“An artificial cap on credit card interest rates is likely to backfire on the White House by making credit less accessible to the cash-strapped households that most need it,” Columbia Business School economics professor Brett House told me.

Earnings call discussions

The proposal was a major topic this week during the earnings calls of America’s big banks. Executives broadly agree a 10% cap would reduce access to credit for higher-risk borrowers and could have adverse effects on consumer spending and growth, Morningstar director Sean Dunlop told me.

“I think Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, provided the most context among the firms I cover, alluding to a previous time when President Carter tried to impose interest rate ceilings—and the administration had to abandon its efforts within two months, given the severity of the economic impact,” Dunlop said.

Fraser noted that consumers spend roughly $6 trillion annually on credit cards and carry about $1.2 trillion in balances. She warned that making card products unprofitable would curtail spending on those cards as credit availability declines, he said.

Other CEOs and CFOs had similar concerns:

— JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum said the cap would likely reduce access to credit rather than help consumers. He argued that intense competition already compresses margins and that price controls would force broad lending cutbacks — especially for higher-risk borrowers.

— Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said the industry is committed to affordability but argued a cap would tighten credit. “You’re going to get restricted credit, meaning less people will get credit cards, and the balance available to them on those credit cards will also be restricted,” he said.

—Citi CFO Mark Mason called affordability an important issue and said Citi looks forward to working with the administration on a constructive solution. “I also say that an interest rate cap is not something that we would or could support,” he said, arguing it would restrict access to credit. 

Dunlop said if the proposal is implemented, banks would likely respond by tightening lending standards, competing more aggressively for higher-FICO borrowers, and seeking to offset lost interest income through higher fees.

Higher interest rates compensate lenders for nonpayment risk; without that flexibility, issuers would narrow underwriting and concentrate lending among the least risky borrowers. “For issuers that extend credit to lower-income borrowers, like Bread, the credit card economics simply don’t work out at lower interest rates, and they’d be forced to shrink their lending volumes dramatically,” Dunlop said.

The debate highlights the tension between lowering borrowing costs and preserving access to unsecured credit — a balance policymakers must weigh as affordability concerns collide with market realities.

Have a good weekend.

Quick note: In observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the next CFO Daily will be in your inbox on Tuesday.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Fortune 500 Power Moves this week:

Dennis K. Cinelli was appointed CFO of Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (No. 147), effective Jan. 15, and as such has resigned his board of directors seat. Cinelli will succeed Andrew C. Warren, who has served as EVP and interim CFO since June 2025. Most recently, Cinelli served as CFO of Scale AI. He previously held senior finance and operational roles at Uber, including global head of strategic finance, and later running the U.S. and Canada Mobility (Rides) business. Before Uber, Cinelli was with G.E. Ventures as CFO. 

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.

Here’s more CFO moves this week:

Clare Kennedy was appointed CFO of Spencer Stuart, a global advisory firm, effective Jan. 12. Kennedy succeeds Christine Laurens as part of a planned succession and in support of Laurens’ retirement from full-time executive work. Kennedy, who is based in London, joins Spencer Stuart from Maples Group, an international advisory firm, where she served as global chief operating officer. She joined Maples Group from Freshfields, an international law firm, where she served as its global CFO. Kennedy previously spent 18 years at Linklaters, an international law firm, where she held a variety of senior finance and commercial leadership roles. She began her career at Arthur Andersen and EY as a chartered accountant, specializing in tax. 

Gillian Munson was appointed CFO of Duolingo, Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL), a mobile learning platform, effective Feb. 23. Matt Skaruppa will step down after nearly six years with the company; he will remain CFO until Munson starts her new role, at which time he will assume an advisory role. Munson assumes the CFO role after serving on the Duolingo board of directors since 2019 as chair of the audit, risk and compliance committee. She was most recently the CFO of Vimeo and previously held CFO positions at Iora Health, Inc. and XO Group Inc.

Betsabe Botaitis was appointed CFO of P2P.org, a non-custodial institutional staking provider. Botaitis brings over 20 years of leadership across financial services, fintech, and Web3, with experience building governance and operations in high-growth organizations. Most recently, Botaitis served as CFO and treasurer at Hedera. Botaitis’ career spans both traditional financial institutions and crypto-native organizations. She began in retail banking before holding senior finance roles at Citigroup and LendingClub, and later co-founding and serving as CFO of a blockchain company. 

Julie Feder was appointed CFO of Obsidian Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company. Feder brings over 20 years of strategic finance experience in life sciences and health care. Feder joins Obsidian from Aura Biosciences, where she served as CFO for six years. Before Aura, she was CFO at Verastem. Before that, Feder spent six years at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc., as CFO.

Deborah Ricci was appointed EVP and CFO of Acentra Health, a technology and health solutions company. Ricci joins Acentra Health from Guidehouse Inc., where she most recently served as partner and chief financial and administrative officer. Earlier in her career, Ricci held multiple senior finance leadership roles, including CFO positions at Constellis, Centerra Group, and A-T Solutions, and began her career as a certified public accountant with KPMG.

