US officials are preparing to announce one of the largest cuts to bank capital requirements in over a decade.

This is seen as the latest sign of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.

According to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the Financial Times (FT), regulators are preparing to lower the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR) in the next few months.

The rule requires large banks to hold a predetermined amount of high-quality capital against their total leverage.

This leverage includes assets such as loans and off-balance sheet risks like derivatives.

The rule was introduced in 2014 as part of comprehensive reforms following the 2008-09 financial crisis. Bank lobbyists have campaigned against this rule for years, arguing that it penalizes credit institutions holding even low-risk assets like US Treasury bonds, makes trading in the $29 trillion government debt market difficult, and weakens their lending capabilities.

Greg Baer, CEO of the Banking Policy Institute lobby group, said, “Penalizing banks for holding low-risk assets like Treasury bonds weakens their ability to support market liquidity during stressful times when it is most needed. Regulators should act now instead of waiting for the next event.”

Lobbyists expect regulators to present reform proposals by the summer.

The easing of capital rules comes at a time when the Trump administration is cutting back regulations in everything from environmental policies to financial disclosure requirements.

However, critics say that given recent market fluctuations and policy changes under President Donald Trump’s administration, reducing bank capital requirements is a worrying development.

Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argued, “Considering the current state of the world, there are all sorts of risks for US banks, including the role of the dollar and the direction of the economy. It does not seem like the right time to loosen capital standards.”

Analysts say that rolling back the SLR would be a boon for the Treasury market and could help Trump achieve his goal of lowering borrowing costs by allowing banks to purchase more government bonds.

This could also encourage banks to take on a larger role in Treasury bond trading, after the sector lost ground to large traders and hedge funds due to rules introduced after the financial crisis.

Leading US policymakers have voiced their support for easing the SLR rule. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that such a reform is a “high priority” for the main banking regulators: the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Fed Chair Jay Powell said in February: “We need to work on the structure of the Treasury market, and the answer to part of this problem may be, and I think will be, reducing the calibration of the supplementary leverage ratio.”

Currently, the eight largest US banks are required to hold so-called Tier 1 capital (common equity, retained earnings, and other items that are first to absorb losses) equivalent to at least 5% of their total leverage.

The largest banks in Europe, China, Canada, and Japan are held to a lower standard, with most requiring capital of only 3.5% to 4.25% of their total assets.

Bank lobbyists hope that the US will align its leverage ratio requirements with international standards. Another option being considered by regulators is to exclude low-risk assets, such as Treasury bonds and central bank deposits, from the leverage ratio calculation, as was temporarily implemented for a year during the pandemic.

Analysts at Autonomous estimate that reintroducing this exemption would provide an approximately $2 trillion increase in balance sheet capacity for large US lenders.

However, this would make the US an international exception, and regulators in Europe are concerned that credit institutions might demand similar capital relief for their positions in Eurozone government debt and UK government bonds.

Most large US banks are more constrained by other rules, such as the Fed’s stress tests and risk-weighted capital requirements, which could limit how much they benefit from SLR reform.

US President Donald Trump’s trade wars could be forced to end this month, even without dozens of trading partners having to make concessions.

The decision rests with the US Court of International Trade (CIT), a little-known, New York-based federal court that adjudicates cases related to trade and customs law.

The court will hear oral arguments in a case questioning Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) last month to impose sweeping new tariffs, and his subsequent 90-day suspension of the highest levies applied to approximately 60 trading partners.

If the court grants the plaintiffs’ request for an emergency preliminary injunction, the trade negotiations that the Trump administration is currently rushing to complete with dozens of countries could be upended.

Opponents of the tariffs, according to a report in POLITICO, argue that Trump has violated the Constitution and hope the US Court of International Trade will grant a preliminary injunction by the end of the month.

Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative constitutional rights group representing VOS Selections (a New York-based wine and spirits company) and other small businesses suing over Trump’s tariffs, stated that many businesses will not survive if the tariffs are not lifted, as the case could potentially reach the Supreme Court.

An injunction would also jeopardize Trump’s efforts to use the threat of country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs to negotiate new trade deals with dozens of nations.

Trump announced the first of these deals with the United Kingdom on Thursday, though many details remain unclear. The White House has also been negotiating an agreement with China to reduce tariffs and establish a bilateral mechanism to resolve long-standing trade disputes.

