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Crude oil stockpiles fell by 4.2 million barrels to 416.8 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 20

U.S. crude oil inventories fell by more than expected last week and product stocks were mixed as refineries raised their capacity use, according to data released Friday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Commercial crude oil stockpiles excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 4.2 million barrels to 416.8 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 20 and were about 5% below the five-year average for the time of year, the EIA said.

Analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had predicted crude stockpiles would fall by 1.1 million barrels.

Oil held in the SPR increased by 260,000 barrels to 393.3 million barrels. Oil stocks at Cushing, Okla., the Nymex delivery hub, were down by 320,000 barrels at 22.7 million barrels.

The EIA estimated U.S. crude oil production at 13.6 million barrels a day, off by 19,000 barrels a day from the previous week. Crude imports fell by 178,000 barrels a day to 6.5 million barrels a day and exports were down by 1.2 million barrels a day to 3.7 million barrels a day.

Refineries ran at 92.5% of capacity, up from 91.8% the previous week. Refinery runs were forecast to slip by 0.3 of a percentage point in the Journal survey.

Gasoline inventories increased by 1.6 million barrels to 223.7 million barrels, and were 3% below the five-year average, the EIA said. Gasoline demand was 9.0 million barrels a day compared with 8.9 million barrels a day the week before. Gasoline stocks were forecast to have fallen by 800,000 barrels.

Distillate fuel stocks dropped 1.7 million barrels to 116.5 million barrels, against expectations of a 200,000 barrel increase, and were 10% below the five-year average.

Joan Miró’s ‘Head of a Catalan Peasant’: A Playful Portrait’s Regional Spirit

The painter’s 1924 canvas reflects his evolution toward Surrealism and abstraction even as it evokes his own identity.

It looks like a noodly creature from deep under the sea. On a straw-yellow background, scattered with a few gray freckles in the top left and bottom right corners, two lines form a pencil-thin cross; on each end of the horizontal stroke are black dots with three red lines shooting out of them like eyelashes at half-mast. At the top is something that resembles a drooping bell pepper, partially shaded in cardinal red; at the bottom a brace of thicker crimson squiggles dangle like the tentacles of a jellyfish. In the top right corner hangs a funky five-pointed star, shaded in blue, beneath blue, yellow and red arcs.

The painting, in oil and crayon and measuring roughly 5 feet by 4 feet, is unmistakably by Joan Miró. Titled “Head of a Catalan Peasant,” it’s the first of four “Head” canvases made in 1924 and 1925, right as the Spanish painter developed the capricious style for which he became famous. The title (unusually, Miró’s own) brings the painting into focus: The cross forms a face; the two black dots, eyes; the squiggles beneath, a beard. Atop the head sits a barretina typical of Miró’s native Catalonia.

Miró called himself an “international Catalan,” and each term is important in his biography. Born in 1893 to a prosperous Barcelona goldsmith, Miró was bound for bourgeois respectability. His father enrolled him in business school, but in 1911, typhus, and something like a nervous breakdown, intervened. His parents sent him to their small farm in Montroig (Red Mountain), near Tarragona. That arid landscape became his Eden.

Once he recovered, Miró studied art in Barcelona, where he made paintings with the bright colors of the Fauves and, later, in the style of Cezanne and the Cubists. In 1919, he first visited Paris, and from then on his artistic life was split between the middle of nothing in Catalonia and the middle of everything in the capital of the avant-garde. When he settled there, in 1920, he brought grasses and twigs from Montroig to finish his early masterpiece, “The Farm” (1921-22), a translation of Tarragona into an aesthetic space between Fra Angelico and André Breton, whom he met in Paris. Though Miró was too attached to craft and composition to be a bona fide member of the movement, he was inspired by Surrealism’s intuitive and even automatic approach, in which the artist cedes control to chance. Breton called him “the most thoroughly Surrealist of us all.”

In Paris’s cosmopolitan swirl, Miro found in the figure of the Catalan peasant a means of evoking his regional identity—of setting it loose in the new aesthetic realms he had discovered. It first appeared in “The Hunter” (1923-24), a surreal landscape in which the peasant holds a dead rabbit in one hand and a still-smoking gun in the other, all depicted in a symbolic language that, like the word “sard” painted in the bottom right corner, is as much read as seen. Fittingly, Breton bought the piece, as he would “Harlequin Carnival” (1924-25), a chaotic circus of a canvas that represents the zenith of Miró’s Surrealism.

“Head of a Catalan Peasant” reflects the evolution of Miró’s style, from eclectic representation to a near-abstraction that hovers between drawing and writing, delineating figures but also spelling out signs. The crossed lines form the face of the ghostly cartoon, but also divide the canvas into four quadrants around a horizon. The wavy beard (Miró loved drawing hair), and the three lines (a cloud, perhaps?) hanging like nested apostrophes in the top right of the canvas, are little more than glyphs.

