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Trump Media surges after expansion into financial services including crypto and ETFs

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This illustration shows an image of President-elect Donald Trump next to a phone screen that is displaying the Truth Social app, in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21, 2022.

Stefani Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

Trump Media and Technology Group is expanding into financial services, including investment vehicles, the firm announced Wednesday.

Shares of the Truth Social parent company, which trade under the ticker DJT, jumped more than 10% in premarket trading. President Donald Trump indirectly owns 114,750,000 shares of the company, held in a revocable trust.

The financial services division will be known as Truth.Fi, and it will be started with up to $250 million from the company that will be custodied with brokerage firm Charles Schwab, according to a news release. That money will be allocated to customized exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies, among other investment vehicles.

The company said it expects to launch products and services, including its own investment vehicles, later this year.

“Truth.Fi is a natural expansion of the Truth Social movement. We began by creating a free-speech social media platform, added an ultra-fast TV streaming service, and now we’re moving into investment products and decentralized finance,” TMTG CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes said in the release.

“Developing American First investment vehicles is another step toward our goal of creating a robust ecosystem through which American patriots can protect themselves from the ever-present threat of cancellation, censorship, debanking, and privacy violations committed by Big Tech and woke corporations,” added Nunes, a former congressman from California.

The release did not specify what types of investment vehicles Truth.Fi would offer, but said Schwab would “broadly advise” the company’s investments and strategy. The products would focus on “American growth, manufacturing, and energy companies as well as investments that strengthen the Patriot Economy,” according to the release.

Samantha Schwab, the granddaughter of the namesake founder of Charles Schwab, recently became the deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The announcement comes after complaints from Republicans that banks have treated some conservatives unfairly. During a remote appearance last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump complained to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan that the firm was locking out and de-banking conservatives.

“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America,” Trump said.

The president also took on Jamie Dimon, CEO at JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by assets.

“You and Jamie and everybody, I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong,” Trump said.

The remarks continued a simmering feud between Republicans and the nation’s largest banks, with a flashpoint coming last year when a group of state attorneys general filed a complaint alleging that the institutions were discriminating against customers based on religious and political affiliations. Officials at the banks have denied wrongdoing.

Complaints about de-banking are also common among the crypto community, which was aligned with Trump during his presidential campaign.

Truth.Fi comes on the heels of the Trump memecoin, which launched shortly before the inauguration and resulted in on-paper gains of billions of dollars for the Trump Organization and its affiliates.

The new financial services firm may end up being a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, which announced a deal with Visa on Tuesday as part of its push to expand beyond social media. Musk is a close adviser to President Trump.

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Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says markets are too complacent

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Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, leaves the U.S. Capitol after a meeting with Republican members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the issue of de-banking on Feb. 13, 2025.

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday that markets and central bankers underappreciate the risks created by record U.S. deficits, tariffs and international tensions.

Dimon, the veteran CEO and chairman of the biggest U.S. bank by assets, explained his worldview during his bank’s annual investor day meeting in New York. He said he believes the risks of higher inflation and even stagflation aren’t properly represented by stock market values, which have staged a comeback from lows in April.

“We have huge deficits; we have what I consider almost complacent central banks,” Dimon said. “You all think they can manage all this. I don’t think” they can, he said.

“My own view is people feel pretty good because you haven’t seen effective tariffs” yet, Dimon said. “The market came down 10%, [it’s] back up 10%; that’s an extraordinary amount of complacency.”

Dimon’s comments follow Moody’s rating agency downgrading the U.S. credit rating on Friday over concerns about the government’s growing debt burden. Markets have been whipsawed the past few months over worries that President Donald Trump‘s trade policies will raise inflation and slow the world’s largest economy.

Dimon said Monday that he believed Wall Street earnings estimates for S&P 500 companies, which have already declined in the first weeks of Trump’s trade policies, will fall further as companies pull or lower guidance amid the uncertainty.

In six months, those projections will fall to 0% earnings growth after starting the year at around 12%, Dimon said. If that were to happen, stocks prices will likely fall.

“I think earnings estimates will come down, which means PE will come down,” Dimon said, referring to the “price to earnings” ratio tracked closely by stock market analysts.

The odds of stagflation, “which is basically a recession with inflation,” are roughly double what the market thinks, Dimon added.

Separately, one of Dimon’s top deputies said that corporate clients are still in “wait-and-see” mode when it comes to acquisitions and other deals.

Investment banking revenue is headed for a “mid-teens” percentage decline in the second quarter compared with the year-earlier period, while trading revenue was trending higher by a “mid-to-high” single digit percentage, said Troy Rohrbaugh, a co-head of the firm’s commercial and investment bank.

On the ever-present question of Dimon’s timeline to hand over the CEO reins to one of his deputies, Dimon said that nothing changed from his guidance last year, when he said he would likely remain for less than five more years.

“If I’m here for four more years, and maybe two more” as executive chairman, Dimon said, “that’s a long time.”

Of all the executive presentations given Monday, consumer banking chief Marianne Lake had the longest speaking time at a full hour. She is considered a top successor candidate, especially after Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Piepszak said she would not be seeking the top job.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: UNH, TSLA, BABA

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Klarna doubles losses in first quarter as IPO remains on hold

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Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, speaking at a fintech event in London on Monday, April 4, 2022.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Klarna saw its losses jump in the first quarter as the popular buy now, pay later firm applies the brakes on a hotly anticipated U.S. initial public offering.

The Swedish payments startup said its net loss for the first three months of 2025 totaled $99 million — significantly worse than the $47 million loss it reported a year ago. Klarna said this was due to several one-off costs related to depreciation, share-based payments and restructuring.

Revenues at the firm increased 13% year-over-year to $701 million. Klarna said it now has 100 million active users and 724,00 merchant partners globally.

It comes as Klarna remains in pause mode regarding a highly anticipated U.S. IPO that was at one stage set to value the SoftBank-backed company at over $15 billion.

Klarna put its IPO plans on hold last month due to market turbulence caused by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plans. Online ticketing platform StubHub also put its IPO plans on ice.

Prior to the IPO delay, Klarna had been on a marketing blitz touting itself as an artificial intelligence-powered fintech. The company partnered up with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in 2023. A year later, Klarna used OpenAI technology to create an AI customer service assistant.

Last week, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company was able to shrink its headcount by about 40%, in part due to investments in AI.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski

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