Corporations are continuing to spend on business travel, but are being strategic about how they allocate those dollars amid ongoing trade uncertainties, according to new reports from the travel and expense platform Navan and the Global Business Travel Association.

Corporate travel spending activity increased 15% year over year in the second quarter of 2025, according to a business travel index published Tuesday from Navan.

Navan’s index, backed by Nasdaq, is derived from millions of corporate business transactions on its platform. It examines the amount spent and number of transactions relating to airline travel, hotel reservations and expense transactions from corporate cards.

Amy Butte, Navan’s CFO, said during an interview that from talking with other chief financial officers over the past few months, she never got the sense that corporate leaders would stop spending on business travel altogether. Instead, they are in “wait and see” mode.

“If you’re making choices about where you’re being cautious, we’re not seeing people be cautious in the area of relationship building, either with their customers or with their teammates. We’re still seeing the spend allocated towards travel as a key component of any business strategy,” Butte said.

But while global business travel is expected to reach a new high of $1.57 trillion in 2025, according to a Monday report by the Global Business Travel Association, that total represents 6.6% year-over-year growth, which is less than the 10.4% increase that was previously predicted. GBTA cited trade tensions, policy uncertainty and economic pressures as the reasons for the more moderate growth.

A string of sentiment polls by GBTA also shows that corporate travel optimism for the rest of 2025 appears muted. The percentage of respondents who said they were optimistic about the overall outlook for the business travel industry in 2025 dropped sharply from 67% in November 2024 to 31% in April and declined slightly again this month to 28%.

The findings from both reports, grouped together with commentary from airline CEOs last week, show C-suite leaders are still largely left in wait-and-see mode amid President Donald Trump’s fluid tariff policies, but companies appear now to have a better read on how they will manage the uncertainty.

“Historically, corporate travel has been the first thing, one of the easiest things, to minimize if you’re a company,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said during the company’s earnings call this month, adding that corporate travel on the airline has been flat on a year-over-year basis.

But Butte said that Navan has not seen a drop-off in business travel. Instead, businesses are shifting how they are spending.

For example, Butte said businesses are continuing to commit to individual, face-to-face meetings, rather than spending on large group outings. The Navan index shows that spending on personal meals, meaning one-on-one meetings held over a meal, was up 9.8% from last year, while spending on team events and meals was the only category in the report that declined.

Navan did see some compression earlier in the year in the share of higher-priced airline tickets purchased that were first class or business class, Butte said, but she added that the platform has since seen an acceleration as uncertainty has lessened.

Airfare prices have also declined so far this year, which means business and consumers alike are spending less on plane tickets. Airfare fell 3.5% in June from a year earlier while inflation overall rose, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

GBTA CEO Suzanne Neufang said during an interview that CFOs have not cut travel spending off entirely, but are looking for efficient ways to get employees on the road. This may look like booking multicity trips, scheduling multiple meetings per trip or booking fewer trips per month, she said.

Neufang said the business travel industry has been focused over the past five years on making sure every trip has a purpose and delivers a return on investment.

“Gone are the days when there’s really frivolous business traveling,” Neufang said.

The new findings on business travel spending also come as airlines are reporting their quarterly earnings.

When Delta reported earnings on July 10, Bastian said he expects both consumer and corporate confidence to improve in the second half of the year, creating an environment for travel demand to accelerate.

Delta and other airlines saw travel demand come in weaker than expected at the beginning of the year, especially from price-sensitive customers traveling domestically. Bastian said back in April that Trump’s trade policies were hurting bookings.

Bastian took a more positive tone this month, telling CNBC that corporate travel has stabilized as businesses have more clarity and confidence than they did earlier this year. But he said corporate travel is in line with last year, not the 5% to 10% growth Delta expected at the start of the year.

Meanwhile, Delta President Glen Hauenstein said on an earnings call this month that corporate travel trends are “choppy” and overall corporate volumes are expected to be “flattish” over last year.

