Business

(Reuters) – Bank of America is set to award stock to most of its global employees for the eighth time since 2017, following a robust performance by the second-largest U.S. lender in 2024, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Friday.

The stock awards, which will be issued in addition to year-end incentive awards, would be granted to employees earning an annual total compensation of up to $500,000, covering about 97% of the lender’s global workforce.

BofA had 213,193 staff at the end of 2024, which means the stock awards will amount to slightly over $1 billion.

Earlier this week, BofA’s fourth-quarter profit beat expectations, boosted by trading activity. The lender also predicted it would earn higher interest income for 2025.

For the full year of 2024, the banking giant’s revenue surpassed $100 billion, driven by strong growth in fee income, and its profit came in at $27.1 billion.

“Every source of revenue increased, and we saw better than industry growth in deposits and loans,” BofA CEO Brian Moynihan said in an earnings release. “We believe this broad momentum sets up 2025 very well.”

Wall Street CEOs also voiced confidence that the incoming U.S. administration would maintain a business-friendly environment beneficial to banks. This comes as the country’s top lenders report a surge in profits, driven by an uptick in dealmaking and trading activities.

Bankers expect global deal volumes to surpass $4 trillion in 2025, the highest level in four years.

The broader operating environment has been favorable for the banking industry, propelled by strong equity markets and analysts’ expectations that President-elect Donald Trump will implement a deregulatory and lower-tax agenda.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported, citing a source, that BofA’s bonus pool for investment bankers will probably rise 10% for the previous year.

The bank’s stock surged 30.5% in 2024, outperforming the broader equity markets.

Stock awards are typically issued to reward employees, retain top talent, and align their interests with the company’s long-term success.

(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Saeed Azhar in New York; Editing by Mohammed Safi Shamsi and Diane Craft)

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The possibility of the U.S. outlawing TikTok kept influencers and users in anxious limbo during the four-plus years that lawmakers and judges debated the fate of the video-sharing app. Now, the moment its fans dreaded is here, but uncertainty over TikTok’s future lingers.

On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that bans the immensely popular, trend-setting social media platform starting Sunday unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd., sells to an approved buyer.

The unanimous decision ended a legal battle that pitted national security concerns against free speech rights. TikTok, ByteDance and some of the devoted users who rely on the platform for entertainment, income and community argued the statute violated the First Amendment. The Biden administration sought to show ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable threat.

The Supreme Court ruling, however, is not guaranteed to end the TikTok saga, which has become enveloped in the wider battle between Beijing and Washington. A Biden administration official told The Associated Press on Thursday that the outgoing administration would leave the law’s implementation — and potential enforcement — to President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump, who is set to return to the White House the day after the ban takes effect, has credited TikTok with helping him win the support of more young voters in last year’s election. A Trump adviser said this week that the incoming administration would “put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark.” What those measures will look like — and if they can withstand legal scrutiny — remained unknown Saturday.

Here’s a look at how TikTok became a global cultural phenomenon and the political wrangling that followed the app’s commercial success:

TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district.

In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok while keeping the app separate from Douyin.

Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.

The often silly videos and music clips content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.

TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.

Challenges came in tandem with TikTok’s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.

During his first term in office, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. India banned TikTok — along with other Chinese apps — the same year following a military clash along the India-China border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.

In 2021, the Biden administration dropped the Trump-era orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

Between January 2021 and August 2022, representatives for TikTok engaged in serious negotiations with the Biden administration about the app’s future in the U.S. The talks resulted in a 90-page draft security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August 2022. The two sides then ceased substantive negotiations, according to TikTok’s attorneys, though some meetings also took place in following months.

A copy of the draft agreement submitted in court showed that it would have opened up TikTok’s U.S. platform for security inspections and blocked access of U.S. user data from China. The company says it has already implemented some provisions of the agreement, including routing U.S. user data to servers operated by software giant Oracle.

In its lawsuit to overturn the sell-or-ban law, the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of its appeasement plan, which it calls Project Texas.

But the Department of Justice and administration officials argued in court documents that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok’s U.S. operations and China. They also said the opacity of TikTok’s algorithm, coupled with the size and technical complexity of the platform, made it impossible for the U.S. government – or its technology provider, Oracle – to effectively guarantee compliance with the proposal.

In February 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to remove TikTok from government-issued devices, mirroring some other countries that also prohibited the use of the app on official devices.

The following month, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew during an hours-long hearing in which he sought to reassure a tense House committee that the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.

According to court documents, TikTok’s representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism against the platform increased in volume among Republicans in Washington who claimed the platform amplified pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content, an accusation the company vigorously denied.

Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year, and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who voiced about the potential for the platform to surveil and manipulate Americans.

The legislation the Supreme Court upheld passed the House and the Senate in April after it was included as part of a high-priority $95 billion package that provided foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden quickly signed it, and the two companies and a group of content creators quickly sued.

A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The legislation gave ByteDance nine months from the enactment date to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale was in progress.

