Facebook prioritizes privacy. Can it deliver?

Good Thursday morning, and welcome to today's DealBook Briefing. (Want this by email? Sign up here.)

Big questions over Facebook’s privacy pivot

Facebook plans to start shifting people toward private messaging and away from the public broadcasting on which its business has been built, Mike Isaac of the NYT reports:

• Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that the company “would focus on private and encrypted communications, in which users message mostly smaller groups of people they know.”
• “Unlike publicly shared posts that are kept as users’ permanent records, the communications could also be deleted after a certain period of time.”
• “He said Facebook would achieve the shift partly by integrating Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger so that users worldwide could easily message one another across the networks.”
• That, Mr. Zuckerberg said, would make Facebook a “living room,” rather than a “town square.”

Facebook’s declining public perception, fueled by fake news and data privacy scandals, is driving the shift. “Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. To grow, and roll out new technologies like its reported cryptocurrency, the company needs to regain trust.

But plenty of questions remain:

• What’s the business model? Most of the company’s current profits come from openly sharing content and displaying targeted ads, which doesn’t fit with the privacy push. Mr. Zuckerberg argued that there were “all kinds of different commerce opportunities” available in a shift to privacy, but didn’t elaborate.
• Should its platforms be integrated? It’s not clear that users want Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger to be combined. And Facebook could find itself facing allegations of anti-competitive behavior by tying them together.
• When will it happen? Mr. Zuckerberg had promised to improve Facebook’s privacy in the past and then was painfully slow to act. (A “Clear History” tool announced last year still hasn’t arrived.)

Huawei sues the U.S., citing Constitutional violations

Huawei sued the U.S. government yesterday over a ban on government agencies using the Chinese telecom giant’s products because they could violate American national security.

The U.S. says Huawei products are a security threat, and could be used by Chinese authorities to spy on telecom networks — though it has yet to produce supporting evidence. Washington has pushed wireless carriers to avoid using the company’s equipment, and urged other countries to follow suit.

The lawsuit will force Washington to show its hand. “The U.S. Congress has repeatedly failed to produce any evidence to support its restrictions on Huawei products,” Guo Ping, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said in a statement.

Huawei also claims it’s being unfairly singled out in an unconstitutional bill of attainder — where legislation singles out a person or entity for punishment without trial. Mr. Guo said that Congress was acting as “judge, jury and executioner.”

But the strategy is risky. Its business practices and relationship with Beijing will be put under the microscope. And legal experts say the lawsuit on its own is unlikely to succeed: The Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab lost a similar lawsuit two years ago.

Washington eases its big bank rules

Federal regulators plan to roll back regulations on the country’s largest banks and financial firms, making it easier for them to gain approval to raise dividends or buy back their shares.

The Fed will reboot its “stress tests” that banks undergo each year. In particular, the Fed won’t give “pass” or “fail” grades for the portion of the tests that measure banks’ ability to keep lending during an economic crisis.

Big non-bank firms will also get an easier ride. A federal oversight panel will scrap the “systemically important financial institution” designation, which subjects non-bank firms like insurers and asset managers to intrusive oversight. (It’s largely symbolic: Only four firms had been labeled systemically important and all have successfully argued to shed that status.)

This is part of the Trump administration’s effort to relax financial regulations imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Officials have sided with the banking industry in arguing that Obama-era rules stifled lenders’ ability to make loans and continue to grow.

But critics say it’s risky, and could lead to a less safe, less transparent financial system. Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, a financial industry watchdog, told the NYT, “The markets are not going to have the full picture.”

America’s trade deficit breaks a record

President Trump’s aggressive fights over trade are driven by a desire to narrow America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a sign of partners taking advantage of the U.S. But the gap between imports and exports has actually widened, leaving the U.S. with a record trade deficit of $891.3 billion, Jim Tankersley and Ana Swanson of the NYT write:

• “The increase was driven by some factors outside Mr. Trump’s control, like a global economic slowdown and the relative strength of the United States dollar, both of which weakened overseas demand for American goods.”
• “But the widening gap was also exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut,” they add, “and the trade war he escalated last year.”
• “Economists have long warned that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts would ultimately exacerbate a trade deficit he has vowed to reduce, as Americans, flush with extra cash, bought more imported goods.”
• “By his own metric, the president is failing to right America’s global trading relationships.”

But economists aren’t panicking. “I’d rather live in a country that capital is trying to get into, rather than get out of,” Larry Summers, who led the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, told the NYT. “The reason we have a trade deficit is people are investing in America.”

The E.U. wants new Brexit ideas, fast

Officials in Brussels have reportedly asked Prime Minister Theresa May to offer new proposals that would convince British lawmakers to back her Brexit deal within the next 48 hours, the BBC reports.

“E.U. officials said they would work nonstop over the weekend if ‘acceptable’ ideas were received by Friday to break the deadlock” over issues tied to the Irish border, which have been the main sticking point, according to the broadcaster.

