Many new presidential administrations bring changes to tax law, but the current one’s gotten the ball rolling sooner than most. To take action on international tax law “literally within the first hour” of a new term, as we saw happen last week, is, in the words of PwC US national tax office co-leader Pat Brown, “unprecedented in my lifetime.”

But as PwC US tax leader Krishnan Chandrasekhar noted, part of tax leaders’ job is to “curate” new tax laws to “provide clarity” for organizations. In that spirit, PwC tax experts, speaking at the firm’s 2025 Tax Policy Media Breakfast last week, shared their predictions for what we’ll see in terms of tax this year:

TCJA extensions are a shoo-in. The new administration will be highly motivated to pass extensions for the provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) before they expire on December 31, Rohit Kumar, PwC US national tax office co-leader, said. The “Republican trifecta” of the president, the Senate, and the House “is not going to allow those tax cuts to expire,” he noted.

What is in question is the timing of the extensions, and that depends on whether they’re included as part of one big bill alongside border security, energy, and other provisions, or whether they get a separate bill of their own.

Click here for more on potential tax changes in 2025.—CV

If we were tech mega-millionaires or billionaires, we’d normally sleep easy. But maybe not this week.

The rapid rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company with a low-cost open source model that threatened to usurp US-based AI leaders, clearly rattled tech investors. The day DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT on Apple’s app store, the S&P 500 dropped 1.5%, and Nasdaq, where major tech stocks trade, fell 3.1%. Nvidia, the seemingly unbeatable AI powerhouse, saw $593 billion of market value dry up in one day, “a record one-day loss for any company on Wall Street,” according to Reuters.

Tech companies have been pouring cash into AI investments, and investors are largely still waiting for the payoff. With DeepSeek’s significantly cheaper model, that spend may get harder to justify.

And from the initial reaction on the Street, investors were clearly spooked. Tech CEOs, however? They’re either putting on a happy face—or not as rattled as you’d expect.

Meta and Microsoft were the big names on deck, and they both plan to stick with their hefty AI investments.

For more on how on how Big Tech is responding to DeepSeek, click here.—NP

UPS is steering its trademark brown trucks in a new direction, and investors aren’t too happy about it.

In its Q4 earnings report, the parcel delivery behemoth announced it would cut volumes with Amazon, its largest customer, by more than 50% by the second half of 2026. CEO Carol Tomé said in an earnings call that the deal would “rightsize our network.” If UPS kept things status quo with Amazon, it would “likely result in diminishing returns,” she added.

“Amazon is our largest customer, but it’s not our most profitable customer,” Tomé told analysts. “Its margin is very dilutive to the US domestic business.”

It was one of three “strategic actions” the company announced, which also included insourcing 100% of its SurePost product and $1 billion in related cost-saving measures. The changes “will put us further down the path to becoming a more profitable, agile and differentiated UPS,” Tomé said in a news release.

Looking forward to 2025, the company said it expects to bring in roughly $89 billion in revenue and achieve a 10.8% operating margin. That puts UPS about $6 billion behind investors’ expectations for the year, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Keep reading here.—AZ