To justify previous tariffs on China and the largely suspended 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Trump had declared a national emergency due to immigrants and fentanyl crossing the border. However, the VOS case challenges the reciprocal tariffs Trump announced on April 2.

The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group representing manufacturers who support import protection, praised Trump’s decision to use emergency law to implement his trade agenda as a “bold and long-overdue reset of the global trading system.”

But figures like former Republican Senator John Danforth argue that Trump is using a “flimsy pretext” to usurp the taxing and trade powers vested in Congress by the founders.

“This is the biggest issue our country has faced since its founding. This is about the concentration of power in one hand and James Madison’s idea of spreading power across various branches of government,” Danforth said in an interview.

Danforth, along with a group including former Republican senators George Allen and Chuck Hagel, and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, submitted an amicus brief criticizing Trump’s decision and urging the CIT to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the administration from collecting tariffs while the cases are pending.

The brief states, “Since the founding of the Republic, the power to tax – like the power to raise revenue – has belonged exclusively to Congress. This is not a formality. This country was born out of the slogan ‘No taxation without representation,’ meaning that the power to tax, raise revenue, and determine the economic obligations of the people must belong to the elected representatives of the people.”

Danforth argued that the argument in their brief goes to the very heart of the matter. “This isn’t about the appropriateness of tariffs or some legal issues. It’s a constitutional issue. The question is, ‘Can the President seize the power to tax from [Congress]?’ but I would also add to that the power to control foreign trade,” the former senator said.

Schwab, lead counsel for the VOS case in the CIT on Tuesday, said they presented a series of arguments they believe the court will find persuasive.

“[Fundamentally,] we do not believe that the IEEPA grants the president the authority to impose tariffs or implement customs duties,” Schwab stated.

The plaintiffs also contest Trump’s assertion that a “large and persistent annual merchandise trade deficit” justifies imposing tariffs as a national emergency, given that the US has had a trade deficit for 50 years. Schwab said this gave Congress ample time to act if its members deemed it necessary.

The plaintiffs also advance several more technical legal arguments. One is the “major questions doctrine,” which requires an explicit delegation of authority from Congress when the executive branch takes actions exceeding an undefined threshold of “economic and political significance.” The plaintiffs argue that Trump’s tariffs clearly surpass this threshold.

Another somewhat related argument is the “nondelegation doctrine,” which states that Congress cannot delegate its legislative powers to the executive branch without providing an intelligible principle to guide the executive’s discretion.

Schwab stated, “Here, what the Trump administration is essentially saying is that they have the authority to impose tariffs without any oversight, and they can do it whenever they want, at whatever rate they want. If the court interprets [the IEEPA] this way, we believe it will find it unconstitutional.”

Statements made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding future virtual relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) companions and AI therapists are currently a hot topic.

First, his comments on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast drew attention. Zuckerberg was discussing the future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends.

According to Meta’s founder, while Americans, on average, have only three friends, they “wanted fifteen friends.” He then argued that although emotional bonds with AI bots are not currently socially accepted, society would eventually “find the words” to understand that people using AI to fill the loneliness and void in their lives are “rational.”

Zuckerberg continued to touch upon this subject. The Meta CEO’s less-noticed remarks, made a few days prior on Ben Thompson’s “Stratechery” podcast, further elaborate on his vision of how AI companionship might function.

Many interpreted Zuckerberg’s words to mean that you would have AI friends instead of real friends, and in fact, that’s more or less what he meant:

“There’s an interesting sociological finding: the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average American wants to have more than three friends. So, ideally, you want to enable people to connect with the right people, and that’s something we try to help people with. When they’re not physically together, they can stay connected through our apps, keep in touch with people, meet new people. But going forward, I think there’s going to be a dynamic where you’re interacting with different people on different topics.”

However, there’s something more significant (and ominous) that the tech billionaire implied between the lines: the fact that Meta has an AI strategy built on knowing much more about your friends and family.

In his interview with Thompson, Zuckerberg stated:

“I think one of the things that I’m most focused on is how AI can help you be a better friend to your friends. There are so many things that I don’t remember about people I care about, that I could be more thoughtful. There are issues like, I’m a ‘plan at the last minute’ kind of person, and then issues arise like, ‘I don’t know who’s around, and I don’t want to bother people.’ An AI that has good context on what’s going on with the people you care about can help you with that.

