Finance

IT IS the sort of tale Agatha Christie might have spun. The setting is Camden, a picture-postcard coastal town in Maine filled with antique shops and cafés selling lobster rolls. Amelia Bond, an out-of-towner, is tip-toeing through the flower beds, her pockets stuffed with poison. She is making her way to a neighbouring property owned by Lisa Gorman, heiress to L.L. Bean, an outdoorsy retailer. Ms Bond stops at the property line: her target is not Ms Gorman herself, but a clutch of 70-foot oak trees that rise up between her windows and the sweeping vista of Camden bay; her poison not arsenic or cyanide, but tebuthiuron, a herbicide used mostly along motorways and near airports for long-term “control” of “woody plants”. Months later, when the oak’s foliage has withered, Ms Bond remarks to Ms Gorman that her trees do not “look good” and offers to split the cost of removal. Ms Gorman, smelling a rat, declines and has the tree tissue sent for testing. Next come lawyers, glossy magazine exposés and public spectacle. More

A good cover letter marries an applicant’s CV to the demands of the job. It helps employers identify promising candidates, particularly those with an employment history that is orthogonal to their career ambitions. And it serves as a form of signalling, demonstrating that the applicant cares enough about the position to go through a laborious process, rather than simply scrawling their desired salary at the top of a résumé and mass-mailing it to every business in the area. More

Boston Fed President Susan Collins said she will be reluctant to support further rate cuts anytime soon with inflation still high and policymakers hampered by a lack of data.
“I see several reasons to have a relatively high bar for additional easing in the near term,” said Collins, a voter this year on the Federal Open Market Committee.

Susan Collins, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Moran, Wyoming, US, on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Boston Federal Reserve President Susan Collins on Wednesday said she will be reluctant to support further interest rate cuts anytime soon with inflation still high and policymakers hampered by a lack of data due to the government shutdown.
“Given my baseline outlook, it will likely be appropriate to keep policy rates at the current level for some time to balance the inflation and employment risks in this highly uncertain environment,” the central bank official said in remarks delivered in her home district. “I see several reasons to have a relatively high bar for additional easing in the near term.”

Collins’s comments are notable because she is a voting member of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. Her remarks put her on the hawkish side of the rate debate, highlighting a fissure among committee members that led Chair Jerome Powell to say in October that a cut at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion, despite market pricing of a high probability.
Collins supported the quarter percentage point rate cut at the October meeting but indicated that further easing could thwart the Fed’s efforts to get inflation lower.
While Collins said softness in the labor market “bears watching,” she added that the risks of inflation staying above the Fed’s 2% target warrant caution.
“Against this backdrop, providing additional monetary support to economic activity runs the risk of slowing – or possibly even stalling – the return of inflation to target,” she said. “And with resilient demand, the downside risks to employment, while present, do not seem to have increased further since the summer.”
Collins also noted the role that the government shutdown is playing in her decision making. The impasse appears to be over, but White House press secretary said Wednesday that key reports on inflation and employment may not be available at all for October.

“Absent evidence of a notable labor market deterioration, I would be hesitant to ease policy further, especially given the limited information on inflation due to the government shutdown,” Collins said.
The FOMC in October voted 10-2 for the cut. Governor Stephen Miran voted no because he wanted a bigger reduction, while Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid opposed because he favored no cut. More

Like many people, your columnist spends a lot of time looking forward to the Saturday following his payday. How could he not? It is the most exciting one of the whole month: time to update the household accounts. Separate spreadsheets monitor cash accounts, pension pots, portfolio allocations and expected returns. An especially thrilling sheet keeps tabs on a mortgage and all the puzzles it raises, such as when to overpay or refinance. Each monthly update takes an hour or so. But you can have fun with the graphs for far longer. More

Kim Kardashian’s Skims is now valued at $5 billion after a new funding round.
The brand plans to use the money to fund an expansion of physical stores.
The cash infusion could also delay an expected IPO from the brand.

Skims underwear is displayed on a shelf at a Nordstrom store on March 25, 2025 in Corte Madera, California. 
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Kim Kardashian’s Skims brand has raised $225 million in new funding led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, valuing the shapewear and apparel company at $5 billion — up from roughly $4 billion after its 2023 round.
The deal comes as Skims nears $1 billion in annual net sales, six years after its 2019 launch, and marks one of the largest private raises for a U.S. consumer brand this year. BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated funds also joined the round, Skims said Wednesday.

