Liz Hoffman

2 weeks ago | semafor.com | Liz Hoffman

Sunday marked the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second term, an arbitrary but politically significant check-in mark. The economic upshot: not good, and likely to get worse before it gets better. One problem is that we’re in a data black hole. Companies are reporting earnings for the three-month period that ended just before “Liberation Day,” and the latest unemployment figures DOGE’s big federal layoffs.

2 weeks ago | semafor.com | Ben Smith |Liz Hoffman

JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis. “If you could find the fancy hotel rooms in London where bankers were starting to watch Margin Call again, you could probably have a pretty good futures trading operation, based on them starting to panic,” Chandor said in an interview from his office in Connecticut last week.

2 weeks ago | semafor.com | Liz Hoffman

For years, two firms have dominated the business of telling investors how to vote in corporate elections. One wants out. Glass Lewis, the scrappier and smaller rival of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), is discussing a dramatic shift to essentially scrap its “house view” on ballot measures ranging from takeover battles to complaints about gender balance, political donations, and carbon emissions, according to people familiar with the matter and an internal memo seen by Semafor.

3 weeks ago | semafor.com | Liz Hoffman

“It’s hard to accept any new fact as clarity and certainty,” Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said, giving voice to the general feeling among business executives whipsawed by tariffs. He’s “hoping and praying for a negotiated solution that provides for continued open trade.”It was two days out from US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day.” And Anderson’s comments took on new salience a few days later, when Trump pauses his most sweeping tariffs and starts the clock on trade negotiations.

3 weeks ago | semafor.com | Liz Hoffman |Daron Acemoglu

Financial markets are not the economy. But both are yoked right now to the American tech sector in ways that threaten to unravel. What’s often ignored in the public hand-wringing about the Trump administration’s attacks on institutions — courts to interpret contracts, exchanges to provide price discovery free of ideological pressures, and regulators to set rules of the road — is that those institutions are even more important to this red-hot corner of commerce than most seem to think.