Increasingly free from form, Miró embraces color. He grounds his painting not in the brown earth of Montroig, from which figuration grew, but rather in the world of “The Hunter,” in which his distinctive fantasies played out with the jumbled dream logic of collage. Here the peasant leaves behind “The Farm” and passes by the surreal environs of a landscape like “The Tilled Field” (1923-24), as he strides straight onto the picture plane; the field is definitively a color-field, with its loose brushwork pointing ahead to the nearly Pollock-like use of paint in “The Birth of the World” (1925).

From the safety of the French capital, Miró watched the Spanish Civil War in horror, and made a lost work known as “Catalan Peasant in Revolt.” When he eventually returned to Spain, as the Nazis invaded Paris, he lived uneasily under the fascist regime. He remained, however, the Catalan peasant, devoted less to grand causes or -isms or even politics in general, and more to the world around him—and the world beyond.

New Law Requiring Businesses to Report Who Owns Them Is Put on Hold Again

An appeals court restores an injunction on the Corporate Transparency Act, which aims to unmask shell companies but is seen as onerous by business groups

The implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act—a law aimed at getting shell companies to disclose their true ownership—was paused again just days before a reporting deadline was set to take effect, as a federal appeals court handed the case to a panel for further consideration.

In a court filing late Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a stay on a national injunction the court had issued Monday that reinstated the Jan. 1 reporting deadline for millions of companies. The lifting of the stay means the January filing deadline will be postponed once again and bars the government and the Treasury Department from enforcing the law, pending oral arguments before the court’s so-called merits panel, a group of judges tasked with considering appeals.

The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan law passed in 2021 to curtail the use of anonymous shell companies and help track flows of illicit money, would require companies to file beneficial ownership information with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or face the possibility of penalties such as fines and jail time. The law could cover more than 32 million small businesses nationwide.

Though backed by anticorruption groups, the law has been criticized by small-business owners and associations as onerous and even invasive, and has been challenged in multiple court cases across the country.

In one of them, Texas District Judge Amos Mazzant on Dec. 3 issued a temporary national injunction, ruling that he needed to fully consider the merits of both sides. But his ruling also made clear that he believed the law is likely unconstitutional. Lawyers for the Treasury Department filed an expedited appeal and an emergency motion to stay the injunction that same week.

On Monday, the federal appeals court judges sided with the Treasury Department, saying, “The government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits in defending CTA’s constitutionality.” The court order also expedited the appeal to the next available oral argument panel.

Within hours of the stay on Monday, FinCEN said it would give businesses additional time to file, extending the deadline to Jan. 13 for many companies.

In a rapid turn of events, the appeals court said Thursday that its merits panel is reviewing the expedited appeal and is lifting the stay of the injunction to “preserve the constitutional status quo while the merits panel considers the parties’ weighty substantive arguments.”

“In light of a recent federal court order, reporting companies are not currently required to file beneficial ownership information with FinCEN and are not subject to liability if they fail to do so while the order remains in force,” FinCEN said Friday. “However, reporting companies may continue to voluntarily submit beneficial ownership information reports.”

On Monday, the agency said it continues “to believe that the law is constitutional and will continue to pursue an appeal.”

The latest reversal “practically throws compliance by covered corporate entities into chaos,” according to Joseph Lynyak, a banking attorney at Dorsey & Whitney.

“The CTA is not well understood by the business community, and there are now both domestic and reporting companies that may now be completely confused in regard to their respective CTA obligations,” he said.

Elon Musk’s fight with Maga reveals split on immigration within Trump’s circle

President-elect’s new allies in Silicon Valley suffer backlash over foreign workers from his core supporters

A battle between Elon Musk and Maga supporters over immigration has highlighted a fracture between Donald Trump’s new backers in Silicon Valley and his more radical base.

The rift over immigration policy and visa schemes for foreign workers stemmed from Trump’s appointment of Sriram Krishnan, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, as the White House’s senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence.

The move prompted a backlash from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base on X, which quickly spiralled into a debate over H-1B visas — a programme aimed at highly skilled foreign labour critical to US technology groups.

Quoting a post in which Krishnan supported the removal of country caps for green cards to “unlock skilled immigration”, far-right activist Laura Loomer said in a post on X on Monday that it was “alarming to see the number of career leftists who are now being appointed to serve in Trump’s admin when they share views that are in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda”.

Representatives from across the Trump world jumped into the debate. Far-right activists backed Loomer, who in turn attacked tech executives in the president-elect’s orbit, including Musk and David Sacks, whom Trump has appointed as the White House AI and crypto tsar and is set to work closely with Krishnan.

