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The biggest US banks have all passed the Federal Reserve’s annual tests of whether they can withstand a future economic and market crisis, prompting analysts to predict a sharp increase in dividends and share buybacks.

The Fed said on Friday that under its “severely adverse” scenario, in which unemployment surges to 10 per cent, the 22 banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, would lose more than $550bn.

However, they would suffer a much smaller hit to capital than in recent years and remain well within required regulatory standards.

The theoretical recession used by the Fed to test banks’ resilience was less severe than the previous year’s. While the scenario was designed before President Donald Trump’s return to office, it comes at a time when his administration is pushing to soften financial regulations.

“Large banks remain well capitalised and resilient to a range of severe outcomes,” said Michelle Bowman, the Fed’s vice-chair for supervision.

The results of the Fed’s “stress tests” will be used to calculate the minimum level of capital that banks need relative to their risk-adjusted assets, providing a critical buffer to absorb losses.

Jason Goldberg, analyst at Barclays, forecast on the basis of this year’s results that Goldman Sachs would be the biggest winner among the leading US lenders as its minimum capital level would drop from 13.7 per cent to 10.7 per cent. Wells Fargo, M&T Bank and Morgan Stanley would also have their capital requirements cut by 1 percentage point, he predicted.

He added that this was likely to raise the amount of excess capital that most banks seek to return to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks. “We expect share repurchase (in dollars) to increase 12 per cent at [the] median bank relative to the prior year’s exam, with most banks stable to higher,” he said.

Banks are optimistic that the tests will become even more accommodating after the Fed responded to a legal challenge by the main banking lobby group with a promise to overhaul the exercise. The central bank said earlier this year it planned to make the exercise more transparent and to average the test results over the past two years to reduce volatility.

The banks are required to wait until Tuesday to provide an update on what they expect their new capital requirement to be. They frequently lay out plans for dividends and share buybacks after the Fed stress tests.

The Fed said this year’s stress tests would push banks’ aggregate tier one capital ratio, their main cushion against losses, down by 1.8 percentage points — a smaller drop than in recent years and well below the 2.8- percentage-point fall in last year’s exercise.

But the Fed said it expected to calculate banks’ capital requirements on the basis of its two-year averaging proposal, providing that was finalised in the coming weeks. This will increase the capital hit to 2.3 per cent. Bowman said the change was preferable “to address the excessive volatility in the stress test results and corresponding capital requirements”.

The lender with the biggest fall in its capital due to the theoretical stress was Deutsche Bank’s US operation, which had a hypothetical decline of more than 12 percentage points, based on the averaged results of the past two tests. The next largest falls were at the US subsidiaries of Switzerland’s UBS and Canada’s RBC. But they all remained more than double the 4.5 per cent minimum level through the exam.

In this year’s “severely adverse” scenario, US GDP declined 7.8 per cent in a year, unemployment rose 5.9 percentage points to 10 per cent and inflation slowed to 1.3 per cent. House prices fell 33 per cent and commercial property prices dropped 30 per cent. 

While this would be one of the most extreme recessions in history, it is milder than the one drawn up by the Fed last year. The theoretical market crash — with share prices falling 50 per cent and high-yield bonds selling off sharply — was also less severe than in last year’s exercise.

The Fed said banks benefited from their higher profitability. It added that it had included lower hypothetical losses from private equity after “adjusting how these exposures are measured to better align with these exposures’ characteristics”.

Under pressure from Trump to ease the regulatory burden in support of growth and investment, the Fed has announced plans to rework many of its rules for banks. 

This week, the Fed and the two other main banking watchdogs announced plans to slash the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio, which sets how much capital the biggest banks need to have against their total assets.

After the Supreme Court issued a ruling that limits the ability of federal judges to issue universal injunctions — but didn’t rule on the legality of President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship — immigrant rights groups are trying a new tactic by filing a national class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two immigrant rights organizations whose members include people without legal status in the U.S. who “have had or will have children born in the United States after February 19, 2025,” according to court documents.

One of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, William Powell, senior counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, says his colleagues at CASA, Inc. and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project think that, with the class action approach “we will be able to get complete relief for everyone who would be covered by the executive order.”

The strategic shift required three court filings: one to add class allegations to the initial complaint; a second to move for class certification; and a third asking a district court in Maryland to issue “a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction asking for relief for that putative class,” Powell said.

In the amended complaint, filed two hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the immigrant rights attorneys said that Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship, if allowed to stand, “would throw into doubt the citizenship status of thousands of children across the country.”

“The Executive Order threatens these newborns’ identity as United States citizens and interferes with their enjoyment of the full privileges, rights, and benefits that come with U.S. citizenship, including calling into question their ability to remain in their country of birth,” reads the complaint.

Rights groups and 22 states had asked federal judges to block President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. Issued on his first day in office, the executive order states, “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

But after three federal district court judges separately blocked Trump’s order, issuing universal injunctions preventing its enforcement nationwide, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to block universal injunctions altogether.