United Airlines reported earnings last week. CEO Scott Kirby said during the company’s call with analysts that so far this month, the airline has seen a double-digit acceleration in business demand as uncertainty has declined.

Andrew Nocella, United’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, added that the business traffic growth is “across the board” and not restricted to any singular hub or vertical, which he said reflects lessening macroeconomic uncertainty.

Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines are scheduled to report their quarterly results this week.

WASHINGTON — Bleach maker Clorox said Tuesday that it has sued information technology provider Cognizant over a devastating 2023 cyberattack, alleging that the hackers pulled off the intrusion simply by asking the tech company’s staff for employees’ passwords.

Clorox was one of several major companies hit in August 2023 by the hacking group dubbed Scattered Spider, which specializes in tricking IT help desks into handing over credentials and then using that access to lock them up for ransom. The group is often described as unusually sophisticated and persistent, but in a case filed in California state court on Tuesday, Clorox said one of Scattered Spider’s hackers was able to repeatedly steal employees’ passwords simply by asking for them.

“Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques,” according to a copy of the lawsuit reviewed by Reuters. “The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over.”

Cognizant did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the suit, which was not immediately visible on the public docket of the Superior Court of Alameda County. Clorox provided Reuters with a receipt for the lawsuit from the court.

Three partial transcripts included in the lawsuit allegedly show conversations between the hacker and Cognizant support staff in which the intruder asks to have passwords reset and the support staff complies without verifying who they are talking to, for example by quizzing them on their employee identification number or their manager’s name.

“I don’t have a password, so I can’t connect,” the hacker says in one call. The agent replies, “Oh, ok. Ok. So let me provide the password to you ok?”

The 2023 hack caused $380 million in damages, Clorox said in the suit, about $50 million of which were tied to remedial costs and the rest of which were attributable to Clorox’s inability to ship products to retailers in the wake of the hack.

Clorox said the clean-up was hampered by other failures by Cognizant’s staff, including failure to de-activate certain accounts or properly restore data.

There’s a new player making waves in an industry dominated by big banks.

Imprint, the 5-year-old credit card startup, beat out banks in a competitive bidding process for a new co-branded card from online shopping platform Rakuten, CNBC has learned.

The deal is the most recent sign that Imprint is gaining traction in the co-branded credit card industry.

The New York-based startup also just raised $70 million in additional capital, boosting its valuation by 50% to $900 million less than a year from its previous round, according to Imprint CEO Daragh Murphy.

Credit card partnerships with retailers, airlines and hotels are some of the most hotly contested deals in finance. Brands often go through extensive bidding processes to select a card company, while the companies compete for the right to issue cards to millions of loyal customers. The industry’s largest players include JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Citigroup and Synchrony.

“We’re talking to Fortune 500 companies about being their partner and them choosing us over Synchrony, over Barclays, over U.S. Bank,” Murphy said in an interview. “We have to kind of walk and talk like we’re a big, important company, even though we still have a startup ethos.”

That’s why the company recently raised capital, bringing its total to $330 million, most of which is held on the firm’s balance sheet, according to Murphy. Those funds help show potential partners that Imprint has staying power, he said.

Imprint also has about $1.5 billion in credit lines from banks including Citigroup, Truist and Mizuho, which it uses to extend loans to card customers, Murphy said. The startup is behind the cards from brands including Eddie Bauer, Brooks Brothers and Turkish Airlines.

To offer its credit cards, Imprint usually partners with one of two small banks, First Electronic Bank or First Bank and Trust. Imprint handles the customer experience, including the technology and credit decisions, while using the credit card rails of regulated banks.

In the case of the Rakuten card, Imprint is relying on the American Express network, which allows users to get Amex purchase protections and other perks. It is using First Electronic Bank to help issue the cards.

“Though we’re not a regulated bank, we’re effectively building a bank,” Murphy said. “We have to do all the same things as a bank. We’re a capital markets company; we’re a compliance company; we’re a risk and credit and fraud company; we’re a technology company.”

