Chapter 1: How is AI spending impacting companies today?
Storms, floods, and fires are ever more extreme. And yet, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life.
I've never been a big fan of FEMA.
FEMA's a disaster. FEMA's a dirty word. People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps. Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it?
And can we survive without FEMA? American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA, is a brand new series from WNYC's On The Media.
Chapter 2: What challenges do companies face with AI token usage?
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Congratulations, Chairman Warsh. I guess? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Friday today. This one is the 24th of April. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We have seven minutes at the top of the program today to talk about the week gone by.
Chapter 3: How are companies measuring the return on AI investments?
And I got to tell you, I am not sure it is going to be enough. Katharine Pell is at MSNOW, also at The Bulwark. David Gora is at Bloomberg. Hey, you two.
Hey, Kai. Hey, Kai.
Catherine, you get to go first. The news of the day, of course, in our wheelhouse, as it were, is that the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, is dropping, and you can't see me, but that's in air quotes, the investigation into the Fed and Chair Powell. I guess I wonder, first of all, what you make of that.
Well, it seems like the White House is White House slash DOJ.
I know that they're supposed to be independent from each other, but it seems like all of the above have recognized that they are getting in their own way or Trump is getting in his own way, that the way to get his pick for the next Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, through is to find an off ramp for what certainly appears to be a political campaign.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Procter & Gamble's recent earnings?
politically motivated criminal investigation into Jerome Powell and that the way to get Kevin Warsh cleared is to abide by Senator Tom Tillis's request to drop this investigation because Tillis says he likes Warsh, but he's not going to move forward any of Trump's picks for the Fed until this investigation is done. And to my knowledge, we still have not heard from Tillis to know whether
This satisfies that demand because it's not totally clear that Howell is out of the woods.
Right, right, right. So, David, let's keep going with that. The last line of Pirro's tweet this morning, because that's how we do government policy nowadays, is by tweet or true social. Her last line was, I reserve the right to reopen this investigation. And I guess, you know, to Catherine's point, is that enough for Tillis, who we think is looking for an off-ramp?
But also, what about Powell, right? Because let's remember, his term is up as chair on the 15th of May, but he does have the statutory right to stay on the board for another two-ish years.
Chapter 5: How are consumers responding to rising prices in essential goods?
It's a great point. So we haven't heard from Senator Tillis. We haven't heard from Jay Powell. And remember what he said a little while back. He said he was going to stick around until this probe was resolved with transparency and finality. Those were his words. And so I think the question is, does this mark a resolution of that?
So in that tweet that you referenced in that post, Jeanine Pirro passing the buck over to the inspector general at the Federal Reserve, calling upon the inspector general to do this investigation of the renovations and what Powell said to Congress. I should note, back in July... Fed chair Jerome Powell called for the same thing.
Chapter 6: What role does innovation play in consumer product success?
So this work has been underway by the inspector general already. But I think that's really the key question here. If this is simply moving from one investigator to the next, is that going to satisfy the Fed chair that this investigation is over with? And I, like Catherine, like you, waiting to see what we hear from the senator who's been threatening to block all of this and from the chair.
And we'll see if anything emerges here over the course of the weekend.
Catherine, with complete awareness of what happens when one assumes, let's assume that this all works out, as it were, for the way the president wants it to. And and Mr. Warsh does get the actual job. What did you make of his confirmation hearing this week?
To be honest, I found the whole thing a little bit frustrating because the elephant in the room is this criminal investigation case. Of Powell, which may or may not be dropped.
Chapter 7: How does the new women's sports bar reflect changing cultural trends?
Right. And to the extent that that came up, the question for Warsh was, would you, you know, well, do you agree with Powell that this was politically motivated because of a disagreement over policy? He was also asked about. whether he would stand up and defend Lisa Cook, who is a board member whom Donald Trump has been trying to fire. That case is before the Supreme Court.
And Warsh punted on both. And nobody asked Warsh, well, what would you do if, in fact, you had a disagreement with the president and he wanted you to cut interest rates and you slash the FOMC would did not cooperate. What would you do if he threatened you, smeared you, launched a criminal investigation into you, tried to fire you? And nobody asked that.
Chapter 8: What future plans do the owners have for expanding their business?
And so I found that a little bit frustrating because I think that that's really what matters more than anything else. Even if Kevin Warsh has indicated that he would cut interest rates or at least try to encourage the rest of the FOMC to cut interest rates, he can't do it solo. Um, It's going to become increasingly difficult for the Fed to do that because inflation has been so stubborn.
And so that that question will arise. Should there be a chair? Right.
Right. So, David, let's keep going with that. You had a great conversation with Michael McKee, who covers the Fed from Bloomberg earlier this week. And what I want is an understanding of walking in the door now. What is worse going to be like as a Fed chair? Because this has been a tricky process.
It's been a tricky process, and he's somebody who has opined for a very long time about what he would like to see the Fed become, how it should operate, how much it should communicate, how much it shouldn't, how it should approach inflation. I think that's another element of frustration, to borrow Catherine's word here, is that he was very unwilling to
engage with what he has spent his whole career talking about during the course of that hearing. And he had a very cute way, and I say that respectfully, of dealing with this. He said, I'm not a believer in forward guidance. So he used that as a way to kind of shut down any questions that were hypothetical in nature.
As we've talked about before on the show, his job is going to be to rally this committee behind him or to try to do so. It's not just his decision alone, emphasizing that again for everybody who doesn't have an intimate knowledge of how the Fed works. I think that is going to be a huge challenge for him going forward.
You know, whether he wants to cut rates or the president's telling him to cut rates, he has to work with this committee to convince them that that would be the thing to do, even if, in fact, it is not the right thing to do at that particular time. Catherine, they meet next week, the Fed does. And just to bring it to current events, right, we're still in the middle of an energy shock.
The mantra at the Fed has been we're going to try to look through this energy shock to see what's going on. But we also had the International Energy Agency this week saying, you know what, this energy crisis is going to last two years. How then does one run a central bank when you're trying to do that?
They're in a very difficult position. They were in a difficult position before, obviously, given that inflation had been hotter than they wanted and the economy seemed to be slowing down, is maybe the right way to describe it. Not in a bad space, but unemployment was creeping up, et cetera. So they already had this very difficult set of constraints around them.
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