Monday Dispatches: Power, Money and the Price of Everything

Monday opened with a $1.8 billion fund that the Justice Department calls justice and Democrats call a slush fund — and the gap between those two descriptions tells you almost everything about where American institutions stand right now. Elsewhere, the largest utility deal in history closed quietly, fueled not by electricity demand of old but by the insatiable appetite of AI data centers. America is selling its gas to the world and asking its own citizens to pay for the privilege. A Swiss bank has grown so large it has outrun the country that hosts it. And Wall Street is quietly rewriting how corporate Europe borrows money. Five stories, one throughline: the rules of how power and capital move are being rewritten in real time.

The Justice Department Creates a $1.8 Billion 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' — and Washington Erupts

President Trump dropped his family's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for the Justice Department creating what it is calling the Anti-Weaponization Fund, a $1.776 billion pot of taxpayer money designed to compensate anyone who can demonstrate they were targeted by the US government for political or ideological reasons. The fund, announced by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, will draw from the DOJ's perpetual judgment fund — meaning no Congressional appropriation is required — and will stop processing claims no later than December 15, 2028. The settlement also dropped two administrative claims by Trump including those related to the Mar-a-Lago raid and what his team described as the Russia-collusion hoax. The plaintiffs in the original case, Trump himself, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and the Trump Organization, will receive a formal apology but no direct monetary payment.

The political reaction was immediate and fierce. Democrats and government watchdog groups called the arrangement the most brazen act of self-dealing in the history of the presidency. CREW president Donald Sherman said Trump used nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to pay off his friends and allies, including potentially those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it a giant slush fund for right-wing political violence and subversion. The DOJ insisted the fund carries no partisan requirements to file a claim, but critics noted that terms like weaponization and lawfare have been used almost exclusively by Trump and his allies to describe criminal charges related to January 6, his classified documents case and the 2020 election conspiracy charges, all of which were dismissed after he returned to office. Legal experts flagged a further anomaly: Trump's lawyers filed the dismissal of the IRS case in a way that appeared designed to block the presiding federal judge from even analyzing whether the original suit was legally valid.

NextEra Buys Dominion Energy for $67 Billion in the Largest Utility Deal in History

NextEra Energy, the Florida-based renewable and nuclear power giant that already operates more wind and solar capacity than any company on earth, announced Monday it would acquire Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion — the largest utility acquisition in US history by a significant margin. Dominion is the electricity provider for northern Virginia, the site of the world's largest concentration of data centers, including facilities owned by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Meta. The deal unites the two companies best positioned to benefit from the most consequential shift in US electricity demand in decades: the insatiable appetite of artificial intelligence infrastructure for power. Data center electricity consumption in the US is forecast to grow by 5.3% in 2027 alone, and northern Virginia's grid is already operating at maximum strain.

For NextEra, the acquisition is a calculated bet that the AI power demand wave is not a temporary spike but a structural transformation of the US energy market. The combined company would control generation, transmission and distribution assets serving tens of millions of customers while operating one of the largest clean energy fleets in the world. NextEra has consistently argued that renewables and nuclear are the only technologies capable of meeting AI-scale demand at the speed required, and the Dominion deal gives it the grid infrastructure to prove that thesis in real time. Regulatory approval will require sign-off from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and multiple state public utility commissions, a process expected to take between 12 and 18 months. Dominion shareholders will receive NextEra stock in the transaction; Dominion CEO Robert Blue is expected to become a senior executive at the combined company.

The World Can't Get Enough US Energy. Americans Are Paying the Price.

The United States is the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, a position it reached by building more than a dozen export terminals along the Gulf Coast over the past decade and ramping domestic gas production to a record 120.2 billion cubic feet per day in the first quarter of 2026. US LNG exports hit a record 11.7 million metric tons in March, driven by the closure of Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City following Iranian strikes and the broader disruption to Middle Eastern energy flows caused by the war. The global price premium for LNG has kept US export terminals running at or beyond nameplate capacity, with facilities like Plaquemines LNG operating as much as 40% above their original design output. The EIA forecasts US LNG exports will average 17 billion cubic feet per day in 2026 and 18.2 billion in 2027, cementing the country's position as the dominant global supplier.