Musk, himself an immigrant to the US, came out in favour of hiring highly skilled foreign workers. There is “a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America”, he said on X on Wednesday. “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE.”

The schism raises questions over whether two vastly different wings of Trump’s constituency — some of America’s most powerful tech executives and far-right activists — will be able to coexist.

Tech bosses, historically targets of Trump’s ire, have stepped up a charm offensive on the president-elect in recent weeks, donating to his inaugural fund and dining with him at Mar-a-Lago.

“Big Tech execs think they run things now,” Loomer wrote on X on Thursday. “One day they will [rub] Trump the wrong way and it will escalate. The blow-up between Maga and the tech bros is going to be glorious.”

The online sparring put a spotlight on Musk, who has taken on the role of Trump confidante after becoming one of his most vocal cheerleaders and bankrollers during his presidential campaign. The president-elect has made the billionaire and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy responsible for slashing government spending and federal regulation.

In a lengthy post on X on Thursday, Ramaswamy said skilled migration was needed because of an American culture of “mediocrity over excellence”, prompting further backlash from Maga supporters.

Musk on Thursday turned to sports analogies in an attempt to quell the blowback online. “Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” he wrote on X.

“This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA,” Musk added, referring to foreign-born players in the US basketball league.

Krishnan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Visas including the H-1B programme have been key to the development of Silicon Valley and remain so for sustaining America’s premier tech sector.

“The H-1B is critically important to Silicon Valley,” said Hiba Anver, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group. “There is more than one type of company-sponsored visa, but H1-B is the one visa that the most number of people could potentially qualify for.”

The US government allows for 85,000 new beneficiaries every fiscal year. Denial rates rose in Trump’s first presidency, because of policies that courts later ruled unlawful.

Unlike other visa categories, “you don’t have to be born in a particular country, you don’t have to work in a foreign office for the same company, and the evidentiary bar is not as high”, Anver said.

In the race to stay ahead of China in technological development, from semiconductors to AI, attracting talent is vital for the US tech sector.

“There has been overwhelming commentary from the executives I speak to about the complexity of bringing people here, and how that is hurting their ability to innovate,” said Daniel Newman, chief executive at The Futurum Group.

“If you look at some of the biggest breakthroughs on innovation, the skillsets, the engineering and the tech are often started by people who have come here on visas,” he added.

Companies take advantage of huge investor demand to pull forward bond issuance originally planned for next year

Global corporate debt sales soared to a record $8tn this year, as companies took advantage of red-hot demand from investors to accelerate their borrowing plans.

Issuance of corporate bonds and leveraged loans climbed by more than a third from 2023 to $7.93tn, according to LSEG data, as big companies from AbbVie to Home Depot took advantage of borrowing costs falling to their lowest level in decades relative to government debt.

The surge in activity passed a previous peak in 2021, as strong investor demand drove down costs for corporate borrowers even before the Federal Reserve and other central banks started cutting interest rates from their multi-decade highs.

“Markets are firing on all cylinders, and then some,” said John McAuley, Citigroup’s head of debt capital markets for North America.

Bankers say those cheap funding costs — at least relative to safe government bonds — initially persuaded companies to pull forward their issuance to avoid any market turbulence around the US election. But when spreads tightened further in the wake of Trump’s resounding victory, some decided to lock in next year’s borrowing needs, too.

“Initially it was just about ‘let’s de-risk our funding for the year’,” said Tammy Serbée, Morgan Stanley’s co-head of fixed income capital markets. “Then it was, ‘Actually conditions look pretty attractive, why don’t we just pull forward 2025 as well?’”

Pharma giant AbbVie raised $15bn from an investment-grade bond sale in February to help fund its acquisitions of ImmunoGen and Cerevel Therapeutics, while other large issuers in 2024 included Cisco Systems, pharma group Bristol Myers Squibb, beleaguered aerospace giant Boeing and retailer Home Depot.

The average US investment-grade bond spread shrank to as little as 0.77 percentage points in the aftermath of the election, the tightest gap since the late 1990s, according to Ice BofA data. It has since widened only slightly. Spreads on riskier high-yield corporate bonds have widened more since mid-November, but also remain not far from 17-year lows.

Despite the narrow spreads, total borrowing costs remain elevated due to the level of Treasury yields, with yields on investment-grade corporate debt at 5.4 per cent, compared with 2.4 per cent three years ago, according to BofA data.

Those relatively high yields on corporate debt have attracted big inflows, with investors pouring almost $170bn into global corporate bond funds in 2024, according to EPFR data, the most on record.

