The new head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission made a thinly veiled dig at disclosure red tape such as Environmental and Social Governance rules that he lambasted as “regulatory creep”, claiming the Dem commander-in-chief and his allies “weaponized” financial disclosure rules “to advance social and political agendas”

“The path to public ownership has become narrower, costlier, and overly burdened with rules that often create more friction than benefit,” the 68-year-old lawyer said.

Trump’s SEC chair Paul Atkins was speaking at the New York Stock Exchange with a vow to Make IPOs Great Again. James Franey/NY Post

“These trends have eroded American competitiveness; locked average investors out of some of the most dynamic companies; and pushed entrepreneurs to seek capital elsewhere, either in theprivate markets or on foreign shores,” he added.

“These decades of accretive rulemakings have produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate,” Atkins, who took up the role in April, said, criticizing lengthy annual reports and proxy statements that burden companies with high costs while overwhelming investors.

His comments come as the final Democrat SEC commissioner, Caroline Crenshaw, prepares to leave office when her term in up next month.

It leaves just GOP appointees Atkins, Hester M. Peirce, and one-time acting chair Mark T. Uyeda as the only members left in office.

Atkins rang the Opening Bell on Wall Street on Tuesday before his speech calling for a return to the basic of American capitalism. James Franey/NY Post

Atkins, who previously served at the SEC in the 1990s and returned as chairman earlier this year, tied the critique to a broader historical narrative as America approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026.

He issued a full-throated defense of America’s capitalist past and a return to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton’s vision of ecpnomic freedom.

“Hamilton understood that markets, structured properly, can unleash the might of American dynamism as no monarch or government ministry possibly could,” Atkins told an audience of officials and bankers earlier.

The SEC is Wall Street’s top financial watchdog. Atkins was speaking at an event to make this nation’s 250 anniversariy earlier today in New York. James Franey/NY Post

Our prosperity is no accident of history—nor is our primacy assured in the future,” he added. “In recent years, our regulatory frameworks have veered from the founding ideals that helped the United States
to once stand without peer as the world’s destination for public companies.”

The crypto-friendly Trump appointee pointed to a 40% drop in US-listed companies since the mid-1990s, from over 7,000 to about 4,200, blaming rules that multiplied faster than the problems they aimed to solve.

Atkins in an interivew with Fox Business in July hinted that he would support combining the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a smaller regulator that focuses and derivatives, as lawmakers grapple how to oversee the burgeoning US crypto market.

But he said he has supported the idea “for years” and that it “makes a lot of sense — especially with the potentially overlapping jurisdictions” between the two.

This is breaking news story. Check back for updates.

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At least 10 other financial institutions closed their windows to the billionaire real estate tycoon over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill ­melee.

The moves came in the months after Trump left the White House in 2021, sources inside the Trump Organization told me.

The stunning scale of the blacklisting is being revealed here for the first time. 

President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 8, 2025. REUTERS

It should be reported as much as possible for the simple reason that if any big bank can cancel a former president over politics as opposed to illegality, then every American citizen is in danger of facing the same mistreatment.

More From Charles Gasparino

For expressing an opinion, or starting a business out of step with the progressive culture norms that have infected so much of society, you too can see your economic livelihood go up in smoke and ­“debanked.”

Debanking is such an odd word for one of the most insidious parts of cancel culture, and its sponsors like it that way.

It sanitizes, via clumsy, obtuse lingo, what is essentially something of dangerous ­Orwellian magnitude: negating an American citizen’s ability to save, and conduct business through a big bank.

That’s why Trump and Republicans like South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott are taking steps to end the politicization of banking.

Keep in mind, there are already laws preventing the likes of JPMorgan, BofA and Capital One — the banks Trump has publicly stated canceled him — from being conduits for drug kingpins and Mafiosi.

(Trump has sued Capital One, which denied Trump’s allegations.)

Debanking takes it further. It forces banks to remove customers who might pose nothing more than “reputational risk,” a flighty rule enforced by bank regulators in recent years to keep financial institutions from doing business with people like Jeffrey Epstein.

The now-deceased convicted child sex predator was a JPMorgan customer for years, and in theory making it impossible for Epstein to finance his illegality sounds like what should be happening.

That is until you dig deeper.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, just after Trump lost the 2020 election and started to act out (which the last time I checked was his constitutional right), the enforcement of reputational risk took a decidedly political turn, bank officials tell me.

If you believe people at the two largest banks, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan and Brian Moynihan’s BofA, the Biden administration ­unleashed its bank regulatory cops at the Office of Comptroller of Currency, the FDIC and the semi-independent Federal Reserve to go beyond nixing perverted financiers from their platform.

A Chase bank sign in Richmond, Virginia, Wednesday, June 2, 2021. AP

They used the amorphous nature of what is reputational risk to enforce a political regime, the bank ­officials said.

