Will the U.S. join Israel in its strikes against Iran? That is the big question on Friday as President Trump said he would make a decision within the next two weeks. Will it come sooner? Interestingly, Israeli stocks have moved higher all week despite the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange being damaged by an Iranian missile on Thursday. We delve into all of the implications for investors, the Fed and more.
We also look at businesses’ latest pushback against raids against illegal immigration. And I spoke to the leader of a major conservative organization bringing proxy contests against corporate America.
Tehran, tariffs and inflation
It’s not quite a “TACO trade” rally. But investors on Friday are cheering President Trump’s announcement that he could take up to two weeks before deciding whether to join Israel in striking Iran.
The hiatus — Trump really likes two-week windows — could buy the administration time to find a diplomatic off-ramp for a war that threatens to drive up oil prices and inflation.
But it does little to remove uncertainty hanging over trading floors and board rooms, and may merely move this crisis into next month, when it could run up against other major deadlines, including the expiration of Trump’s 90-day pause on most “reciprocal” tariffs.
The latest: Stocks in Europe are gaining, but S&P 500 futures are in the red. The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has fallen roughly 2.5 percent, to below $77 a barrel.
But Brent is up more than 20 percent in June, worrying inflation hawks. And watch the Strait of Hormuz: Any disruption to that waterway could snarl crude and liquefied natural gas exports, driving up energy prices and muddling the forecast for central bankers’ rate moves.
The Fed sees risks ahead. As it kept rates unchanged on Wednesday, the central bank warned of a triple whammy — slowing growth, rising inflation and growing unemployment — in the second half of the year. “We expect a meaningful amount of inflation to arrive in the coming months,” said Jay Powell, the Fed chair, suggesting that borrowing costs would hold steady for a while longer.
That has put the Fed on a collision course with Trump. On Thursday, the president again railed against Powell and the central bank, accusing them on social media of “costing our Country Hundreds of Billions of Dollars.” Trump added that the benchmark rate should be about 2.5 percentage points lower, more or less in line with that of the European Central Bank. Inflation has fallen faster in Europe, but Trump’s tariffs are expected to reignite price gains there as well as in the U.S.
What does that mean for rates? The Fed is sticking with its forecast for two cuts this year. But its latest dot-plot projection showed that seven of the 19 policymakers see no cuts at all, up from four in March.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Endeavor ex-chair’s new venture poaches a new president. Patrick Whitesell, who helped found the entertainment giant with Ari Emanuel, plans to announce on Friday that he’s hiring one of his old firm’s top people for his Silver Lake-backed investment firm, WTSL. Jason Lublin, a two-decade veteran of Endeavor who was most recently C.F.O. and helped lead major deals including the takeovers of William Morris, IMG and U.F.C. is joining as WTSL’s president. Lublin will also be president and C.O.O. of Win Sports Group, a professional football representation firm Whitesell also started.
Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions face another blow. SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft experienced “a catastrophic failure” and exploded into a fireball before a routine test in Texas on Wednesday. Though Musk brushed off the incident as “just a scratch,” it’s the latest setback for his rocket giant as it hopes to have the reusable rocket ready for a Mars mission as soon as next year.
Masa Son of SoftBank reportedly pitches a trillion-dollar A.I. and robots complex. The Japanese tech investor is spearheading what’s being called “Project Crystal Land,” a plan to essentially create a U.S. version of China’s huge industrial complexes in Arizona, according to Bloomberg. He has spoken with federal and state officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Bloomberg reports, and wants to work with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest chip assembler.
Little raid relief in sight
Closer to home, corporate leaders continue to worry about the effect of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Conflicting messages from the administration about whether any industries are exempt from raids are leaving businesses anxious, while many are seeing workers go AWOL rather than risk arrest.
How things look: Downtown Los Angeles, which is usually abuzz with activity from clothing production and sales activity, is notably quieter. Wholesale shops are padlocked, according to Bloomberg, while the LA Fashion District Business Improvement District has reported a nearly 24 percent drop in employee attendance there since a prominent raid on June 6.
Some undocumented workers at Texas dairy farms have also stopped showing up to work, creating uncertainty for farmowners. “Those cows, they have to be milked every eight hours, so if milkhands are gone, what are you going to do?” Sid Miller, the state’s agriculture commissioner, told Bloomberg. “It’s sheer panic.”
Of note: Angel City F.C., the women’s soccer team owned by the Disney chief Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, made up to 10,000 T-shirts with “Immigrant City F.C.” printed on the front and “Los Angeles Is for Everyone” on the back in English and Spanish for its June 14 game.
Iger and Bay signed off on the move, according to Deadline.
Top Trump officials are defending the scope and pace of the raids, which has ramped up considerably in recent weeks. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now averaging more than 1,600 daily apprehensions, according to Bloomberg.)