To gain a toehold in the market for co-branded cards, which can be used anywhere credit cards are accepted, Imprint decided it would focus on a seamless digital experience for customers, Murphy said. That requires technology integration that is difficult for established players who rely on third-party companies including Fiserv to complete transactions, he said.

“The banks are in trouble because they don’t own the technology that the credit card runs on,” Murphy said. “Every credit card in your wallet, whether it’s Chase … or from Citi or Synchrony, they rely on two or three different third parties to power the technology.”

Imprint also decided to set itself apart by making it easy for customers to pay off their loans, Murphy said. Card companies including Bread Financial and Synchrony make a far larger percentage of revenue from late fees than Imprint does, he said.

“You shouldn’t have all these regressive late fees, and you shouldn’t make it hard to pay,” Murphy said. “The easier we make it to pay, the more likely you are to use the card, and the more likely you are to use the card, the better it is for everybody.”

Finally, Murphy said the company’s low customer acquisition costs allow it to fund more rewards for card users.

The new Rakuten card, for instance, offers users an extra 4% in cash back in addition to what customers earn through shopping on the online portal, capped at $7,000 in spending per year.

Users also earn 10% in cash back while dining at Rakuten’s partner restaurants, and 2% cash back on groceries and non-partner restaurants.

The previous Rakuten credit card was issued by Synchrony and discontinued in 2022.

Orange juice prices could rise by 20% to 25%, according to Johanna Foods, a small U.S. business suing the White House over tariffs threatened against Brazil.

President Donald Trump said in a July 9 letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that he would apply a 50% tariff to all imports from Brazil starting Aug. 1.

Trump said the high tariff rate was necessary because of ‘the way Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro.’

Prosecutors in Brazil have alleged that Bolsonaro was part of a scheme that included a plan to assassinate the country’s current president, who defeated him in the last election, and Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing.

Trump also said Brazil was censoring U.S.-based social media platforms and was running “unsustainable Trade Deficits” with the United States.

However, the United States has a goods trade surplus with Brazil — more than $7 billion last year, according to data from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Johanna Foods, which says it supplies nearly 75% of all private label “not from concentrate” orange juice to customers in the U.S., says those arguments do not constitute an economic emergency and therefore the president does not have the power to levy this tariff.

“The Brazil Letter does not refer to any legal or statutory authority under which the Brazil Tariff can be imposed by the President,” the company’s attorney Marc Kaplin writes in a filing.

“The Brazil Letter does not constitute a proper executive action, is not an Executive Order, does not reference or incorporate any Executive Orders or modify or amend any existing Executive Order,” the attorney continued.

The company said some of its customers include Walmart, Aldi, Wegman’s, Safeway and Albertsons.

Johanna Foods CEO Robert Facchina said the duty would result in an estimated $68 million hit, exceeding any single year of profits since the company was created in 1995.

“The Brazil Tariff will result in a significant, and perhaps prohibitive, price increase in a staple American breakfast food,” the lawsuit reads.

“The not from concentrate orange juice ingredients imported from Brazil are not reasonably available from any supplier in the United States in sufficient quantity or quality to meet the Plaintiffs’ production needs.”

Orange juice prices have already been rising across the country. Over the last year, the average price of a 16-ounce container rose 23 cents, or more than 5%, to $4.49, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Orange juice futures, the global benchmark that tracks the commodity, have also jumped recently. During the last month, they are up nearly 40%, with most of that increase coming on the heels of Trump’s threat.

Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled last month that social media companies can be held accountable for the content posted on their platforms. Elon Musk’s social media site, X, was also briefly banned last year in Brazil after Musk refused to comply with a court request to ban some accounts.

Facchina says layoffs of union manufacturing employees, administrative staff and a reduced production capacity at the company’s Flemington, New Jersey, and Spokane, Washington, facilities are near-certain should these tariffs go into effect. Johanna Foods employs almost 700 people across Washington state and New Jersey.