Rohan Ranadive was appointed managing director and CFO of GTCR, a private equity firm. Ranadive succeeds Anna May Trala, who is retiring. Trala will remain affiliated with the firm, serving as a senior advisor going forward. Ranadive brings more than 20 years of experience. He joins GTCR from Vista Equity Partners, where he was a managing director of finance operations. Before that, he was the CFO of Aviditi Advisors and spent 12 years at TPG Capital in various finance and accounting leadership roles.

Big Deal

Accenture’s latest Pulse of Change research is based on a survey of 3,650 C-suite leaders from the world’s largest organizations across 20 industries and 20 countries.

Companies are pouring resources into AI, with 78% now seeing it as a bigger driver of revenue growth than cost cuts, according to the report. At the same time, 35% of leaders said a solid data strategy and core digital capabilities would do the most to accelerate AI implementation and scale. However, 54% of employees report low‑quality or misleading AI outputs that waste time and hurt productivity. In AI, value follows quality, so trust in outputs and data accuracy remains critical for sustained growth, according to Accenture.

Going deeper

Here are four Fortune weekend reads:

“Exclusive: Former OpenAI policy chief creates nonprofit institute, calls for independent safety audits of frontier AI models” by Jeremy Kahn

“America’s $38 trillion national debt is so big the nearly $1 trillion interest payment will be larger than Medicare soon” by Shawn Tully 

“Worried about AI taking your job? New Anthropic research shows it’s not that simple” by Sharon Goldman

“America’s hottest job opening right now is in the NFL—no degree is required, you won’t be fixed to a desk and it pays up to $20 million” by Preston Fore

Overheard

“We have transitioned from a K-shaped recovery into a Barbell Economy, a system heavily weighted at the extremes of wealth and precarity, connected by a middle class that is rapidly snapping.”

—Katica Roy, a gender economist and the CEO and founder of Denver-based Pipeline, a SaaS company, writes in a Fortune opinion piece. 

Social media ranked the top reason 55% of Gen Z and 44% of millennial investors say they got into investing, according to a survey of 300,000 investors over five years by the Oliver Wyman Forum. 

In their search for alternative pathways toward financial security, personal finance influencers are providing solutions. Videos describing how to invest $1,000 in the stock market or explaining “the stock market tea” in terms of the Kardashians or The Real Housewives franchise get hundreds of thousands of views across platforms. 

Vivian Tu, better known as Your Rich BFF, has 2.7 million TikTok and 3.8 million Instagram followers and gives advice on investing, financial planning,and tax loopholes.

“Suddenly, you have someone who doesn’t look like your dad’s financial advisor. You have somebody who looks like I could be anybody’s college best friend,” Tu previously told Fortune. “I want to entertain my audience and turn finance into funance and just make talking about money more accessible for the next generation of rich BFFs.”

Creator Rebecca Ma, who goes by Becca Bloom online, has 8.2 million followers on Instagram and TikTok. She shares her daily routine, feeding her cat caviar for breakfast and showcasing her endless luxury clothing hauls. Each one gets millions of views and likes. 

The popularity of these videos shows a common desire for extreme financial success. The Oliver Wyman Forum survey found in 2022, 18% of people said they felt pressure to make money to feel successful. By 2025, that number had climbed to 33%, and this feeling more than doubled among low-income earners and boomers nearing retirement. 

Economic uncertainty is driving Gen Z to invest early  

More than half of Gen Z started to learn about investing before entering the workforce, compared to only 20% of Baby Boomers, according to a World Economic Forum survey from 2024. Nearly a third started investing in college or early adulthood, twice the rate of millennials who invested at that age. 

Early investing is part of a strategy towards financial independence, which is now the

fastest-growing unmet financial need, according to the survey. Economic nihilism is growing within Gen Z as they face a stagnant job market and are pessimistic about the future of safety net programs like Social Security. 

“There’s this genuine interest to learn. Isaid Natalya Guseva, head of financial markets and resilience initiatives at WEF, which has surveyed investor habits every two years since 2022. She sees Gen Z’s lust for financial literacy as “driven by various things,” but overwhelmingly a sense from them that they can’t rely on things like governments and pensions as much as prior generations did. She also points to more access to information and diversified products to invest in as a draw for Gen Z.

Across all age groups, financial independence is the top skill people wished that they had learned more about earlier, according to WEF. Gen Z has taken this very seriously and is set on making as much money as possible.  

“Gen Z and young people in general have many financial goals, and we see many of them are actually quite medium to long term,” Guseva said. “Only about a tenth or fewer of our investors say they want to beat the market or speculate.”

