this newsletter. With so many financial newsletters competing for attention, it’s hard to find one that cuts through the noise. That’s where The Daily Upside comes in. Created by a team of Wall Street insiders and bankers, this fresh, insightful newsletter delivers in-depth perspectives that go beyond the usual headlines. Subscribe for free today.

Texas holdup: DEI considerations may trip up a settlement between Boeing and federal prosecutors over the fatal 737 Max crashes. A Texas judge whose courtroom has become a favored venue for conservative litigants ordered the government to explain this clause in the plea agreement:

The judge, Reed O’Connor, has been skeptical of other pieces of the deal, which many families of crash victims also oppose. Finalizing it is crucial for Boeing, which has a mountain of other problems.

A loophole that allows multilateral development banks to finance so-called captive coal plants in developing Asian countries could doom global net zero goals, Nithin Coca and Tim McDonnell wrote. The main culprit is China, where “the financing and operations of [captive coal] plants lack transparency, partly due to their designation as national strategic projects,” Coca wrote.