Brazil was the 18th-largest source of U.S. goods imports last year, with more than $42 billion worth of imports entering the country, according to U.S. International Trade Commission data.

In its legal filing, the company asks the Court of International Trade to declare that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not grant Trump the statutory authority to impose the tariffs against Brazil, and that the president has not identified a national emergency or “unusual and extraordinary threat” as required by the IEEPA law to impose the tariffs.

In response to the lawsuit, a White House spokesperson said the administration is ‘legally and fairly using tariff powers that have been granted to the executive branch by the Constitution and Congress to level the playing field for American workers and safeguard our national security.”

Elon Musk’s health tech company Neuralink labeled itself a “small disadvantaged business” in a federal filing with the U.S. Small Business Administration, shortly before a financing round valued the company at $9 billion.

Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) system, with an initial aim to help people with severe paralysis regain some independence. BCI technology broadly can translate a person’s brain signals into commands that allow them to manipulate external technologies just by thinking.

Neuralink’s filing, dated April 24, would have reached the SBA at a time when Musk was leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. At DOGE, Musk worked to slash the size of federal agencies.

MuskWatch first reported on the details of Neuralink’s April filing.

According to the SBA’s website, a designation of SDB means a company is at least 51% owned and controlled by one or more “disadvantaged” persons who must be “socially disadvantaged and economically disadvantaged.” An SDB designation can also help a business “gain preferential access to federal procurement opportunities,” the SBA website says.

The Department of Justice has previously fined companies for making false claims about their SDB status.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in addition to his other businesses like artificial intelligence startup xAI and tunneling venture The Boring Company. In 2022, Musk led the $44 billion purchase of Twitter, which he later named X before merging it with xAI.

Jared Birchall, a Neuralink executive, was listed as the contact person on the filing from April. Birchall, who also manages Musk’s money as head of his family office, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Neuralink, which incorporated in Nevada, closed a $650 million funding round in early June at a $9 billion valuation. ARK Invest, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital were among the investors. Neuralink said the fresh capital would help the company bring its technology to more patients and develop new devices that “deepen the connection between biological and artificial intelligence.”

Under Musk’s leadership at DOGE, the initiative took aim at government agencies that emphasized diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In February, for example, DOGE and Musk boasted of nixing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding for the Department of Education that would have gone towards DEI-related training grants.

The U.S. shipbuilding industry is looking for help. A South Korean company is answering the call.

Hanwha Philly Shipyard CEO David Kim, nodding to the gargantuan vessels under construction just off the Delaware River, on Wednesday offered the kind of vision that has brought some optimism back to the U.S. shipbuilding community.

“You take that level of experience, the technology that we have, the know-how, the process expertise, and so clearly, we believe we have a lot to bring to the Philly Shipyard, as well as to the U.S. maritime industrial base, in terms of modernization capacity,” he said on a walkthrough of the shipyard.

Hanwha Philly Shipyard CEO David Kim.Obtained by NBC News

Hanwha Group bought the Philly Shipyard in December for $100 million and plans to invest multiple times that amount in the yard, training over a thousand new workers and bringing in new high-tech equipment. The company hopes to build naval ships and become the first U.S. builder of specialized liquefied natural gas tankers.

Shipbuilding in the United States has been all but dormant. China, South Korea, Japan and Europe all produce far more ships than the United States, with the few shipyards still operating in the country concentrating on military ships.

Revitalizing shipbuilding has been one of the areas President Donald Trump has pointed to as part of a broader effort to bring manufacturing back to the United States — a move some see as shortsighted considering the costs associated with building the kind of gigantic modern ships that remain a core part of how goods and commodities move around the planet.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Coca-Cola in the United States will begin to be made with cane sugar, but the company did not explicitly say that was the case when it was asked later about Trump’s claim.

Trump said Wednesday afternoon on Truth Social that he had been speaking to Coca-Cola about using cane sugar in the sodas sold in the United States and that the company agreed to his idea.

