Business

1. Trade jitters paralyze CEOs
2. Rahm heads to Wall Street
3. BYD > Tesla
4. Fink’s next frontier
5. Beijing’s bank check

President Donald Trump is expected to announce the most dramatic shift in US trade policy in decades in a Rose Garden press conference tomorrow. That’s about all we know right now.

Just hours from “Liberation Day,” details are scant on exactly how the president plans to upend 30 years of global commerce. His EU counterpart, Ursula von der Leyen, says the bloc has “a strong plan to retaliate,” but to what?

Reciprocal tariffs — “whatever they charge us, we charge them,” in the president’s words — are likely, plus some indirect tariffs for targeted political effect, like pressuring Vladimir Putin on peace talks by taxing imports to the US from countries that buy Russian oil.

The CEO of one investment giant I talked to this week was reduced to lobbing a simple request into the White House: schedule the announcement for after 4 pm, when the market is closed. (This was a request made by, among others, former NYSE President Stacey Cunningham during Trump’s first term, with some success.)

Trump sees tariffs as a way to revive American manufacturing; a cudgel to settle scores and project strength; a source of revenue to pay for tax cuts; and an ideological war against a system that MAGA loathes. Most economists agree the first is unlikely and, outside of some national-security sectors, not worth subsidizing with an estimated $6 trillion tax on households. The second has yielded some foreign-policy wins.

The third would require high and sustained tariffs that could actually sap government coffers, if economic growth slows and tax receipts drop. Trump’s first-term tariffs were mostly harmless, but were smaller and set against a more favorable economic backdrop of low interest rates and steady growth.

The fourth — replacing the neoliberal world order — seems certain to work. Whatever the numbers are tomorrow, the economic world we’re heading into will look nothing like the postwar free-trade consensus that preceded it.

Execs are slow to buy tariff insurance

Trade jitters are through the roof, but companies have been slow to embrace the one obvious solution: giving MAGA what it wants. 

With a handful of high-profile and mostly foreign exceptions — Hyundai, Apple, TSMC, and SoftBank among them — executives are playing a wait-and-see game before rerouting supply chains and rewriting investment plans. “You can’t move a factory overnight,” Onsemi CEO Hassane El-Khoury told Semafor earlier this year.

Foreign companies facing almost certain tariffs of some kind have been quicker to react than US firms whose executives remember the back-and-forth policies of Trump’s first term and are wary of being caught out. (Their decisive actions have mostly been putting out immediate fires.)

“Build a plant that depends on imported parts, and Trump may cut you off at the knees with new tariffs,” liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote this week. “Build a plant that’s only profitable if tariffs stay in place, and Trump may cut you off at the knees by backing down.”

Rahm Emanuel is coming to Wall Street

Rahm Emanuel, a veteran Democratic leader and political brawler widely seen as a 2028 presidential contender, is coming to Wall Street. Emanuel, who served most recently as Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan, is rejoining investment bank Centerview Partners, where he worked from 2019 to 2021 counseling CEOs on mergers, regulation, and political matters.

Centerview is a logical place for Emanuel to hang his hat as he weighs a White House campaign. It’s home to heavyweight Democratic fundraisers, including co-founder Blair Effron, and has a client list whose CEOs would be valuable allies in a centrist run.

“I’m not done with public service, and I hope public service isn’t done with me,” Emanuel said in an interview.

For now, though, he’ll bring his rolodex and street-fighter political savvy to Centerview, which like all Wall Street advisers these days, is trying to help corporate clients navigate a changed political and regulatory landscape. Dealmaking in Trump’s America has turned it into a high-wire act, which means political advice is going at a premium in corporate boardrooms. (Centerview hired former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus, Semafor scooped last month, and Emanuel’s return suggests that the political calculus isn’t entirely one-sided.)

“CEOs and their boards are facing geopolitical and economic crosswinds that are new to them,” Emanuel said. “I look forward to working with my Centerview colleagues to help navigate through the new environment.”

BYD sales soar, squeezing out Tesla

China’s BYD is pulling farther ahead from Tesla, ramping up pressure on Trump’s very busy right-hand man. The automaker, which passed Tesla in 2023 by number of EVs produced, Monday reported 58% growth in quarterly sales. It has benefitted from a drop in Tesla sales that is so far limited to Europe and is being attributed to backlash to Musk’s politics.

China is winning the global EV race with a simple formula: undercut on price, overdeliver on quality. BYD’s cars — priced at less than €40,000 in Germany, for example — are cheaper than those of Tesla and Lucid, which are still high-end brands. It’s the same playbook that Japan’s Honda and Toyota rode to dominance in the 1970s and 1980s. There will always be a niche for luxury, but EVs are a battle of persuading the masses on a new technology. China’s focus on scale is winning.

— Rohan Goswami

BlackRock comes for Wall Street’s fees

Larry Fink is coming for the 2-and-20 crowd. The BlackRock CEO said in his annual letter, released Monday, that private markets will soon be as accessible and transparent as public markets. BlackRock made waves last year scooping up private investment shops, but its $3.2 billion acquisition of Preqin, a data provider for private markets, may end up being more disruptive to this fast-growing corner of finance. With enough data, “private markets will be accessible, simple markets.”

