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Philippines orders Google, Apple to remove Binance from app stores

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Zhao Changpeng, founder and chief executive officer of Binance, attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 16, 2022. 

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

The Philippines’ Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered Google and Apple to remove cryptocurrency exchange Binance from their app stores.

In a press release out Tuesday, the regulator said it had sent letters to Google and Apple requesting the removal of applications controlled by Binance from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, respectively.

SEC Chairperson Emilio Aquino said the Philippine public’s continued access to Binance sites and apps “poses a threat to the security of the funds of investing Filipinos.”

The agency accused Binance of offering unregistered securities to Filipinos and operating as an unregistered broker, adding that this violates the country’s securities laws.

Binance, Google and Apple were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Aquino said that blocking Binance from the Google and Apple app stores would help “prevent the further proliferation of its illegal activities in the country, and to protect the investing public from its detrimental effects on our economy.”

The Philippines’ National Telecommunications Commission has previously moved to block access to websites used by Binance in the country.

The SEC says it earlier warned the Philippine public against using Binance and began studying the possibility of blocking Binance’s services in the Philippines as early as November last year.

The SEC said Binance has been actively promoting its services on social media to attract funds from Filipinos, despite not being licensed by the regulator.

The watchdog said it is urging Filipinos with investments in Binance to immediately close their positions, or to transfer their crypto holdings to their own crypto wallets or exchanges registered in the Philippines.

The action adds to a litany of woes for Binance, which recently replaced its CEO with Richard Teng, the former chief of UAE regulator Abu Dhabi Global Markets, in November 2023, after a U.S. government settlement ordering the company to pay a $4.3 billion fine for alleged money laundering violations.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was charged with violating the Bank Secrecy Act and agreed to step down. Zhao’s sentencing is expected to take place on April 30.

Binance has separately been sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over alleged mishandling of customer assets and the operation of an illegal, unregistered exchange in the U.S.

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Treasury Secretary Bessent says market woes are more about tech stock sell-off than Trump’s tariffs

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. 

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.

“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.

Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.

However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.

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S&P 500, YTD

Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.

“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”

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Conservative cable channel Newsmax shares plunge more than 70% after a dizzying 2-day surge

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A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022. 

Callaghan O’hare | Reuters

Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.

The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.

Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors. 

The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.

Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.

The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: TSLA, DJT, AMZN, RIVN

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