The Bidenistas hated crypto, thought it was an affront to their power to control the economy, and pressured banks from doing business with this somewhat heterodox emerging industry, according to the bank sources.

So was anything related to guns and certain conservative religious organizations, they added.

And most of all, anything MAGA, including the multibillion-dollar real estate and resort empire of Mr. MAGA himself, Donald J. Trump.

Such an effort isn’t easy to prove because there’s no direct smoking gun, no memo (at least not yet) telling banks to cancel Trump from their system.

A general view of a Bank of America sign as seen in Wyckoff, New Jersey, on April 13, 2020. Christopher Sadowski

The banks say the pressure was more subtle but still real: Failure to remove Trump or crypto types and others would result in heightened enforcement, ­harassment and possibly fines.

The banks decided to drop customers, even rich ones like Trump, because it wasn’t worth the hassle.

I have covered finance for three decades now and thought I saw it all: Bernie Madoff, Epstein, the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street scandals, penny stock scams and hedge fund implosions.

But what happened to Trump in 2021 was truly surprising given the breadth of big banks dropping him as a client and scary given their rationale.

As bad as the events of Jan. 6 were, Trump did tell the crowd that crazy afternoon to protest peacefully.

Trump didn’t break the law holding a rally.

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You may disagree with his rhetoric that day.

He had just lost a closely fought election against Joe Biden.

Trump said he really won it.

Millions of people seemed to agree.

He wouldn’t be the first politician to pull that lever. Democrat Stacey Abrams never really fully conceded when she lost in her first attempt to become governor of Georgia against Republican Brian Kemp.

How many times did Hillary Clinton say Trump was an “illegitimate president” after she lost the 2016 contest to him? 

During the violent social justice protests of 2020, Gwen Walz, the wife of Minnesota Gov. and 2024 Democrat VP candidate Tim Walz, said she “kept the windows” open to smell the burning debris.

“I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she said.

Or how about what Kamala Harris proudly said around the same time.

The then-Biden VP candidate, who went on to get trounced by Trump in 2024, supported the defunding of the police movement that led to much more mayhem than what ­occurred on Jan. 6.

Her rationale for the “largely peaceful protests” that burned cities to the ground, delivered to fellow-traveler lefty late-night host Stephen Colbert, is at least as cringey as anything Trump said on Jan. 6.

“They’re not going to stop,” she said during an appearance on the show.

“They’re not. This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware . . . That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

Did Jamie Dimon tell Harris that her money isn’t good at JPM?

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Censorship has been a point of tension for Spotify, which has faced heated backlash for flagging COVID-19 information from podcaster Joe Rogan and banning Steve Bannon from the platform.

“More relevantly, it’s the pressure we are seeing the EU put on companies to censor more,” a source familiar with the probe told The Post.

In a letter sent to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) slammed recent laws from the EU and UK that require social media platforms – even those based in the US – to censor “disinformation” and “harmful content” or face massive fines.

Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during a television interview at the US Capitol earlier this month. Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock

“These foreign laws, regulations, and judicial orders may limit or restrict Americans’ access to constitutionally protected speech in the United States. Indeed, that appears to be their very purpose,” Jordan wrote in a copy of the letter obtained by The Post.

The committee ordered Spotify to preserve documents and all contact with foreign governments, as well as individuals linked to the White House, and provide this information to the House by Aug. 12, according to a letter obtained by The Post.

The committee ordered Spotify to preserve documents and all contact with foreign governments and individuals tied to the White House. REUTERS

Spotify found itself caught in the midst of a controversy in 2022 over Rogan’s comments on COVID-19 – including claims that Ivermectin can cure the disease. 

Clinical trial data do not demonstrate that Ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19 in humans, according to the FDA.

Outraged critics accused Spotify of permitting the spread of misinformation, and musician Neil Young famously pulled his music from the platform in protest.

The company vowed to include advisories on COVID-19 content after a group of scientists and medical professionals signed an open letter calling for Spotify to “take action against mass-misinformation events.”

Podcaster Joe Rogan’s comments on COVID-19 threw Spotify into a free speech controversy in 2022. PowerfulJRE /YouTube

At the time, Biden-era press secretary Jen Psaki called it “a positive step,” but added that the White House wants platforms to do “more.”

Rogan recalled the chaos during an episode of his show last month – and dished that two unnamed former presidents had been involved in the protests against his discussion of the pandemic.

Spotify also banned Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in 2020 after he threatened Anthony Fauci and former FBI Director Christopher Wray, calling for Trump to put their “heads on pikes.”

The podcast returned to Spotify last month after a five-year suspension.

While Spotify is based in Stockholm, Sweden, it has a large presence among American users, as well as New York offices in the World Trade Center.

Along with pressure at home, aggressive foreign laws that punish online platforms for “disinformation” could be forcing companies like Spotify to censor content for all users, including those in the US, which is a violation of free speech, Jordan claimed.

