Billionaire investor Warren Buffett hinted in March that Berkshire Hathaway had made a small addition to its portfolio. A new regulatory filing may have just revealed what he was referring to.

When asked in March whether Berkshire was still putting money to work, Buffett said the conglomerate had made “one tiny purchase” but was still struggling to find attractive opportunities.

“Got one tiny purchase, but we aren’t finding things that — we weren’t finding them before,” Buffett said at the time in an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick.

A regulatory filing released Friday showed Berkshire initiated a roughly $55 million position in Macy’s during the first quarter — a sliver of a portfolio valued at more than $300 billion and a size that would fit Buffett’s description of a “tiny” investment.

By contrast, Berkshire’s other newly disclosed position during the quarter was far larger: a roughly $2.6 billion stake in Delta Air Lines, making it an unlikely candidate for the modest purchase Buffett referenced in March.

Still, investors may not have the full picture. Berkshire’s quarterly equity filings only capture U.S.-listed positions that meet reporting requirements, leaving open the possibility that Buffett was referring to an international investment or another holding not reflected in Friday’s disclosure.

Buffett, who stepped down as Berkshire’s chief executive at the start of 2026 and handed the role to Greg Abel, said earlier this year that he remains deeply involved in overseeing investments and market activity.

The 95-year-old said he still comes into the office daily and works alongside colleagues on trading decisions. Buffett described regularly speaking with Berkshire’s director of financial assets, Mark Millard, before the opening bell to discuss market developments.

Millard, whose office Buffett said sits about 20 feet away from his own, executes trades based on those conversations, underscoring Buffett’s continued role in portfolio management despite the leadership transition.

“I won’t make any [investments] that Greg thinks are wrong. … Greg gets the sheet every day,” Buffett said.

In the first quarter, Berkshire also sold a slew of stocks including Mastercard and Visa in an effort to unwind positions tied to Todd Combs, the longtime investment manager and Geico chief who left for JPMorgan at the end of 2025. Ted Weschler, the other investment manager, continues to oversee about 6% of the holdings.

Berkshire Hathaway added a sizeable stake in Delta Air Lines, marking the conglomerate’s return to the airline industry after exiting the sector entirely during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

The Omaha-based company built a position worth more than $2.6 billion, making Delta Berkshire’s 14th-largest holding at the end of March, according to a new regulatory filing.

Warren Buffett stunned investors six years ago when he sold Berkshire’s entire equity portfolio of U.S. airlines, including stakes worth more than $4 billion across United, American, Southwest and Delta Air Lines. Buffett said at the time that the pandemic had fundamentally altered consumer behavior and travel patterns.

Among Berkshire’s largest holdings, the firm trimmed its stake in Chevron during the quarter while significantly increasing its relatively new position in Alphabet. The Google parent is now Berkshire’s seventh-largest holding.

Berkshire also initiated a small position in Macy’s, valued at roughly $55 million at the end of the first quarter.

Unwinding Todd Combs positions

Meanwhile, the conglomerate sold a slew of stocks last quarter, likely as part of an effort to unwind positions tied to departed lieutenant Todd Combs.

The longtime investment manager and Geico chief left for JPMorgan at the end of 2025. Combs had been one of two portfolio managers recruited by Buffett to help oversee Berkshire’s equity portfolio. Ted Weschler, the other investment manager, continues to oversee about 6% of the holdings.

Among the most notable sales were Mastercard and Visa, the first stocks Combs purchased after joining Berkshire and positions that mirrored major holdings from his former hedge fund, Castle Point Capital.

The conglomerate also fully exited Amazon after trimming the position late last year. The investment had long been viewed by some investors as a Combs-driven bet.

Other stocks Berkshire sold included UnitedHealth Group, Aon, Pool Corporation, Domino’s Pizza and Charter Communications.

Not ideal environment

Buffett, who stepped down as CEO after more than six decades at the helm, remains chairman of the Omaha, Nebraska-based company and continues to come into the office five days a week.

New CEO Greg Abel has said he consults Buffett, 95, on investments and capital allocation, including the recent resumption of buybacks in the first quarter.

Buffett recently acknowledged displeasure with the investing backdrop as Berkshire’s cash hoard swells to a record nearing $400 billion.

