The Information : Anthropic Prepares Supervoting Power for Founders as it Readie

Anthropic Prepares Supervoting Power for Founders as it Readies for Mega-IPO
The AI company is shoring up its unusual governance structure, which also includes a long-term trust that controls the membership of the board of directors.

The Takeaway
  • Anthropic prepares to give CEO Amodei, other founders supervoting shares
  • Rights could protect them from outside shareholder pressure
  • Such shares are important since the founders own relatively little of the company

Anthropic has been preparing to give CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders a class of stock with extra voting power to help insulate them from outside shareholder pressure, two people familiar with the matter said.

It would be the first time Anthropic’s leaders have extra voting power, which has become common practice for tech founders. It is all the more relevant for Anthropic because its co-founders hold relatively small ownership stakes in the company compared to other tech founders, another person said. The company also is planning to maintain its existing body of nonshareholder trustees with a special class of stock to elect the majority of members to the company’s board of directors, a more unconventional buffer against outside shareholder influence.

The plans are part of Anthropic’s efforts to shore up its unusual governance structure ahead of a planned initial public offering, which could come as soon as late September and may be the biggest IPO in history. The specifics of the voting arrangements couldn’t be learned, and the plans could still change.

Anthropic already has two structural components very few other large, publicly traded companies have. It is a public benefit corporation, meaning its leaders have legal cover to pursue societal goals beyond making money for shareholders. The IPO would make it by far the most valuable public benefit corporation in the U.S. stock market. (The next largest is $40 billion software maker Veeva Systems.)

And Anthropic has given significant but narrow governance powers to its Long-Term Benefit Trust, a group of advisers who aren’t employees or investors. The trust, created in 2023, has one major formal power today: It can elect the majority of Anthropic’s seven-person board of directors. The company granted it those powers through Class T shares that have no economic power.

These trustees include former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. The trust is down to just three members, from its usual five, after Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a former member of the California Supreme Court, exited this month to become Anthropic’s chief global affairs officer.

Anthropic is now planning to balance the trust’s powers with new voting rights for its seven founders. Because the company has raised hundreds of billions of outside capital, the founders’ combined stakes have been diluted down to a small minority ownership.

Amodei himself owns only roughly 2% of the company, a person close to Anthropic said. That would be one of the smallest ownership percentages for any founder-CEO taking his or her company public in recent decades. Amodei said on a podcast last year that he and the six other co-founders, including his sister, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, each own a roughly equal share of the company.

Tech founders have often used special share classes to ensure control. Ahead of its IPO in June, SpaceX adopted a dual-class share structure that gave Elon Musk supervoting shares. Other tech companies such as Snap and Meta Platforms have also given their founders supervoting shares. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg controls more than 50% of the voting power, even though he owns less than 15% of the company’s overall shares.

It’s unclear exactly how Anthropic will divide the powers between the founders and the benefit trust or how many votes founders’ shares will get.

The trustees are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and get no shares in the company, but they often attend meetings of the board of directors and advise on issues related to policy and safety, a person familiar with the matter said.

WSJ : Bonds Are Getting Hammered, and Wall Street Says the Rout Won’t End Anytim

Bonds Are Getting Hammered, and Wall Street Says the Rout Won’t End Anytime Soon
With yields on 30-year U.S. Treasurys at 19-year highs, investors predict a new era in the bond market. And it looks a lot like 2007.

  • A global bond selloff is driving up borrowing costs, with the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond yield topping 5.3% for the first time since 2007.
  • The rising yields are increasing federal interest costs, which are slated to consume 3.3% of GDP this year and 4.6% by 2036.
  • Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken steps to curb the rise in yields, but the continued climb has exposed the limits of his maneuvers.


A selloff in global bonds is driving up borrowing costs for governments, businesses and families across the developed world. Wall Street sees no end in sight.