In the letter, the chairman nodded to an incident in August 2024, when Thierry Breton, who at the time was responsible for enforcing EU content laws, warned X and its owner Elon Musk that it may need to censor content to prevent “potential spillovers in the EU.”

Elon Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zimmerman, Andronika

Though the social media platform is based in Texas, its content – in this case, a live interview with then-president elect Donald Trump – is also available to EU users, making it subject to EU regulations.

Breton called on Musk to ensure that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content.”

Many EU laws come hand-in-hand with hefty fines, like its Digital Services Act, which authorizes fines up to 6% of a platform’s global revenue – which could translate to billions of dollars for social media giants like Meta.

X has pushed back against some of these orders, even notching a win earlier this month over the Australian government.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a panel last September for Acquired, a technology podcast. REUTERS

Australia’s online safety commission had ordered X to block a post blasting government officials in favor of transgender care, or cough up a $520,000 fine.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has similarly pushed back on content restrictions, announcing in January – just before Trump took office – that Facebook has done “too much censorship.”

The Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner scrapped its fact-checking and content moderation policies, opting for a crowd-sourced “Community Notes” model similar to Musk’s on X.

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The incoming Trump administration and the Biden administration went back and forth on Saturday over the status of TikTok and whether a ban of the service would take place, after the video app said that it would be forced to “go dark” on Sunday when a federal law takes effect.

President-elect Donald J. Trump told NBC News that he would “most likely” find a way to give the company a 90-day extension once he takes office on Monday “because it’s appropriate.”

Earlier on Saturday, the White House press secretary called TikTok’s claim it would go dark “a stunt.” TikTok, in a statement late Friday, had called on the Biden administration to assure Apple, Google and other technology companies that they would not be punished for delivering TikTok’s services in the United States.

“We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.

Despite the back and forth, TikTok’s fate was still unclear.

The company’s statement was its latest attempt to pressure the administration to grant it a reprieve from a law, upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, that would effectively ban its service starting Sunday.

The law says that app stores and major cloud computing providers cannot deliver TikTok to U.S. consumers unless the company is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to a non-Chinese owner. Lawmakers introduced the measure last year over fears that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.

TikTok did not detail what would happen on Sunday, including whether it would voluntarily shut itself down or simply cease to function because it would lose access to services it needs to stay online. The app claims 170 million U.S. users.

The Biden administration had earlier signaled that federal officials would not immediately take action against Apple, Google and the other companies under the law.

President Biden signed the TikTok ban bill into law in April after it passed Congress with bipartisan support. Lawmakers said Beijing could pressure ByteDance to extract sensitive data on American users or influence TikTok content to serve the Chinese government’s interests.

TikTok has said the Chinese government has no role in the company and that it has spent billions of dollars to address U.S. security concerns. ByteDance has headquarters in Beijing and is subject to China’s control.

On Friday, the Supreme Court accepted the government’s national security rationale for the law, with the majority opinion pointing to “TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects.”

Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement after the Supreme Court’s ruling that the process would play out “over time.” The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said that enforcing the law would fall to the incoming Trump administration, which takes office on Monday.

TikTok said that those comments were not enough to satisfy other companies that they would not run afoul of the law if they continued to distribute and maintain the app. Those companies could face penalties as high as $5,000 for each TikTok user who accesses the app inside the United States after the ban takes effect.

“The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans,” the company said.

The loss of that user base would be significant, but not the biggest TikTok has suffered. In 2020, it was banned in India, where it had 200 million users. As in the United States, the authorities in India cited national security concerns for their decision against TikTok.

Mr. Trump, who takes office Monday, has previously indicated his support for TikTok and was considering an executive order to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States.

But it’s unclear if an executive order by Mr. Trump could effectively halt a ban. Legal experts said he could direct the Justice Department not to enforce the law, or delay enforcement for a set period, but how such an executive order would fare if challenged in court is uncertain.

Mr. Trump could also find a buyer, which would allow him to extend the deadline by 90 days if a viable deal is on the table. But no clear buyers have emerged.

It was unclear what 90-day extension Mr. Trump was weighing when he spoke with NBC News on Saturday.

“We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,” he told NBC. If he does grant the app a 90-day extension, “I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he added.

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The statement came hours after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a law forcing the app to be divested from its Chinese parent company in two days and rejecting TikTok’s appeal that the decision violates the First Amendment.

Under the law, services providers like Google and Apple must stop allowing new downloads of TikTok after the ban takes effect – with potential fines of $5,000 per user if they don’t comply.

A mock funeral was held for TikTok in New York City on Friday after the Supreme Court upheld the app’s forced sale. Getty Images

“The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans,” the company said in a statement Friday night.

“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19.”

President Biden has since punted enforcement of the law to President-elect Donald Trump, who formally takes office on Monday and has vowed to save the app. 

Members of Congress and the Justice Department have alleged that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, poses a national security threat – capable of secretly manipulating content via its recommended algorithm and mass data collections such as location-tracking, among other risks. 

