An investigation in the U.S. House of Representatives and a hearing in the Senate will examine whether financial regulators during the administration of former President Joe Biden deliberately cut off crypto industry leaders and others from the banking system in an inappropriate use of authority.

“Debanking is un-American — every legal business deserves to be treated the same regardless of their political beliefs,” said Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who took over the gavel earlier this month and has scheduled a February 5 hearing on debanking. “Unfortunately, under Operation Chokepoint 2.0, Biden regulators abused their power and forced financial institutions to cut off services to digital asset firms, political figures, and conservative-aligned businesses and individuals.”

Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is the name Republican lawmakers and the digital assets industry have been using for the systemic severing of crypto insiders from U.S. banks, in reference to an earlier era’s Operation Chokepoint — a government-sanctioned effort to reduce risk in banking by encouraging the lenders to back away from legal but otherwise risky businesses.

Delving into the struggle of crypto executives and businesses to maintain banking relationships, the House Oversight Committee is “investigating whether this debanking practice originates from the financial institutions themselves or from either implicit or explicit pressure from government regulators,” according to a letter the committee chairman, Representative James Comer, sent on Friday to founders and CEOs of several crypto companies and organizations, including Coinbase, Lightswap and Uniswap Labs.

The challenge of pinning the lack of banking options entirely on the government is that some financial institutions may have made decisions based on their own risk appetites or business plans that deliberately steered clear of crypto interests. And banking regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were public in their guidance that regulated banks seeking to do crypto business would face restrictions and additional scrutiny from the agencies.

However, a Coinbase pursuit of private FDIC communications with banks demonstrated that the agency directed them to stop pursuing digital assets services until the regulator had specific rules in place, which it wasn’t developing.

“We are grateful to assist in the thorough investigation of this pernicious practice,” said Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, which also received the House committee’s letter probing the trend.

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have been focusing their own investigation requests on President Donald Trump’s recently launched meme coin, $TRUMP. He’s been accused of using the presidency to rack up billions of dollars, and they cite the token as a potential risk for dangerous conflicts of interest.

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The televised image of Donald Trump towered over delegates in a conference hall in the ski resort of Davos on Thursday, embodying the outsized impact the new president has had just a few days into his second term in the Oval Office.

Prime ministers, business leaders and the president of the European Central Bank had queued up to see him address the World Economic Forum, his first speech to a global audience since returning to the White House. One attendee joked about fetching some popcorn for the show.

Trump did not hold back, provoking nervous laughter as he issued a series of demands and ultimatums to allies and rivals alike.

Saudi Arabia and other producers must cut oil prices, global central banks “immediately” needed to slash interest rates, and foreign companies must ramp up investments in US factories or face tariffs. The EU — which came in for particular opprobrium — must stop hitting big American technology companies with competition fines.

“We are going to be demanding respect from other nations,” the president said. His predecessor had “allowed other nations to take advantage of the US. We can’t allow that to happen any more.” 

Trump’s demands came amid a frenetic first week in office in which the president launched a blitzkrieg of executive orders and announcements intended not just to reshape the state but also assert America’s economic and commercial supremacy. Tariffs of up to 25 per cent could be slapped on Canada and Mexico as early as February 1, riding roughshod over the trade deal Trump himself negotiated in his first term. 

China could face levies of up to 100 per cent if Beijing failed to agree on a deal to sell at least 50 per cent of the TikTok app to a US company, while the EU was told to purchase more American oil if it wanted to avoid tariffs. Underscoring the new American unilateralism, Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization, as well as exiting the Paris climate accord for a second time. 

Strikingly, Trump reached for an obscure, 90-year-old provision in the US tax code to threaten a doubling of tax rates for foreign nationals and companies if their home countries were deemed to have imposed “discriminatory” taxes on American multinationals. 

This proposal throws a “hand grenade” at international tax policymaking, says Niels Johannesen, director of the Oxford university Centre for Business Taxation at Saïd Business School. The move suggests a determination to “shape other countries’ tax policy through coercion rather than through co-operation”, he adds.

The plans unveiled this week by the new president raise the spectre of a multi-front economic war as Trump uses the power of America’s resurgent economy to rebalance the international order in his favour.

The key question, say investors and policymakers, is whether this amounts to a more intense version of the transactional, dealmaking approach seen in Trump’s first term, or a shift towards unbridled unilateralism, where a White House unbound by the constraints of international law cajoles and intimidates foreign governments and businesses.

“He’s weaponising everything: trade, tax and energy. I’m worried that finance will get weaponised too,” says the head of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. “Most people are betting that he cares about the stock market — that’s the only check. That and the fact that he has said he wants to be a peacemaker.”

In Davos, leading US executives were eager to cheer Trump’s agenda — suggesting there is little anxiety within the corporate sector about the US potentially rupturing the global rules-based order. 

Tariffs are an “economic tool. That’s it,” said Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, in a CNBC interview at Davos this week. “If it’s a little inflationary, but it’s good for national security, so be it. Get over it.”