Bond yields are at 19-year highs, and investors are blaming the rout on everything from the continuing U.S.-Iran conflict, which has stoked inflation worries, to the deluge of tech-company bonds vying for debt funds’ cash. They are also anxious about budget deficits and a lack of clarity from a new Federal Reserve chairman.

Few see eye to eye on exactly how much weight to put on any one factor, but most agree on one thing: None of those conditions are likely going away soon. What’s more, many see something larger driving the selloff: the economy’s resilience in the face of interest rates that were once considered high enough to slow growth significantly.

If the 2008-09 financial crisis ushered in an era of ultralow interest rates, then current market conditions might mark a return to the way things were before that downturn, some say. Investors are hesitant to buy longer-term bonds because of the risk that rates could move higher, and possibly much higher, even if the Fed doesn’t move immediately.

“Basically, this is a normalization,” said Robert Tipp, chief investment strategist and head of global bonds at PGIM Credit.

Yields on government bonds, which rise when bond prices fall, have reached multiyear highs in recent days, with the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond topping 5.3% for the first time since 2007. The 10-year yield, the premier benchmark for borrowing costs, has also come close to its highest level since early 2025.

So far, the selloff has been limited to bonds. Stocks are hovering near record highs and corporate earnings are still robust—signs that higher interest payments aren’t squeezing economic growth.

Still, a sustained move higher in yields will have consequences well beyond Wall Street. One of the most direct victims is the government itself, which will be forced to pay higher interest rates on its growing pile of debt as older bonds mature and are replaced by new ones.

Even before this year’s run-up, interest on the debt was consuming a bigger slice of the federal budget. Now, nearly one in five dollars of revenue goes to interest payments.

Over the past half-century, federal interest costs averaged 2.1% of GDP. That figure is slated to hit 3.3% this year on its way to 4.6% in 2036, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But it could easily be worse than that.

The CBO’s forecast earlier this year assumed the yield on the 10-year Treasury note would be 4.1%. That is well below its current level at around 4.7%. If the 10-year remains elevated, the government might factor in higher borrowing costs in future forecasts.

Publicly held U.S. debt is now at about 100% of GDP, nearing records set after World War II. That debt load makes the country more sensitive to rate moves. A mere 0.1 percentage-point rate move above forecasts in all rates would add $379 billion in net interest expenses, according to the CBO.

“The issue is not so much the rising interest rates,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “The issue is the deficit. If we can only be concerned about one thing, that one thing should be the 10-year deficit outlook.”

Higher yields also have political implications. Treasurys play a major role in determining borrowing costs across the economy, including 30-year mortgages.

Elected based in large part on voters’ concerns about affordability, President Trump has repeatedly promised to lower mortgage rates. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also said early in Trump’s second term that the administration would try to push down the 10-year yield, in part by reducing the deficit, which would reduce the supply of bonds entering the market.

Those efforts, though, haven’t born fruit, and polls suggest that voter dissatisfaction with the economy remains high—hurting Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections.

In recent weeks, Bessent has taken steps that some analysts have seen as connected to his effort to at least prevent a further rise in Treasury yields. Those have included intervening in the currency markets to support the Japanese yen, a move that could in turn reduce pressure on Japan’s government to sell U.S. Treasurys to buy its own currency.

Yields, though, have continued to march higher, exposing the limits of his maneuvers.

“The fact that action by the Treasury Secretary up to this point has maybe not been as effective as he might have liked is another reason to think that this move higher could be sustained,” said Zach Griffiths, head of investment-grade and macro strategy at the research firm CreditSights.

In one encouraging development, Treasury yields edged lower Tuesday, with the 10-year yield slipping to 4.706% from 4.725% Monday, according to Tradeweb.


Stocks fell, with the Nasdaq Composite sliding 1.3%, the S&P 500 dropping 0.7%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipping 0.2%, or 116 points.