TikTok has denied the allegations. 

The app wants assurances that service providers will not be penalized if the app is still functioning past Sunday. AP

A law passed by Congress last April gave the platform a 120-day timeline to divest its stake entirely from its parent company or face a ban on Jan. 19. 

If the app goes offline, users would be redirected to a website with details of the ban. 

Though the platform would remain usable for a period for those who already downloaded it, services would gradually degrade due to a lack of product support and updates.

Trump – once a vocal critic of TikTok who initially led the efforts to block the app – is said to be mulling an executive order that would further delay enforcement of the law for 60 to 90 days while he attempts to facilitate a sale to a US buyer. 

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration on Monday and will be seated alongside other tech titans such as Elon Musk and Apple’s Tim Cook.

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The Biden administration issued sweeping rules on Monday governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an attempt to set up a global framework that will guide how artificial intelligence spreads around the world in the years to come.

With the power of A.I. rapidly growing, the Biden administration said the rules were necessary to keep a transformational technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries that could use it to augment their militaries, carry out cyberattacks and otherwise threaten the United States.

Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.

The rules put various limitations on the number of A.I. chips that companies can send to different countries, essentially dividing the world into three categories. The United States and 18 of its closest partners — including Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — are exempted from any restrictions and can buy A.I. chips freely.

Countries that are already subject to U.S. arms embargoes, like China and Russia, will continue to face a previously existing ban on A.I. chip purchases.

All other nations — most of the world — will be subject to caps restricting the number of A.I. chips that can be imported, though countries and companies are able to increase that number by entering into special agreements with the U.S. government. The rules could rankle some foreign governments: Even countries that are close trading partners or military allies of the United States, such as Mexico, Switzerland, Poland or Israel, will face restrictions on their ability to purchase larger amounts of American A.I. products.

In a statement, the European Commission said on Monday that it had shared its concerns about the measures with the Biden administration.

“We are concerned about the U.S. measures adopted today restricting access to advanced A.I. chip exports for selected E.U. member states and their companies,” the commission said, adding that European countries are “an economic opportunity for the U.S., not a security risk.”

The rules are aimed at stopping China from obtaining from other countries the technology it needs to produce artificial intelligence, after the United States banned such sales to China in recent years.

But the regulations also have broader goals: having allied countries be the location of choice for companies to build the world’s biggest data centers, in an effort to keep the most advanced A.I. models within the borders of the United States and its partners.

Governments around the world, particularly in the Middle East, have been pumping money into attracting and building enormous data centers, in a bid to become the next center for A.I. development.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Sunday that the rule would ensure that the infrastructure for training the most advanced artificial intelligence would be in the United States or in the jurisdiction of close allies, and “that capacity does not get offshored like chips and batteries and other industries that we’ve had to invest hundreds of billion dollars to bring back onshore.”

Mr. Sullivan said the rule would provide “greater clarity to our international partners and to industry,” while countering national security threats from malicious actors that could use “American technologies against us.”

It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to keep the new rules or how to enforce them. In a call with reporters on Sunday, Biden administration officials said that the rules had bipartisan support and that they had been in consultations with the incoming administration about them.

Though companies in China have begun to develop their own A.I. chips, the global market for such semiconductors is dominated by U.S. companies, particularly Nvidia. That dominance has given the U.S. government the ability to regulate the flow of A.I. technology worldwide, by restricting U.S. company exports.

Companies have protested those limitations, saying the restrictions could hamper innocuous or even beneficial types of computing, anger U.S. allies and ultimately push global buyers into buying non-American products, like those made by China.

In a statement, Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president for government affairs, called the rule “unprecedented and misguided” and said it “threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.”

“Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead,” he said. Nvidia’s stock dipped nearly 2 percent on Monday.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in a statement that the company was confident it could “comply fully with this rule’s high security standards and meet the technology needs of countries and customers around the world that rely on us.”

In a letter to congressional leadership on Sunday that was viewed by The New York Times, Jason Oxman, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a group representing tech companies, asked Congress to step in and use its authority to overturn the action if the Trump administration did not.

John Neuffer, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said his group was “deeply disappointed that a policy shift of this magnitude and impact is being rushed out the door days before a presidential transition and without any meaningful input from industry.”

“The stakes are high, and the timing is fraught,” Mr. Neuffer added.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Monday that it opposed the restrictions, calling them an expansion of Washington’s “long-arm jurisdiction.” It said it would “take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”

The rules, which run more than 200 pages, also set up a system in which companies that operate data centers, like Microsoft and Google, can apply for special government accreditations.

In return for following certain security standards, these companies can then trade in A.I. chips more freely around the globe. The companies will still have to agree to keep 75 percent of their total A.I. computing power within the United States or allied countries, and to locate no more than 7 percent of their computing power in any single other nation.

