Flagship

Trump lashes out at Powell

US President Donald Trump on Thursday lashed out at the Federal Reserve chair for not cutting interest rates, saying Jerome Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough.” Trump’s taunt came as the European Central Bank cut rates, and a day after Powell warned that US tariffs could lead to higher inflation and slower growth. No president has ever attempted to remove a Fed chair prematurely, and such a move would fuel market instability after several rocky weeks for investors, analysts say. White House allies, however, don’t see Trump’s attacks as an attempt to immediately oust Powell, but rather “an effort to throw the Fed chair off balance and position him as a future scapegoat for the country’s economic woes,” Politico reported.

Trump targets independent agencies

US President Trump’s desire to fire the Federal Reserve chair reflects his broader campaign to exert control over historically independent agencies. Trump has already dismissed top labor and trade officials; his administration is challenging a 1935 precedent that bars presidents from politically motivated terminations of certain federal officers, in a Supreme Court case that holds far-reaching implications for the Federal Reserve’s independence. And the IRS is reportedly considering Trump’s request to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after the school rejected his demands, a move that would significantly breach the revenue agency’s “historical insulation from political pressure,” The New York Times wrote. Trump’s attacks on independent agencies involve “reenvisioning both the history and the future of the American state,” historian Adam Tooze argued.

IMF doesn’t forecast global recession

The head of the International Monetary Fund warned Thursday that global economic growth will slow because of tariffs and trade tensions, but she stopped short of forecasting a recession. Uncertainty over global trade is “off the charts,” Kristalina Georgieva said ahead of the IMF and World Bank meetings next week. In its January report, the IMF projected a 3.3% rise in global GDP this year, boosted by strong US economic growth — but since then, US President Donald Trump’s tariff regime has led experts to downgrade their outlooks. Emerging markets with export-driven economies are among the most exposed countries, a new Goldman Sachs analysis found; Mexico’s GDP is now expected to contract 0.5%.

US compared to emerging markets

The US’ politics and finances increasingly resemble those of an emerging market, several experts argued. Countries in the developing world can be dynamic and fast-growing, but are risky, volatile, and “subject to damaging things like arbitrary and capricious government” and unpredictable courts — not unlike the US at the moment, Brett Arends wrote in MarketWatch: “You can never be sure what you’re really going to get.” The CEO of stock exchange Euronext called the US “unrecognizable.” With investors questioning whether American exceptionalism is over, the stability of the US political order has become “very, very relevant,” a Deutsche Bank economist said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.

Trump promises EU trade deal

President Donald Trump said the US would “100%” strike a trade deal with the EU, during a White House meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Thursday. Meloni, widely perceived as Europe’s “Trump whisperer,” had more than her reputation as a diplomatic bridge-builder at stake during the visit: Italy is one Europe’s top exporters to the US. The two leaders struck a positive tone, even as European officials expect most of Trump’s tariffs to remain in place, Bloomberg reported, with little progress in trade negotiations this week. The EU is considering further retaliatory tools if the tariffs remain, including restricting key exports to the US or targeting American tech firms.

Nvidia navigates US-China tensions

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with Chinese trade officials on Thursday, underscoring the country’s importance to the US chipmaker as tech tensions rise between Washington and Beijing. The visit came after the US further restricted Nvidia chip sales to China in its efforts to rein in Beijing’s AI ambitions. Nvidia is the “biggest corporate bargaining chip” in the US-China trade war, Semafor wrote, and Huang is emerging as a “chameleonic player:” He recently dined with US President Donald Trump and pledged a massive US investment. Other semiconductor giants are bracing for economic headwinds from Trump’s tariffs. Dutch firm ASML said orders were below expectations, but Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company gave a bullish outlook for the year, reporting better-than-expected earnings Thursday.