Skims plans to use the new capital to accelerate brick-and-mortar and international expansion, as well as product innovation and category diversification. The company has 18 stores across the U.S. in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta and one in Mexico, with plans to open additional stores overseas in 2026.
Skims said it’s laying the groundwork to become a “predominantly physical business” in the coming years, a pivot for a company that built its reputation as a digital-first direct-to-consumer brand.
“This milestone reflects continued confidence in our long-term vision and coupled with disciplined execution, positions Skims to unlock its next phase of growth,” CEO and co-founder Jens Grede said in a statement.
The new funding follows the debut of NikeSkims, a partnership with Nike that launched earlier this year and sold out within hours. The collaboration signals Skims’ ambitions to scale beyond its core shapewear products and into activewear, apparel and performance categories, pushing the brand further into the mainstream athleticwear market dominated by Lululemon, a handful of upstarts and Nike itself.
The new capital infusion could further delay an IPO from Skims. The company has been eyeing a public debut since at least 2024, based on statements by Grede.

The consumer IPO market has been largely stagnant in 2024 and 2025, with few fashion or beauty brands debuting as investors turn cautious on discretionary retail. By raising new private funding, Skims can continue to scale without immediate pressure to list.
“Skims stands as a solutions-driven apparel innovator, pioneering new categories and redefining everyday wear,” said Beat Cabiallavetta, global head of hybrid capital at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. “We look forward to partnering with management to pursue significant opportunities and deliver disruptive, sustained growth.”
Since its launch, Skims has built a cult following with its inclusive sizing, minimalist aesthetic and high-profile campaigns featuring global athletes and celebrities. Kardashian, who serves as chief creative officer, said the new funding marks “an exciting new chapter” for the company.
“We can’t wait to take Skims to the next level as we continue to innovate and set the standard for our industry,” Kardashian said. More

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The Senate Agriculture Committee released Monday a draft of its part of a digital assets market structure bill that could guide the future of the crypto industry in the U.S.
Their draft includes a provision that would give favorable regulatory status to tokens such as bitcoin and ether.
The text also calls for the CFTC to have more control over regulating the crypto industry.
Clear guidelines on regulating decentralized finance are largely absent from lawmakers’ draft.

The U.S. Capitol is shown the morning after the Senate passed legislation to reopen the federal government on Nov. 11, 2025 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images

The Senate Agriculture Committee has released a draft of its portion of a much-awaited digital assets market structure bill — a critical step toward accelerating institutional and retail adoption of cryptocurrencies. 
Unveiled on Monday by Agriculture Chair John Boozman, R-Ark., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the bipartisan discussion draft lays the groundwork for creating guardrails for the crypto industry in the U.S. It also establishes guidelines for institutions that want to work with digital assets, from bitcoin and ether to tokenized financial instruments.

“This is the most consequential roadmap for how an institution is going to integrate digital assets into their business,” Cody Carbone, CEO of crypto trade association Digital Chamber, told CNBC. “It’s like the best possible step-by-step of what type of compliance rules requirements they would need to follow to work with crypto.”Here are five key takeaways from the discussion draft.

1. Grants favorable regulatory status to some cryptocurrencies

The text classifies some of the largest digital assets by market capitalization such as bitcoin and ether as “digital commodities,” placing them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s purview.  
This provision removes a major blocker to digital asset adoption for institutional fiduciaries, Juan Leon, an analyst at crypto-focused asset manager Bitwise, told CNBC.
“Compliance and risk departments will finally have a federal statute to point to,” Leon said. “This shifts the internal conversation … [and] it provides the legal certainty required to move assets into a formal, strategic allocation.”
It will also create “a starkly bifurcated market” consisting of regulated and unregulated tokens, with the former class of assets seeing “a massive influx of institutional capital, deep liquidity and a robust derivatives ecosystem.”

2. Requires crypto firms to segregate funds and manage conflicts of interest

The draft calls for crypto companies to “establish governance, personnel, and financial resource separation among affiliated entities that perform distinct regulated functions.”
Bitwise’s Leon interprets the provision as a challenge to the “all-in-one” business model that is common among crypto exchanges. According to those models, an exchange, broker, custodian, and proprietary trading desk are all wrapped up into one entity. 
In other words, digital asset firms could be required to keep their various businesses separated like traditional financial companies, according to Leon. The change would serve as “a foundational pillar for institutional adoption.”

3. Gives the CFTC more power to regulate digital assets 

The text gives more power to the CFTC, empowering it to work in tandem with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue joint rulemaking on crypto-related matters.
“There’s a lot more power or authority delegated to the CFTC to have jurisdiction over this industry,” Carbone said. 
The shift comes after the SEC for years served as the main regulator of digital assets, after it edged out the CFTC to gain authority over the industry. 

4. Allows the CFTC to collect fees

The draft calls for regulated entities to pay fees to the CFTC. Those fees would go toward registering digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, in addition to conducting oversight of regulated entities and carrying out education and outreach. 