The rules also set up the first controls on weights for A.I. models, the parameters unique to each model that determine how artificial intelligence makes its predictions. Companies setting up data centers abroad will be required to adopt security standards to protect this intellectual property and prevent adversaries from gaining access to it.

Governments facing restrictions can raise the number of A.I. chips they can import freely by signing agreements with the U.S. government, in which they would agree to align with U.S. goals for protecting A.I.

Under the guidance of the U.S. government, Microsoft struck an agreement to team up with an Emirati firm, G42, last year, in return for G42’s eliminating Huawei equipment from its systems and taking other steps.

The Biden administration could issue more rules related to chips and A.I. in the coming days, including an executive order to encourage domestic energy generation for data centers, and new rules that aim to keep the most cutting-edge chips out of China, people familiar with the deliberations said.

The latter rule is a response to an incident last year in which U.S. officials discovered that Huawei, a Chinese telecom firm under U.S. sanctions, had been obtaining components for its A.I. chips that were manufactured by a leading Taiwanese chip firm, in violation of U.S. export controls.

The announcements are among a flurry of new regulations that the Biden administration is rushing to issue before the presidential turnover as it tries to close loopholes and cement its legacy on countering China’s technological development. The administration has issued new limits on exports of chip-making equipment to China and other countries, proposed new restrictions on Chinese drones, added new Chinese companies to a military blacklist and hurried to complete new subsidies for U.S. chip manufacturing.

But the A.I. regulations issued Monday appear to be among the most sweeping and consequential of these actions. Artificial intelligence is quickly transforming how scientists carry out research, how companies allocate tasks between their employees and how militaries operate. While A.I. has many beneficial uses, U.S. officials have grown more concerned that it could enable the development of new weapons, help countries surveil dissidents and otherwise upend the global balance of power.

Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at the RAND Corporation, said the rules would create a framework for protecting U.S. security interests while still allowing firms to compete abroad. “They are also forward-looking, trying to preserve U.S. and allied-led supply chains before they are offshored to the highest subsidy bidder,” he said.

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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The next big fight over offshoring is playing out in Washington, and this time it involves artificial intelligence.

The Biden administration, in its final weeks in office, is rushing to issue new regulations to try to ensure that the United States and its close allies have control over how artificial intelligence develops in the years to come.

The rules have touched off an intense fight between tech companies and the government, as well as among administration officials.

The regulations, which could be issued as early as Friday, would dictate where American-made chips that are critical for A.I. could be shipped. Those rules would then help determine where the data centers that create A.I. would be built, with a preference for the United States and its allies.

The rules would allow most European countries, Japan and other close U.S. allies to make unfettered purchases of A.I. chips, while blocking two dozen adversaries, like China and Russia, from buying them. More than 100 other countries would face different quotas on the amount of A.I. chips they could receive from U.S. companies.

The regulations would also make it easier for A.I. chips to be sent to trusted American companies that run data centers, like Google and Microsoft, than to their foreign competitors. The rules would establish security procedures that data centers would have to follow to keep A.I. systems safe from cybertheft.

The Biden administration’s plan has prompted swift pushback from American tech companies, which say global regulations could slow their businesses and create costly compliance requirements. Those firms also question whether President Biden should be setting rules with such far-reaching economic consequences in his final days in office.

While some of the details remain unclear, the new rules may force tech companies that are pouring tens of billions of dollars into building data centers around the world to rethink some of those locations.

Artificial intelligence, which can answer questions, write code and create images, is expected to revolutionize the way countries fight wars, develop medicines and make scientific breakthroughs. Because of its potential power, U.S. officials want A.I. systems to be built in the United States or in allied countries — where they will have more say over what the systems do — rather than in countries that could share that technology with China or act in other ways contrary to U.S. national security.

Peter Harrell, a former White House economic official and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the United States currently had a substantial edge in A.I. and the leverage to decide which countries could benefit from it.

“It’s important to think about how we want those transformational developments to be rolled out around the world,” he said.

The rules are largely about national security: Given the way that A.I. might transform military conflict, the regulations are designed to keep the most powerful technology in the hands of allies and prevent China from getting access to A.I. chips through international data centers.

But U.S. officials say data centers are also important sources of new economic activity for American communities. They want to encourage companies to build as many data centers as possible in the United States rather than in regions like the Middle East, which is offering money to attract tech firms.

Some labor unions have come out in support of the Biden administration’s plan. That’s because data centers are huge consumers of electricity and steel. Each one creates work for construction companies, electricians and HVAC technicians, as well as workers involved in energy production.

“Labor has a huge interest in the future of A.I. and technology, not only in terms of its application but in terms of the infrastructure that supports it,” said Michael R. Wessel, an adviser to the United Steelworkers union.

But U.S. tech companies and their supporters argue that the rules could hold back technological developments, strain international alliances and motivate countries to buy alternative technologies from China, which is racing to develop its own A.I. chips.