Google loses another antitrust case

Google illegally monopolized parts of the digital advertising business, a US federal judge ruled Thursday, dealing a major blow to the tech giant’s core business. The decision was the second antitrust win for the US government against Google: Last year, a judge ruled that the company held a monopoly over online search. The latest defeat is a gloomy backdrop for a court hearing next week to determine whether Google must break up its search business. Google’s setbacks come as the Donald Trump administration pursues an antitrust case against Meta, with the scrutiny marking the first time since the 1990s that US federal courts are weighing antitrust breakups, The New York Times wrote.

Brandon Daniels, CEO, Exiger; Dr. Albert Bourla, CEO and Executive Chairman, Pfizer; Tom Hale, CEO, ŌURA; Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder, Manas AI; Partner, Greylock; Stephen Ubl, President & CEO, PhRMA; John Zutter, CEO, Lantern, and more will join the Healthcare and a Healthy Economy session at the 2025 World Economy Summit. As global demographics shift and people take a more expansive view of their health, this session focuses on how public and private sectors can expand access and increase affordability.

April 25, 2025 | Washington, DC | Learn More

SpaceX leads bid to build ‘Golden Dome’

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is a frontrunner to build US President Donald Trump’s proposed missile defense shield, Reuters reported. Musk, a major Trump donor and White House adviser, has formed a consortium with two other companies with close ties to the president — Peter Thiel’s Palantir and drone maker Anduril — in a bid to build key parts of Trump’s “Golden Dome,” modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. The companies have proposed using hundreds of satellites to monitor for threats, and hundreds more equipped with lasers and missiles to shoot down enemy ordnance. SpaceX reportedly wants the Pentagon to rent the service, rather than own it outright, in a “subscription model” that government officials have expressed concerns about.

Silencing VOA benefits Beijing

US President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the English-language global radio news service Voice of America hands Beijing a “strategic victory,” a Chinese-American columnist argued. Li Yuan, like millions of Chinese people, “learned English through Voice of America and listened to its news reports,” she wrote in The New York Times. It gave a glimpse of the censored world beyond China’s borders, and Trump’s decision to dismantle it is a “surrender [in] the battle of narratives.” A US judge Thursday was set to hear arguments in two lawsuits challenging Trump’s silencing of VOA, a move that has left a void in global news coverage in heavily censored countries, a VOA advocacy group argued, allowing China and Russia to exert greater influence.

Foraging trend spreads from China to US

An outdoorsy social media trend among young people has spread from China to the US. Modern foraging, or “ganking,” began as a niche online phenomenon, in which city dwellers recorded themselves flocking to public parks and forests armed with plastic bags and shovels to dig for vegetables and other edible plants. More Americans are now taking up ganking, after discovering the trend on Xiaohongshu, which is seen as the Chinese equivalent of Instagram; a flood of US users joined the platform earlier this year as TikTok’s future in the US appeared precarious. The trend has become “a surprising cultural crossover,” Radii China wrote, with Xiaohongshu becoming “an unexpected bridge between Chinese and American urban explorers.”

April 18:

• Japan releases inflation data.
• Baggage handlers and flight dispatchers begin a four-day strike at London’s Gatwick airport.
• Many global markets are closed for Good Friday.

A new exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art highlights the first 70 years of American photography through more than 200 largely unseen works. The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 focuses almost exclusively on little-known creators to tell “an expanded story about the birth of this medium,” one curator told the BBC. Though originating in Europe, photography has a distinctly American history given the speed at which it spread around the country: One featured photographer, for instance, was a gold prospector who moved from New York to California in search of fortune, “but instead of taking from the landscape, made a career of photographing it,” the BBC wrote.

Progressive activist Abdul El-Sayed will run for Michigan’s open Senate seat, endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders following his call for like-minded candidates to challenge the Democratic Party’s establishment, Semafor’s David Weigel reported.

“Michiganders are looking for people who can both fight and build,” El-Sayed told Weigel. This race has no frontrunner, and Michigan is set for the first real ideological Democratic primary contest of 2026, with Sanders on one side and everyone else in the party still figuring out who to support.