Good morning. Andrew here. In 1913, Louis Brandeis, a future Supreme Court justice, wrote in Harper’s Weekly that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” That mantra — long a hallmark of the public stock markets — is about to be tested. The S.E.C. is said to be planning to allow public companies to disclose financial details only twice a year rather than quarterly. Today, we go deep into the debate over balancing the burden of “red tape” against the value of disclosure. We also look at some of the most significant financial frauds in history. Would they have grown even larger without the oversight of frequent public discourse? Where do you come down on the debate? Let us know your thoughts. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Quarterly quandaryThe S&P 500’s multiyear bull-market run has been one for the ages, adding trillions of dollars to investors’ portfolios. It’s also elevated earnings season into a quarterly happening, giving prominent C.E.O.s a megaphone to speak about their industry, business trends, the global economy and more. For years, though, some of those same corporate chiefs, including Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett and Larry Fink, have grumbled that quarterly disclosure requirements are onerous and costly. President Trump has long agreed; in his first term, he called on the S.E.C. to examine overhauling the process. That push is picking up steam in his second administration — and it’s rekindling a wider debate about how best to modernize financial markets while protecting investors, Brian O’Keefe and Bernhard Warner report. What’s to be gained by scrapping quarterly reports? Paul Atkins, the S.E.C. chair, told DealBook last year that such a shift would remove the “torture” and expense of filing required reports and disclosures. Atkins has also promoted other strategies to make operating a listed company more business-friendly, including limiting shareholder proposals and raising the bar for shareholder lawsuits. And, he said, the plan will “make I.P.O.s great again.” The market for new listings has been in a decades-long slump, a trend Atkins (and Wall Street) is keen to see reversed. But the timing is awkward: Wall Street is grappling with a tsunami of requests by investors to pull their money out of private credit funds, a fast-growing segment of the markets that, compared with public markets, is something of a black box. The latest: The S.E.C. is said to be preparing a proposal that would ditch the quarterly requirement and give companies the option to report only twice annually, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Semiannual reporting has become the norm in much of Europe, including in Britain (though many big companies still follow the quarterly cycle). “Much of the world doesn’t require quarterly reporting, and their markets function just fine,” Steve Sosnick, the chief strategist at Interactive Brokers and a longtime Wall Street veteran, told DealBook. Still, he added, “I just think more transparency is better.” But some major corporate scandals, including WorldCom and Enron, happened under the quarterly reporting system, notes Lawrence Cunningham, the presiding director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. The regular filings didn’t prevent companies from manipulating the numbers, or make what was going on obvious. What’s next? Sosnick predicts that the days of quarterly reporting are numbered, if only because it’s so hard to argue that fewer reports will harm investors. Cunningham sees a twist: “What I predict will happen in America is a lot of companies will just continue to report quarterly even though they don’t have to.”