The US stock market rallied this week as investors digested the prospect of an easing of regulations governing banks and high-technology companies, as well as the announcement of a massive $100bn artificial intelligence infrastructure project launched by OpenAI and SoftBank. By the end of the week (as of late Friday afternoon in New York), the S&P 500 index was up 1.8 per cent. 

“Anecdotally, people talk to CEOs and say they all feel super-positive,” says Mahmood Pradhan, head of global macro at Amundi Investment Institute.

“If I ask myself what justifies the animal spirits, the banking deregulation stuff is real and the prospect of lower corporate taxes is real.” 

Yet, outside the US, the threat of a widening array of trade barriers and conflicts over tax policies is weighing on the economic outlook. Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s economics commissioner, says a fracturing of global trade would be of particular worry to economies like Europe, where trade accounts for more than a fifth of GDP.

He cites IMF estimates showing that extreme geoeconomic fragmentation in trade could wipe out 7 per cent of global GDP over the medium run. “If this global economic fragmentation settles in — and there is a risk of that — it is going to have sizeable negative economic consequences.”  

Even while bracing for a tariff onslaught, though, some European policymakers claim to see potential upsides.

“It is a new environment which is definitely less comfortable for Europe, but which also offers a lot of opportunities,” says Alexander de Croo, Belgium’s prime minister. “Europe can show there that we have stability and that you are in a predictable environment where investment can take place.”

European officials also say they could benefit from deeper trade ties with other countries that may be squeezed out of US markets. “Countries are coming to us because they want to diversify away from the US,” says a senior EU official.

“We need to keep on being open but not being naive,” says Spanish economy minister Carlos Cuerpo. “We need to have our companies competing under equal footing, equal conditions and a level playing field with respect to others. That was the case with China. That will need to be the case also with the US.”

While the US and Europe have long railed against Chinese trade practices, Beijing was quick this week to present itself as an upholder of the global, rules-based order rather than its nemesis. 

Speaking the day after Trump was inaugurated, Chinese vice-premier Ding Xuexiang insisted that economic globalisation “is not a ‘you lose, I win’, zero-sum game”. The largest countries of the world needed to “lead by example” he said, praising international bodies including the World Trade Organization and UN. 

The irony of China presenting itself as a free-trading paragon while Trump seeks to extract concessions from his closest allies by brute economic force was not lost on Davos attendees watching Ding’s performance. 

Despite the barrage of measures and statements fired out by the White House this week, most global policymakers are taking a wait-and-see approach to Trump’s aggressive transactionalism, rather than leaping to conclusions about the longer-term ramifications for the global economic system.

“Why put my cards on the table before he has?” says the senior EU official.

Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary, acknowledges there remain “lots of questions” about the president’s approach. “Is it about leverage around negotiations? Is it about revenue-raising in terms of tariffs?” The UK, he says, will continue to argue for a “much more open, global trading economy.”

There is little question, however, that Trump is signalling a significant escalation in how he will wield trade as a weapon compared with his first term.

“Those around Trump have had time to build up a systematic, methodological approach for protectionist trade policy and it shows,” says former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate. The approach will be to build up a case file of “evidence” against countries, she says, and then use it to extract concessions in areas of both economic and foreign policy.

The question remains how far Trump is willing to go. The danger of trampling on the rules-based order, says Jeromin Zettelmeyer, head of the Bruegel think-tank, is a complete breakdown in the diplomatic and legal channels for settling international disputes.

If Trump were to pull out of a wider range of international frameworks, such as the WTO or the IMF, he warns, then the arrangements that help govern the global economy could get “substantively destroyed”. 

The extreme case, he adds, is that “they really do a Putin” — namely by violating the sanctity of international borders. Taking control of Greenland or the Panama Canal by force, as Trump has threatened, would amount to “the reintroduction of the law of the jungle”.

Michael Strain, director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank, questions whether Trump will reverse the “fundamental forces” that drive global economic integration — and whether the president even wants to do so. But regardless, he says, the uncertainty about his true intentions “makes it hard for business to plan, creates a chilling effect on investment, and creates tensions with our allies.”

Some caution against being awestruck by Trump’s threats or his espousal of capitalism without limits, because his agenda was so incoherent.

“What we are seeing is huge doses of American hubris,” says Arancha González, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po. “We are blinded by the intensity of all the issues put on the table and by Trump’s conviction. But we are not looking at the contradictions. It’s like we are all on an orange drug.”

Additional reporting by Harriet Agnew in Davos and Peter Foster in London

Data visualisation by Keith Fray

Companies that want to build AI voice into their products are rushing to work with ElevenLabs, the startup that develops synthetic voice technology like voice cloning and dubbing tools. Now ElevenLabs is turning up the volume on its business with a huge series C raise, just a year after a sizable series B.

The New York startup has closed a Series C of $250 million at a valuation of between $3 billion and $3.3 billion, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. The round is being led by ICONIQ Growth, several people said. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the lead investors in the company’s $80 million Series B in January, 2024, was another name mentioned as a potential investor in this round. ElevenLabs, ICONIQ Growth and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to our request for comment. 

For months, investors have been scrambling to invest in ElevenLabs after a blockbuster period of growth for the company, with its AI audio technology getting used everywhere, TechCrunch was the first to report in October.

