A promise of shock and awe, mostly
President-elect Donald Trump used his first broadcast interview since the election to promise a fast-moving and disruptive administration that could shake up American and global business, including raising tariffs and cutting immigration.
But for all the talk of breaking things, Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wouldn’t follow through with some of the moves that markets have feared, including trying to fire or undermine Jay Powell, the Fed chair.
“No, I don’t think so,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker about seeking to remove Powell before his term ends in May 2026. That said, the president-elect wasn’t exactly clear in all his comments: “I think if I told him to, he would,” Trump said of asking him to go, before adding, “But if I asked him to, he probably wouldn’t.”
For the record, Powell has said he doesn’t think the president has the legal authority to dismiss him and that he wouldn’t leave if asked. At the DealBook Summit last week, the Fed chair also said that he expected to have a “fine” relationship with Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, who had floated naming a sort of shadow Fed chair.
Other things Trump said he wouldn’t do: raise the age for Social Security or Medicare, or cut them as part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s government-efficiency initiatives. He also said he wouldn’t limit access to abortion pills, and said he’d work with Democrats to avoid deporting the roughly 700,000 immigrants known as Dreamers.
But he said he still plans to do a lot:
-
Trump said he would impose sweeping tariffs, despite warnings that it could undercut his pledge to bolster the economy. That said, he admitted that he “can’t guarantee” that American families won’t pay more if they’re brought about.
-
He also promised to end birthright citizenship, the provision in the Constitution guaranteeing American citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. (How that would happen outside of a constitutional amendment is unclear and would meet legal challenges in any case.)
-
Trump also said that while he wouldn’t personally order the prosecution of perceived political enemies including Liz Cheney, he expected his administration to take up such cases.
-
And he suggested that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, would examine a debunked link between vaccines and autism.
Trump expects business leaders to go along for the ride. He told Welker that he’s having dinner with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon executive chair and founder of Blue Origin, a rocket company. (Bezos told Andrew at the DealBook Summit that he’s “very optimistic” about a second Trump administration.)
The president-elect boasted that he feels he has more of a mandate this time: “When I won the first time, I wasn’t nearly as popular as this,” he told Welker. “And one thing that’s very important, in terms of the election, I love that I won the popular vote, and by a lot.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
China investigates Nvidia over competition concerns. The authorities there have opened an inquiry into the chipmaker over its 2020 deal to buy Mellanox Technologies, a computer networking company; Beijing approved the deal on the condition that Nvidia not discriminate against Chinese competitors. The Biden administration has barred Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips used for artificial intelligence to China, angering Beijing.
China loosens monetary policy ahead of new trade battles with the U.S. Government officials this morning pledged to adopt a “moderately loose” stance for the first time since 2010, and added that they would increase fiscal spending next year to boost the nation’s economy. The comments come ahead of a crucial meeting this week to set Beijing’s economic priorities for 2025.
The police release new images of the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare’s C.E.O. The New York Police Department published photos of the man in the back seat of a taxi on the day that Brian Thompson was shot in Midtown Manhattan. The authorities are scouring thousands of hours of footage from surveillance cameras around the city, although they believe the suspect has left New York.
Taylor Swift’s $2 billion global concert series ends. The pop star performed the final show of her Eras Tour last night in Vancouver, British Columbia, having more than doubled the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history. By many measures, Swift’s shows became an economic phenomenon for the ages, including concert attendance, average price paid per ticket, merchandise sales and more.
Economic data will be in focus this week. The Consumer Price Index for November will be published on Wednesday, as the Fed keeps an eye on inflation ahead of a meeting later this month to decide on interest rates. In corporate earnings, Oracle reports on Monday; Adobe and Inditex, the owner of Zara, on Wednesday; and Broadcom and Costco on Thursday.
A Madison Avenue mega-merger
The global advertising industry is poised for a potentiallytransformative shake-up, as Omnicom confirmed that it will buy a big rival, Interpublic.
The deal to combine the industry’s third- and fourth-largest players would create the world’s biggest ad conglomerate at a time when the sector is being disrupted by Big Tech. But pulling it off won’t be easy.