“The risk is that over the long term, countries are going to say, ‘We cannot rely on the United States, we cannot be importing our advanced technology from the United States, because there is always this threat that the U.S. government is going to take it away from us,’” said Geoffrey Gertz, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

California-based Nvidia, which controls 90 percent of the A.I. chip market, has lobbied against the rules in meetings with Congress and the White House, as have Microsoft, Oracle and other companies. They worry that the rules could hurt international sales.

Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president of global affairs, said in a statement that the policy would hurt data centers around the world without improving national security and would “push the world to alternative technologies.”

“We would encourage President Biden to not pre-empt incoming President Trump by enacting a policy that will only harm the U.S. economy, set America back and play into the hands of U.S. adversaries,” Mr. Finkle added.

Tech companies have also tried to blunt the impact by appealing to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s incoming administration, which can decide whether to keep or enforce the rules, tech executives and other people familiar with the exchanges said.

Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment.

Biden officials have also clashed over the regulations. Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo, who is more sympathetic to industry complaints and had concerns about how the Trump administration would carry out the rules, has been at odds with the White House and other agencies, according to three officials and others familiar with the discussions, who declined to be named to discuss private deliberations.

Some U.S. allies expressed concerns about the rules, officials said. And in a Dec. 19 letter to the Biden administration, bipartisan lawmakers on the Senate Commerce Committee criticized the restrictions as “draconian” and said they would “severely hinder the sale of U.S. technology abroad.”

After the White House decided to move forward, the Commerce Department pushed for additional changes to the rule, including increasing the number of chips that can be sold without a license and delaying the rule’s start for 120 days to allow the Trump administration to potentially make changes, two officials said.

It is unclear what Mr. Trump would do about the issue, although he has recently expressed support for having data centers built in the United States. His advisers include some China skeptics who are likely to favor tougher restrictions. Others, including the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have business ties to countries in the Middle East that are likely to oppose any restrictions.

The new rules build on export controls that the Biden administration has put in place in recent years to ban shipments of advanced A.I. chips to China and other adversarial countries and to require special licenses to send A.I. chips to countries, including in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Those controls have allowed the United States to exert some global influence. To gain access to Nvidia chips last year, G42, a leading A.I. firm in the United Arab Emirates, promised to relinquish its use of technology made by Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications firm under U.S. sanctions.

But U.S. concerns have grown that Chinese companies are getting critical technology by smuggling in chips or through remote access to data centers in other countries.

Companies have also faced long waits to obtain licenses for even small numbers of chips, and foreign officials have appealed directly to the Biden administration to try to obtain them. So officials began working last year on a more transparent distribution system.

Tech companies say the requirements could make data centers too expensive for some nations, preventing some from using A.I. to benefit their health care, transportation and hospitality industries. Among the countries that would face caps and other restrictions are traditional American allies like Israel, Mexico and Poland, a NATO member.

“We can all agree that none of these workloads or uses of A.I. technology and the GPUs they rely on constitute national security concerns,” said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s executive vice president, in a company blog post referring to graphic processing units, or A.I. chips.

Nvidia and other tech companies have also argued that the rules could backfire by driving buyers in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere to Chinese companies like Huawei.

Some U.S. officials disagree. One analysis that U.S. officials put together, including for consultations with private industry, argued that Chinese chipmakers faced significant hurdles and would not be able to export enough chips to train cutting-edge A.I. models. The analysis was viewed by The New York Times.

“Huawei is struggling to make enough advanced chips to train A.I. models within China, much less export chips,” said Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump and the chief executive of Garnaut Global, a China-focused research firm.

The post Biden Administration Ignites Firestorm With Rules Governing A.I.’s Global Spread appeared first on Our Story Insight.

That’s the signal we’re getting from the bond market: The possibility that the fiscal time bomb of nonstop spending that Joe Biden and his minions have planted is ready to explode just in time for Trump to take office.

Most of the financial punditry is too obsessed with stock indexes to appreciate the bond market’s warning signs.

Stock prices have their place, of course.

When investors pile into stocks as they’ve been ­doing since Trump’s election — ­until recently, that is — it’s an indication that many are betting his policies of lower taxes and less regulation will lead to higher corporate earnings and GDP growth.

For my money, the bond markets provide a more accurate window into underlying fissures that could lead to severe fiscal distress in the future.

More From Charles Gasparino

Recall, the Dow reached record highs at the end of 2007 just as lending markets started to flash the first warning signs of the 2008 financial crisis.

And that’s just one example of bonds exposing a problem well before the rest of the financial world had a clue.

I’m not saying we’re heading for a 2008-like financial collapse.

For starters, all collapses are different.

But bonds are certainly signaling trouble ahead.

The best gauge of this is the price of the 10-year bond the Treasury issues to finance much of the federal debt. Smart traders follow it for signs of economic distress because consumer rates — such as mort­gages — are priced off of its interest rate, or “yield.”

