risk management

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As you may have heard last week, Democrats will have a majority in the House and Senate come January. Companies have many questions as to what this stunning turnaround means for them on the legislative front, Rohit Kumar, principal and co-leader of PwC’s national tax office, told CFO Brew.

Kumar, who spent nearly 11 years in the offices of the Senate Republican leader and majority leader before joining PwC, said clients are asking what they can expect both in the “lame duck” session between now and when the next Congress is sworn in, and in the next two years.

Legislative “gridlock,” but pay attention. A “divided government,” with power split between Congress and the White House, means that major legislation is unlikely to pass, Kumar said. Any legislative change next year, he said, is likely to occur around a debt limit increase and government funding. “House and Senate Democrats, if they calibrate carefully, could probably extract some collateral policy concessions out of that,” he said.

However, “gridlock does not mean stability for CFOs,” Michelle Carlsen, director and analyst at Gartner, told CFO Brew in an email. “It changes where policy risk comes from. Finance leaders should prepare for a more fragmented planning environment in which executive, judicial and state-level actions can materially affect cost forecasts and investment decisions.”

So what do CFOs need to keep an eye on most? Keep reading.—CV

      

Sponsored By PwC

Here’s the reality as PwC sees it: we already know that AI could challenge traditional business models and push industries to reinvent themselves. But despite fears of an economic reckoning, they note that AI’s growth dividend is actually already taking shape.

There have been pressing questions raised about agents operating beyond their intended boundaries, potentially accessing systems without authorization. But PwC shares that these risks aren’t reasons to retreat from AI, but rather, arrows pointing at what to polish and refine.

Read more to understand their take on the AI growth dividend, and what the current AI reality can actually tell us.

strategy

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Over the last three years, global sportswear market leader Nike has revealed two separate restructuring plans, and is now a shadow of its former S&P 100 self (though it’s still in the S&P 500).

But new Nike CFO David Denton gave investors enough hope for the iconic brand in a recent meeting to make Guggenheim Securities senior retail and e-commerce analyst Simeon Siegel wonder: Had the former Pfizer CFO been engaged in the Nike business longer than his few months on board would indicate?

“While Mr. Denton officially became CFO on 8/17, we get the sense that he was involved with the financials for a bit longer, even participating in the company’s annual planning session this year,” Siegel and two colleagues wrote in an Oct. 22 note.

For more on Nike’s new CFO and his strategy, keep reading.—DL

      

talent management

Morning Brew Inc.

Tucked into Anthropic’s 300+ page prospectus were details about an employee benefit that, while still fairly niche, is becoming more popular among private companies.

Under a donation matching program, “employees can pledge a meaningful portion of their equity awards toward charitable giving, which we match with shares of our Class N common stock,” per the S-1 filing, which was released in the weeks before the AI giant is expected to IPO.

Charitable giving has long had a foothold in the corporate world, partly because tax laws make it advantageous for workers and companies to donate part of their earnings to nonprofits. And while a handful of public companies allow employees to donate their publicly traded shares to charity, such programs weren’t on private employers’ radar until more recently.

That’s starting to change due in part to the immense amount of wealth currently locked up in private markets, according to Adam Nash, co-founder and CEO of Daffy, a donor-advised fund vendor that administers Anthropic’s donation matching program.

“We actually have private companies that are worth a trillion dollars,” Nash said. When you consider “new solutions for charitable giving that just react to that, coming up with a solution that doesn’t include private stock, frankly, I think doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he added.

For more on the equity to charity pipeline, keep reading on HR Brew.—CV

      

Sponsored By Sage

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 165,000. That’s how many jobs the US economy added in October, while the unemployment rate dropped a smidge to 4.1% from 4.2% in September. (Reuters)

Quote: “Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production.”—Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, on the Cybertruck’s fate, which he announced on X (Chicago Tribune)

Read: How LIV Golf, the $5 billion golf league that was backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, sank into the bunker. (WSJ)

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