The U.S. spirits industry maintained its market share leadership over beer and wine for a third straight year in 2024, even as revenues slid, according to new data released Tuesday.

Spirits supplier sales in the U.S. fell 1.1% last year to a total of $37.2 billion, while volumes rose 1.1%, according to the annual U.S. economic report from the Distilled Spirits Council, a leading trade organization.

That is the first time revenue for the spirits category has fallen in more than two decades. Despite a return to more typical buying patterns after a pandemic boom, spirits revenues have grown an average 5.1% annually since 2019. Between 2003 and 2019, the average annual growth rate was 4.4%.

“While the spirits industry has proven to be resilient during tough times, it is certainly not immune to disruptive economic forces and marketplace challenges, and that was definitely the case in 2024,” said DISCUS President and CEO Chris Swonger.

Tequila and mezcal remained a bright spot for the year as the only spirits category showing sales growth, as revenue climbed 2.9% to $6.7 billion.

Premixed ready-to-drink cocktails grew double digits, but the category includes various types of mixed spirits including vodka, rum, whiskey and cordials.

Mexican spirits and beer have grown more popular with consumers for over two decades, and tequila and mezcal sales outpaced American whiskey for the first time in 2023.

The road ahead for the Mexico-based products remains uncertain. The Trump administration earlier this month delayed imposing tariffs on imports from Mexico — which would include distinctive products such as mezcal and tequila — by one month while tariff negotiations continue.

“These tariffs have wreaked havoc on our craft distilling community,” said Sonat Birnecker Hart, president and founder of KOVAL Distillery in Chicago. “Many craft distillers have expended great time, effort and resources to expand into international markets only to see their dreams shattered by tariffs that have absolutely nothing to do with our industry,” Hart added.

Swonger also noted that tariffs would be a “catastrophic blow” to distillers and only add to the pressure higher interest rates have put on the industry’s supply chain, as wholesalers and retailers continue to deplete inventory buildups and cautiously restock products.

“Consumers were contending with some of the highest prices and interest rates in decades, which put a strain on their wallets and forced many to reduce spending on little luxuries like distilled spirits,” said Swonger. 

“Our sales dipped slightly but consumers continued to choose spirits and enjoy a cocktail with family and friends,” he said.

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made an appearance in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint, the conservative group’s plan was simple: Abolish it entirely.

Now, with a Project 2025 co-author in charge of the bureau, that idea looks like a real possibility.

Over the weekend, Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the powerful Office of Management and Budget, took over as de facto head of the agency and subsequently ordered all nonessential work there to stop. Vought is one of more than 30 co-authors of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint for the Trump administration’s agenda, though he did not write the section on the CFPB.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is arguably the most powerful and unaccountable regulatory agency in existence,” the report states.

Whether the bureau is rendered toothless by its new leadership or abolished by congressional action, its emergence as a target for conservative ire has been years in the making, boosted most recently by technology executives including Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Created by Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, in the wake of the Great Recession, the CFPB lodged steady but largely unglamorous wins for consumers. 

Yet all the while, it faced a drumbeat of opposition from small-government conservatives and business interests who challenged not only its regulations and enforcement actions, but its very basis for existing. Consumer complaints about corporate misbehavior have by some measures reached all-time highs.       

“This is an agency that has an incredible amount of responsibility for regulating in the financial services sector,” said Julie Margetta Morgan, a former associate director at the bureau who started there in 2022 and resigned right after Trump’s second inauguration. She added, “There are a number of big bank lobbyists who have had it out for the CFPB from Day 1.”

But most recently, some in the tech world — including those who have become particularly influential with the Trump administration — have been its loudest critics.

Musk, who leads the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort, posted “RIP CFPB” on X on Sunday. Andreesen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, said on a podcast last year that the agency had been “terrorizing financial institutions.” Part of his criticism has centered around “debanking,” something that the CFPB itself also tried to stop. (In 2021, the CFPB shuttered a lending startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz.) 

“The CFPB works for regular people that don’t run in Elon’s circle,” said one current CFPB employee, who was granted anonymity out of fear of reprisal. “Elon doesn’t know single mothers whose cars break down and are scammed by predatory car lenders. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be driven into debt by overdraft fees. He doesn’t have a mortgage he is struggling to pay off. So he can’t understand why the CFPB is so important to protect regular folks from being scammed.”

Compared with the vast resources historically commanded by the Justice Department’s antitrust division, not to mention the Federal Trade Commission — the agency traditionally tasked with enforcing consumer regulations — the CFPB’s remit was always relatively limited in scope. Notably, its annual budget has never exceeded $1 billion.  

It is thus perhaps not surprising that it never landed a proverbial knockout blow that would stick in the minds of the American public. Still, it steadily gained a favorable reputation. In 2015, Time magazine devoted a major feature to the bureau under the headline, “The Agency That’s Got Your Back.”   

Margetta Morgan, the former CFPB associate director, said eliminating medical debt from credit reports has been particularly significant.