Bond prices move in the opposite direction from yields.

And since the beginning of December, prices of the 10-year have nose-dived while yields have spiked significantly, more than 10%.

When this happens, it’s a sign of trouble ahead.

Maybe Fed Chairman Jerome Powell hasn’t quite conquered inflation, which eats into bond returns.

Traders demand lower prices (higher yields) for lending their money to Uncle Sam.

Troubled bill payer

Maybe more troubling is that ballooning deficits as we have seen during the Biden years means the government increasingly can’t pay its bills.

As deficits explode, the Treasury will have to issue more debt at those lower prices and higher yields to attract enough buyers.

Even worse is that at some point those buyers — particularly foreign adversaries like the Chinese who increasingly finance our largesse — might scale back significantly on the bond buying.

The result could be catastrophic, with yields skyrocketing, causing a recession or even worse.

Those are the alarm bells the bond market is sounding, and the reason for the recent sell-off in stocks.

Trump isn’t even in office, and his critics are already blaming him for the unfolding situation.

They say his tax cuts will widen the deficit; his planned use of tariffs to craft trade deals are scaring bond traders — because tariffs are inherently inflationary since they add to the costs of goods.

Ditto for his deportation of undocumented aliens, since that will reduce the supply of people looking to work on the cheap.

But traders tell me the overriding concern is clearly Biden’s wasteful and wild spending fueled by his obsession with being more transformationally leftist than his former boss, Barack Obama.

Yes, even in defeat, the traders say, Biden continues to spend like a man on a mission, seemingly oblivious to the potential fiscal-cliff disaster it could create.

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The US government runs on a fiscal-year basis, which begins Oct. 1.

In November alone, the federal government ran a deficit of $366.8 billion — nearly 20% higher than at the same time last year.

Astounding, since the economy is growing and tax receipts should be strong enough to push deficits lower.

The debt is now at $36 trillion, a scary 123% of our entire GDP and growing.

The budget deficit — which fuels the debt binge — is rising to close to $2 trillion in the coming year.

For comparison, in Trump’s first term, his last pre-COVID deficit was around $980 billion.

Larry McDonald, a former Lehman Brothers bond trader and author of the influential Bear Traps Report, lays out in chilling detail Biden’s going-away “gift” to Trump.

Yes, all that student-loan forgiveness, green-energy subsidies, handouts to migrants, expensive spending boondoggles like the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, and arms to Ukraine are adding up.

According to McDonald, Biden has ramped up his spending as he’s about to depart from office.

Between Oct. 1 and Trump’s January inaugural, the Bidenistas are on track to spend $2 trillion, or 30%, of the annual budget they proposed.

“Trump will have to cut spending for the rest of the year to stay within the limits of the allocated budget,” he says.

My Fox colleague, former Trump econ adviser Larry Kud­low, is an optimist.

He believes Trump’s free-market policies of low taxes and less regulation will actually spur the economy’s economic growth and increase tax receipts.

Trump will use tariffs strategically to gain an edge in global trade.

The “DOGE brothers,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will take an ax to the federal bloat and further appease the so-called “bond vigilantes” — traders whose selling pressure often brings government spenders to their senses.

Let’s hope Kudlow’s right.

So far, the bond vigilantes aren’t buying it.

In fact, they seem to be just ­getting started.

The post Donald Trump restoring the economic woes sustained by the Biden administration will take time appeared first on Our Story Insight.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has been reviewing the $14.1 billion deal on whether it poses security risks for months. On Dec. 23, CFIUS said it was at a standstill, leaving the issue up to Biden.

The president’s decision is a major use of executive power on a heavily-politicized election year issue. His announcement comes with just over two weeks left in his term. President-elect Donald Trump had vowed to crush the deal when he returns to office for his second term.

President Joe Biden speaks on the economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC on Dec. 10, 2024. REUTERS

Despite the clear political pressures, Biden said his choice was based on national security concerns.

“It is my solemn responsibility as President to ensure that, now and long into the future, America has a strong domestically owned and operated steel industry that can continue to power our national sources of strength at home and abroad,” Biden said in a statement on Friday, “and it is a fulfillment of that responsibility to block foreign ownership of this vital American company.”

US Steel shares plunged 8% premarket on Friday. US Steel did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Nippon declined to comment.

CFIUS had reached a stalemate on its review of the deal on concerns that Nippon’s large size and overseas mills might threaten US Steel’s own output, according to correspondence between the committee and Nippon Steel viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A US Steel sign lays on the ground outside the Carrie Furnace that was part of the abandoned Homestead Steel Works in Swissvale, Pa. AFP via Getty Images

Nippon’s offer, first announced in December 2023, immediately faced heat from politicians and union leaders. 

Democratic and Republican lawmakers slammed the deal and treated it as a symbol of the erasure of US-owned companies. 

The United Steelworkers union claimed it was blindsided by the merger, and argued Nippon was unlikely to honor the union’s contract and protect workers’ pensions.