Uniting the two would create a global behemoth. An all-stock transaction values Interpublic at about $13.2 billion using Friday’s closing stock prices. (The deal represents a 21 percent premium to Interpublic’s stock price.)
The combined company would have net revenues of more than $20 billion.
The traditional holding company model itself is under threat. Big Tech, notably Google and Meta, has eroded the traditional business of ad giants. Group M, a media agency owned by WPP, predicts that ad revenues will surpass $1 trillion for the first time this year — but Alibaba, Amazon, ByteDance, Google and Meta are expected to account for over half of that.
That dynamic has forced Interpublic, Omnicom and others to cut costs, but industry watchers believe that bigger steps are needed. “It feels like we are on the precipice of significant secular changes,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, wrote in a note on Sunday after news of the talks emerged.
Martin Sorrell, the founder of S4 Capital and the former leader of WPP, the world’s biggest ad company, told DealBook that Omnicom was taking advantage of its sky-high stock valuation to try and buy its rival. But it may not be enough: “Scale is no longer key,” he said.
Omnicom has tried big M.&A. before. In 2014, Omnicom announced a $35 billion deal with Publicis. But that collapsed after the companies couldn’t agree on who was acquiring whom, or who would be in charge.
This time around, it’s clear who’s in charge.
Publicis, WPP and others could feel pressure to react to a deal. Publicis has already gained market share by being faster to adapt to new technology, but is still feeling the heat. Meanwhile, WPP has underperformed its rivals.
Other companies are thinking about deals, too. Shareholders in Vivendi, the French media group that owns Havas, an ad agency, will vote on Monday on whether to break up the company — which may lead to more M.&A.
“Effective altruists reduce value to anything that can be quantified, but you very often cannot quantify the things we value the most.”
— Amy Schiller, the author of “The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong — and How to Fix It,” on effective altruism, a push to optimize charitable giving. The model has come under scrutiny, with many asking if proponents including Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, used it to justify swindling customers.
The high cost of rebuilding Syria’s economy
The sudden toppling this weekend of President Bashar al-Assad, the longtime dictator of Syria, after a brutal 13-year civil war surprised many observers. But the swift capitulation was partly because the conflict had decimated the economy. One consequence: The government was unable to pay salaries of its soldiers, and many simply chose to give up the fight.
President Biden said Syria faced “a moment of historic opportunity,” but warned that it was also “a moment of risk and uncertainty.” Now, one big question is how to reconstruct the country.
What would it cost to rebuild the economy? The full figure won’t be known until monitors can assess the wartime damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure. But a 2019 estimate put the price tag at as high as $400 billion — or several times bigger than the country’s rapidly shrinking G.D.P.
The challenges are staggering. Between 2011 and 2019, the economy shrunk by roughly two-thirds. That was followed by the pandemic, a global surge in inflation and a devastating 2023 earthquake. The World Bank estimated this year that the poverty rate was nearing 70 percent.
Syria isn’t a major oil exporter compared to other Middle Eastern states, but the industry is a big part of its economy and has been pummeled by sanctions.
What will President-elect Donald Trump do? On Saturday, he said on social media that the United States should stay out of Syria. His bigger focus is Russia, which had propped up Assad’s regime for years, and has granted al-Assad and his family asylum. Now, Trump said, President Vladimir Putin should do a deal in Ukraine. “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act,” he wrote.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
-
Arthur J. Gallagher, an insurance broker, agreed to buy a rival, AssuredPartners, for $13.45 billion. (Reuters)
-
“The Insider in Charge of Abu Dhabi’s $330 Billion Deal Machine” (Bloomberg)
Artificial intelligence
-
X added, then quickly removed, a new image generator powered by xAI’s Grok chatbot after users noted that the program had fewer restrictions than competing services. (TechCrunch)
-
“Blackstone’s Data-Center Ambitions School a City on AI Power Strains” (Bloomberg)
Best of the rest
-
One place the Trump family business is flourishing: the status-hungry Indian luxury property market. (NYT)
-
“Inside the Four-Day Workweek Experiment” (NYT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
The post Trump Gives Powell a Reprieve, but Pledges Big Moves Elsewhere appeared first on New York Times.