“When CFPB started digging in on medical debt, it was astounding to see the extent to which consumers had inaccurate medical debt on their credit reports and then were being hounded by debt collectors over them,” she said. “I think the medical debt rulemaking was huge, and we saw that when we spoke to individual consumers.”

Yet as early as 2017, conservatives were charting a path to end the agency altogether. An article that year published by the Heritage Foundation — the group whose Project 2025 now appears, despite some Trump assurances to the contrary, to be driving much of his second administration’s rollout — laid out the case against the CFPB’s very existence.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is arguably the most powerful and unaccountable regulatory agency in existence,” the article’s authors wrote, arguing that its rulemaking ultimately restricted Americans’ access to credit while “eroding their financial independence” and posing concerns about due process and separation of powers. 

Instead, they said, consumers would enjoy the same protections if the agency’s powers were swept back into the Federal Trade Commission and if existing state and local laws were enforced, they said.   

One of the authors, Norbert Michel, today a vice president at the pro-free-market Cato Institute, told NBC News that assuming that malfeasance is taking place — something he said there is often disagreement about — enforcement powers already exist at multiple government agencies, not to mention at the state level, to address it.

“In one sense, you’ve given a new federal agency extreme discretionary power — and in other sense, done nothing new,” Michel said. “So somewhere in there you have an increase in government authority that’s not necessary.”

Still, the agency persisted and became particularly active under Rohit Chopra, a Biden appointee, who helped bring actions against many major lenders, as well as financial technology firms and loan servicing groups. 

Chopra’s largest action came against Wells Fargo, which paid a $1.7 billion penalty over accusations it improperly repossessed cars and froze customers’ accounts. Chopra also engineered a settlement with Navient, formerly among the nation’s largest student-loan servicers, over allegedly abusive practices.    

Yet it was the agency’s recent work around so-called financial technology enterprises that may have created the conditions for its demise. In 2023, it sought to subject large fintech players like PayPal and Venmo to the same supervisory examination process as banks.

Since that time, Musk has made clear he hopes to turn X into a payments platform. X recently announced a deal with Visa to begin processing payments. 

“You have Silicon Valley VCs not wanting any oversight of their businesses, many of which are premised on the idea that [financial technology] somehow is new and different and thus not subject to traditional consumer protections,” said another current CFPB employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Last year, the Supreme Court heard the first challenge to the CFPB’s very existence — and decided in its favor, with Justice Clarence Thomas, viewed as among the court’s most conservative members, writing for the 7-2 majority that Congress had been clear in setting up its funding mechanism as a body of the Federal Reserve. 

That did not stop the chorus of voices calling for the agency to be reined in. Notably, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 referred to the CFPB as little more than “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation.”

“The CFPB is a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency,” Robert Bowes, an official in Trump’s first administration, wrote. “It is unconstitutional. Congress should abolish the CFPB.” Consumer protection functions, he said, should be returned to banking regulators and the Federal Trade Commission.

For consumer advocates, such an outcome would be cataclysmic for everyday Americans.  

“The CFPB protects real people from financial companies ripping them off,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit group. “If your car has been illegally repossessed by a bank, or if you’ve been the victim of a predatory student loan servicer, or ever had to pay junk fees, the CFPB steps up to make sure a company can’t rip you off.”

Its potential elimination, Witte said, will have “disastrous consequences” and should be “infuriating” to almost everyone.

Last week, White House crypto czar David Sacks held his first press conference to discuss the future of crypto policy coming out of the Trump administration.

While that will include stablecoin legislation and digital asset regulation, Sacks told CNBC that a top agenda idea is also evaluating “whether it’s feasible to create either a bitcoin reserve or some sort of digital asset stockpile.”

But will the momentum around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies carry over to corporate America more broadly, appearing on balance sheets?

To date, companies with exposure to bitcoin in their business operations have been the first movers in this space, in many cases, to show their support and buy-in to the industry. According to the bitcoin tracking website Bitcointreasuries, 79 public companies currently hold bitcoin, with some of the largest holders being companies like Riot Platforms, Coinbase and Block. 

Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, and its co-founder, Michael Saylor, have been the champion of this approach as the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. On its third-quarter earnings call earlier this month, the company said it holds 471,107 bitcoins on its balance sheet, about 2% of the total supply and worth roughly $45.2 billion.

Also on the list of crypto industry companies holding bitcoin on the balance sheet is Moonpay, a venture-backed financial technology company that builds payments infrastructure for crypto. The company has added bitcoin to its balance sheet equal to 5% of its operational cash, according to CEO Ivan Soto-Wright.

While Soto-Wright said some of the thought process is that “we’re only going to succeed if bitcoin succeeds,” he believes there is a growing argument to include bitcoin in any company’s treasury strategy.

“It’s really detached both from interest rates and equity market movements, so you could see it from that perspective,” he said. “You could also see it from the perspective of an inflation hedge .. in terms of large money movement, it’s incredibly efficient so you could argue it’s a better version of gold.” 