The Supreme Court did not rule on the birthright issue itself. But after the ruling, Trump called it a “monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law,” in a briefing at the White House.

The president said the ruling means his administration can now move forward with his efforts to fundamentally reshape longstanding U.S. policy on immigration and citizenship.

Friday’s ruling quickly sparked questions about how the dispute over birthright citizenship will play out now — and how the ruling on universal injunctions might affect other efforts to push back on executive policies, under President Trump and future presidents.

“Nationwide injunctions have been an important tool to prevent blatantly illegal and unconstitutional conduct,” the National Immigrant Justice Center’s director of litigation, Keren Zwick, said in a statement sent to NPR. The decision to limit such injunctions, she said, “opens a pathway for the president to break the law at will.”

Both Zwick and Powell emphasized that the Supreme Court did not rule on a key question: whether Trump’s executive order is legal.

At the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi would not answer questions about how the order might be implemented and enforced.

“This is all pending litigation,” she said, adding that she expects the Supreme Court to take up the issue this fall.

“We’re obviously disappointed with the result on nationwide injunctions,” Powell said. But, he added, he believes the Supreme Court will ultimately quash Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship.

“The executive order flagrantly violates the 14th Amendment citizenship clause and Section 1401a of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” Powell said, “both of which guarantee birthright citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States, with only narrow exceptions for ambassadors [and] invading armies.”

The court’s ruling set a 30-day timeframe for the policy laid out in Trump’s executive order to take effect.

“The Government here is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the District Courts’ entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act,” a syllabus, or headnote, of the Supreme Court’s ruling states.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, also discusses the differences between “complete relief ” and “universal relief.” 

“Here, prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship,” Barrett wrote. “Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling suggests that constitutional guarantees might not apply to anyone who isn’t a party to a lawsuit.

The concept of birthright citizenship has deep roots, dating to the English common law notion of jus soli (“right of the soil”). The doctrine was upended for a time in the U.S. by the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott ruling.

Current legal standing for birthright citizenship in the U.S. extends back to the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified, stating, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

“Any executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship is just as unconstitutional today as it was yesterday,” Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, told NPR.
“There is nothing substantively in the decision that undercuts those lower court opinions. The opinion just undercuts the tools available to the courts to enforce that constitutional mandate.”

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Donald Trump said on Thursday the US and China had signed a trade deal, two weeks after saying they had reached an understanding in London about how to implement a truce in the countries’ dispute.

“We just signed with China yesterday,” the US president said at the White House on Thursday, without providing any details.

A White House official said the US and China had “agreed to an additional understanding for a framework to implement the Geneva agreement”, in a reference to the trade talks that the nations held in May, when they first negotiated a truce.

Two people familiar with the situation said on Thursday that Washington and Beijing appeared to have put in writing what had previously been negotiated but not included in a formal document. Ahead of the London talks, US officials had said they wanted to reach a handshake deal with the Chinese, but some experts said it was naive not to have a document.

The agreement in Geneva involved significantly reducing tariffs on each other for 90 days while they tried to hammer out a comprehensive trade accord. The deal had faltered, however, over disagreements about Chinese rare earth exports and US export controls.

Earlier this month, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent led a team that included commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and US trade representative Jamieson Greer for talks in London with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng to resolve the impasse. After two days, the sides said they had reached a deal but provided no details.

On Thursday, Lutnick said they had completed the deal that was originally reached in Geneva. “That deal was signed and sealed two days ago,” he told Bloomberg television.

“While we need to look at the details, if the deal brings more certainty, predictability and fairness into US-China trade it will be a great victory for the people of both countries,” said Sean Stein, president of the US-China Business Council. 

China’s commerce ministry on Friday said the two sides had “further confirmed” the details of the framework agreement reached in London. 

It added that approvals of export applications for controlled items would be issued “in accordance with the law’, and that the US side would also lift “restrictive measures” taken against China, without giving further details.

The purported deal comes as the Trump administration works to reach broad agreements on trade with multiple partners ahead of a July 9 deadline when “reciprocal” tariffs the president announced in April would be reapplied. Those levies, of up to 50 per cent on most US trading partners, had been temporarily lowered to 10 per cent for 90 days to allow foreign countries to negotiate.

US officials have since been holding intensive talks with countries including India, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and the EU to reach permanent settlements. 

Only the UK has reached a trade agreement with the US, while China has secured lower “reciprocal” tariffs of 10 per cent following a period of tit-for-tat tariff increases. Trump has also left in place additional tariffs of 20 per cent on all Chinese imports, citing Beijing’s failure to slow the flow of precursors of the drug fentanyl from China.

The administration is also looking at applying global tariffs to imports in sectors including semiconductors and consumer electronics, aerospace parts, lumber, copper, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals.

Additional reporting by Wenjie Ding in Beijing and Wang Xueqiao in Shanghai