The deadline’s arrival the day before Trump’s inauguration makes things tricky. Only the sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban and can do so only if a buyer has taken concrete steps toward a purchase.

Although experts have said the app would not disappear from existing users’ phones Sunday, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

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By Nivedita Balu

TORONTO (Reuters) -Four of Canada’s biggest lenders said on Friday they were withdrawing from a global banking sector climate coalition, joining six major U.S. banks.

The departures from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance began with Goldman Sachs’ announcement on Dec. 6 and come ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House next week. Trump has been critical of efforts by governments to prescribe climate-change policies.

The four Canadian banks are TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, National Bank of Canada and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).

The other big U.S. banks that have withdrawn are Wells Fargo, Citi, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan.

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a UN-sponsored initiative set up by former Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, was launched in 2021 to encourage financial institutions to limit the effects of climate change and push toward achieving net-zero emissions.

The Canadian banks said in separate statements that they were equipped to work outside the alliance and develop their climate strategies.

“The NZBA was formed at a time when the global industry was scaling up efforts to take action on climate, and served a valuable role in galvanizing these efforts and establishing momentum,” CIBC said in a statement.

“As this space has evolved and matured, and having made significant progress alongside our clients in these areas, we are now well-positioned to further this work outside of the formal structure of the NZBA,” it said.

Canadian banks have faced mounting pressure to address climate-related risks arising from their funding activities in the past few years. The country’s banking regulator has also introduced guidelines for financial institutions to manage their climate-related risks.

Separately, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced it had withdrawn from a global body of central banks and regulators devoted to exploring ways to police climate risk in the financial system.

(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Toronto, Additional reporting by Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru; Editing by Rod Nickel and Edwina Gibbs)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Friday the decision on the future of the TikTok app will be up to him, but he did not provide any detail about what steps he would take.

“It ultimately goes up to me, so you’re going to see what I’m going to do,” Trump said in an interview with CNN. “Congress has given me the decision, so I’ll be making the decision.”

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Susan Heavey)

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(Reuters) – Honda’s U.S. financing arm was ordered on Friday by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that affected the credit reports of 300,000 drivers of Honda and Acura vehicles.

The CFPB said American Honda Finance deferred some drivers’ loan payments during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to then tell credit reporting agencies that the drivers were delinquent when they should have been reported as current.

“False accusations on a credit report can have serious implications for Americans seeking a job, housing or a loan,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement faulting the financing arm’s “sloppy practices.”

The $12.8 million payment includes a $2.5 million civil fine and $10.3 million in restitution to drivers.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The national debt is slated to rise by $23.9 trillion over the next decade, a sum that does not include trillions of dollars in additional tax cuts being championed by President-elect Donald Trump.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its 10-year budget outlook on Friday that showed a slightly brighter picture as higher taxable incomes will relieve some pressure on the rising national debt. Still, annual budget deficits are expected to be equal to 6.1% of U.S. gross domestic product in 2035, which the CBO noted is “significantly more than the 3.8 percent that deficits have averaged over the past 50 years.”

The analysis paints a difficult picture for an incoming Republican administration bent on cutting taxes in ways that further widen deficits unless they’re also paired with major spending cuts. Trump’s proposed extension of his 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire after this year along with new cuts could easily exceed $4 trillion and his nominee to be treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warned Thursday that the economy could crash without them.

“We do not have a revenue problem in the U.S.,” Bessent insisted at his confirmation hearings. “We have a spending problem.”

The CBO numbers suggest more bluntly that there is a persistent and possibly worsening gap between the taxes that Americans are willing to pay and the services they expect government to provide. The CBO noted that cumulative deficits from 2025-2034 would be smaller by $1 trillion relative to its June forecast, largely because the amount of taxable income is expected to increase.

Still, the budget deficit is expected to be $1.87 trillion this year, a slight decline from the $1.91 trillion shortfall last year.

Deficits as share of the total economy would then narrow through 2027 as tax collections would increase faster than outlays, a trend that would then reverse as spending grew faster due to the costs of Social Security, Medicare and servicing the national debt.

The federal government is poised to spend $7 trillion this fiscal year, a sum that would equal about 23.3% of GDP.

While tax revenues as a share of the total U.S. economy are close to the 50-year average, government spending is poised to continue growing. Discretionary spending on national security and social programs will account for $1.85 trillion next year. The CBO already has spending in these categories on a downward trajectory as discretionary spending would equal 5.3% of GDP, down from the half-century average of 7.9%.

With an aging population, government spending would largely increase because of Social Security and Medicare — two programs popular with voters that many Republicans and Democrats alike have vowed to protect, despite clear signs that they’re on an unsustainable path.

Michael Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation — which among other things tracks the federal debt — said in a statement that “as lawmakers consider the range of expiring tax policy at the end of the year, they should make a commitment to at least ‘do no fiscal harm’.”

“They should avoid budget gimmicks and base their assumptions on neutral, nonpartisan estimates like this one from CBO,” he said.

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Associated Press reporter Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.

