Hwang was found guilty of fraud in a case that cost Wall Street banks billions of dollars in losses.

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US president-elect nominates Lutnick, a Wall Street investment firm CEO, to lead his 'tariff and trade agenda'.

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Throughout Vice President Kamala Harris’s abbreviated presidential run, she often emphasized one key principle that separated her campaign from that of former President Donald Trump. When Trump mocked her laughter, Harris pushed back by framing her propensity for exuberance as an invaluable strength: “I find joy in the American people,” she said in September. “I find joy in optimism, in what I see to be our future and our ability to invest in it.” On Tuesday afternoon, several hours before the polls closed, Harris once again reminded the voting public of this core value. “To everyone who has worked hard and brought back the joy during this campaign—thank you,” she captioned a video posted to her X account.

But as election results came in, jubilation seemed limited to supporters of her opponent, who espoused a very different view of the fractured electorate. Early Wednesday morning, the media projected that Trump would win, affirming that American voters remain entranced—and energized—by his divisive rhetoric. In her concession speech that afternoon, Harris asked her supporters not to succumb to despair over this moment of darkness, and instead to “fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars—the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.” Harris’s loss is not an unequivocal indictment of joy as an organizing strategy, in electoral politics or otherwise. But it does illustrate the limits of peddling optimism as a change candidate without rigorously critiquing the status quo—especially when voters see you as part of maintaining it.

Hope is always a hard sell, and Harris inherited an unenviable candidacy: President Joe Biden didn’t step down from his reelection bid until a disastrous June debate performance (and some serious muscling within the party) forced his hand. Not only did Harris have less than four months to make her case to the American people, but as Biden’s VP, she was also saddled with the baggage of his administration—right as his approval rating hit a new low. To many voters, Harris represented an extension of the Biden policies that they (sometimes unfairly) blamed for inflation, low wages, and unemployment, a message that Trump hammered home with his slogan “Kamala broke it. Trump will fix it.” Whereas Trump was able to galvanize the GOP base by stoking economic resentments, Harris was tasked with gamely winning over frustrated voters without undermining her party’s sitting president.

Harris’s position in an unpopular White House made her a tricky messenger for idealistic visions of the future, amid both economic discontent and tremendous geopolitical instability. Her ties to the Biden administration also put Harris in a categorically different position than Barack Obama was in during his first presidential run, in 2008, when his sanguine campaign promises landed with voters in part because his call for unity offered a stark departure from hawkish, Bush-era partisan politics. As a presidential candidate, Obama was also a blank slate, having spent just part of his sole senatorial term in the national spotlight; he had more latitude to define himself because he was weighed by very little history.

When asked what she would have done differently from Biden during the past four years, Harris said last month, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind”—other than that she would have had a Republican in her Cabinet. For some voters in the Democrats’ base, that type of rhetoric just didn’t inspire excitement—moderate Democrats’ attempts at bipartisan collaboration, which Republican lawmakers have been less keen to initiate, have at times yielded disappointing results. Nor did it ameliorate concerns about the Biden administration’s continued support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which put the party at odds with some young voters, as well as many in the Black, Muslim, and Arab American communities. Harris, a supporter of Israel, often spoke more empathetically about the conflict in Gaza than Biden did, but she also skirted the issue; asked during a CNN town hall what she would say to someone who was considering supporting a third-party candidate because of her position on the conflict, she deflected by saying that voters “also care about bringing down the price of groceries.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Moments such as this undercut the Harris campaign’s cheerful aesthetics. Asking voters to look past humanitarian atrocities in the name of curbing inflation may be a strategy with precedent, but it’s not one that feels driven by a joyful service mandate. And during a year that’s been disastrous for incumbent politicians around the world, the Democratic Party failed to offer an energizing vision of doing things differently. Take The New York Times’ reporting on how Wall Street’s private-equity firms, investment banks, and wealthy corporate executives were influencing Harris’s economic-policy agenda. Giving “large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” as one executive put it, sounded to some voters a whole lot like business as usual.

For many Americans feeling the downstream pains of corporate greed, preserving the sanctity of a dysfunctional political system is not a motivating factor at the ballot box. But as in 2016, the Democrats focused heavily on how unfit Trump is for the presidency—an argument aimed at wooing suburban Republicans and independents—rather than offering their base exciting, practical solutions to the country’s problems. In 2016, substantial portions of the party’s base rallied around the populist senator Bernie Sanders, but the party instead backed the establishment figure Hillary Clinton (and, according to Sanders’s camp, ignored attempts to help keep his supporters engaged in crucial swing states). The following election cycle, the party again picked a more centrist candidate over Sanders, but Joe Biden heeded some of the lessons from Sanders’s popular campaigns—and forged a broader coalition by moving left on some issues.

Several years later, Harris could have used that enthusiasm—but Democratic leadership didn’t seem to give much thought to why those voters supported Sanders in the first place. Despite the fact that voters consistently identified the economy as the issue most important to them, Harris stopped criticizing Big Business abruptly during her campaign, and the party walked back an earlier proposal to lower everyday costs by combatting grocery price gouging. In the immediate run-up to the election, the campaign pivoted away from emphasizing other commonsense, populist ideas that have clear benefits for average working Americans. Paid family and medical leave, which Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, signed into Minnesota law as the state’s governor, is tremendously popular. So, too, is raising the minimum wage, as results on some state ballot measures show, even in red states such as Alaska.

The rich may insist that money can’t buy happiness, but anyone who has struggled to feed their children or afford rent knows that nothing is more thrilling than finally attaining a modicum of financial security. Addressing the barriers that many Americans face when trying to get there—and their frustrations that the Democratic political establishment doesn’t share their priorities—might just have inspired some lasting optimism this time around.  

Denmark-based Novo Nordisk teased some new details about a potential Ozempic successor during a call with investors on Tuesday. Sales of the company’s current blockbuster weight loss drug, Wegovy, continued to soar in the third quarter, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The millennial-skewed telehealth platform…

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Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

Sales of Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy continue to soar, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The Danish pharma giant posted its third-quarter earnings report early Tuesday morning and boasted sales figures blowing past analysts’ projections.

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With polling places across the U.S. starting to close, Wall Street and investors across the world are waiting for votes to be tallied. In the coming days, America will find out whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be its 47th president — and which one will implement a policy agenda with big implications for…

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