US Steel shareholders approved the deal in April, but as the presidential election neared, political opposition to the bid only grew. Vice President Kamala Harris also spoke out against the deal during her campaign.

The exterior of a blast furnace building owned by Japanese company Nippon Steel in Kashima, Ibaraki prefecture on Dec. 6, 2024. AFP via Getty Images

An entrance sign for Nippon Steel’s East Nippon Works on Dec. 6, 2024. AFP via Getty Images

Meanwhile, US Steel warned that a failure to merge with the Japanese firm would put thousands of union jobs at risk. The US steelmaker would have to shutter some of its mills, and potentially move its headquarters out of key swing-state Pennsylvania, US Steel said in September.

Some of Biden’s senior advisers have expressed concerns that blocking the deal could hurt relations with Japan, a close ally and major investor in US businesses, according to The Washington Post.

In a November letter, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba urged Biden to sign off on the merger, according to Reuters. The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nippon had tried to ease US concerns, offering to move its US headquarters to Pittsburgh, where US Steel is based, and to honor all union agreements. 

Biden speaks at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 2, 2025. Getty Images

The Japanese steelmaker had also reportedly offered to give the US government veto power over any future cuts to US Steel’s production capacity, according to Reuters.

The collapse of the deal would cost Nippon a $565 million penalty, a likely detriment to future US investments.

Nippon hoped to raise its global output capacity to 85 million metric tons from 65 million through the merger.

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“Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re in the Congress,” Biden told the “More Perfect Union” podcast.

“I don’t know how you look your constituents in the eye and know because of the job they gave you, gave you an inside track to make more money,” Biden said, adding: “I think we should be changing the law.”

President Biden said he supports a ban on members of Congress and their spouses trading stock while in office. AP

The interview was conducted by Faiz Shakir, a political adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and published by A More Perfect Union, a pro-labor advocacy and journalism organization.

It’s unclear what impact Biden’s statement could have, coming only a month before his term ends.

Biden had previously declined to take a position on congressional stock trading.

His fellow Democrat, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, initially opposed proposals that lawmakers and their spouses be banned from trading stocks.

Pelosi, who is married to venture capitalist Paul Pelosi, insisted that her husband makes stock trades independently and that she has no involvement. She said in December 2021 that there is a “free market” that members of Congress “should be able to participate in.”

Speculation about Pelosi’s future in Congress has ramped up in recent days after the 84-year-old congresswoman from San Francisco underwent hip replacement surgery in Europe earlier this week.

Lawmakers have often flouted lax rules that govern stock trading while serving in office. UPI

Pelosi suffered a fall while on a trip to Luxembourg over the weekend, breaking her hip.

Financial disclosure forms showed that Paul Pelosi, who is said to be worth in excess of $275 million, sold 2,000 shares of Visa stock worth between $500,000 and $1 million on July 1. In September, the Justice Department announced it was suing Visa for alleged antitrust violations.

Since 2021, Pelosi has softened her stance amid backlash, coming out in support of strengthening an existing law, the Stock Act, which requires lawmakers to disclose their stock sales and purchases.

She has also called for extending stock trading disclosure requirements to members of the judiciary, while stiffening penalties for members of Congress who flout the rules.

Relations between Biden and Pelosi, who were once close, are said to have been ruptured after the former speaker played a key role in nudging the president from the race earlier this year due to concerns over his age and mental acuity.

Pelosi told news outlets that she intended for the Democrats to stage a quick primary process following Biden’s decision to step aside, but his swift endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris frustrated those plans.

Biden’s support for a ban marks somewhat of a pivot for the president, who has been largely noncommittal on the issue.

When Jen Psaki served as White House press secretary two years ago, she said Biden would “let members of leadership in Congress and members of Congress determine what the rules should be.”

Biden has long declined to take a position on the issue. His fellow Democrat, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, initially opposed a sweeping ban. AFP via Getty Images

A bipartisan proposal to ban trading by members of Congress and their families has dozens of sponsors, but it has not received a vote.

Although lawmakers are required to disclose stock transactions exceeding $1,000, they’re routinely late in filing notices and sometimes don’t file them at all.

Shakir said he admired Biden for having not “gone in early on Google, and Boeing, and Microsoft, and Nvidia, and, you know, Amazon” while he was a US senator from Delaware, a position he held for 36 years.

Pelosi is married to venture capitalist Paul Pelosi. The couple is said to have a net worth in excess of $275 million. Chris Kleponis – CNP / MEGA

Biden said he lived on his Senate salary instead of playing the stock market.

Trading in Congress has long been criticized by government watchdogs, who say the access to nonpublic information creates a temptation for lawmakers to prioritize their own finances over the public good.

Public anger has mounted since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when some lawmakers were caught buying and selling millions of dollars worth of stock after being warned about the coming disruption from the virus.

With Post wires

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