“It isn’t our ideal surrounding area — or environment, I should say — in terms of deploying cash for Berkshire,” the former CEO said.

Coinbase received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, to operate as a trust bank, the company said Thursday.

If finalized, the crypto exchange will be able to operate payment products in addition to its custody business under federal supervision, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, told CNBC.

“Over the long haul we will be able to explore, with the OCC, offering not just custody products but also other infrastructure products, particularly around payments, that we think will expand and extend crypto payments in all sorts of new and interesting and important directions,” Grewal said.

The company made clear it will not become a commercial bank, take retail deposits or engage in fractional reserve banking — the practice employed by big banks of keeping just a fraction of customers’ deposits in reserve while lending out the rest. Still, a trust charter would give it the legal authority, access to banking infrastructure and regulatory credibility to move, hold and settle money more efficiently — and perhaps set it up to compete more with PayPal or Square.

The approval is a preliminary agreement that Coinbase’s application meets key regulatory requirements, subject to fulfilling certain conditions before it can actually operate as a trust bank.

Coinbase would be regulated directly by the OCC, one of the three main federal banking regulators, rather than be subject to state-based regulation, which is a major pain point for companies in fast-moving industries like crypto.

Up until this point, that’s been “the only way to go about this,” Grewal said, nodding to President Donald Trump’s promise to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world” in his second term. The Biden administration before it famously maintained an anti-crypto stance that the industry believes hampered its growth and leadership on the global stage.

State-by-state regulation creates a headache for many fast-paced startups playing in the heavily regulated financial services space. Instead of a single rulebook, companies face 50 slightly different ones that can not only slow growth but also increase costs.

“We wouldn’t be pursuing this if we didn’t think there were important opportunities in crypto infrastructure, including payments, that lie ahead,” Grewal said. “The OCC’s conditional approval is an important recognition by the agency that they want to see those products and services, particularly around payments and custody, developed here in the U.S., first and foremost.”

Coinbase has established a payments strategy centered on making stablecoins — particularly Circle-issued USDC — a mainstream global payment method. Last year, it launched Coinbase Payments, a product for platforms and merchants that includes wallet integrations and stablecoin checkout. It also launched a payments protocol with Shopify built on its in-house blockchain, Base. Separately, it partnered with Shopify and Stripe to allow their merchant partners to accept the USDC stablecoin.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also said the company has a “stretch goal” to make USDC the No. 1 stablecoin in the world, a position currently held by Tether’s USDT, and that he aims to make Coinbase “the No. 1 financial services app in the world” in the next few years. Armstrong has also become one of the most consequential private-sector voices on Capitol Hill when it comes to crypto policy, particularly in recent negotiations around the Clarity Act, crypto market structure legislation.

Visa is launching six new tools using artificial intelligence to modernize the process of disputing credit card charges, the company told CNBC exclusively.

The digital payments company said the tools are designed to reduce the costs and frustration of “outdated” dispute processes for multiple entities involved in the payments process: merchants, issuers and acquirers.

“Some of the challenges are these back-office systems are still largely manual,” Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services, told CNBC. “We really had to think differently about how we approach this at scale.”

In 2025, Torre said, Visa processed more than 106 million charge disputes globally, marking a 35% increase since 2019.

“Our goal is to streamline this as much as possible,” Torre said. “We’d love to be able to see that growth rate come down.”

Visa’s new tools are part of a larger push by major banks and financial institutions to incorporate AI into their businesses — both internally and in consumer-facing applications. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have both said they’re already using AI to hire fewer people. BNY spent $3.8 billion on technology in 2025, or about 19% of its revenue.

Visa said three of its six new tools focus on merchants, allowing them to address potential disputes before they escalate, managing disputes with generative AI responses and providing a deeper level of detail on order insights to manage confusion over unfamiliar charges.

For example, Torre said, many disputes are borne out of cardholders not recognizing a specific charge on their statements. With the new tool, Visa will be able to provide further details to financial institutions to show cardholders that data at a deeper level, according to the company.

The other three tools are built for issuers and acquirers, using predictive AI models to aid in case-by-case analysis, analyzing documents for summaries and auto fill and establishing an AI-powered dispute platform to manage the entire process in one location, Visa said.