‘This will be a very good move by them — You’ll see. It’s just better!’ Trump wrote in the post.

But Coca-Cola did not commit to the change when NBC News asked it later about Trump’s post.

‘We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca-Cola brand,’ a company spokesperson said in a statement. ‘More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca-Cola product range will be shared soon.’

Donald Trump drinks a Diet Coke during the ProAm of the LIV Golf Team Championship at Trump National Doral Golf Club, on Oct. 27, 2022, in Doral, Fla.Lynne Sladky / AP file

It remains unclear whether Coca-Cola agreed to Trump’s proposal or whether the beloved soda will still be made with corn syrup.

The Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again initiative, named for the social movement aligned with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pushed food companies to alter their formulations to remove ingredients like artificial dyes.

Coca-Cola produced for the U.S. market is typically sweetened with corn syrup, while the company uses cane sugar in some other countries, including Mexico and various European countries.

Coca-Cola announced in 1984 it was going to “significantly increase” the amount of corn syrup it was using in its U.S. products, The New York Times reported at the time.

Coca-Cola said it would use corn syrup to sweeten bottled and canned Coke, as well as caffeine-free Coke, but left itself “flexibility” to use other sweeteners, like sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, the Times reported.

Kennedy has criticized how much sugar is consumed in the American diet and has said updated dietary guidelines released this summer will advise people to ‘eat whole food.’

Trump has been known to enjoy Coca-Cola products. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Diet Coke button, which allows him to order the soda on demand, has joined him in the Oval Office for both of his terms.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday it was ‘highly unlikely’ he would fire Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve.

His statements, made in the Oval Office, come less than 24 hours after telling a room full of Republican lawmakers that he was considering doing so.

“No, we’re not planning on doing anything,” Trump told reporters in response to a question about whether he wanted to fire Powell.

“I don’t rule out anything but I think it’s highly unlikely unless he has to leave for fraud,” Trump said, while criticizing Powell’s management of a Fed renovation project that the White House had recently floated as a pretext for removing the Fed chair.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on June 25. Kent Nishimura / Getty Images

The president had asked GOP lawmakers late Tuesday how they felt about firing the Fed chair, according to a senior White House official. They expressed approval for firing him. The president then indicated he likely would soon but that no final decision had been made.

Still, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., posted on X on Tuesday night that Powell’s firing was ‘imminent,’ something that prompted a sell-off in stock futures before Wednesday’s market open. By noon Wednesday, major stock indexes had recovered to trade almost flat on the day.

CBS News first reported the meeting. A Fed official declined comment to CNBC on the report about the Trump meeting Tuesday, which came after Republicans blocked a procedural vote on crypto legislation that the president favors.

Trump and other White House figures have launched a multipronged attack on Powell to push the central bank to lower its key borrowing rate. Most recently, they have blasted Powell over renovations to the Fed’s Washington headquarters, raising suspicion that Trump could try to remove him for cause.

A recent Supreme Court decision indicated that the president does not have the authority to remove Fed officials at will.

In a CNBC interview Wednesday, Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, repeated that “I don’t see” Trump firing Powell. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that he didn’t expect Trump to move in that direction.

However, Luna, who on Tuesday joined with other party members in blocking the crypto initiative, said on X that a move against Powell is forthcoming.

“Hearing Jerome Powell is getting fired! From a very serious source,” she said, later adding, “I’m 99% sure firing is imminent.”

Consumer prices rose in June as President Donald Trump’s tariffs began to slowly work their way through the U.S. economy.

The consumer price index, a broad-based measure of goods and services costs, increased 0.3% on the month, putting the 12-month inflation rate at 2.7%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. The numbers were right in line with the Dow Jones consensus, though the annual rate is the highest since February.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core inflation picked up 0.2% on the month, with the annual rate moving to 2.9%, with the annual rate in line with estimates. The monthly level was slightly below the outlook for a 0.3% gain.