Chip stocks took a hit, with all 30 stocks in the PHLX Semiconductor Index down during intraday trading. The index saw its largest decrease since July 1 and lost about 19% from its June 22 all-time closing high.

Indexes, though, have still logged double-digit gains this year.

“Markets have been able to overlook the increase in yields so far…because we’ve had this earnings boom,” said Keith Lerner, chief investment officer at Truist Advisory Services. “But I think as we move past the earnings season, there’ll be more focus on yields.”

WSJ : Your Favorite Old T-Shirt Might Now Be Worth a Fortune Vintage graphic tee

Your Favorite Old T-Shirt Might Now Be Worth a Fortune
Vintage graphic tees have become increasingly valuable for their ability to convey personality and authenticity—the rattier, the better

At ThriftCon, a vintage clothing convention held earlier this month in New York City, nostalgia was front of mind for many attendees. So were graphic T-shirts.

A self-described “elder millennial” came in search of one for the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, but left with an old tee for MTV’s animated series “Celebrity Deathmatch,” which aired in the late 1990s and 2000s. Another ThirftCon attendee was looking to replace a lost tee for the band the Smashing Pumpkins. Some styles for sale at the convention cost more than $800.


“You’ve heard of comfort food? These are comfort tees,” Gabriel Julio, a brand consultant from New Jersey, said jokingly. He was with a friend, Luis Avelino, owner of Illusion Vintage in Houston, who was selling graphic tees ranging from $30 to upwards of $1,000.

“Nostalgia is big business,” Avelino said. In 2021, a Grateful Dead shirt from 1967 sold for more than $17,640 at Sotheby’s, a record price. “Art, music and pop culture are always the most sought after,” Avelino added.

Like other vintage items, graphic tees have become more valuable for their ability to convey personality and authenticity. That was partially why Janet Jackson chose to wear one to the BET Awards in June, according to her stylist, Laurel Thomson.

“Originally, we had an outfit picked out—a look straight off the runway,” Thomson said. “Then Janet said she wanted to do something completely different.” The ensemble Jackson wore to the awards—a Tupac Shakur tee with a striped shirt and striped trousers—was a nod to the two artists’ 1993 film, “Poetic Justice,” Thomson said, as well as an act of “self-expression and individuality.”

Enrique Crame III, 48, whose Fine and Dandy vintage showrooms in Manhattan have provided clothes to shows like “The Bear” and “And Just Like That…,” said that old graphic tees can instantly tell a story.

Miley Cyrus commemorated the 20th anniversary of “Hannah Montana” this past spring in an old “Hannah Montana” T-shirt worn beneath a Rabanne gown. Zendaya wore an oversize Spider-Man tee as a dress to an event promoting her film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in June.

“You want a movie or TV character to have a back story, and a vintage tee does that without having to say a word,” Crame said. Prized tees in his possession include one that Keith Haring made to promote Madonna’s 1990 “Blond Ambition” tour.

Ryan Beck, COO of the luxury resale business Justin Reed, noted that band or rap tees specifically can be conversation starters. “The rarer, the better,” Beck said. “If it’s a one-off or something not licensed, there’s a market.” Justin Reed recently sold a bootleg Lauryn Hill tee—unofficial merchandise—for $4,500, Beck added.


The lived-in quality of vintage graphic tees can only add to their value. “Early on, people and stores wouldn’t buy anything distressed or with holes,” said Patrick Matamoros, 51, who grew up in East Los Angeles and started picking up decrepit, threadbare T-shirts at area flea markets more than 30 years ago. “Now people can’t get enough,” he added, “because they have history to them; they took years to get like that.”

Matamoros, who began selling tees to vintage shops in the ’90s and early ’00s, said that a telling sign of their evolution into luxury goods was when a line of customized vintage T-shirts that he made with the streetwear designer Jerry Lorenzo sold out soon after being released in 2016. In addition to band tees, Matamoros also traffics in vintage styles for movies like “Star Wars” and in T-shirts bearing brand names like Coca-Cola, Puma and Nike.