Young people prefer AI over traditional advising

Nearly half of people consult AI when investing, compared to just over a third in 2023, according to the Oliver Wyman survey. Investors using AI typically use it as a sounding board rather than letting it independently invest their money. Compared to traditional financial advising, AI provides a judgment-free environment to learn, respondents said, and makes them feel more understood than human advisors. 

“We also see that younger generations, especially Gen Z, say that they would trust an institution more if it had an AI chat bot. ” Guseva said. “Many are using AI to learn about investing” 

With increased pressure, Gen Z is making riskier investments. While Oliver Wyman Forum found that Gen X and Baby Boomers’ investment portfolios tend to have more traditional compositions with higher levels of diversification and risk-hedging, cryptocurrency makes up more than one third of 71% of Gen Z investors’ portfolios, according to WEF.

“We see that more people know how to access crypto than stock, CTFs, and bonds, and more people feel like they can understand crypto than stocks, CTFs and bonds,” Guseva said. “What that shows to us is that what crypto has done is had a really great marketing campaign and awareness campaign. To us, it’s a lesson on, how do you meet people where they are?” 

Gen Z’s pivot toward higher-risk, high-reward assets like cryptocurrency isn’t just a trend. Their financial habits rank second among the areas where they feel most misjudged, the survey found, and their rejection of slow and steady wealth accumulation is a sign that they’re done with conventional wisdom that doesn’t fit their vision of the future. 

More significantly, The U.S. government released its most recent numbers for Treasury International Capital Data (covering November) and they revealed that net foreign inflows into U.S. assets of all kinds were $212 billion.

That’s a lot, according to ING’s Chris Turner.

“The main takeaway is that foreigners continue to pour money into U.S. asset markets. The TIC release is a volatile data set, but looking at the rolling 12-month average, in November the net foreign purchase of US assets was around $100 billion per month – compared to around $25 billion in the summer of 2024,” he told clients this morning.

Cathie Wood adjusts her ‘rolling recession’ theory

There are several other factors giving traders good vibes about the U.S.

Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood announced in a new commentary that her “rolling recession” theory (that various sectors of the economy have suffered recessions even though the economy as a whole has held up) may be coming to an end. The U.S. “has evolved into a coiled spring that could bounce back powerfully during the next few years,” she said.

Wood is an idiosyncratic investor but she has a fervent fanbase buoyed by the performance of her ARK Innovation ETF, which is up 45% over the last 12 months, per Yahoo Finance:

Tech bulls are enthusiastic about Q4 earnings

Her bullishness looks tepid compared to Wedbush’s Dan Ives, who told clients to ignore all the people who have hating on tech stocks recently.

“We believe tech stocks will have a very strong 4Q earnings season led by Big Tech as the cloud stalwarts Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon had very robust AI enterprise demand in the quarter based on our field checks,” he said. “We believe … the Street is still underestimating how big this AI spending trajectory is and we expect 4Q tech earnings to be another validation moment with a doubling down on aggressive initial cap-ex numbers into 2026. Our bullish view is that investors are still not fully appreciating the tidal wave of growth on the horizon from the $3 trillion of spending over the next 3 years coming from enterprise and government.”

There’s a price gauge showing he may be right: The price of copper is up 33% over the last 12 months (based on the Comex continuous contract). President Trump’s copper tariffs didn’t help, of course, but the underlying issue is that tech companies building AI data centers need as much copper as they can get—so the copper price looks like an indicator of robust tech activity.

Trump: much smoke, less fire

Lastly, investors are becoming inured to Trump’s political dramas as they learn that much smoke often means little fire. Trump may have apprehended Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro but he left the remainder of his regime in place. He may have threatened to bomb Iran again, but then he didn’t. His administration may be criminally investigating U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, but after Powell came out against him with guns blazing in a video on Sunday Wall Street was reassured that Fed independence wasn’t going away in the short term. Even Trump’s threat to invade Greenland looks like it might end up in the Pentagon’s “Easier said than done” file.

‘De-dollarisation is going to take some time’

ING’s Turner isn’t giving up on his theory that the world is slowly moving away from the dollar, yet. But his note this morning admitted that the greenback isn’t dead yet. The dollar has gained nearly a full percentage point in value on the DXY index of foreign currencies since the start of the year.

“The dollar is drifting higher this week on probably what is best described as a macro move. U.S. data has come in on the firmer side, e.g. retail sales and jobless claims, while the Fed’s Beige Book presented a view of a gently expanding economy and no immediate threat to the jobs market,” he told clients.

“We would again conclude that de-dollarisation is going to take some time and that if the dollar is to come lower this year, it will be driven by lower U.S. [interest] rates and increased foreign hedging of U.S. assets.”

Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

• S&P 500 futures were up 0.36% this morning. The last session closed up 0.26%.
• STOXX Europe 600 was flat in early trading.
• The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was flat in early trading. 
• Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.32%.
• China’s CSI 300 was down 0.41%. 
• The South Korea KOSPI was up 0.9%. 
• India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.16%. 
• Bitcoin was down to $95.5K.