Business

➚ BUY: Sunnyvale. Intel shares rose 10% after analysts floated a partnership with TSMC, which could be a solution to the deep problems that bounced Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger last year.

➘ SELL: London Fog. Another company has slighted the LSE for better-capitalized shores: Unilever’s ice-cream spinoff will list in Amsterdam. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves told Semafor earlier this year that keeping national champions listed in London was a priority.

Inflation spike crushes bonds… European stocks rally on Ukraine talks… which feature real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff… Bob Diamond sees ¾ of US banks disappearing… Trans-Atlantic gold arbitrage…

Donald Trump is escalating his trade war, announcing Thursday proposed reciprocal tariffs that could hit even staunch trading partners, spook markets, and complicate his aims of easing interest rates. Trump signed the memorandum ahead of a visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a nation that would be hit hard by tit-for-tat tariffs.

The stock market — to Trump, the most visible scorecard of his economic agenda — has shrugged off trade tensions and this week’s high inflation numbers, but the bond market hasn’t. Treasury yields spiked the most in almost two months and show that investors expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates just once this year, and not until late 2025.

“Interest Rates should be lowered, something which would go hand in hand with upcoming Tariffs!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday, a statement so internally inconsistent as to prompt The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page to ask, “Does President Trump understand money?” (Rupert Murdoch’s double-barrelled broadsides against Trump have been a fascinating media story lately, as Semafor’s Ben Smith has written. News Corp.’s flagship paper is a rare hotbed of Republican resistance to the president’s agenda.)

Semafor is keeping tabs on the business community’s MAGA shift and the Trump administration’s crackdown on corporate diversity efforts. The news is coming fast, and we’ll bring you updates in each newsletter.

Animating principles: Disney will downplay content warnings on some of its classic movies that feature racial stereotypes. Since 2019, films including Peter Pan and Dumbo have carried upfront language that its portrayals “were wrong then and are wrong now.” (The more deeply problematic “Song of the South” has been scrubbed entirely from Disney’s archives.) The company, no newcomer to the culture wars, is also changing how it rates executives and awards bonuses, replacing a “diversity & inclusion” metric with a “talent strategy” one, The New York Times reported.

Leading from the back: The US Securities and Exchange Commission is effectively abandoning its push to force public companies to disclose their carbon emissions, acting chair Mark Uyeda said. The pivot comes two days after Goldman Sachs scrapped its requirement that IPO-bound companies have diverse board members and ISS, the influential shareholder consultant, said it would no longer consider diversity when making investor voting recommendations. Also, Nasdaq is declining to appeal a December court ruling that struck down its 2022 policy requiring listed companies to have diverse directors.

Underwriters, regulators, and exchanges can all serve as hall monitors, using their power over the public markets to nudge companies. They enthusiastically played that role a few years ago when DEI and ESG were in favor, but are now following the broader retreat.

• The view from Europe: The continent’s large shareholders are holding firm on ESG. A new report from Morningstar shows that while support among large US money managers like BlackRock and Vanguard for environmental and social corporate ballot measures has fallen from 54% in 2021 to 31% last year, it’s stayed constant at more than 95% among their European peers.

Listen up: Instacart’s chief marketing officer, Laura Jones, joined Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast to talk about creating a Super Bowl ad in a world where corporate values are out of fashion. The grocery-delivery app’s spot goes full-on goofy, featuring brand mascots including the Pillsbury Doughboy, Kool-Aid Man, and Energizer Bunny en route to a customer’s doorstep. This year’s ads stayed far away from the social-justice-tinged spots of previous years — remember Kylie Jenner emerging from a protest crowd to hand a can of Pepsi to a police officer? — as companies try to avoid controversy.

“You can’t make everyone happy with what you say. So you have to really focus on what you do. We deliver groceries,” Jones told Semafor’s Ben Smith and Max Tani. “As officers in a corporation, we should really stay focused on the task at hand.”

An investment fund backed by a member of Qatar’s royal family is eyeing a takeover of an iconic American pizza chain.

Irth Capital Management has spoken with advisors about mounting a take-private bid for $1.4 billion for Papa Johns, according to people familiar with the matter. Irth was founded by Matthew Bradshaw and Sheikh Mohamed “Moe” al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family (not to be confused with his mountaineer cousin who shares the same name and title).

Bradshaw co-founded Durational Capital before starting Irth, and seems to be looking to replicate a playbook that he successfully ran at other companies — Durational took Southern fried-chicken stalwart Bojangles private in 2018 and did the same at mattress company Casper in 2021.

Irth disclosed a 4.99% position in Papa Johns last year, just beneath the threshold that would trigger disclosure of its plans. Irth’s investment strategy involves taking small stakes in public companies with an eye toward full takeovers: Irth “creates many of its own opportunities,” the firm said in an investor brochure.

Join us in DC for a critical discussion on the tax battles that could reshape Washington. With a GOP trifecta now in power, calls for tax reform are swelling. Semafor’s Elana Schor will explore the high-stakes debates shaping these proposals: How will Congress navigate tax cuts amid record deficits?

March 6, 2025 | Washington DC | RSVP

Fed Chair Jay Powell suggested that the government may not need a top banking cop. “For many years, as you know, we did our business without a vice chair for supervision,” Powell said in congressional testimony yesterday. When asked whether that was effective, he said it was, and came with “less volatility.” The job was most recently held by Michael Barr, whose plan for aggressive new capital rules ran into stiff — and legitimate, in the view of this newsletter writer — resistance from the industry and appears moribund. And Barr’s contentious streak upset the consensus that Powell tried to cultivate.

Historically not a seat of power, the vice chair job grew in prominence after 2008, when Dan Tarullo, a blunt, white-haired law professor, brought Wall Street to heel. (Bank stocks jumped when he announced his resignation in 2017.) Trump’s pick for the job, Randy Quarles, spearheaded some deregulation that the Fed later partly blamed for a string of regional-bank failures in 2023.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is announcing major layoffs across its space and launch businesses today, the latest setback in Bezos’ multifront competition with Musk. Blue Origin was founded nearly 25 years ago but didn’t manage a successful crewed launch until 2021, and it still lags SpaceX on the government contracting front. A person familiar with the matter told Semafor that wide cuts are expected, and Bloomberg reports they could affect up to 10% of employees.

The scorecard in the battle of the billionaires is getting lopsided. Musk has wrangled Washington in a way that Bezos, who bought a Kalorama estate in 2016 and its newspaper of record, hasn’t been able to. The Washington Post is struggling while Musk’s media property, X, has defied doomsayers and gained relevance (if at a significant cost to its billionaire owner). Among the advertisers returning to the platform, according to WSJ, is Amazon.

Roughly 75,000 federal workers accepted the Trump administration deferred resignation offer, a senior administration official told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott on Wednesday night.

Representing around 3.75% of the federal workforce, the final headcount came just hours after a judge lifted a hold on the buyout program amid a lawsuit from federal employee unions. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the win in court as “the first of many legal wins” for Trump.