Good morning. Supply-chain finance disclosure can give a distorted picture of a company’s liquidity; Fed governor Stephen Miran scolds central bankers who defended Jerome Powell; and AI can’t touch these skilled trade jobs.

Some popular financial-engineering techniques are back in the spotlight.

Last fall’s collapse of auto-parts supplier First Brands has brought renewed scrutiny to tools known as supply-chain finance, my colleague Jonathan Weil writes. There is also more transparency about them now than just a few years ago because of new disclosure requirements.

Weil’s column caught my eye as I’ve reported on companies’ disclosure terms and size of supply-chain-financing programs in compliance with the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Critics have said the disclosures don’t go far enough. My CFO Journal colleague, Kristin Broughton, has covered the shrinking programs at some of these companies.

Auto-parts retailers provide some of the clearest examples of how such machinations burnish companies’ numbers. Those companies include Genuine Parts, O’Reilly Automotive and AutoZone, which had been customers of First Brands.

Other S&P 500 companies with supply-chain-finance obligations that exceed trailing free cash flow include:

• HP
• Ball
• Mondelez
• Stanley Black & Decker

📆 Earnings

• BlackRock
• Goldman Sachs
• J.B. Hunt Transport Services
• Morgan Stanley

Ripple effects from President Trump’s attack on Fed Chair Jerome Powell continue, with the latest voice taking a contrarian tone.

Fed governor Stephen Miran, who was appointed by Trump, said that a letter in Powell’s support signed by prominent central-bank officials from around the world was an overstep. Miran made his remarks during a Q&A session with a moderator at an economics conference in Athens on Wednesday.

What he said: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for central bankers to get involved in non-monetary-policy issues in their own country, and I think it’s even less appropriate in other countries.”

• U.S. Economy Best Served by Independent Federal Reserve, Fed’s Kashkari Says

📰 Other headlines

• Meta Lays Off 1,500 People in Metaverse Division
• Ford Suspends Factory Worker for Heckling Trump
• Jamie Dimon Seemed to Have Trump Figured Out—Until This Week
• More Than a Million Verizon Users Experience Outages
• California Attorney General Investigating xAI Over Grok’s Deepfakes
• Exclusive: OpenAI Forges Multibillion-Dollar Computing Partnership With Cerebras
• FTC Finalizes Order With GM, OnStar Over Data Collection Practices
• Tesla’s Full Self-Driving System Will Only Be Available Via Subscription, Musk Says
• AI Can’t Touch These Skilled Trade Jobs. If Only Enough Humans Would Fill Them.
• Inside the Mad Dash to Save Saks, America’s Last Luxury Retailer
• Exclusive: Two Fitness Companies Are Merging With Jared Kushner’s Backing
• UPS Crash Probe Turns to Jet Part With Past Problems

Paramount Skydance, a Los Angeles-based media and entertainment company, named technology executive and current board member Dennis Cinelli its next CFO, an appointment that comes as the company is embroiled in a bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery. Cinelli, a former Uber executive who was most recently CFO at Scale AI, will take on his new role effective Thursday. He succeeds Andrew Warren, who has served as interim CFO since June. Cinelli’s past roles include head of mobility for the U.S. and Canada at Uber, where he helped expand the business ahead of its initial public offering.

—Amira McKee contributed to today’s Ledger.

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