If there is one story to watch on Wednesday, it will be this: what Jay Powell, the Fed chair, says about the economic impact of conflict in the Middle East and how it might change the central bank’s forecasts about interest rates in the coming months. We also take a look at the fallout of the Musk-Trump breakup for an overlooked stakeholder: China.
Trump and Iran loom over the Fed
President Trump’s increasingly bellicose remarks about Iran over the past 24 hours — he’s called for the country’s “unconditional surrender” as it exchanges barrages with Israel — may not exactly be scaring investors. But it has thrown the Fed a curveball.
The central bank is widely expected to hold interest rates steady on Wednesday. Markets will be watching closely the Fed’s rates forecast and Jay Powell’s news conference. High on the agenda will be questions about whether the Fed chair sees conflict in the Middle East and higher oil prices creating a new inflation risk that forces the central bank to keep rates higher for longer.
A recap: In March, the Fed signaled that it would lower its benchmark lending rate by half a percentage point this year. (Trump, who has repeatedly chided Powell for not cutting rates sooner, argues that two full percentage points of cuts are warranted.)
A lot has happened since then. Moody’s cut America’s triple-A credit rating, citing Washington’s inability to manage the nation’s fiscal hole. Nonpartisan congressional analysts estimate that the House version of Republicans’ huge policy bill would grow the national debt by $3.4 trillion and potentially jolt the market for Treasury notes and bonds.
And now there are the war risks — both in the case of the Israel-Iran conflict and with Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff approach that has destabilized global supply chains. Together, they threaten to reignite inflation.
That uncertainty has divided Wall Street. “The Fed’s main message at the June meeting will be that it remains comfortably in wait-and-see mode,” Mark Cabana, the head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America, wrote in a research note this week. Bank of America forecasts that the Fed will make just one quarter-point cut this year.
But economists at Goldman Sachs see the Fed going with two cuts this year. That’s what the futures market is pricing in on Wednesday.
There’s uncertainty about Powell himself, too. Trump has said he plans to name a successor soon, even though Powell’s term as Fed chair doesn’t end until May. If the president does so, expect that transition drama to hang over the central bank and weigh on investors and businesses.
Trump and Powell do not see eye to eye on the economy or on rates policy. Would Trump look for a replacement who shares his preference for lower rates to bolster growth? More important, could that pick swing other members of the Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee to get more dovish?
Speaking of which, it will be worth watching just how aligned the policymakers are on rates. We’ll know more this afternoon.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration sends conflicting messages on immigration raids. While President Trump last week promised to protect farming and hospitality workers, leading to a pause in many such operations, he has since exhorted officials to redouble efforts to crack down on those living in the U.S. illegally. The Department of Homeland Security has reversed guidance exempting farms and hotels from raids, The Washington Post reports. That’s dividing Republicans and risks damaging the economy.
Doubts grow about the fate of Republicans’ domestic policy legislation. Fiscally hawkish lawmakers continue to denounce the Senate bill’s costs, while moderates are increasingly uncomfortable with deep cuts it would make to Medicaid. (“My guess is it will fail,” predicted Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin.) A new poll showed that 42 percent of Americans oppose the legislation, while 23 percent support it.
The Senate passes a landmark crypto bill. The GENIUS Act, which seeks to establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins, was approved by lawmakers from both parties, overcoming objections from some Democrats who thought it didn’t go far enough. The legislation must still clear the House.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick talks up the “Trump Card.” A website promoting the proposed visa, which would cost $5 million and give foreigners a pathway to legal residency in the U.S., has racked up more than 68,000 registrations of interest, he told The Financial Times. (Whether that leads to actual applications is unclear.) Many details of the scheme, including the tax treatment of visa holders and whether any countries would be excluded, remain undecided.
How the Musk-Trump breakup could be felt in China
With Elon Musk seemingly well and truly on the outs with President Trump, the fallout may be felt as far as Beijing.
Many trade experts, as well as Trump allies like Steve Bannon, viewed the Tesla C.E.O. as a bulwark against the China hawks in the administration, Grady McGregor reports. The big question now: Will Beijing see Musk’s departure as detrimental to the country’s frayed trade ties with Washington — and could it even weaken China’s negotiating hand during tariffs negotiations?
Musk’s web of business interests was a wild card. His conflicts of interest were clear well before he took on a prominent position in the Trump administration. And his ties to China — where Tesla produces half its cars — were among the most glaring.