5. Establishes listing standards for tokens

The text calls for crypto exchanges to only permit trading of digital commodities that are “not readily susceptible to manipulation.”
It’s a provision that could reduce the number of “rug pulls” and other scams that are still common in some parts of the crypto industry, with the goal of establishing standards and building confidence in the market.

What’s next?

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s discussion draft is far from final, but it does offer critical insights into the direction of efforts to pass crypto-friendly regulations in the U.S., according to Carbone.
“It’s not final, it’s not done, but this gives a good sense of where Congress is going and what the final rules may be,” Carbone said. 
The committee will likely spend the next few weeks getting feedback on their draft, meaning it may be “almost impossible to get [a final version of this part of the bill] done by the end of the year,” he added.
However, that period will give lawmakers time to offer more concrete guidance on several issues that are bracketed – or not yet finalized – in the discussion draft. Those include provisions on anti-money laundering rules and regulations specific to decentralized finance players.
Several crypto players plan to work in tandem with lawmakers to help iron out those details, among others. 
“We’ve long said crypto is a bipartisan issue, and this draft from Chairman Boozman and Senator Booker reflects that,” Moonpay President Keith Grossman told CNBC. “It’s critical that legislation distinguishes between centralized intermediaries and decentralized systems, and we look forward to working with the Committee to get it right.”
The discussion draft is only one piece of larger legislative efforts to overhaul regulations for the crypto industry, according to Carbone. Ultimately, the text will be combined with the Senate Banking Committee’s draft on the digital assets market structure in a bid to create one comprehensive bill.
And although lawmakers are nowhere near the finish line in that process, crypto firms are finding other ways to work with regulators and other authorities to meaningfully advance their industry, Grayscale Investments Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm told CNBC.
“In the absence of comprehensive legislation, we’ve still seen meaningful progress on the regulatory front,” Salm said, adding that the SEC, Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department have recently provided guidance around staking in crypto exchange-traded products. “That said, thoughtful legislation will be critical to solidifying the foundation of the digital asset industry in the U.S. and unlocking even greater value for investors and consumers.” More

Generation Z has already made its mark on investing—consider crypto, FOMO, meme stocks and gamified investing. But, in a less flashy way, it is grandparents who are truly shaking things up. America’s surging stockmarket has been driven, most of all, by old investors. More

Michael Burry attends the New York premiere of “The Big Short” at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on Nov. 23, 2015.
Jim Spellman | WireImage | Getty Images

Michael Burry, the investor made famous by “The Big Short” who recently roiled the market with a tech short bet, is accusing some of America’s largest technology companies of using aggressive accounting to pad their profits from the artificial intelligence boom.
In a post Monday on X, the Scion Asset Management founder alleged that “hyperscalers” — the major cloud and AI infrastructure providers — are understating depreciation expenses by estimating that chips will have a longer life cycle than is realistic.

“Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings – one of the more common frauds of the modern era,” Burry wrote. “Massively ramping capex through purchase of Nvidia chips/servers on a 2-3 yr product cycle should not result in the extension of useful lives of compute equipment. Yet this is exactly what all the hyperscalers have done.”
Burry estimated that from 2026 through 2028, the accounting maneuver would understate depreciation by about $176 billion, inflating reported earnings across the industry. He singled out Oracle and Meta Platforms, saying their profits could be overstated by roughly 27% and 21%, respectively, by 2028.
CNBC has reached out to Oracle and Meta for comments. Nvidia declined to comment. Burry’s accusation is a serious one, but could be hard to prove because of the leeway companies are given in estimating depreciation. CNBC was not independently able to confirm this practice was being done by the companies.
When paying for a large asset upfront — like semiconductors, servers, etc — a company is then allowed under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, to spread out the cost of that asset as a yearly expense that is based on the company’s estimate of how rapidly that asset depreciates in value. If companies estimate a longer life cycle for the asset, they can then lower the yearly depreciation expense that hits the bottom line.
Burry, who famously bet against subprime mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis, has warned this year that AI enthusiasm resembles the late-1990s tech bubble.

Burry last week revealed seemingly fresh wagers against AI favorites Nvidia and Palantir Technologies. He disclosed put options with a notional value of about $187 million against Nvidia and $912 million against Palantir as of Sept. 30, according to a regulatory filing. The filing didn’t specify the strike prices or expiration dates of the contracts.
The disclosure prompted a sharp reaction from Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who called Burry’s wagers “super weird” and “bats— crazy.” It’s not clear whether he still holds those positions or whether they were just a hedge.
Shares of Nvidia rebounded nearly 6% on Monday after dropping 7% last week. Palantir saw its shares pop almost 9% on Monday following a 11% sell-off last week. Nvidia was lower again on Tuesday.
Burry said in his X post that “more detail” was coming on Nov. 25 and that readers should “stay tuned.” More