On the back of a strong funnel of business, sources tell us that ElevenLabs was initially looking for funding at a $4 billion valuation. But a $3 billion valuation is still triple the unicorn valuation that the company landed with that year-ago Series B. One source said the company has been preparing to announce the round this month so official confirmation may come any day now.

ElevenLabs’ fundraise comes after a strong few years both for the company and the wider industry. The company was founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski who respectively previously worked at Palantir and Google. Childhood friends from Poland, the pair were inspired by the poor quality of dubbing in the American videos they watched growing up, and they saw an opportunity to use AI to develop something better. 

Their idea was a clear example of right idea-right time. As generative AI services have become more advanced, multimedia has come to the fore, and there has been a growing interest in building applications that include sound and video alongside GenAI text services.

ElevenLabs released its first beta product in January 2023, and by the time it had raised its Series A of $19 million in June 2023, it had gone viral.

Some of that growth has not been without controversy, with stories of fake news being created with its tech. But as ElevenLabs has developed a raft of detection tools and other safeguards to prevent misuse, it has emerged as a key partner for enabling speech-based services for an increasingly high-profile number of businesses. 

Its technology, usable via an API and priced at a number of usage tiers, covers a wide range of use cases: translating text to speech (in multiple languages), cloning voices, changing voices in an audio track, creating entirely new voices; alongside other voice editing tools.

Customers include other technology platforms such as Syntheisa, the text-to-video startup that works with businesses and itself announced a fundraise of $180 million earlier this month; publishing giants like Washington Post, Harper Collins and Bertelsmann, which says 36 businesses are using ElevenLabs’ tech in their content creation; and gaming companies, among others.

Usage has led to a rapid rise in sales. In October, sources told us that ElevenLabs’ annualized recurring revenue (ARR) had grown from $25 million in 2023 to $80 million. Two people in November estimated that its ARR was likely closer to $90 million. If the latter figure is accurate, a $4 billion valuation would have put its valuation multiple at 44 times ARR; in the end it seems the deal has been done at a slightly more moderate multiple of 37 times ARR.

For some context on that number, these are not the most exuberant valuations at the moment: investors appear willing to pay as much as 50 times ARR for the fastest-growing generative AI companies. 

Anysphere, the maker of a popular AI-coding assistant Cursor, has received multiple unsolicited offers valuing the company at about $2.5 billion, which translates to about 52 times ARR, TechCrunch reported in November. The company has seen its revenue grow from $4 million annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in April to $4 million a month as of last month. (ARR is commonly calculated by multiplying the latest monthly revenue by 12.) However, by the time the deal, which was led by Thrive at a valuation of $2.5 billion, was announced earlier this month, Anysphere had reached $100 million in ARR, The New York Times reported. That implies that the company was valued at 25 times ARR.

ElevenLabs’ more temperate multiple may be a function of the company’s competitors, which include a plethora of startups but also giants like Google and OpenAI.

Other past backers of the company have included Sequoia, Credo Ventures, Concept Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Disney, and nearly two dozen high-profile angel investors.

The council of one of Britain’s most famous cities is drawing up plans to charge residents a 200 per cent council tax bill in effort to generate more revenue for the local authority.

Oxford City Council has approved plans to double council tax charges on second homes in a move aimed at making the city “a fairer place to live” in a move than will impact hundreds of households.

Oxford City Council is preparing to hike council tax on second homes

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The council had initially planned to implement the charge from April 2024, following its initial approval in February 2023.

However, these plans faced a setback in late December 2023 when council officers received guidance from the Government.

This delay came after officials were informed they needed to provide affected homeowners with 12 months’ notice following the legislation’s royal assent.

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As a result, this requirement pushed the implementation date back to April 2025, as the legislation did not receive royal assent until October 2023.

Council tax bills are expected to go up this year

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Speaking after the committee’s approval, Oxford City Council’s deputy leader Ed Turner emphasised the fairness aspect of the new measure.

“We really want to make Oxford a fairer place to live,” he said. Turner added: “If people have a second home in Oxford, it’s only right that they make an appropriate contribution for local services.”

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The deputy leader also highlighted the council’s eagerness to implement the charges, stating: “We need this money, and I think we will be charging from the first moment that we legally can.”

Oxford is not the only local authority floating raising council taxes on specific types of property owners.

Wandsworth Borough Council, where residents are known for paying the lowest council tax in the country, are preparing to target foreign investors who are buying London properties and leaving them vacant.

As of April 1, the Labour-run council will charge a 100 per cent council tax premium on homes which have not been lived in for 12 months.

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Wandsworth is one of the wealthier boroughs in London but is looking to raise more council tax revenue

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Property owners who do not reside in the property for five years will have to pay 200 per cent more, while those who not live in the home for five years will be charged a 300 per cent penalty.

Those who are second home owners, who have furnished their property despite it not being their primary residence, will be hit with a double council tax bill.

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Under previous tax rules, a property in Wandsworth needed to be empty for two years before being hit with a 100 per cent council tax rate.

GB News has contacted Oxford City Council for comment.