They will also be a lot cheaper, though Fink is more delicate on this front. Some private asset managers are worth the high fees they charge and some aren’t, but the opacity of the market makes it hard to tell who’s who. Tracking the returns of a broad universe of private deals would drop that curtain, separate laggards from outperformers, and force the industry to justify its fees.

Consider what happened in public stocks: The first S&P 500 index funds, launched in the 1970s, set a public benchmark against which stockpickers could be measured. It took a few decades, but many of them were found wanting. Fees charged by actively managed mutual funds peaked in the 1990s and had fallen more than 60% by 2022, according to Morningstar. Where did all that money go? A lot of it went to BlackRock, which is the largest manager of passive index funds.

China presses banks to lend

China’s government is pouring $69 billion into its largest banks in an effort to shore up a sluggish and rattled economy.

President Xi Jinping is trying everything short of a huge stimulus on the order of Beijing’s 2008 bazooka, which economists say overtorqued China’s industrial sector and loaded local governments with debt they still haven’t shaken.

The recent moves are meant to spur consumer demand that is dragging down the world’s second-biggest economy. Beijing earlier this month ordered its banks to boost loans and credit-card use to encourage spending, and are now giving them the firepower to do it. But it’s unclear whether cheap rates will be enough to tempt consumers whose confidence in the economy has barely budged from pandemic troughs.

Even China’s biggest banks — three of those receiving government cash now are on the global “too-big-to-fail” list — have always been a bit isolated from the global financial system, but Beijing’s ratcheting up of aid with little to show for it bears close watching.

Stephen Miran, Chair, White House Council of Economic Advisers, will join top global leaders at Semafor’s 2025 World Economy Summit. Taking place Apr. 23-25, 2025, in Washington, DC, this will be the first major gathering of its kind since the new US administration took office.

Bringing together leaders from both the public and private sectors — including congressional leadership, finance ministers, and central bankers — the three day summit will explore the forces shaping the global economy and geopolitics. Across twelve sessions, it will foster transformative, news-making conversations on how the world’s decision-makers are tackling economic growth in increasingly uncertain times.

Apr. 23-25, 2025 | Washington, DC | Learn More

➚ BUY: Chasers. Apple is facing a €150 million EU fine related to ads, while Meta executives want Trump’s help fighting another EU penalty, WSJ reports. As former Trump official Makan Delrahim told CNBC yesterday, recent actions suggest US antitrust laws will be enforced “pretty vigorously” as well.

➘ SELL: Shots. Biotech stocks are falling as Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. begins sweeping changes to the nation’s health care apparatus. A top FDA scientist resigned, and Kaiser reported that Kennedy ordered references to mRNA — the science behind the Covid vaccine — removed from grant applications.

Companies & Deals

• Metal detector: A top Nippon Steel executive will meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Washington, seeking the administration’s blessing for a MAGA-fied proposal to acquire US Steel, people familiar with the matter told Semafor. The Japanese firm’s vice chairman is expected to press Nippon’s commitments to invest as much as $7 billion into US steelmaking facilities, which it hopes will win Trump’s approval for the takeover. Steel union leaders are also expected to attend tariff announcements at the White House tomorrow. Commerce didn’t return requests for comment.
• Chips down: Lutnick has signalled that he will withhold CHIPS Act funds from companies that don’t sufficiently expand their US operations, Bloomberg reported. TSMC’s $100 billion commitment is a roadmap.
• Mind games: Google’s quasi-independent AI arm, DeepMind, has made it more difficult for in-house researchers to publish their data — seeking to maintain an edge in the AI arms race that has pitted Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft against each other. While Chinese AI companies race to go open, US tech firms are starting to close themselves off, inverting a historical truth.

Making Business Great Again

• DOGE days: The big consultancies have been hit hard by Elon Musk’s cuts. Accenture boss Julie Sweet warned earlier this month that the company was already feeling the pinch from DOGE cuts, but a Financial Times analysis shows that Deloitte has the most contracts at risk — 129 deals, with claimed savings totalling $372 million.
• News memes: Newsmax shares rocketed nearly 1,200% in its Nasdaq IPO, creating a $12 billion media juggernaut and minting a billionaire in the process. It was briefly worth as much as The New York Times and Paramount Global, which had a combined $32 billion in 2024 revenue to Newsmax’s $171 million.

Watchdogs

• Glass houses: Proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis urged Goldman Sachs shareholders to reject “egregious” $80 million pay packages each for Goldman chief David Solomon and his top lieutenant, John Waldron. Glass Lewis and its peer, ISS, have long criticized bank bonuses, in the process making an enemy out of Jamie Dimon, who described them as “incompetent” in an interview with Semafor’s Gina Chon last month. The Goldman paydays are big, but widely seen as the price to keep Waldron warm in the No. 2 seat.
• Capital crimes: US prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, accused of the murder of a UnitedHealth executive that raised concerns about a wave of corporate violence.

The top US financial regulator wants to let one of its signature accomplishments of recent years die on the vine. The move’s immediate practical impact is limited, but its symbolic resonance is significant, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell writes.

Mark Uyeda, acting chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the agency will drop its legal defense of rules it adopted in the last months of Joe Biden’s presidency that requires many companies to publish information about their emissions and exposure to climate risk.