“We’ll be able to get them insights and data so they can move from being reactive to proactive,” Torre said.

Torre said Visa’s new AI tools are part of a broader host of solutions for consumers, including a subscription manager announced last week that allows cardholders to cancel unnecessary subscriptions directly on the manager.

The automation will save time, money and unnecessary confusion for both parties, he added. Most of the tools will be generally available later this year, the company said.

“We really believe that disputes in this solution makes it much easier to manage and resolve,” Torre said. “We think it has better outcomes for everyone.”

BEIJING — As corporate giants navigate U.S.-China tensions, more than 80 global executives, from Apple to Eli Lilly, traveled to Beijing this weekend for the annual state-organized China Development Forum.

The executives’ remarks reflected renewed interest in capturing the Chinese consumer, after years of uncertainty from the Covid-19 pandemic, slower growth and U.S. trade tensions.

Fresh off a recovery in Apple iPhone sales in China, the company’s CEO Tim Cook took the stage after Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Sunday, praising the “extraordinary” pace of technological progress in the country, such as factory automation.

He said: “We are proud to be part of that progress, and we’re committed to working alongside our supplier partners to push it even further.” He added that more than 90% of Apple’s production in China is powered by clean energy.

Apple still manufactures most of its iPhones in China, which accounted for nearly 18% of Apple’s revenue in the December quarter. Thanks to the iPhone 17 release, Apple smartphone sales in the first nine weeks of the year were up 23% year-on-year, bucking a 4% decline in China’s overall smartphone market, according to Counterpoint Research.

On his way to Beijing, Cook also visited Chengdu, China, as Apple has been pressured to cut its China App Store fees.

According to an official delegate list seen by CNBC, attendees included more than 30 executives of U.S. companies, including McDonald’s, Coach parent Tapestry, and Mastercard, along with representatives of British, South Korean and German corporations.

Their trips to Beijing come as the U.S. and China reached a trade truce in October that lowered the effective tariff rate to less than 50% for a year. It remains unclear whether the two countries can extend the truce and whether Beijing will agree to allow more critically needed rare earths to leave the country.

U.S. President Donald Trump was scheduled to visit Beijing later this month for trade talks, but delayed the plans by at least a few weeks due to the Iran war.

U.S. companies have pushed ahead with plans to invest in China, even as the White House has sought to encourage more of that spending to return home.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly announced in March plans to invest $3 billion in China over the next decade. The company reported that just under 3% of its revenue came from China last year.

CEO David A. Ricks told CNBC’s Eunice Yoon that he sees “significant” potential in China for the company’s GLP-1 obesity drug, if there are better reimbursement systems.

Beijing has made incremental improvements to foreign access.

Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro weight-loss drug was added to China’s list for reimbursements under the state-run health insurance this year.

On Sunday, China’s Premier Li said Beijing would make it easier for foreign businesses to access the country’s services sector. He added that China would also buy more healthcare and digital technology products from abroad.

He also pushed back on the idea that state subsidies drove China’s technological development, while stating that the country has never pursued a trade surplus. Li noted that many products made in China by foreign companies are exported back to their home markets, with profits accruing to investors.

China reported a record trade surplus in 2025. This year, China began its 15th five-year development plan, with a focus on boosting tech self-sufficiency as well as domestic demand. Measures to support consumption have focused on trade-in subsidies and incremental increases to social welfare.

But the high-level China Development Forum didn’t reflect all views. Stephen Roach, an economist and senior fellow at Yale Law School, said he was not invited this year, after 25 years of attending the event.

“My focus on consumer-led rebalancing was always presented as constructive criticism,” he told CNBC by email. “Ironically, it is something they have finally embraced in the 15th five-year plan — albeit with inadequate policies.”

But executives that were still invited have businesses at stake. Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume has now visited Beijing twice in just four weeks. He accompanied German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on a state visit in late February.

“Our long-standing partnership provides an opportunity to address challenges clearly at the China Development Forum as well: volatile supply chains, an imbalance between supply and demand, and high price pressure in the market,” Blume said in a statement distributed to media.