That is one of the arguments that Saylor has made, and one he repeated while making one of the most high-profile pushes to spur a major U.S. company to add bitcoin to its balance sheet, appearing at Microsoft’s annual meeting to speak on behalf of a shareholder proposal that called on the company’s board to evaluate holding bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

Saylor doubled down on that message at the ICR conference earlier this year, where in a presentation he said that companies can either “cling to the past” and continue to buy Treasury bonds, execute buybacks and dividends, or “embrace the future” by using bitcoin as digital capital.

“It works for any company,” Saylor said in the retail conference’s keynote speech. “We’re the people building with steel and they’re building with wood.”

At least in the short-term, it can look good, too. Tesla, one of the few non-crypto-focused companies to hold bitcoin on its balance sheet, showed the positive side of this in its most recent quarter when it marked a $600 million profit due to the appreciation of bitcoin. The Financial Accounting Standards Board adopted a new rule for 2025 that mandates that corporate digital asset holdings be marked to market each quarter. 

But so far, the message and broader movement has not spread much wider than the crypto industry. Just 0.55% of votes at Microsoft’s annual meeting supported the plan. Microsoft, as well as proxy advisors Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, had all suggested shareholders reject the proposal ahead of the vote.

Microsoft said in an October proxy filing that its treasury and investment services team previously evaluated bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to fund the company’s operations and reduce economic risk, adding that it “continues to monitor trends and developments related to cryptocurrencies to inform future decision making.”

At Microsoft’s annual meeting, CFO Amy Hood said: “it’s important to remember our criteria and our goals of our balance sheet and for the cash balances, importantly, is to preserve capital, to allow a lot of liquidity to be able to fund our operations and partnerships and investments .. liquidity is also a really important criteria for us, as well as generating income.”

The lack of adoption so far isn’t discouraging proponents of companies holding bitcoin on the balance sheet. Ethan Peck, the deputy director of the Free Enterprise Project, which is part of conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, filed the shareholder proposal at Microsoft and said he plans to file similar proposals during the upcoming proxy season at other large companies. In all, it has been recently estimated that the S&P 500 universe of companies collectively holds over $3.5 trillion on balance sheets, though the figure changes quarter-to-quarter.

While Peck said he is not advocating for companies to take as aggressive of a stance as Strategy has, “Companies should consider holding a couple percent of bitcoin in order to negate or offset the base of your cash holdings because you’re losing your shareholders’ money.”

“The bond yields are not outpacing real inflation, so you’re losing money,” Peck said.

The performance of bitcoin over the past five years. Bitcoin has vastly outperformed cash equivalents, though with much greater volatility.

However, that debate is far from decided in corporate America, according to Markus Veith, who leads Grant Thornton’s digital asset practice, especially as bitcoin has reacted more in line with the broader stock market than inflation over the last year or so, and volatility is still high — something that Microsoft’s board also pointed out in its rejection of that shareholder proposal.

Veith said regulation might also be holding companies back. The SEC rescinded SAB 121 in January, a rule that required banks to classify cryptocurrencies as liabilities on their balance sheet, creating a capital requirement burden that kept many banks from providing custody for crypto assets.

That’s a change that could lead banks, including Goldman Sachs, to revisit the issue. CEO David Solomon told CNBC at Davos last month that “At the moment, from a regulatory perspective, we can’t own” bitcoin, but he added that the bank would revisit the issue if the rules changed. Much of Wall Street is also starting to at least cautiously sing a different tune, with Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan both telling CNBC while at Davos last month that their institutions could allow broader adoption if the regulatory environment changes. 

But regulation can’t solve the issue of crypto’s extreme volatility, and the concern that there may be another downturn at some point. “What do you do if there’s going to be another crypto winter, and the price goes down and you’re sitting for a prolonged basis on a big stash of bitcoin and the price keeps going down? How do you explain that to your stakeholders, shareholders, or board? That’s probably what is hindering more companies from going into this space,” Veith said. 

The most recent CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey, taken in December, is a reflection of that risk assessment: 78% of the CFO respondents to the survey said bitcoin is a highly speculative asset class, while 7% said it is a credible store of value. Furthermore, 11% said it is a fraud, though that latter view has come down over time in the quarterly CFO survey.

As the Trump administration continues to embrace crypto, the crypto view from within corporate America could change more.

Asked if he thinks companies are reassessing the things they once assumed about crypto, Soto-Wright pointed to the overtures coming out of Washington, D.C., and the potential for a national reserve and additional regulation changes.

“If you look at the general trends, it’s becoming more adopted by institutions as there’s more circulation, as there are more products that come to market, and as it starts to develop its statute and stance as a truly diversified, uncorrelated financial instrument,” he said.

“I think you’ll start to see more and more companies recognize that in their treasury portfolio management strategy, this is another asset that is legitimized,” Soto-Wright said.