His biggest sale to date was a long-sleeve Nirvana tee from the British leg of the band’s final tour. Only nine of the shirts are said to exist in the world. Matamoros sold the T-shirt to Kosuke Iwatani, a vintage dealer in Japan, for $55,000.


“I remember guys asking, ‘What you gonna do when vintage isn’t cool anymore?’ ” Matamoros said, recalling his earlier days of selling graphic tees. “I’d always laugh.”

WSJ : OpenAI’s Second-Quarter Sales Show Tepid Growth Compared With Anthropic Th

OpenAI’s Second-Quarter Sales Show Tepid Growth Compared With Anthropic
The ChatGPT-maker’s revenue disappointed some investors, although the company told them its growth accelerated in the third quarter

  • OpenAI told investors its revenue grew 18% to $6.7 billion in the second quarter, disappointing some shareholders as losses deepened.
  • The company’s operating loss widened to $12.3 billion in the second quarter from $9.3 billion in the first quarter.
  • Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, surpassing OpenAI’s sales for the first time.

OpenAI told investors its revenue grew by 18% from the first to the second quarter, while its losses deepened, results that disappointed some shareholders who had hoped the startup would show more progress catching up to rival Anthropic.

The company said its revenue grew to $6.7 billion in the three months ended in June, up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Meanwhile, its operating margin sank further into the red, pushing the company farther away from profitability ahead of a much-anticipated initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.

Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, marking the first time its sales surpassed its older rival. The company also swung to a small operating profit.

The two companies’ diverging fortunes show just how drastically the artificial-intelligence race has shifted since the beginning of the year. A slowdown in the growth of ChatGPT, combined with the success of Anthropic’s hit coding tool, Claude Code, has put OpenAI on its back foot, forcing the company to pivot its business and overhaul its leadership team.

Last week, the company replaced its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after she spent less than a year on the job. Her departure followed a string of other exits, including former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and Fidji Simo, once seen as the heir apparent to Chief Executive Sam Altman.

OpenAI has told investors that its growth rate has picked up since the launch of a set of new models in July, the people said.

For many startups, nearly $7 billion in quarterly revenue would be extraordinary, but the expectations are different for OpenAI. The company has sold investors on a stratospheric pace of growth and signed large computing deals premised on its ability to soon generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. The performance of Nvidia, Oracle, and other tech giants hinges on OpenAI’s ability to make good on its commitments to them.

OpenAI’s sequential rate of growth was slower than Palantir over the same period, and also behind other AI highfliers such as CoreWeave and Micron.

OpenAI recently released a “super app” that integrates its coding tool, Codex, with ChatGPT and a web browser, and has said that the new product is attracting users quickly. In recent months, its co-founder and President Greg Brockman has also taken a more active role leading the product and business divisions in an effort to reaccelerate growth.

The company’s operating loss, which includes stock-based compensation, widened from $9.3 billion in the first quarter to $12.3 billion in the second quarter, outpacing its revenue growth. Anthropic, by contrast, managed to eke out an adjusted profit, telling investors that it had made progress in how efficiently it uses computing resources.

It’s unclear what methods Anthropic, which isn’t yet a public company, used to calculate its adjusted profit, although in past communications with investors, it has excluded stock-based compensation from the figure.

OpenAI subsidizes hundreds of millions of users who don’t pay for ChatGPT, and also cut the prices for two of its latest models after corporate customers began to grow more cautious about their spending on AI tools and shifted more tasks to cheaper AI systems made in China. Anthropic has also had to calm investors who have grown more nervous about the threat these models pose to American AI labs.

