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President Trump paid a rare visit to the Fed on Thursday, continuing his pressure campaign on its chair, Jerome H. Powell.Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Andrew here. Watching Jay Powell grimace as he stood next to President Trump on Thursday was quite the sight. Trump’s effort to embarrass the Fed chair about the central bank’s renovations budget — as a way to pressure him to lower interest rates — was most likely ineffective.
In truth, it was probably counterproductive: Given the Fed’s interest in portraying itself as independent, the theatrical tour is likely to only make the Fed hold firm on not cutting rates. We dive into that, as well as what companies are saying about tariffs. Plus, we’ve got some A.I. hacks from the C.E.O. of Sanofi.
Jay Powell has — for now — survived his latest encounter with President Trump, a hard-hat tour of the Fed’s headquarters.
It was a rare visit on Thursday by a sitting president to an institution that global investors fear is losing its independence as the Trump administration repeatedly attacks it over interest rates, and a $2.5 billion renovation project, Vivienne Walt reports. (Trump also presented Powell with a document saying the costs had ballooned to $3.1 billion, a figure that Powell quickly fact-checked.)
Trump, the seasoned developer who has threatened to oust the Fed chair, on Thursday told reporters he “would fire” a project manager if that person had overspent on one of his real estate projects. He later seemed to back off on dismissing Powell, but made it clear that he wants lower rates.
The Fed meets next week to deliberate just that. Economists widely expect that the central bank will stand pat.
Trump’s visit shifts the focus to the Fed’s finances. Cumulative losses at the self-funded central bank over the past two years hit $192 billion. (It usually makes a profit.) It’s blown through its initial budget to renovate two buildings it said were riddled with asbestos and lead. Tariffs and inflation helped drive up costs, Fed officials told reporters on a tour on Thursday.
Could the renovations sink Powell? Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said the project seemed more fit for the Palace of Versailles “than a public institution.”
But for business and government leaders, the trend has been to project power to investors through high-priced buildings.
Central banks have a glamour streak, too. “They print their own money, so they don’t have the same budget constraints,” Erik Fossing Nielsen, a senior adviser for Independent Economics, a London consultancy, told DealBook. “From Day 1, they needed to show wealth and trust, otherwise people would not give you their money to handle,” he added.
After the Berlin Wall fell, Germany, short on cash, spent tens of millions renovating its 1930s finance ministry complex, with corridors spanning the equivalent of 3.4 miles, and a contemporary art collection. And in January, the Dutch central bank reopened after a 320-million-euro ($376 million) renovation that includes bird nests and insect sanctuaries.
(Powell, by contrast, said he scrapped planned beehives at Fed H.Q. amid the furor.)
The Fed’s spending is minuscule compared with other projects. Apple’s headquarters opened in 2017 and cost $5 billion. And Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, the government-funded desert city project initially estimated to cost $500 billion, is now expected to reach trillions.
Trade war jitters and geopolitics could stifle the kingdom’s “giga projects.”
The F.C.C. approves the Skydance-Paramount deal. The agency cleared the highly scrutinized media merger after it had received assurances that the new company, which would include Paramount’s Hollywood studio and CBS, would commit to unbiased journalism and would steer clear of programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Shares in Paramount rallied on the news, even as “South Park” and other Paramount shows have been skewering President Trump.
Intel expects to shrink its work force by more than 25,000 jobs this year. The struggling chipmaker, which was late to the artificial intelligence boom, has shuffled through a series of C.E.O.s and turnaround strategies in recent years — and is now in fierce cost-cutting mode. In addition to reducing its head count, it will curtail European expansion plans, slow an Ohio factory project and consolidate some overseas operations to stem losses.
Union Pacific says it is in merger talks with Norfolk Southern. A tie-up would create a $200 billion coast-to-coast U.S. rail giant but could also reduce competition in the vital and highly concentrated sector. Rail mergers have previously hit regulatory obstacles, but Trump has signaled that his administration could take a lighter touch on antitrust cases.
With a week to go before President Trump’s Aug. 1 tariff deadline, corporate bosses are again speaking up.
The latest: Shares in Puma fell sharply on Friday after the company said that it would lose money this year as Trump’s trade war eats into the bottom line. And in a statement, Volkswagen warned of “political uncertainty and increased barriers to trade” in cutting its full-year profit outlook, and revealed a 1.3 billion euro ($1.5 billion) tariff hit.