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U.S. auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into complaints that General Motors vehicles equipped with certain V8 engines, including its best-selling Silverado, can seize up without warning.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration on Thursday said it was investigating an estimated 877,710 vehicles after receiving 39 complaints from users of GM vehicles equipped with L87 V8 engines.

The NHTSA said complainants reported “no detectability prior to the engine failure,” which can lead to an increased risk of a crash resulting in injury and/or property damage. A bearing failure can cause the engine to seize or a breaching of the engine block by a connecting rod, regulators said.

The vehicles included in the preliminary investigation include: 2019-2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500; 2021-2024 Chevrolet Tahoe; 2021-2024 Chevrolet Suburban; 2019-2024 GMC Sierra 1500; 2021-2024 GMC Yukon; 2021-2024 GMC Yukon XL; 2021-2024 Cadillac Escalade; and 2021-2024 Cadillac Escalade ESV.

General Motors was the U.S. leader in 2024 auto sales, posting a 4.3% increase in sales for the year, its best performance since 2019. Its Silverado pickup truck was the second-best selling vehicle in the U.S. last year.

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By Jody Godoy

(Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued Pepsi on Friday for offering preferential pricing to a larger retailer, whom a source familiar with the matter confirmed was Walmart.

The practices fed high consumer prices by leaving other retailers, from large grocery chains to independent convenience stores, to pay more, the FTC said.

The lawsuit filed in New York alleges that the soft drink manufacturer violated the Robinson-Patman Act, a law that went largely unenforced for decades by the federal government.

Walmart and PepsiCo did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for a comment.

“The FTC’s action will help ensure all grocers and other businesses—no matter the size—can get a fair shake and compete on the merits of their skill, efficiency, and talent,” outgoing FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.

The FTC’s two Republican commissioners, including Andrew Ferguson, who will chair the commission after President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday, voted against the case.

(Reporting by Jody Godoy in California; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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By Allison Lampert

(Reuters) – The largest U.S. aerospace trade group on Friday opened the door to discussions on specific tariffs, after incoming President-elect Donald Trump suggested slapping duties on countries like Mexico and Canada.

Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), which represents U.S. planemaking and defense giants like Boeing and General Dynamics, waded in on the prospect of tariffs for the first time, saying in a statement it would discuss how to tailor them to protect national security and key industries.

The statement did not give specifics.

“We are eager to work with the Trump administration to discuss where tariff policy may support our products, while also ensuring the industry is empowered to continue growing in a way that supports U.S. national security needs and maintains our position as a leading high-technology, U.S.-centered manufacturing sector,” the statement said.

Trump’s warning in November about potential 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada have already triggered threats of retaliation from Ottawa and raised concerns among sectors like automotive that the move could also hit U.S. industry.

In 2023, Canada was the top import country and third largest export destination for aerospace and defense trade with the United States, according to AIA. Mexico was not among the top five.

(Reporting By Allison Lampert in Montreal. Additional reporting by Tim Hepher in Paris and Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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By Yuka Obayashi

TOKYO (Reuters) – Oil prices climbed on Friday, heading for a fourth weekly gain, driven by concerns over tighter supply following U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers and signals from a Federal Reserve official of potential interest rate cuts.

Brent crude futures rose 13 cents, or 0.2%, to $81.42 per barrel by 0113 GMT, after declining 0.9% in the previous session. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were up 27 cents, or 0.3%, to $78.95 a barrel after dropping 1.7% on Thursday.

Both contracts fell on Thursday with Yemen’s Houthi militia expected to halt attacks on ships in the Red Sea. Still, they remain on course for a fourth weekly gain, with Brent up 9% and WTI rising 10% year-to-date.

“Supply concerns from U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers and tankers, combined with expectations of a demand recovery driven by potential U.S. interest rate cuts, are bolstering the crude market,” said Toshitaka Tazawa, an analyst at Fujitomi Securities.

“The anticipated increase in kerosene demand due to cold weather in the U.S. is another supportive factor,” he added.

Investors are assessing the Biden administration’s latest round of sanctions targeting Russia’s military-industrial base and sanctions-evasion efforts, following broader measures against Russian oil producers and tankers.

Moscow’s top customers are now scouring the globe for replacement barrels, driving a surge in shipping rates.

Inflation is likely to continue to ease and possibly allow the U.S. central bank to cut interest rates sooner and faster than expected, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said on Thursday, countering recent market bets on a shallower rate path.

In the U.S., natural gas futures jumped about 4% to a two-year high on Thursday on colder weather forecasts for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend.

In the Middle East, maritime security officials said the Houthi militia is expected to announce a halt in its attacks on ships in the Red Sea, after a ceasefire deal in the war in Gaza between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

The attacks have disrupted global shipping, forcing firms to make longer and more expensive journeys around southern Africa for more than a year.

But investors remained cautious, as the Houthis leader said his group would monitor the implementation of the ceasefire deal, and continue its attacks on vessels or Israel if the deal is breached.

(Reporting by Yuka Obayashi; Editing by Stephen Coates)

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