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Good morning from the newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Wednesday, July 17th,

and this is your FT news briefing.

US banks feel the squeeze on their lending margins

as interest rate cuts loom.

Ursula von der Leyen narrowly gets the backing to become the next European Commission president

and United Airlines sees a more positive outlook for 2019 than it initially predicted.

But first, the F.T.'s Washington correspondent, Kiran Stacy, tells us how Big Tech defended some of its practices on Capitol Hill yesterday

and what Congress isn't warming up to Facebook's cryptocurrency ideas just yet.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

Executives from some of the biggest names in tech faced members of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Facebook went before the Senate

banking committee to defend its cryptocurrency Libra and Facebook, Google, Apple,

and Amazon faced members of the House of Representatives.

The F.T.'s Kiran Stacy breaks down what happened on Tuesday, starting with the co-creator

of Facebook's cryptocurrency David Marcus.

David Marcus really got hauled over the calls I would say during his hearing.

It started off with Cheryl Brown who is the ranking member on the Democrat side.

Literally started by saying, you can't trust Facebook is dangerous now

Facebook might not intend to be dangerous but surely they don't respect the

power of the technologies they are playing with like a toddler who has gotten his

...