In response to concerns from the agriculture and hospitality industries, Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, said that agents were simply enforcing the law. “We need a work force to do that type of work, then create a legal pathway,” he told “The Daily” podcast. “The president understands there’s a broken system here, but it doesn’t mean we just ignore the law.”
And this week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary — who pressed Trump to exempt agricultural businesses from immigration raids — sought to dispel any sense of division within the administration. “The President and I have consistently advanced a ‘Farmers First’ approach, recognizing that American households depend upon a stable and LEGAL agricultural workforce,” she wrote on X.
But she added, “Severe disruptions to our food supply would harm Americans. It took us decades to get into this mess and we are prioritizing deportations in a way that will get us out.”
A proxy warrior explains his culture war campaign
This week, we wrote about a recent study that found that shareholder proxy votes combating D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives on average succeed just 2 percent of the time. The data suggests that these efforts often serve a broader public relations agenda rather than a direct path to policy change.
DealBook caught up with Paul Chesser, the director of the Corporate Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative research group pushing some of these resolutions. Chesser says that the proxy contests are largely misunderstood — and that most proposals, whether brought by the left or the right, ultimately fail.
“The left was way ahead of us using these levers,” Chesser said, noting that liberal activist shareholders have made similar challenges for years. Conservative activists, he said, had not engaged in proxy contests, partly because of their belief in free markets.
That changed when they began to believe that the free market was being hijacked by left-leaning politics. “We’re providing a counterbalance,” Chesser told DealBook.
Things really took a turn for conservatives in 2020, Chesser said, citing the widespread corporate response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder that year. Watching companies “throwing all sorts of money at B.L.M. after the riots in 2020” was a revelation, he said, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Chesser acknowledges that all proxy activists face an uphill battle. “It doesn’t matter who brings a shareholder proposal,” he said. In aggregate, given the very small number of successful efforts, he concluded, “They all get shot down.” For him, “the vote totals are almost irrelevant.”
He added that this wasn’t unique to the nascent conservative campaigns.
Chesser didn’t deny the notion that such campaigns are P.R. events. “We’re about P.R.,” he said. “Welcome to the nonprofit world.” He framed these efforts as essential, and said that proxy initiatives from both sides of the political spectrum were critical tools for moving the boundaries of discourse in corporate America — known as shifting the Overton window.
Chesser says the proposals still hold sway, even if they often lose. “It is meaningful to them for some reason,” he said of the targeted companies. If it wasn’t, he said, “why do they fight it?”
“It used to be about fireworks, then it was about drones. Now, it’s shooting fireworks from drones.”
— Colin Cowie, a luxury wedding planner, on the increasingly complicated process of organizing “super weddings.” (The latest: Jeff Bezos of Amazon is set to wed Lauren Sánchez in Venice this month.) Organizers told The Wall Street Journal that budgets are stretching into the eight-figure range, as clients demand air-conditioning in old castles, famous chefs and D.J.s, and in one instance, a $500,000 holograph of a bride’s grandfather.
Talking A.I. with Zillow’s C.E.O.
We’re asking C.E.O.s about their approaches to artificial intelligence. Today, we’re chatting with Jeremy Wacksman, who leads the housing app Zillow. The responses have been condensed.
How do you use A.I. in your work or personal life?
I spend a lot of time either catching up on meetings I’ve missed or on asynchronous documentation. You can tell ChatGPT, “Treat me like my role. Here’s all this data — summarize it for me the way I would need to know going forward,” and you can get a personalized summary. That’s just — that’s far more valuable to me than to try to read a transcript at one-and-a-half speed or watch a video at one-and-a-half speed.
What direction have you given your team on how to use A. I.?
It’s about getting everyone to experiment. We’ve had what we call “A.I. days,” where we showcase work and celebrate examples. We’ve also started weaving it into our bigger meetings, like product reviews: When a product manager-design-engineering team is prototyping, oftentimes, they’re now using an A.I. tool called Replit. They’re prototyping really quickly to get something in front of a user.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Home Depot is reportedly battling against the deal maker Brad Jacobs for the building products supplier GMS, which could sell for several billion dollars. (WSJ)
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The French government will invest €1.35 billion ($1.55 billion) into Eutelsat in a move France hopes will help the satellite company take on Elon Musk’s Starlink. (Reuters)
Technology and artificial intelligence
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Australia is a step closer to barring people under 16 from using social media after a government trial found that it was technologically possible to adequately screen users by age. (Bloomberg)
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An adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union urged the court to confirm a €4.1 billion antitrust fine against Google over claims that it used its Android mobile operating system to block rivals. (Reuters)
Best of the rest
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How a messy divorce between United Talent Agency and Michael Kassan, the veteran marketing mogul, played out at this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival. (NYT)
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Here’s the top-ranked restaurant in the World’s 50 Best list: Maido in Lima, Peru. (NYT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
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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