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Signs of US economic pessimism

Signs of US economic pessimism are creeping up among global investors and American consumers as President Donald Trump charges ahead with his tariff plans. Stocks in the US and Asia fell along with US Treasury yields Tuesday after Trump vowed to move forward with tariffs against Mexico and Canada, while bitcoin, seen as a favorable “Trump trade,” has also slipped. Wall Street analysts are whispering concerns of an overvalued market, and Americans’ inflation fears are growing: A consumer confidence index on Tuesday recorded its largest monthly decline since August 2021. Trump’s tariff push suggests that of his “two priorities — a soaring stock market and a retributive, America First trade policy — the latter is winning,” Semafor’s Liz Hoffman wrote.

US eyes more chip controls

Chinese companies are buying more artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia, as the US looks to tighten semiconductor controls targeting Beijing. US President Donald Trump is looking to further restrict Nvidia chip sales to China amid broader proposed curbs to curtail the country’s tech ambitions. But analysts attributed the recent swell in orders for Nvidia’s China-compliant H20 chip to the sudden emergence of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, as its low-cost AI models are increasingly adopted by tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent. Trump is also eyeing curbs on H20’s sales to China, Bloomberg reported; Nvidia’s shares fell Tuesday, a day before its earnings report that will offer clues on how the US chip giant is navigating the threat of tariffs and export controls.

Debate over Trump’s China hawkishness

US-China experts diverged on whether Donald Trump’s administration has been as tough on Beijing as many predicted. Washington’s China-related measures so far are “relatively thin,” The Wire China’s Noah Berman wrote: Tariff hikes are below what Trump originally floated, TikTok remains alive, and the countries are reportedly exploring a new trade deal. The approach, which differs from Trump’s first term, has made the Republican foreign policy establishment “very nervous about where we’re going on China,” a longtime US national security expert said. But a recent spate of hawkish personnel and policy moves, including issuing a memo listing China as an “adversary,” signals Washington is “gearing up for tougher policies” toward Beijing, Sinocism’s Bill Bishop wrote.

Apple shareholders back DEI

Apple shareholders on Tuesday rebuffed an investor bid to cut its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even as a growing number of US firms scrap or roll back DEI policies. Apple’s board had disagreed with a conservative think tank’s proposal that argued the tech giant’s diversity commitments could present a legal liability. The company’s biggest competitors, Meta, Google, and Amazon, along with major US banks like Citi, have made U-turns on diversity amid a broad corporate backlash following Donald Trump’s executive order banning “illegal DEI” practices. Some large firms are threading a needle: Delta is rebranding its diversity efforts as merit-based “people initiatives.”

Nippon, US Steel look to save deal

Japan’s Nippon Steel is not giving up on its attempt to take over US Steel despite political setbacks. Former President Joe Biden blocked the $15 billion merger on national security grounds, and President Donald Trump said earlier this month that the Japanese firm was considering an investment in the American giant instead. But executives from both companies have sought meetings with White House officials to salvage what Semafor’s Rohan Goswami called a “strong contender for ‘weirdest deal of the decade.’” Nippon and Japanese government officials are “nodding along as Trump declares the deal dead, then proceeding as though they expect it to be completed.”

SK crisis forces execs to tackle tariffs

South Korea’s political crisis is forcing the country’s business leaders to tackle the problem of US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. The proposed US duties on cars, semiconductors, and steel would hurt South Korea’s biggest industries, and executives are alarmed that the government — paralyzed by the impeachment of the country’s pro-Trump president — isn’t doing enough to bring Washington to the negotiating table. While South Korea’s industry minister will visit Washington this week to press for tariff exemptions, Korean executives are also meeting with US officials and hiring former Trump aides to spearhead their companies’ government affairs, Reuters reported. But analysts said that without a leader-to-leader meeting, any deal would be difficult to reach.

Huntington was right about world order

The concept of a “clash of civilizations,” put forward by the US political scientist Samuel Huntington, was not wrong, but merely premature, a historian argued. Huntington prominently disagreed with a peer, Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 argued that we had reached “the end of history” with the end of the Cold War marking the final victory of liberal democracy. Huntington proposed that the new world order would instead be shaped by conflict between major civilizations, including the democratic West. Fukuyama’s argument seemed to win out, and Huntington’s was criticized over the difficulty of defining a “civilization.” But Russia and China have not submitted to the liberal order, the historian Nils Gilman argued in Foreign Policy, and the Fukuyamian optimism has receded.

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Brain-mapping woos advertisers

India’s richest man is using neuroscience to lure advertisers for cricket match broadcasts. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance — which merged with Disney to become the country’s biggest entertainment group — has spent billions on the broadcast rights for the upcoming Indian Premier League, making ad revenue critical. Reliance is now wooing smaller companies to advertise by presenting them with “brain mapping” research that analyzed participants’ neurons to show its streaming ads have higher engagement rates than Instagram and YouTube, Reuters reported. But the strategy isn’t a silver bullet, an analyst cautioned: “You aren’t going to win an argument in a board meeting next year by pointing at a brain scan, you’ll win that market by pointing at the profit and loss chart.”

Asia drives Cuban cigars’ record sales

Cuban cigar sales reached a record $827 million in 2024, driven by demand in Asia. Habanos, the Cuban cigar company, is half owned by Cuba’s government and half by an Asian conglomerate: Almost a quarter of its sales are in Asia. The cigars are considered the world’s finest, with aficionados lauding Cuba’s “unique variety of tobacco, rich soils, and ideal climate,” Reuters reported, and the company’s insistence on hand-rolling its cigars. They are not legally available in the US, however, because of an embargo on all Cuban produce since 1962. The Obama administration loosened the rules in 2015, but they were reintroduced during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Film studio in UK tests economy

A Hollywood-backed plan to develop a major film studio in a sleepy English commuter town has become emblematic of the fight over the UK economy. Many major movies are already filmed in the UK, but locals in Marlow, outside London, are protesting against the $950 million, 90-acre project supported by Titanic director James Cameron — arguing that it will ruin the town’s charm. The government thinks the UK’s planning laws have too many NIMBY-friendly veto points, and restrict growth. The fight over the studio is “a marker of how far the British government will go to use development as a means to revive the nation’s stagnant economy,” The New York Times wrote.

Feb. 26:

• UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrives in Washington ahead of his first meeting with US President Donald Trump.
• Nvidia, Salesforce, and Anheuser-Busch InBev report their fourth quarter earnings.
• The red carpet is rolled out on Hollywood Boulevard in preparation for Sunday’s Academy Awards.

An ancient account chronicling the scandalous lives of Roman emperors is thriving in bookstores. Popular historical podcast host Tom Holland’s translation of Roman scholar Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars is now on the bestsellers list, thanks not only to an enduring obsession with the Roman Empire, but also because of its political resonance. There are longstanding fears that the US republican system could end up becoming an autocracy like that of ancient Rome, Holland told The Guardian, and “at the moment, that anxiety has a particular salience.” But the book is popular largely because it is filled with sensational stories: “It is kind of ancient Rome’s Popbitch,” Holland said, referring to the iconic UK celebrity gossip newsletter.

When did the media go wrong? A new book argues that Robert Caro is to blame, Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote.

Caro’s sweeping biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, may have ushered in “a reflexive skepticism of the use of power” that makes it difficult for Democrats to actually get things done. Still, any reappraisal of Moses’ methods might be premature: He and others “explicitly tried to drive down public participation,” said one critic. “Does that sound like a match for today?”