“As China’s largest foreign investor, we rely on stable framework conditions,” he said. “That is why we welcome measures to sustainably improve domestic demand and fair competition, as well as the stabilization of supply chains.”

“This year will be a very crucial one,” Blume told CNBC’s Eunice Yoon on the sidelines of the forum Sunday.

After a three-year effort to build up local manufacturing and tech capabilities, Volkswagen is launching 20 new models in China this year. The automaker reported an 8% drop in China passenger car sales last year.

When OpenAI announced its Instant Checkout feature last fall, retailers sprang into action. 

Etsy, Walmart and Shopify quickly lined up to let users buy merchants’ products directly within its ChatGPT chatbot. Suddenly, the e-commerce world was fixated on shopping agents, the artificial intelligence tools that can make purchases on behalf of users.

Shopify President Harley Finkelstein called it the “new frontier” for online retail.

Several months later, OpenAI and its retail partners have headed back to the drawing board. 

The AI startup is moving away from Instant Checkout and is now working with retailers to create dedicated apps within ChatGPT. This approach will reroute users to the retailer’s own website to complete a purchase, giving those companies more control of the customer experience and the transaction process.

“OpenAI underestimated how difficult the enablement of transactions was going to be, which, on the one hand, is a little surprising, but on the other hand, it’s not easy for retailers,” Bob Hetu, an analyst at research and advisory firm Gartner, told CNBC in an interview. 

An OpenAI spokesperson said it is prioritizing better search and product discovery in the chatbot, two areas where it has seen some early traction in user adoption.

“Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases can happen more seamlessly,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement.

The Information was first to report OpenAI’s pivot.

The change in strategy has raised questions about whether tech companies and their retail partners oversold shopping bots’ readiness. It also highlights the challenges AI startups can face as they attempt to alter the e-commerce landscape that’s dominated by incumbent giants like Amazon.

OpenAI, while racing to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Anthropic, released a flurry of new offerings and experiences last year in an effort to expand its market share and build out new revenue streams. As shoppers have turned to ChatGPT to ask questions about products, e-commerce emerged as a potentially lucrative opportunity. 

While OpenAI tries to figure out its commerce strategy, competitors such as Google aren’t sitting still.

On Thursday, Google released new updates to its shopping agent platform that enable its systems to load real-time product data, preventing mishaps such as out-of-stocks and pricing errors. It also lets users add multiple items to their carts and connect loyalty memberships — two features OpenAI hasn’t yet fully cracked.

OpenAI initially billed Instant Checkout as the “next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, it also helps you buy it.” 

The company said it would collect “a small fee” on each transaction, but declined to disclose any additional financial details. 

OpenAI said at the time of the announcement that products from U.S. Etsy sellers would be available to buy directly in ChatGPT, and it expected to add items from “over a million” Shopify merchants at some point. 

Onboarding merchants turned out to be an arduous process, and Instant Checkout was prone to errors, said Emily Pfeiffer, principal analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester. As of last month, she said, roughly 30 Shopify merchants were available via Instant Checkout.

Walmart made about 200,000 products available for purchase inside ChatGPT, Walmart confirmed. It’s unclear how many Etsy products made it onto the service. 

OpenAI could scrape some retailers’ websites to obtain data on products surfaced in ChatGPT, but that meant information about whether items were still in stock, estimated delivery timing, or shipping costs could be inaccurate or out of date, Pfeiffer said in an interview.

“Crawling and scraping is inadequate to get the full breadth of product data that you need to do a good job of commerce,” Pfeiffer said.

“I think that it was not an ideal shopping experience, but it’s not like the death of agentic commerce,” she added.

OpenAI introduced Apps SDK at its annual developer conference in October and began adding dedicated retail apps to the chatbot from Instacart, Target and several online travel agencies last year.

Shopify confirmed that a new e-commerce user experience is coming to ChatGPT. 

Buyers will still be able to find Shopify merchants’ products within the chatbot, but the checkout will no longer be native there. Instead, purchases will be completed through merchants’ own online stores, either within an in-app browser in the ChatGPT mobile app or in a separate browser tab on the web, the company said. 

Merchants will not need to build apps for ChatGPT to participate in that process.  