A worker prices produce at a grocery store in San Francisco, California, US, on Friday, June 7, 2024.David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Prior to June, inflation had been on a generally downward slope for the year, with headline CPI at a 3% annual rate back in January and progressing gradually slower in the subsequent months despite fears that Trump’s trade war would drive prices higher.

While the evidence in June was mixed on how much influence tariffs had over prices, there were signs that the duties are having an impact.

Vehicle prices fell on the month, with prices on new vehicles down 0.3% and used car and trucks tumbling 0.7%. However, tariff-sensitive apparel prices increased 0.4%. Household furnishings, which also are influenced by tariffs, increased 1% for the month.

Shelter prices increased just 0.2% for the month, but the BLS said the category was still the largest contributor to the overall CPI gain. The index rose 3.8% from a year ago. Within the category, a measurement of what homeowners feel they could receive if they rented their properties increased 0.3%. However, lodging away from home slipped 2.9%.

Elsewhere, food prices increased 0.3% for the month, putting the annual gain at 3%, while energy prices reversed a loss in May and rose 0.9%, though they are still down marginally from a year ago. Medical care services were up 0.6% while transportation services edged higher by 0.2%.

With the rise in prices, inflation-adjusted hourly earnings fell 0.1% in June, the BLS said in a separate release. Real earnings increased 1% on an annual basis.

Markets largely took the inflation report in stride. Stock market indexes were mixed while Treasury yields were mostly negative.

Amid the previously muted inflation ratings, Trump has been urging the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which it has not done since December. The president has insisted that tariffs are not aggravating inflation, and has contended that the Fed’s refusal to ease is raising the costs the U.S. has to pay on its burgeoning debt and deficit problem.

Central bankers, led by Chair Jerome Powell, have refused to budge. They insist that the U.S. economy is in a strong enough position now that the Fed can afford to wait to see the impact tariffs will have on inflation. Trump in turn has called on Powell to resign and is certain to name someone else to the job when the chair’s term expires in May 2026.

Markets expect the Fed to stay on hold when it meets at the end of July and then cut by a quarter percentage point in September.

The Federal Reserve has brought in its inspector general to review a building expansion that has drawn fire from the White House, according to a source familiar with the issue.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell asked for the review, following blistering criticism of the project, initially pegged at $2.5 billion but hit by cost overruns that have brought accusations from President Donald Trump and other administration officials of “fundamental mismanagement.”

“The idea that the Fed could print money and then spend $2.5 billion on a building without real congressional oversight, it didn’t occur to the people that framed the Federal Reserve Act,” Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’ve got a real problem of oversight and excess spending.”

The inspector general serves the Fed and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is responsible for looking for fraud, waste and abuse. Powell’s request was reported first by Axios.

In a letter posted to social media last week, Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, also slammed the project, which involves two of the Fed’s three Washington, D.C., buildings including its main headquarters known as the Eccles Building.

Vought, during a CNBC interview Friday, likened the building to the Palace of Versailles in France and charged that Powell was guilty of “fiscal mismanagement” at the Fed.

For its part, the central bank has posted a detailed frequently asked questions page on its site, highlighting key details and explaining why some of the specifications were changed or “scaled back or eliminated” at least in part due to higher-than-expected construction costs.

“The project also remediates safety issues by removing hazardous materials such as asbestos and lead and will bring the buildings up to modern code,” the page explains. “While periodic work has been done to keep the buildings occupiable, neither building has seen a comprehensive renovation since they were constructed.”

The Fed is not a taxpayer-funded institution and is therefore not under the OMB’s supervision. It has worked with the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington on the project, but also noted on the FAQ page that it “does not regard any of those changes as warranting further review.”

In separate comments, former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, speaking Sunday on Fox News, called the renovation costs “outrageous” and said it was more evidence the central bank “has lost its way.” Warsh is considered a strong contender to succeed Powell when the latter’s term as chair expires in May 2026.