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Trump’s SEC will buoy ‘aggressive innovation,’ Webull president says: ‘Boundaries are going to be tested’

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  • Fintech companies are pushing the envelope after a big change in approach from the SEC under the Trump administration, Webull president and U.S. CEO Anthony Denier told Fortune. Meanwhile, despite bipartisan concerns about the stock-trading platform’s ties to China, Denier said the Robinhood competitor has appeased regulators. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a step back under President Donald Trump’s administration. That’s good news for fintech, according to Anthony Denier, the president and U.S. CEO of mobile stock-trading platform Webull.

Not all commentary from Washington has been favorable to the Robinhood rival, which went public in early April, as the company’s ties to China continue to invite scrutiny. In a recent interview with Fortune, though, Denier expressed confidence about the platform’s relationship with regulators, particularly amid a stark change in attitudes and priorities at the SEC.

“This is setting us up in an environment where you’re going to start seeing aggressive innovation,” said Denier, who has led Webull’s U.S. brokerage since 2017.

“You start to see a bit more of asking for forgiveness rather than asking for permission,” he added.

While he didn’t mention competitors by name, Denier cited rival investment platforms moving into “sports gambling.” That’s presumably a reference to Robinhood’s recent partnership with prediction market Kalshi, which lets users speculate on the outcome of the NBA Finals, U.S. Open, and other major events. 

It’s the type of bold move that never would have been possible under the Biden administration, Denier said. Webull also recently partnered with Kalshi, but Denier has said Webull doesn’t plan on offering sports-related contracts. 

“I think a lot of boundaries are going to be tested,” he said.  

Nowhere is the SEC’s change in approach more stark than with crypto. The agency’s leader under Biden, Gary Gensler, became public enemy No. 1 in the world of digital assets after publicly feuding with the industry and pursuing a divisive regulatory crackdown.

Critics argue Gensler’s SEC embraced “regulation by enforcement,” or relying on litigation and penalties against firms to set policy in the absence of a clear, rule-based framework. This uncertainty, Denier said, caused Webull to sell its digital-asset business and remove crypto offerings from its platform in 2023 as the company prepared to go public.

With crypto advocate Paul Atkins now leading the SEC, however, Webull is planning to reintroduce crypto trading for U.S. customers in the second half of the year.

“It’s going to be with the undertone that crypto investing is still investing at its core,” Denier said, “even though it is an unregistered and unsecuritized product.”

As a revenue source, supporting crypto trading can be feast or famine, with investor interest often surging during a bull run for Bitcoin and other digital assets but then falling away when prices swing in the opposite direction.

Robinhood has responded by making a push into banking and wealth management, mimicking the likes of Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and E-Trade. Webull is making a similar push into the retirement space as its young, tech-savvy customer base—which the company says totals more than 24 million users worldwide—looks to the future. A new partnership with BlackRock gives users access to model portfolios based on various risk appetites and objectives, elevating an advisory product that Denier acknowledged was previously “bare bones.”

“As we start getting more mature, and as our customers start getting more mature with us, their needs are changing,” Denier said, “and we are adapting to meet their needs.”

China ties get Washington’s attention

Webull completed another step in its evolution in early April, going public through a $7.3 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. A retail frenzy sent shares soaring 500% on the second day of trading, briefly giving Webull a market cap of almost $30 billion.

The stock quickly shed those gains, however, particularly after Fox Business reported lawmakers like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) had called on the SEC to investigate and possibly delist Webull because of the company’s ties to China. Shares closed just short of the $11 mark Tuesday, down from a high of $79.56 two months ago.

Chinese citizen Anquan Wang, a former manager at e-commerce titan Alibaba and tech conglomerate Xiaomi, founded Webull in 2016. He remains chairman and CEO, controlling more than 80% of the company’s voting power, according to regulatory filings.

Webull sets up as a locally regulated broker-dealer or licensed financial services firm in each country where it operates. That means Americans’ customer information must stay within the U.S., Denier said, and can only be accessed by employees of the U.S. broker-dealer based in the country.

Webull’s research and development team is based in China, he said. According to prospectus filings, it accounts for roughly 60% of the company’s employees.

“That is not dissimilar from most fintech companies, by the way,” Denier said. “However, unlike most fintech companies, we are a regulated entity and always have been a regulated entity.”

The SEC, he said, does not see Webull as a Chinese company.

“They did not require us to put any Chinese disclosures on our prospectus,” he said.

Both the company’s F-1 and F-4 prospectus filings, however, reference the risk of government investigations into Webull’s China connections.  

“I think, over time, especially being a public company, the idea that we have Chinese investors will fade away as the cap table starts changing,” Denier said, referencing the document that shows equity ownership of a company.

And for now, the relationship with regulators seems sunny.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Trump smartphone will likely be made in China and subject to administration’s tariffs

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Analysts and supply chain experts are not sold on the Trump Organization touting its new smartphone as being “built in the United States,” saying it’s far more likely the $499 device will actually be produced in China.

The Trump Organization, the Trump family’s real estate, hospitality, and entertainment conglomerate, announced on Monday it would license its name to a wireless service called Trump Mobile and its gold-colored “T1” smartphone slated for an August release. The device will use a wireless provider dubbed Liberty Wireless and will operate on the Google Android operating system.