At an investor conference earlier this month, one of Walmart’s top AI executives telegraphed that OpenAI’s commerce strategy is in flux. He referred to Instant Checkout as “a very temporary moment in time.”

“By this time next month, you will not see that experience anymore,” Daniel Danker, Walmart’s executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design, said at Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media & Telecom conference on March 4. “What you will see is that the Sparky experience will travel directly into ChatGPT and Gemini and anybody else that we ever integrate with.” 

A Walmart spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the company plans to integrate its Sparky AI assistant in ChatGPT as soon as next week.

An Etsy spokesperson also confirmed that the online marketplace is developing a ChatGPT app. They noted that the timing and direction remains fluid, so an application may not be the end state for how Etsy products appear in the chatbot.

The spokesperson said an app will give it more control over the look and feel of shopping in ChatGPT. It also provides retailers and marketplaces with more shopper data earlier in the purchase journey vs. Instant Checkout, which only gave a view into the transaction after someone made a purchase, they said.

Pfeiffer said the current ChatGPT app experience “leaves a lot to be desired” and there’s no guarantee that it will be a successful model for AI shopping.  

“Right now, I don’t see success in retail apps in ChatGPT,” Pfeiffer said. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be. Adoption takes time.”

Early data has indicated that while shoppers are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for product research and recommendations, they’re not completing their purchase in the chat window.

Adobe-owned Semrush found that just 22% of users have bought a product inside an AI tool, based on a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers released earlier this month. Half of respondents said they’ve made a purchase after using AI during research.

Walmart said it found that conversion rates, or the percentage of users who make a purchase, were three times lower for products sold directly in ChatGPT than those that rerouted users to a retailer’s website for checkout. Wired first reported the Walmart data.

Etsy said ChatGPT has become a valuable discovery channel for online shoppers, though purchase volume from Instant Checkout was relatively low because the technology is still nascent, the spokesperson said. 

Retailers who are seeing traffic from chatbots or believe their product is the right fit for that type of experience will likely invest in the platform if they can afford to, Pfeiffer said.

For Etsy, a ChatGPT app could incentivize more sellers to join the platform because it allows them to show up in a new marketing channel, she added. 

Perplexity called Amazon’s lawsuit a “bald attempt” to block shoppers from using Comet because AI agents “don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with and cannot be upsold to buy more products.” 

Amazon continues to invest in its own tools, like its Rufus shopping chatbot and “Buy for Me” agent. The company has also expanded its “Shop Direct” feature, which lets consumers browse and shop products that aren’t sold on its site. 

As OpenAI works to refine its approach to e-commerce, Hetu said consumers shouldn’t count the company out, even as it faces stiff competition.

Pfeiffer added that AI shopping, as a whole, is still early days.

“Everyone thinks everyone else has this figured out, or is farther ahead of them,” Pfeiffer said. “The fact is that no one has this figured out.”

WATCH: Ad industry grows frustrated with ChatGPT’s advertising rollout

Mastercard on Tuesday said it agreed to acquire BVNK, a London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm, for up to $1.8 billion. It’s the payment network’s biggest bet yet on the mainstreaming of digital currencies.

The deal includes $300 million in payments that are contingent on BVNK hitting certain performance metrics and is expected to close this year, Mastercard said in a statement.

The acquisition gives Mastercard, the world’s second-largest payment network after Visa, the ability to connect traditional payment rails with emerging blockchain-based systems. That will allow Mastercard to enmesh itself in payments systems involving stablecoins and tokenized deposits as they gain adoption in coming years.

“We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services,” Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in his firm’s release.

BVNK, which was founded in 2021 and told CNBC last year that its valuation was above $750 million, says its platform currently supports transactions on all major blockchain networks in more than 130 countries.

Stablecoin startups have been a hot commodity since the reelection of President Donald Trump in late 2024 ushered in a new era of crypto-friendly regulation.

BVNK reportedly entertained takeover interest from Coinbase as well as Mastercard, and Mastercard had been interested in acquiring a different crypto company, Zerohash, earlier this year.

Applications are now open for the fourth edition of CNBC’s World’s Top Fintech Companies list, produced in partnership with market research firm Statista.