Good personalized AI isn’t just about having some basic information about your interests; a good assistant or good personalization is about having a theory of mind about how you think about things. So, this is what we do with all of our friends. It’s not just like, ‘Okay, this is my friend Bob, and he likes this thing.’ You deeply understand what’s going on in that person’s life, what your friends are going through, what their challenges are, and what the interplay is between these different things.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg points out how interaction provided on Facebook has changed with tools like Instagram. “It used to be that you would interact with the people you were connected to in the feed,” explains the Meta CEO, “for example, someone would share something, and you would comment, and that’s how your interaction would happen.”

So, what’s the situation now? Zuckerberg explains clearly:

“Today, we see Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and I guess now the Meta AI app, and many other things we do, as discovery engines. Most of the interaction doesn’t happen in the feed. The app works like a discovery engine algorithm to show you interesting things, and then the real social interaction happens when you find something interesting and add it to a group chat with your friends or a one-on-one chat. So, there’s a flywheel effect between messaging, where the real, deep, and nuanced social interaction happens, and the feed apps, which are increasingly just becoming discovery engines.”

The Meta CEO doesn’t hide that they are designing this as a “business model.” This model perhaps represents the pinnacle of subjecting both the worker and society as a whole to the “logic of capital”:

“[We] want to use AI to basically enable any business that wants to achieve a certain business outcome to come to us and get service without needing to produce any content or have any information about their customers. They should just be able to say, ‘This is the business outcome I want, this is the fee I’m willing to pay, I’ll connect you to my bank account, I’ll pay you for the business results you achieve’… I think this is a redefinition of the advertising category. If you think about what percentage of GDP advertising is today, I would expect that percentage to increase.”

This is a rather critical statement. Zuckerberg is essentially saying: Businesses will not have to produce any content or know anything about their customers. Meta, or rather Meta’s AI bot, will take over the connection between businesses and customers and most decisions related to branding. It will have more data, a larger scale, more connections, and the world’s largest black box. In the future, marketing and advertising for all companies will mean delegating commerce to an automated infrastructure controlled by a single person (or bot).

What better “social engineering” could there be?

This “business model” also points to a future that will eliminate the “public-private distinction,” one of the hallmarks of bourgeois civilization. Zuckerberg mentioned back in 2010 that he wasn’t hiding his vision of such a “humanity”:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end very quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity… It’s a big challenge to get people to a point where they can be more open. But I think we’ll get there.”

Let me remind you that Zuckerberg has taken quite a few steps in this regard. For example, in 2007, he launched Beacon, which automatically added your Facebook purchases to your feed. This application exposed users’ HIV statuses and which engagement rings they bought.

Moreover, recently, the Wall Street Journal published a story: Meta’s chatbots were talking about fantasy sex with children.

Meta allows “synthetic personalities” to offer full-scale social interaction, including bantering via text, sharing selfies, and even engaging in live voice chats with users.

What is happening once again confirms one of Marx’s analyses regarding the behavior of capital. In Capital, Marx distinguishes between “formal” and “real” forms of subsumption. Initially, capital absorbs the existing labor process—that is, the techniques, markets, means of production, and workers—into itself. Marx calls this “formal” subsumption.

In this process, the entire labor process continues as before, but the capitalist, who monopolizes the means of production and thus the workers’ means of subsistence, forces the worker to submit to wage labor and can accumulate capital using existing markets.

However, capitalism cannot develop on the limited foundations of existing productive forces. The preconditions for the actual capitalist labor process can only be created by capital itself. Thus, capital gradually transforms social relations and forms of labor until they are completely intertwined with the nature and requirements of capital, and the labor process becomes truly, really subsumed under capital.

Therefore, for capital to accumulate, to ensure that property owners do not become propertyless, it must develop models and labor processes that subject not only wage labor but all of society to itself.

Your relationships with friends, what you experience with your family, even information about your mental health, must therefore be laid out before capital:

“Personally, I believe everyone should have a therapist. A therapist is like someone they can talk to throughout the day, or if not throughout the day, about whatever they are worried about. For people who don’t have a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI assistant.”