The Trump Organization’s announcement touted the phones as “proudly designed and built in the United States,” but analysts said it’s more likely the conglomerate is outsourcing manufacturing capabilities to an original device manufacturer (ODM) overseas, as least in the short term, as the U.S. does not have the manufacturing capabilities to build the phone.

“Despite being advertised as an American-made phone, it is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese ODM,” Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in a note published Monday.

Even if the U.S. did have smartphone production capabilities, he said, the company would have to rely on components imported from overseas.

The Trump Organization did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

Trump Organization executive vice president Eric Trump, for his part, admitted Trump Mobile would not initially be an entirely domestic endeavor.

“Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America,” Trump said on The Benny Show podcast on Monday, suggesting the device is being produced or assembled overseas before its August launch.

Manufacturing limitations

President Donald Trump has tried to jumpstart domestic manufacturing by imposing sweeping tariffs, but experts have long warned of the U.S.’s production limitations. Apple, for example, set up its supply chain in China in the 1990s, and moving it would require extensive sourcing substitutions and increased labor costs that would drive the cost of a U.S.-made iPhone to more than $3,000, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives previously said.

These barriers to expanding U.S. production are nearly universal in the industry, according to Przesmicki.

“Generally, no phones have been manufactured in the U.S. since the 2G era in over a decade,” Przesmicki told Fortune. “We have weaker supply chains, fewer capable employees in the smartphone sector, lower margins.”

Przesmicki suggested if any manufacturing of Trump-branded phones were to take place on American soil, it would be on a small scale, about 1,000 phones or fewer. Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insight, told Fortune there’s “no serious chance” the Trump Organization has arranged for U.S. production of the T1 phones, especially before the August launch.

“The idea that this could be replicated in the U.S. in any sort of short- to medium-term timescale is fanciful,” Gebbie said. “It is an absolute pipe dream.” 

Instead, according to Gebbie, the T1 phones will likely have their final assembly stage in the U.S., which would allow the company to avoid steep investments in domestic manufacturing by simply importing all components. This strategy, he said, could be closer to what the Trump Organization intended when it hailed phones “built” in the U.S.

Trump not immune to his own tariffs

The importing of phone components, the majority of which are made in China, would provide another supply chain hiccup for the Trump Organization by making it susceptible to tariffs Trump imposed for the express purpose of discouraging trade with China.

“This absolutely does raise the specter of the Trump Organization mobile falling foul of the tariffs that have been instigated by the Trump administration,” Gebbie said.

“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about screens, whether we’re talking about camera technologies, whether we’re talking about chipsets and processors and smartphones, almost all of this comes from the same manufacturing hubs in Asia,” he added.

The president last month threatened a 25% tariff on smartphones not produced in the U.S. and lambasted Apple for producing its iPhone in India—where it makes about 20% of its total output. Trump warned he would impose a 25% levy on Apple products if the company does not move manufacturing to the U.S. 

Apple announced in February it would invest $500 billion in expanding U.S. plants over the next four years.

Gebbie suggested the Trump Organization’s emphasis on building its phone in the U.S—despite domestic manufacturing being unlikely—is to send a message to big companies that U.S. smartphone assembly is possible.

“Maybe it provides leverage for the Trump administration to go out to device-makers like Apple and Samsung and say, ‘Hey, we are marking smartphones in the U.S. Why aren’t you?’” Gebbie said.



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All 50 states agree to OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s plan for Sackler family to pay up to $7 billion

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A judge on Wednesday is being asked to clear the way for local governments and individual victims to vote on it.

Government entities, emergency room doctors, insurers, families of children born into withdrawal from the powerful prescription painkiller, individual victims and their families and others would have until Sept. 30 to vote on whether to accept the deal, which calls for members of the Sackler family who own the company to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years.

If approved, the settlement would be among the largest in a wave of lawsuits over the past decade as governments and others sought to hold drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies accountable for the opioid epidemic that started rising in the years after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. The other settlements together are worth about $50 billion, and most of the money is to be used to combat the crisis.

In the early 2000s, most opioid deaths were linked to prescription drugs, including OxyContin. Since then, heroin and then illicitly produced fentanyl became the biggest killers. In some years, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 deaths, but that number dropped sharply last year.

The request of U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean Lane comes about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a previous version of Purdue’s proposed settlement. The court found it was improper that the earlier iteration would have protected members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over opioids, even though they themselves were not filing for bankruptcy protection.

Under the reworked plan hammered out with lawyers for state and local governments and others, groups that don’t opt in to the settlement would still have the right to sue members of the wealthy family whose name once adorned museum galleries around the world and programs at several prestigious U.S. universities.

Under the plan, the Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue. They resigned from the company’s board and stopped receiving distributions from its funds before the company’s initial bankruptcy filing in 2019. The remaining entity would get a new name and its profits would be dedicated to battling the epidemic.

Most of the money would go to state and local governments to address the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis, but potentially more than $850 million would go directly to individual victims. That makes it different from the other major settlements.

The payouts would not begin until after a hearing scheduled for Nov. 10, during which Lane is to be asked to approve the entire plan if enough of the affected parties agree.



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CBO digs further into ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ and now says it will raise deficit by $2.8 trillion

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The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.

The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.

“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.

Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.

The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.

Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.

But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.

“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.

At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.

“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”

Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.

The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.

The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.

Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.

While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.

The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”

The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.



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