Dan Mead, head of Bank of America’s investment-grade syndicate, said it had been the bank’s busiest year for high-grade dollar borrowing apart from 2020, when Covid stimulus sparked an issuance frenzy.

“We put out an estimate for each month about what we expected supply should be . . . and every month the actual supply has exceeded [them],” he added.

Even after 2024’s issuance bonanza, many bankers said they expected a steady stream of borrowing next year as companies refinance the wave of cheap debt they secured during the pandemic.

Marc Baigneres, global co-head of investment-grade finance at JPMorgan, expects “activity will remain steady” next year. But he also highlighted the “wild card” of “the potential for more significant, large-scale, debt-financed [mergers and acquisitions].”

However, some bankers cautioned that the corporate borrowing frenzy could slow if spreads widen meaningfully from current levels.

“The market is pricing almost no downside risk right now,” added Maureen O’Connor, global head of Wells Fargo’s high-grade debt syndicate. “With spreads priced to perfection, you are seeing idiosyncratic risk pick up.”

Inclusion in S&P 500 index and growth in operations drove share prices at Blackstone, KKR and Apollo to record highs

The wealth of US private capital bosses jumped by more than $56bn in 2024 as shares of Blackstone, Apollo and KKR hit new highs, fuelled by rapid growth and their addition to the main US stock index.

The share surge has enriched private equity pioneers such as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman and KKR co-founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts, and spawned a new set of billionaire dealmakers in the industry ahead of expected deregulation from the incoming Trump administration that could fuel dealmaking and asset growth in 2025.

Among the seven largest listed US private capital firms, gains in shares held by the industry’s top executives and founders were over $56bn, led by the leadership of Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative manager, according to Financial Times calculations based on public filings.

Blackstone’s top leaders saw their shares rise by $13.5bn in 2024 as its market value soared nearly 50 per cent to $214bn.

Its stock was propelled by the growth of its assets, which have soared beyond $1tn. In September 2023, Blackstone became the first private equity group included in the S&P 500 index.

Analysts expect Blackstone funds for wealthy private investors in real estate, credit and private equity to generate lucrative fees in 2025, bolstering profits. Expectations for its performance have pushed its valuation to more than 40 times its distributable earnings over the past 12 months, a proxy for the group’s cash flow.

Most of the growth in executives’ holdings went to Blackstone chief executive Schwarzman, whose stock rose by more than $11bn this year. The holdings of president Jonathan Gray also gained billions in value, putting his stake at about $7.5bn.

It has also meant two other top executives — private equity head Joe Baratta and chief financial officer Michael Chae — held shareholdings worth over $1bn, according to Blackstone’s proxy statement.

KKR shares performed the best of any large private equity group in 2024, as its stock nearly doubled due to accelerated fundraising, with nearly $120bn in new capital over the past 12 months. It was also added to the S&P 500 in June.

The gains mean the stakes of co-founders Kravis and Roberts both exceeded $12bn. Co-chiefs Scott Nuttall and Joe Bae have also seen their stockholdings soar to about $2.7bn, fuelled by KKR stock’s 30 per cent average annual return since they assumed leadership in October 2021.

Apollo Global, which was added to the S&P 500 in December, has also seen its stock nearly double in 2024, bolstering shareholdings of chief executive Marc Rowan and co-founders Leon Black and Josh Harris, who both left the firm in 2021. The share gains have also created large windfalls for a new generation of leadership inside Apollo who are now paid mostly in stock.

James Belardi, co-founder and chief executive of Apollo’s insurance unit Athene, which oversees about $350bn, saw the value of his Apollo shares rise above $1bn this year while Apollo co-presidents Scott Kleinman and James Zelter held shares worth more than $500mn, according to its annual report. The duo were given large stock grants as part of their promotions in 2017 and were in line to jointly lead Apollo had Rowan left to become the US Treasury secretary under President-elect Donald Trump.

Apollo’s next generation of leadership has also benefited from the leap in the share price. In September 2023, Apollo granted $550mn of restricted stock units to a leadership group of John Zito, deputy chief investment officer of credit, Grant Kvalheim, president of Athene, and two senior private equity partners, Matt Nord and David Sambur. The value of that award has since roughly doubled to more than $1bn.

However, in recent months, executives like Kleinman, Belardi, Zelter and Rowan have either sold large blocks of Apollo stock or signalled their intent to do so.

The top executives at Ares, TPG and Blue Owl all saw their shares gain by over $4bn in value in 2024, according to FT calculations, bolstered by share gains of 50-65 per cent.

In addition to stock gains, private capital executives stand to earn large windfalls from quarterly dividends on their shareholdings. Collectively, top executives at the seven firms have received nearly $3bn in dividends this year, according to FT calculations.

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