Business

➚ BUY: Little Boxes. Apple unveiled a new entry-level iPhone, the 16e, that can run its latest AI tools just like top-end models. But the big news, as usual, is what’s inside — Apple’s first in-house modem, an expensive and long-awaited R&D win meant to ease its reliance on Qualcomm.

➘ SELL: Big Box. Weak sales guidance from Walmart prompted fresh worries about consumer demand. The company’s outlook didn’t take into account tariff headwinds, meaning the picture could be gloomier still. Walmart’s stock slipped 6%, sparking smaller selloffs in Target and Costco shares Thursday morning.

Quantum dreams inch closer… Forever 21 nears Chapter 22 filing… Hedge fund talent war mints $100M contract…Trump appointees double-dip (Rubio runs national archives)…

The FTC’s reaffirmation of Biden-era merger rules should dispel Wall Street’s hopes Trump would usher in a dealmaking boom.

“Rewriting guidelines after every election would be destabilizing,” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said. “Enforcement agencies should avoid a wholesale change in guidelines with every new administration… Firms must be able to make plans without worrying that guidelines are tossed away every four years. Courts will not rely on guidelines that are transparently partisan either.”

Wholesale, destabilizing, and transparently partisan rewriting of guidelines in ways that worry constituents and undermine courts is Trump’s whole bit! In their enthusiasm for Trump, corporate executives have focused on the things he says that they like (deregulation, lower taxes) and dismissed ones they don’t as bluffs (trade wars, immigration crackdown, inflationary policies, politically motivated investigations). A likely outcome here is that corporate America gets all of the destabilizing, norm-shattering Trump they feared and none of the destabilizing, norm-shattering Trump they wanted.

Vice President JD Vance and “Khanservative” allies like Sen. Josh Hawley are as suspicious of big business as progressives are, and antitrust enforcement is a topic where the horseshoe theory of politics holds — where the far left and far right tend to agree. Trump’s merger cops holding to Biden’s agenda shows that even Big Tech’s cozying up to the administration may not have changed their mind toward corporate power.

Ferguson’s comments are “a reaffirmation that what we actually did is innately conservative,” said Josh Tzuker, who was chief of staff to Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust under Biden.

Companies are talking about buybacks again, after a post-2020 drop in CEOs’ favorite stock-price-boosting trick. Mentions of share repurchases during company earnings calls are up roughly 30% since the second quarter of 2024, according to Morgan Stanley research.

But if the past is any guide, they’ll execute them badly. Companies should be the smartest buyers of their own shares — they know more than their investors do — but often manage to buy at the top and sell (issue new shares) at the bottom: Buybacks peaked as a percentage of total market size in 2007 and surged again just before the 2020 crash. To be fair, companies tend to have cash to deploy when things are good and need cash when things are bad, but buybacks at those peaks and troughs are remarkably inefficient. Renewed chatter now comes as worries grow about a market crash.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Bloomberg TV interview that the US would consider lifting Russia sanctions if needed. It’s a sharp about-face from his confirmation hearing, where he said he “100%” supported stronger sanctions on Russian oil and criticized the Biden administration for putting the political need for cheaper energy above national interests.

Peace talks between Trump and Russia — without Ukraine or European allies at the table — could lay the groundwork for easing restrictions on Russia. But shares of Rheinmetall, the German defense contractor at the heart of much of Ukraine’s armament, are up 20% over the last week, even as investors expect some easing of tensions.

Bosses still believe in a return to a fully in-person world. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is pushing a return to Starbucks’ “third place” roots, telling The Wall Street Journal that mobile ordering is a double-edged sword and a distraction. Meanwhile, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon went mildly viral for a leaked rant, obtained by Barron’s, against remote slackers. “Don’t give me this shit,” he said. “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.” Trump has ordered most federal employees back to the office five days a week and red state governors are following suit.

Unions are pushing back, and low unemployment has given new muscle to private-sector workers, half of whom told Pew Research last fall that they would quit if ordered back to the office full-time.

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.

American exceptionalism exceptions: The shine is off some core MAGA trades. The S&P 500 is lagging peer benchmarks in Europe, China, and even Mexico, despite threatened tariffs against those regions. The dollar and US bond yields are falling too. Only Bitcoin still has its Trump bump.

Keep Canada great: A $15 billion Canadian trucking company is redomiciling to the US, reuniting Trump with a fan base cultivated during Covid protest convoys. Quebec’s giant pension fund room sharply criticized the move. The president’s America-first agenda has stirred patriotic backlash in Canada; support for PM Justin Trudeau has even stabilized as some voters worry right-wing populist candidate Pierre Poilievre might fold on tariffs.

Companies like the trucking giant, TFI, which gets 70% of its revenue from the US, will face similar choices over the coming years. London has been losing listings of multinational firms to New York, where valuations (and executive pay) are better, and a strong American economy and business-friendly climate could peel others away from Europe’s struggling continental exchanges.

Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange and one of the industry’s top political donors, outlined its legislative priorities in a blueprint first reported by Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller.

The blueprint could be an influential roadmap for Washington as the industry transitions from being a regulatory target under the Biden administration to an embraced sector under President Trump.

A major change proposed by Coinbase would be to shift oversight of crypto spot trading to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission because the firm considers Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other similar digital assets to be commodities instead of securities.