Few have been more assertive than Bernard Arnault, the luxury magnate who has close to ties to Trump, and whose LVMH conglomerate on Thursday reported a big quarterly sales drop.
Arnault has been using his connections and burning up the air miles. In recent weeks, he’s met Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, The Wall Street Journal reports, in the hopes of cooling nerves even as Europe readies a retaliation plan on more than 93 billion euros’ worth of U.S. imports if talks break down. He’s also spoken to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“I’m pushing as much as I can for us to reach an agreement with the Americans, so that we don’t get caught up in a trade war, which would be extremely damaging for European businesses,” Arnault told The Journal.
Other trade war fallout:
- Moncler, the Italian luxury brand, said that it had been forced to increase prices to offset the tariff hit and that wider economic uncertainty could result in a delay to store openings.
- Tariff-driven inflation has yet to fully show up in official government data, but the Yale Budget Lab is forecasting that consumers will see the levies raising prices in time for the back-to-school shopping season.
Americans’ tastes are changing, and so are the political winds. That could mean big changes for Big Food.
People are increasingly seeking out cheaper private-label brands and healthier products, denting sales for packaged food giants. In response, executives across the sector are increasingly eyeing deals — including takeovers and spinoffs — and re-engineering others, The Times’s Julie Creswell and Lauren Hirsch report.
The stressors are numerous: Higher food prices and the rise of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have prompted shoppers to pull back on snacking. And a health-food kick has affected sales of highly processed foods.
The Trump administration is another factor. Food companies face the threat of higher costs as a result of Trump’s trade war.
And Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pressuring food and beverage companies to ditch certain ingredients and additives under his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Coca-Cola this week said it would offer U.S. consumers a version of Coke made with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.
More deals are occurring in response. And they’re taking various forms. This month, Ferrero, the Italian candy company behind Nutella, said it would acquire the cereal giant WK Kellogg in a $3.1 billion deal. PepsiCo took over the prebiotic soda brand Poppi this year for $1.95 billion, a recognition of strong demand for healthier brands.
Then there’s the potential Kraft Heinz breakup. North America’s third-largest food and beverage company is considering spinning off part of its business, two people familiar with the situation told The Times. “It’s an admission that things have to change in one way or another, whatever that change may be,” said Peter Galbo, an analyst at Bank of America.
Credit…By The New York Times
President Trump has harangued, scolded and belittled Jay Powell scores of times since he nominated him in 2017 to lead the Fed. Those verbal attacks have intensified in Trump’s second term — with approximately 43 coming since April, according to a new analysis by The Times.
Every week, we’re asking a C.E.O. how he or she uses generative artificial intelligence. Paul Hudson, who leads the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, talked about Plai, an internal app that the company developed with Aily Labs, an A.I. start-up, to deliver data insights. His responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you use A.I. in your work and personal life?
Typically, I look at the world headlines and the sports headlines. And then I take a look, on our internal app, at what the A.I. thinks my opportunities and my threats are for the day, for the quarter, for the month. I forward them to people. Much like you would send a funny story to a friend, I send an opportunity for the business to do better.
It might say, Paul, you might want to look at Brazil today because they’re gonna be out of stock in four months if they don’t make an adjustment. It knows who you are. And it makes everything very specific to your role.
I used to fly around the world and ask people questions to try and organize myself on this. Now I can see it all with a cup of coffee. And that’s insane.
What direction have you given your team on how to use A.I.?
A big accounting firm wanted $800 million to curate data in the company to make it A.I.-ready. I said, “No, we will take a dozen people from critical functions around the company, and we will tell them to disrupt themselves with A.I.”
For example, we had many thousands of people in finance doing forecasting. On their best day, they were 92.5 percent accurate over a 12-month period. The A.I. is 99.5 percent accurate. If you’re 92.5 percent accurate, people start hedging. You can’t operate like that.
It also takes the politics away. We start many of our committees now with an agent telling us whether it thinks we should go forward or not on a project. The agent doesn’t have a career at stake. It does not have to look around the room and feel consequences for killing a project.
I think we’re reaching a point where we have to decide what our digital-labor ratio will be going forward. We probably don’t need to add more resources, irrespective of how successful we are, because we are increasing productivity so fast. It’s just magic.