The Trump administration amps up its battle with Anthropic. The government defended its decision to essentially blacklist the artificial intelligence firm from the Defense Department in a court filing yesterday, saying that Anthropic was an “unacceptable risk” to national security because it could disable or alter its technology to suit its own interests in a time of war. The filing was the government’s first response to lawsuits from Anthropic that challenged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent decision to label it a “supply chain risk.” Separately, support for Anthropic is growing: Nearly 150 retired federal and state judges have filed an amicus brief, joining Microsoft, and dozens of engineers and researchers from OpenAI and Google. Japan’s prime minister visits the White House amid a rift over the Middle East war. Sanae Takaichi warned that her meeting tomorrow with President Trump could be “extremely difficult” after the president criticized Tokyo for not agreeing to his request for the Japanese military to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz amid a spike in energy prices. Her visit will be closely watched for signs of how an escalating war could affect Trump’s ties with allies and trading partners. Arizona accuses Kalshi of operating an illegal gambling business. The state’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi, a prediction market, claiming that it was taking illegal bets on elections, among other things. The move underscores the legal challenges facing the fast-growing sector, and a growing clash with states. Amazon bets big on superfast delivery. Amazon said it had introduced one-hour delivery services in hundreds of U.S. cities and three-hour delivery in over 2,000 U.S. locations amid increasing competition from Walmart. Elsewhere, Amazon said it planned to reduce the number of packages it ships with the U.S. Postal Service by at least two-thirds by the fall, as it faces a bidding process with the service that could raise its costs. War rattles cryptoCrypto assets have been rallying since U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28, with Bitcoin up roughly 12 percent since then. But the widening war is rattling one of the sector’s emerging hubs. Last week, Token2049, the industry’s marquee annual conference, was postponed. The event, which was scheduled for next month in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, will now be held in 2027 “in light of the ongoing uncertainty in the region.” TON Gateway, another industry event scheduled to take place in Dubai this year, was canceled. The decisions underscore fears that the fighting could threaten Dubai’s rise as a crypto power, Grady McGregor reports. “The Gulf has built its entire image of stability on the back of investor trust that the region is stable,” said Jesse Marks, a former U.S. Defense Department official and the founder of a consultancy focused on China and the Middle East. “The war undermines that image.” The sector faces deeper woes. Despite the recent mini rally, crypto markets have plunged since the autumn. And the Clarity Act, key crypto market-structure legislation, has stalled in the Senate.
Token2049 has been an important marker of Dubai’s emergence in crypto. The event was expected to draw more than 15,000 attendees. Top executives from Tether, Binance, Polymarket and BlackRock were set to speak. Eric Trump, the president’s son, was also slated to appear. Last month, The Times and others reported that a firm linked to the Emirates had bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, for $500 million — a revelation that prompted Senate Democrats to seek an investigation into the possible national security implications of the deal. Will crypto companies bolt? Emirati officials said they were intercepting projectiles overnight over Dubai. Amid the continued barrages, Laurens Fraussen, a research analyst at the crypto data provider Kaiko, said he expected some crypto firms to at least temporarily relocate to other industry hubs, like Singapore. But if tensions ease, Fraussen and others say the friendly Emirati regulatory environment — the government has one of the world’s only regulators dedicated to digital assets — will remain a draw. “Things will need to get much worse and drag on for much longer for firms to actually consider moving operations out,” said Henri Arslanian, a founder of Nine Blocks Capital Management, a crypto hedge fund.
Goldman’s M.&A. chief on the state of deal-makingA war in Iran. Whipsawing oil prices. Growing dread about private credit. Pessimism about interest rate cuts. Together, these create economic uncertainty, a traditional hurdle for deal-making. But for many deal makers headed to Tulane University’s Corporate Law Institute, a major conference for the M.&A. industry that begins tomorrow, that’s not the case. Stephan Feldgoise, the global head of M.&A. at Goldman Sachs and a speaker at the conference, shared with Michael de la Merced how he sees the deal landscape. The stats: Roughly 8,586 transactions worth $928 billion were announced worldwide in 2026 through yesterday, according to data from LSEG. That was up 41 percent year over year by dollar volume and the best start for the M.&A. industry since 2021. But that was down 22 percent by number of transactions, reflecting how blockbuster takeovers — such as Paramount’s $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery — are where the action is. Companies have adapted to “the new normal”: That is, some degree of instability, Feldgoise said. It’s a lesson they learned after the coronavirus pandemic and “Liberation Day” tariffs last year. While the levies led to a slowing of M.&A. activity in the first half of 2025, deal-making roared back in the second half of the year. The same dynamic is at play now: “You may see things slow down for a bit,” Feldgoise said, adding, “We’re not putting things on stop until we get more clarity.” Here’s what else is happening in M.&A., according to Feldgoise:
Feldgoise isn’t the only one feeling positive. More than half of nearly 100 M.&A. practitioners surveyed by Gladstone Place Partners, the financial communications firm, expect deal-making to increase modestly this year. (Roughly 20 percent think activity will rise “sharply.”) We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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