But the U.K. has said it already put up “reasonable” proposals to satisfy lawmaker’s concerns about being tied to E.U. rules. (That said, Mrs. May has reportedly outlined steps “to develop technology to keep the Irish border open after Brexit” in the event of no deal, Bloomberg reports.)

Unsurprisingly, the E.U. is pessimistic. “There’s increasing concern on the European side that any concessions the bloc would be prepared to give wouldn’t be sufficient to win a majority in the House of Commons,” according to Bloomberg, citing unidentified sources.

More: Toyota says it might stop manufacturing cars in Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit. And the O.E.C.D. has warned that a no-deal departure could cause a recession in the country.

Are leveraged loans a global threat?

The Financial Stability Board will examine whether the $1.4 billion market for leveraged loans — those made to companies with low credit ratings or high debt loads — poses a risk to the global markets, Sam Fleming of the FT reports.

• The F.S.B. will focus on collateralized loan obligations, which are bundles of leveraged loans that are sold off in tranches. The regulator “wants to identify the holders of C.L.O.s around the world and assess the risks that investors could pull money from exposed institutions during a severe downturn,” the FT writes.
• Investors in C.L.O.s include banks, investment funds and insurers.
• Randy Quarles, the chairman of the F.S.B., told the FT, “From a financial stability risk [point of view] we need to know more about that than we do, and we have set up a process at the F.S.B. to understand that.”
• “Companies have been amassing cheap loans thanks to low interest rates and loosening lending standards, and in the U.S. nonfinancial corporate debt is now a higher share of gross domestic product than before the crisis,” Mr. Fleming writes.

How HBO repeatedly failed to stop Netflix

AT&T is rushing to overhaul HBO, and the rest of what was Time Warner, to fight back against Netflix. But Bloomberg Businessweek has taken a look at how the “Game of Thrones” network and its parent company missed opportunities to dominate the streaming wars in the past:

• In 1999, HBO’s chief information officer, Michael Gabriel, asked Jeff Bewkes, then the network’s C.E.O., how he wanted to reckon with the internet. “Bewkes wanted HBO to be all in on the internet when the time was right, Gabriel says, but he didn’t want to spend too much money or be premature,” Businessweek reports.
• In 2007, “An idea spread through HBO: What if Time Warner bought Netflix? It would be the perfect marriage of art and science and give Time Warner enormous leverage over the downstream markets for TV shows and movies. The concept made its way up the chain of command, where it was duly slain.”
• “In a December 2010 New York Times interview, Bewkes, who by then was overseeing all of Time Warner as C.E.O., weighed in on his competitor. ‘It’s a little bit like, Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’ ”
• In the spring of 2014, HBO licensed its older shows to Amazon’s streaming service, giving the network fat fees. But, Businessweek reports, HBO’s in-house streaming team was upset at the arrangement. “Training people to go to Amazon Prime Video to watch classic HBO shows, they worried, could undermine the appeal of HBO’s own internet offerings.”
• “HBO still doesn’t have much control over a key aspect of the direct-to-consumer streaming experience — the consumer.”

Revolving door

Mike Turner will resign as a director of Barclays.

The law firm Sullivan & Cromwell has hired James Bromley from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton as a partner and co-head of its global restructuring group.

Anne Dinning rejoined D.E. Shaw as a member of the hedge fund’s executive committee.

Slate hired Jared Hohlt from New York magazine as its new editor in chief, succeeding Julia Turner.

The speed read

Deals

• Aon won’t make a takeover bid for a rival insurance broker, Willis Towers Watson. (FT)
• Sprint and T-Mobile have reportedly won the backing of the White House for their proposed merger, but have yet to win over the Justice Department or the F.C.C. (Fox Business)
• Blackstone is reportedly close to raising $20 billion for its next big private equity fund. (Bloomberg)
• Mario Batali has sold his stake in his restaurant empire to his business partners. (NYT)

Politics and policy

• Michael Cohen is said to have given the House Intelligence Committee evidence that shows President Trump’s lawyers made changes to a knowingly false written statement given to Congress. (NYT)
• A House committee voted to advance a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024. (Axios)
• Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, says he’s writing legislation that could prevent corporate insiders from selling shares within a certain time period after their companies announce a stock buyback. (CNBC)

Tech

• Congressional Democrats announced bills that would reinstate net neutrality rules. (Verge)
• Facebook might be backing away from its plans to expand into China. (BuzzFeed News)
• Just how likely to succeed is Tesla’s new online-only sales strategy? Also: The automaker is facing backlash in China from customers who won’t receive refunds to make up for new price cuts. (NYT, WSJ)
• Amazon is closing its pop-up stores in the U.S., though it still has ambitious plans for physical retail. (NYT)

Best of the rest

• Meet Haven, the health care joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. (NYT)
• The Fed says that the government shutdown slowed economic activity in some regions. (WSJ)
• Carlos Ghosn is out of jail. What happens now? (NYT)
• A ranking of the most visible brands in the U.S. placed the government bottom. (Axios)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.

We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].