OpenAI has recently paused development of some new models and moved to expand monitoring of its AI systems after the company’s autonomous bots, or “agents” bypassed containment efforts in testing and hacked other companies.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

FT : OpenAI says it will expand monitoring of model testing after hacking incide

OpenAI says it will expand monitoring of model testing after hacking incident
AI lab plans to dedicate more computing resources to security after one of its ‘agents’ escaped control

OpenAI has overhauled its procedures for testing its models, devoting more resources to monitoring them after the start-up’s AI “agents” escaped controls and hacked into another company during evaluations.

The San Francisco-based company on Tuesday said it would tighten the automated AI systems that monitor testing of its latest models, with the aim of raising the alarm within 30 minutes of detecting potential problems.

OpenAI said it would also require stronger isolation of models during testing to prevent internet access.

The changes come as the $852bn AI lab faces criticism over how it allowed an autonomous AI “agent” to evade monitoring and access the internet to hack into the start-up Hugging Face last month during a test of its cyber security capabilities.

The most advanced AI “agents” can carry out complex series of tasks based on high-level instructions, raising the risk of these tools performing unexpected or dangerous actions.

After the breach, OpenAI “temporarily slowed” the pace of training its models and “paused” a technique called reinforcement learning, which some insiders and experts had warned could encourage misbehaviour such as hacking.

“A significant number of workloads remain paused until they . . . meet the new security bar,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

OpenAI said it would now require automated monitoring of all testing of powerful models to flag whether a model might be acting dangerously. If a security violation is flagged, the automated system will “page” specific OpenAI teams.

“We aim to issue an alert within 30 minutes after concerning activity is surfaced through our monitoring system,” it said, adding that it expected its team to pause the test if they “cannot conclusively determine within 30 minutes that the flag is a false positive”.

OpenAI, which is preparing for a potential trillion-dollar IPO and has gone through several leadership changes in recent months, including senior executives in safety and ethics roles, said these measures would require meaningful investment in computing power.

It estimated that about a fifth of its “inference compute” — the computing power needed to run AI models — would now be spent on monitoring.

Hugging Face initially announced on July 16 that the breach was carried out by an autonomous agent, but the attack’s origin was unclear. OpenAI later informed the company its models were behind the hack.

OpenAI’s model Sol and a second unreleased model in development escaped a so-called sandbox environment designed to prevent internet access during testing of cyber-offensive capabilities.

The models exploited a software vulnerability in the sandbox to access the internet and carry out the cyber attack.

OpenAI on Tuesday said it would now “require stronger isolation” for tasks that involve code or software that could be compromised. It added that it had implemented “more controls to isolate higher-risk and untrusted workloads from the internet”.

FT : UAE suspends trade with Iran after saying it fired missiles at Gulf state D

UAE suspends trade with Iran after saying it fired missiles at Gulf state
Defence ministry says weapons were targeting maritime traffic but fell into the sea

The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday suspended trade and commercial ties with Iran after saying Tehran fired two ballistic missiles towards the Gulf state.

The UAE defence ministry said its air-defence systems detected two ballistic missiles launched from Iran towards its territory, in what would be Tehran’s first direct attack on the Gulf state since May. It triggered an emergency phone alert to the UAE’s residents.

The defence ministry said assessments showed the missiles had been targeting maritime traffic but also stated one weapon fell into the sea outside the UAE’s territorial waters while another fell within.

The UAE foreign affairs ministry later announced that “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security, all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice”.

Iran denied any involvement in the missile attacks. Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the allegation was “contrary to the principle of good neighbourliness and undermines ongoing efforts to strengthen trust among the countries of the region”.

The missile attacks come after more than two months in which the UAE and Tehran were trying to reduce tensions between the two countries, which escalated after the US and Israel launched their war against Iran in February.

Much of Tehran’s military retaliation was directed against neighbouring Gulf states — including the UAE — which Iran accused of enabling the US-Israeli attacks.

The UAE bore the brunt of Iran’s assaults on the US’s Arab allies, sustaining almost 3,000 missile and drone attacks. The UAE responded with scores of its own strikes against Iran, as it took the most hawkish stance towards Tehran among its Gulf neighbours. 