The catch is one that utilities and consumer advocates have been warning about for years: when American gas companies sell to the world at global prices, domestic consumers pay a share of the cost. The EIA found that higher natural gas prices in 2025 and 2026 are the result of strong export growth that persistently outpaces US production. American households paid an average of $124 more on their utility bills in the first nine months of 2025 than in the same period the year before, according to Public Citizen. The EIA projects the Henry Hub benchmark price will rise to approximately $4.60 per million British thermal units by 2027 as export demand outpaces production growth. The political tension is acute: Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to cut energy bills in half within 12 months. Electricity prices are rising at twice the rate of overall inflation. The administration has responded by approving more LNG export capacity, not less. Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen put it plainly: we have exited the era of low natural gas prices and entered the era of higher gas prices.

UBS: The Bank That Outgrew Its Own Country

Switzerland is a country of nine million people and one of the world's most stable financial systems, built on a century of banking tradition, discretion and conservative regulation. UBS is a bank with $1.6 trillion in assets, a figure that exceeds the size of the entire Swiss economy. That imbalance, which existed before UBS absorbed the wreckage of Credit Suisse in 2023, has now reached a point of public confrontation between the institution and the government that is supposed to regulate it. Swiss regulators have proposed tightening capital requirements for systemically important banks in the aftermath of the Credit Suisse collapse, a set of rules that would require UBS to hold significantly more capital against its overseas subsidiaries. UBS has pushed back with unusual force and unusual publicity, arguing that the proposed framework would impose requirements so onerous that they would materially impair the bank's ability to compete globally and would damage Switzerland's standing as a financial center.

The confrontation goes to the heart of a question that no small country with an outsized bank has ever satisfactorily answered: can a state of nine million people credibly regulate, bail out if necessary, and ultimately contain the risks posed by an institution whose balance sheet dwarfs its own economy? Switzerland learned in 2008 that the answer to that question, when it involves UBS, is not obviously yes. It learned again in 2023 that the same answer applies to Credit Suisse. The proposed capital rules are an attempt to ensure that a third crisis does not require another emergency intervention. UBS's argument, stripped of its diplomatic language, is that the price of those rules is too high for the bank and therefore too high for Switzerland. The Swiss government and regulators must now decide whether that argument is right, or whether allowing a bank to outgrow its own country's regulatory capacity is the greater risk.

Citi and BlackRock's HPS Strike a €15 Billion Private Credit Deal, Reshaping European Lending

Citigroup and HPS Investment Partners, the private credit arm of BlackRock which manages $381 billion in assets, announced Monday a €15 billion Private Capital Program to expand direct lending across Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and eventually the Middle East over a five-year term. The deal is structured around a division of labor that reflects the new architecture of global credit: Citi, with its deep corporate relationships and origination network, will source the lending opportunities; HPS will provide the capital and carry the credit risk. The program will focus on sub-investment grade debt instruments for corporate and private equity-backed borrowers, a segment where traditional bank lending has been retreating and private credit has been filling the gap with growing speed.

The deal is the latest and among the largest in a wave of bank-private credit partnerships that is quietly reshaping how European companies borrow money. Traditional banks, constrained by capital requirements and the cost of holding loans on their balance sheets, have been ceding mid-market and leveraged lending ground to private credit funds for a decade. Partnerships like the Citi-HPS program institutionalize that shift: banks generate fee income from origination without the capital burden of ownership; private credit funds gain access to proprietary deal flow they could not source independently. Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Société Générale have all launched similar arrangements with private credit managers in the past 18 months. The Citi-HPS deal, at €15 billion over five years, sets a new scale benchmark for the category and signals that the convergence of traditional banking and private credit in Europe has passed the point of being an emerging trend ,it is now the dominant model.