Each year, CNBC and Statista chart the top fintech players from around the world, ranging from startups to Big Tech names, across segments including payments, wealth technology, insurance and more. 

Last year’s iteration included heavyweights such as Mastercard, Stripe and Visa, as well as many newer scaleups. Credit rewards company Bilt, payments upstart TerraPay and insurance platform Entsia made their debuts on the list. 

The World’s Top Fintech Companies has been expanded this year, with regulation tech — companies helping others meet their financial regulatory obligations — becoming its own segment.

Over the years, fintech has progressed from a high-growth challenger segment to a core part of the global financial system, helped by a Covid-fueled race to digitize. Artificial intelligence has spurred the sector further, and has been tipped as a source of transformative change.

The global fintech market attracted $44.7 billion in investment across over 2,200 deals in the first half of 2025, according to the most recent report by KPMG, although this was lower than the $54.2 billion investment seen over the six months prior.

Companies can submit their information for consideration by clicking here. Developing innovative, technology-based financial products and services should be the core business of nominees. 

The form, hosted by Statista, includes questions about a company’s business model and certain key performance indicators, including revenue growth and employee headcount. 

You can read more about the research project and methodology here.

The deadline for submissions is April 24, 2026.

For questions about the list or assistance with the form, please email Statista: topfintechs@statista.com.

Bank executives were sent scrambling over the weekend after President Donald Trump declared late Friday that American credit card companies would be subject to a 10% cap on the interest rate they can charge customers.

The move sent shares of large banks including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America down between 1% and 4% in early trading Monday. Companies more tightly tethered to the card industry, like Visa, Mastercard and American Express, also fell. Capital One, whose loan book is mostly from credit cards, sank nearly 7%.

Trump proposed a one-year cap on interest rates starting Jan. 20. While it’s unclear exactly how that would be enforced, the industry’s message is clear: the plan would bring unintended consequences for consumers and the American economy.

The move would make large swaths of the credit card industry unprofitable, especially tied to customers with less-than-ideal credit profiles, according to banks and analysts. The average credit card rate nationally is 19.7% as of this month, according to a weekly survey from Bankrate.com, while rates for subprime borrowers and store-specific cards are even higher.

Rather than offer loss-making products to consumers, the industry would simply stop offering access to customers with subprime credit, along with a slew of other changes around card programs including scaling back rewards, insiders say. Consumers would either spend less or rely on other forms of unsecured debt, many of which carry even higher interest rates than credit cards, they say.

“We cannot offer products at a loss; there’s no scenario where we would take our entire portfolio to 10%,” said a person with knowledge of the operations of a large bank, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly. “It’s not a stretch to suggest this will very quickly tank the economy.”

The drag on the economy from less spending could be more acute for airlines, retailers and restaurants, which would have to make up for lost card revenues by “potentially raising pricing” on their services, KBW analysts led by Sanjay Sakhrani and Chris McGratty said in a Jan. 11 research note.

The industry’s trade groups issued a joint statement late Friday making their case.

“Evidence shows that a 10% interest rate cap would reduce credit availability and be devastating for millions of American families and small business owners who rely on and value their credit cards, the very consumers this proposal intends to help,” the trade groups said.

The most straightforward approach, through legislation in Congress, isn’t possible by the proposed Jan. 20 start date, said Tobin Marcus, head of U.S. policy at Wolfe Research.

Other enforcement means, through banking regulators including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are also possible. But the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to shutter that agency, and the industry has had a successful run at defeating CFPB rules in federal courts.

“I’m not aware of an authority that they can use to do this unilaterally in any kind of a sweeping way,” Marcus said. “As far as I can tell, telling them they have until Jan. 20 is an attempt to create pressure and have them do it voluntarily.”

While the exact mechanism that Trump can use to enforce an interest rate cap is unclear, card issuers now face the risk that rates could be headed lower in some form of negotiated compromise with the government, KBW’s McGratty said in an interview.

“Is 10% an opening bid?” he said. “There’s a long distance between 10% and what companies charge today.”

Americans had a collective $1.23 trillion in credit card debt as of the third quarter last year, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Balances have been climbing as many Americans spent down the savings they’d built up during the global coronavirus pandemic.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Capital One.