But tensions between the UAE and Iran eased following a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran in June. After the agreement began unravelling in early July, Iran directed its attacks mostly against Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

In recent months the UAE reactivated diplomatic and economic channels with Iran while doubling down on military ties with Israel and the US.  

The missile attacks on Tuesday threaten to disrupt the sense of normality that has returned to the UAE — the emergency phone alert was the first in several months apart from a false one in June.

Dubai’s financial district has been filling up with bankers again while some trade had resumed between the emirate and Iranian ports. In addition, certain Iranian flights to the UAE had quietly returned.

Emirati authorities had also started to allow the return of some 20,000 Iranians with UAE residency who were outside the country when the war began. 

Emirati officials have repeatedly emphasised the UAE wants to avoid being further dragged into a wider regional war.

But the efforts to reduce tensions between the UAE and Iran have been under increasing pressure in recent weeks.

The UAE this month accused Iran of attacking ships operated by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in the Strait of Hormuz.

Tehran had in recent days also engaged in aggressive military rhetoric while maintaining restrictions on traffic through the strategic waterway. 

FT : Chinese humanoid robot maker surges 600% in trading debut Unitree makes ste

Chinese humanoid robot maker surges 600% in trading debut
Unitree makes stellar start in Shanghai as investors clamour for shares

Shares in Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree surged more than 600 per cent on their trading debut in Shanghai on Wednesday, highlighting a mounting onshore investor frenzy for technology companies.

The stock gained as much as 629 per cent before pulling back to trade about 578 per cent higher.

Unitree’s initial public offering was priced at Rmb150.8 ($22.36) a share, valuing the company at about $9bn ahead of the debut.

Its market capitalisation briefly soared above Rmb400bn ($59bn) after trading began, putting it among the ranks of China’s most valuable companies.

There was heavy retail investor interest in the IPO of Unitree. The brand is widely recognised due to displays of its robots dancing, jumping and boxing at lunar new year galas, which are among the most-watched events on Chinese television.

The tranche of shares for retail investors was more than 5,500 times oversubscribed, which reflected “tremendous investor enthusiasm for the company”, said Kenny Ng, a strategist at Everbright Securities International. “This is partly due to Unitree’s high brand recognition in mainland China.”

Valuations for some of China’s newest technology firms are at record highs because of a combination of government support and investor enthusiasm.

The surge put Unitree’s trailing price-to-earnings ratio at almost 1,200, underscoring the high expectations for the company’s growth potential.

Unitree shipped 5,500 humanoid robots last year.

It is one of the few listed humanoid robotics companies, with its largest competitor, AgiBot, remaining private. Another rival, UBTech, is listed in Hong Kong.

The IPO made Unitree “a rare pure-play player of humanoid robot[s] in the Chinese A-share stock market”, said Ming Lee, head of Greater China autos and industrials research at BofA Global Research.

“This would provide a valuation anchor and a path reference for the subsequent listings of many other Chinese robotics companies.”

The frenzy comes despite the US Federal Communications Commission banning imports of humanoid robots last month in a move widely seen as targeting Chinese products.

According to Unitree, overseas revenue accounts for more than 40 per cent of its earnings, with the US making up between 13.3 per cent and 18.4 per cent depending on the year.

FT : Donald Trump says deal reached with Canada and pauses tariffs Last-minute r

Donald Trump says deal reached with Canada and pauses tariffs
Last-minute reprieve follows ‘intense’ talks with Mark Carney to avert 50% levies on billions of dollars in goods

Donald Trump has said he reached an agreement with Canada as he paused the introduction of a fresh volley of tariffs worth billions of dollars on America’s second-largest trading partner for three days.

The US president wrote on Truth Social late on Tuesday that he had postponed the 50 per cent tariffs, which were set to kick in on Wednesday, “based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL”.

