Starting this fall, the check won’t be in the mail, at least from the federal government.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week directing the Treasury Department to cease issuing and receiving paper checks for all payments, including intragovernmental remittances, benefits, vendor payments, and tax refunds by Sept. 30.

Paper, Bounced

All executive departments and agencies were asked to transition to Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) methods, including direct deposit, prepaid card accounts, and other digital options. There will be some exceptions, including for those who don’t have access to banking services or electronic payments and under certain circumstances where they are necessary, like emergency disbursements or national security activities.

“It’s something that should’ve been done 25, 30 years ago,” President Trump said as he signed the order, part of a pair issued Tuesday aimed at modernizing and centralizing the Treasury Department.

Paper checks have become passé. Usage has been in steady decline for decades. A 2024 Federal Reserve study of trends in noncash payments shows that the number of checks used fell by more than 70% from 2000 to 2021.

However, percentages tend to obscure the very real people in the margins who stand to be affected. For example:

• In the 2024 tax season, 90% of the 104,866,000 total refunds were via direct deposit, according to Internal Revenue Service data. That suggests some 9.9 million people/entities received their refunds via paper check. (For context, that’s more than the population of New York, the largest city in the US.)
• The vast majority of Social Security beneficiaries, or 99.3%, accept funds via direct deposit, but a significant number of Americans, or 448,912 people, still receive checks, according to Social Security Administration data.

A part of Trump’s order directs Treasury to develop a public awareness campaign in coordination with heads of agencies to let people know about the switch and guide them on how to access and set up digital payment options.

Risky business: Modernizing payments can be a net good — speedier delivery of funds and eliminating a vector for potential fraud, for instance. But embracing digital payment technology comes with user pitfalls of its own, including new vectors for fraud — just run a Google search and see what pops up.

AI cloud computing provider CoreWeave uncorked the champagne on its Nasdaq debut Friday, but the end result was as flat as a two-day-old soda fountain Pepsi.

Markets were left with no gains, no losses and a lot of questions about where the AI boom is headed.

The Lease of Their Problems

CoreWeave started out in 2017 as a crypto miner, but ditched the sector altogether in 2022 to focus on data centers. The Livingston, NJ-based company was the dictionary definition of right place, right time: As a wise early adopter of Nvidia’s graphics chips, it was ideally positioned to capitalize on the boom in demand for processing that can handle complex AI applications.

Amid last year’s feverish AI goldrush, CoreWeave’s revenue rose more than eightfold to $1.9 billion. But then come the buts: 77% of that revenue came from its two biggest customers, one of them Microsoft, leaving analysts worried about its exposure. (Before this month’s IPO, the company struck a $12 billion, five-year deal with OpenAI to diversify its income). Coreweave also leases its more than two dozen data centers and some of its equipment, leaving it with operating liabilities of $2.6 billion.

So while the $1.5 billion raised Friday in Coreweave’s share sale marked the biggest US tech IPO since 2021, the pricing of $40 a share was well below the expected range of $47 to $55. CoreWeave also sold 23% fewer shares than first planned. And when those shares ended Friday right back where they started, at the $40 IPO price, broader questions about the AI economy were top of mind as traders headed off for the weekend:

• The data center building boom has already faced pressure this year with the debut of smaller and more efficient AI models that don’t require as much computing power. Even Microsoft, CoreWeave’s top customer, backed out of new data center projects in the US and Europe last week. At the same time, Joseph Tsai, the chairman of Chinese tech giant Alibaba warned the data center business is a potential bubble.
• Investors, spooked by inflation and tariff risks, have already been dumping riskier tech assets amid tariff volatility and inflation fears, with the Nasdaq 100 down 2.6% on Friday and more than 9% this year. While markets had hoped for more IPOs this year, that hasn’t materialized and, as far as tech firms go, California AI company Cerebras’ public offering was delayed because it’s still awaiting regulatory approval over an investment from an Abu Dhabi-based cloud company.

Waiting in the Wings: While CoreWeave’s slow start isn’t the best news for the slumbering tech IPO market, there are big names willing to test the markets. Buy-now-pay-later company Klarna filed to go public earlier this month after increasing its revenue over 20% last year to $2.8 billion and turning a profit. Meanwhile, social media platform Discord, software company Figma and AI infrastructure company Databricks are all weighing public debuts.

How’s that for a Trump bump?

Three months into the new administration, Fox News has emerged as the leading cable news network, by far, in terms of overall viewership. It’s been enough to lure back a whole host of previously Fox-skeptical advertisers, according to a recent Financial Times analysis.

In the Foxhole

Fox News’ dominance is undeniable. The network has averaged 3 million viewers during its primetime programming this year, up roughly 50% from a year ago and demolishing the roughly 1.1 million and 553,000 average primetime viewership earned by rivals MSNBC and CNN, respectively. Scratch that. Fox News has had such a strong year, its real rivals aren’t the fellow cable news networks — it’s claimed the 861 top cable news broadcasts since the end of the election, according to an AdWeek analysis of Nielsen data — but the broadcast networks like CBS and NBC. And in the period between Inauguration Day and March 10, Fox actually drew more primetime viewers than either free network player, according to the FT.

Which makes it no surprise that advertisers are ready to hop back into the Foxhole:

• Since the election, the conservative news channel has scored 125 new blue-chip advertising sponsors. Meanwhile, companies such as Netflix, Amazon, and JPMorgan have returned to running ads on Fox airwaves for the first time in two years.
• “The landscape has changed dramatically,” Jeff Collins, president of Fox ad sales, told the FT. “In today’s fragmented landscape, this audience is hard to ignore,” adding that the network has seen an unusual increase in viewership since the election, which has tended to mark a peak in previous cycles.

Streamlined: Suffice to say, Fox is one of the few players still experiencing considerable growth in the cable industry. But it has its eyes on the future as well. The company plans to launch a yet-to-be-named streaming service by the end of the year, and in late February, it hired Apple TV+ veteran Pete Distad to run it. While details are scarce, it would appear to be a direct competitor to streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, and would exist simultaneously with Fox Nation, the news-focused streaming service, and Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming service Fox already operates. And you thought the streaming wars were over.