Musk’s efforts to spearhead cost cuts at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were also troublesome, said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization focused on national security. They resulted in “collateral damage” that benefited Beijing, he told DealBook.
The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. as well as programs aimed at countering Chinese Communist Party propaganda, like Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America, has been a gift to Chinese foreign policy, he added.
Musk’s work could have a long-lasting effect. DOGE cuts to agencies like the Labor Department and the Department of Homeland Security have hamstrung those agencies’ ability to monitor China’s business and trade dealings with Washington, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. One example they cited: ensuring that Chinese cotton and other goods are adequately screened for compliance with tough import rules required by the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Could Chinese exporters see stepped-up oversight in this area now that Musk is out, and with some of his top cost-cutting lieutenants also reportedly mulling an exit?
What could it mean for trade negotiations? Beijing has a trump card with its lock on rare earth supplies, which are vital to Tesla and other American carmakers. That’s still expected to be a key bargaining chip for Chinese negotiators, but with largely Musk not in the picture, Beijing may have lost some leverage there.
“I think Beijing absolutely saw Musk as an asset,” Isaac Stone Fish, C.E.O. of Strategy Risks, a corporate intelligence firm focused on China, told DealBook.
“There’s many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation.”
— Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., throwing a jab at his company’s rival. He added that Meta had begun to offer “crazy” signing bonuses, some as high as $100 million, to poach top researchers from OpenAI; the start-up’s “best people” haven’t accepted, Altman added.
A.I. will come for Amazon jobs
A growing number of corporate leaders have said that artificial intelligence will reshape their business and eventually lead to fewer jobs. That group now includes one of America’s largest employers.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s C.E.O., told the tech and retail giant’s 1.5 million workers that he believes the “once-in-a-lifetime” technology will eventually lead to fewer of them working at the company.
From his memo to employees:
As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, said that this probably didn’t mean that Amazon would conduct mass layoffs in the near future, as it did in 2022 and 2023. Much of the reduction is expected to come from attrition.
A big factor in Jassy’s thinking: the rise of A.I. agents, which can take actions on users’ behalf. The Amazon chief says that there will eventually be “billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field,” and that agents will help his business and others speed up innovation and routine work.
Jassy is the latest to talk up A.I.’s potential for jobs (and job cuts). Here’s a sample of other recent comments:
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Allison Kirkby, the C.E.O. of the British telecom BT, said that the technology could help her trim even more jobs and costs at the business. She has already announced plans to cut more than 40,000 positions and 3 billion pounds ($4 billion) in costs by the end of the decade.
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Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the C.E.O. of the payments company Klarna, has long spoken about how A.I. is helping his business shed jobs. But he also warned that many C.E.O.s weren’t being honest with their employees about A.I. disruption: “We think we’re protecting them,” he told Semafor. “But over time, you realize that it generally leads to bad outcomes and lack of trust.”
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Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia, said “some jobs will be obsolete” because of A.I. But he pushed back against a claim by Dario Amodei, the co-founder of the A.I. start-up Anthropic, that the technology could soon replace half of all entry-level jobs within five years.
In other A.I. news: Pope Leo XIV is making the technology and its potential threat to humanity a key focus of his papacy. And AXA is the top user of A.I. in the insurance industry, according to a new ranking by Evident.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Goldman Sachs is reportedly willing to underwrite SPACs again, as the market for blank-check companies rebounds. (Bloomberg)
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The E.U. said it would consider easing merger rules for defense companies, a move meant to help draw more investors to the sector amid a push to rearm Europe. (FT)
Tech and artificial intelligence
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Elon Musk’s xAI is said to be close to raising $9.3 billion in equity and debt from investors even as the A.I. start-up burns through cash and faces a major environmental legal challenge. (FT, Bloomberg, NYT)
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Democratic lawmakers are demanding information on the consulting firm Palantir’s more than $100 million worth of government contracts since Inauguration Day. They cited a report by The Times that Palantir is helping the administration consolidate government data, which could lead to a master list of Americans’ personal information. (NYT)
Best of the rest
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Chase is raising the annual fee for its Chase Sapphire Reserve card to $795, surpassing that of American Express Platinum and other premium cards. (NYT)
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Facing a bulging to-do list of meetings, unanswered emails and other workplace tasks, more Americans are now working well into the evening. (WSJ)
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Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder of DealBook, the flagship business and policy newsletter at The Times and an annual conference.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Danielle Kaye is a Times business reporter and a 2024 David Carr Fellow, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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