“The great Keystone XL Pipeline, long ago killed by Sleepy Joe Biden, may be awoken from the grave,” Trump wrote, referring to a proposed oil project, hours before a midnight deadline when levies on $20bn worth of goods were set to go into effect.

The last-minute reprieve will ease tensions between the trading partners after Trump last month threatened 50 per cent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, including cement and hockey sticks.

The Trump administration has accused Canada of discriminating against US businesses, citing the dairy industry and government procurement. It has also demanded that Canada resume sales of American wine and spirits, which were pulled from shelves in retaliation for Trump’s earlier tariffs. 

In a statement released late on Tuesday, the White House said Canada was “discriminating against” the US by banning the sale of American alcoholic beverages and cheese, and through its motor vehicle tariff scheme. 

“Canada has expressed a commitment to remove the discrimination,” the White House said. “Because of the status of these negotiations, the public interests favor suspending for a period of 3 days.”

Trump’s latest threat of 50 per cent levies sparked weeks of crunch talks in which Canada offered targeted concessions and pushed for the US to lift existing levies on industries including cars, steel and lumber.

Canadian leader Mark Carney spoke to Trump twice this week during the final stages of what the prime minister called “intense and delicate” negotiations.

The potential failure of the negotiations posed a serious threat to Canada’s economy, which has been battered by ever-changing US trade measures, as well as a political challenge for Carney, who has promised to protect the country from Trump’s volatile tariff regime.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer said: “The deal will include comprehensive market access for all American goods, economic security commitments, digital trade alignment, and many important provisions that will continue to protect our market and American workers, along with our Canadian partners.”

“Let’s be clear, the tariff delay provides relief on both sides of the border,” said Candace Laing, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “Businesses may not be closing up shop with this news, but an extension doesn’t bring the certainty that a signed interim deal would.”

Canadian business leaders have warned of the impact of the new volley of 50 per cent tariffs on hundreds of products. Prolonged duties have caused financial strain to Canada’s car industry, leading to factory closures and job losses.

“US tariffs raise the cost of domestic manufacturing, increase prices, reduce exports and make the industry less competitive,” said Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association.

Trump issued the threat using powers under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which allows the administration to retaliate against discriminatory trade practices by other countries.

The president has had to seek new legal tools to pursue his tariff policies after the US Supreme Court struck down the emergency powers he had used to impose sweeping global levies.

The US and Canada last year also raised the prospect of reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline as part of a grand bargain to ease Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium.

The pipeline was proposed more than 15 years ago to transport about 830,000 barrels a day of heavy crude from the western Canadian province of Alberta to refineries on the US Gulf Coast.

But it was shut under then-president Barack Obama in 2015, before Trump relaunched it in 2017 during his first term. Joe Biden scrapped the project in June 2021 on environmental grounds. 

Canada supplies more than 4mn b/d of crude to the US, accounting for about 60 per cent of total US crude imports.

FYI — BofA (Levingston / Preusser) out with an El Niño note today, recommending

FYI — BofA (Levingston / Preusser) out with an El Niño note today, recommending long NZD/AUD as agricultural terms-of-trade play.

Direction echoes the 16 May and 16 Aug field guides. Transmission map (Australian wheat, Argentine wheat, Brazilian corn/sugar, Asian sugar) is our § 04 / § 05.

What they add worth noting:
(1) NZD/AUD as the specific pair — sharper than our short AUD/USD (trade #5), isolates the ENSO signal by removing the USD leg. NZ dairy / meat exports are terms-of-trade beneficiaries; AU wheat / drought risk on the other side.
(2) Positioning angle — hedge fund NZD shorts at highest since 2006 (CFTC COT). Under-owned setup adds a squeeze catalyst on top of the fundamentals.

Slots in as trade #10 in the grid alongside the existing short AUD/USD. Framework unchanged.

LC

Linl to BofA comment : {NSN TJZ0NRT96OSI <GO>}