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- [00:00]
Reba McEntire
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Unknown Announcer
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Alex Osola
February 2024 through January 2025 the cease fire between Iran and Israel appears to hold after President Trump scolds the two nations. Plus Fed chair Jerome Powell reaffirms his wait and see posture on rate cuts.
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Nick Timoros
He leaned against the idea that the Fed would cut interest rates at their next meeting at the end of July. But he kept the door open to cutting rates after that and why a.
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Alex Osola
Stablecoin may turn into your next credit card. It's Tuesday, June 24th. Alex I'm Alex Osola for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of what's news, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. President Trump responded with anger when there was continued fire between Israel and Iran after a U. S. Brokered ceasefire went into effect.
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Unknown Commentator
You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?
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Alex Osola
But in subsequent hours, there were initial signs that the cease fire might be holding. Israel said it was lifting nearly all wartime restrictions on civilian movement and economic activity. And the Israeli Airport authority said Ben Gurion and Haifa airports are returning to full activity. Israel said it had achieved its war aims, having removed a dual existential threat from Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Iran's foreign minister had said his country would stop its attacks as long as Israel did. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell was in front of Congress today for regularly scheduled testimony on monetary policy. When asked, Powell declined to endorse the view that tariffs will lead to only muted price pressures and that the Fed shouldn't delay rate cuts much longer, a stance made most prominently by his colleague Christopher Waller in the past few weeks.
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Jerome Powell
I will say this, I think many paths are possible here, and certainly the one you mentioned is a possible one. We could see inflation come in not as strong as we expect, and if that were the case, that would tend to suggest cutting sooner. We could see the labor market weakening and that would also suggest cutting sooner on the other hand, if we see inflation coming in higher or if labor market were to to remain strong, then we would probably be moving later. So I think a range of possible paths are possible and certainly the one you mentioned is one of them.
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Alex Osola
I'm joined now by WSJ chief economics correspondent Nick Timoros. Nick, it seems like Powell is not committing either way to cutting rates or not cutting rates. He's under a huge amount of pressure from President Trump to cut them. How is he navigating all of this?
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Nick Timoros
In the hearing today, he really did keep his options open. So he leaned against the idea that the Fed would cut interest rates at their next meeting at the end of July, but he kept the door open to cutting rates after that. And I should add, he didn't explicitly rule out doing anything in July. What he said was they think inflation's going to go up a little bit here because of tariffs. If it doesn't, then they could cut sooner. Alternately, if the labor market ends up getting weaker than they currently see it, they could cut.
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Alex Osola
As we mentioned, Powell is feeling the pressure from within the Fed as some officials want to resume rate cuts sooner than how significant is that rift within the central bank?
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Nick Timoros
So let's step back. Last Wednesday, the Fed had a meeting where they unanimously agreed to keep interest rates steady. But they produced new quarterly projections at that meeting that showed a pretty significant split. There were seven officials who projected no interest rate cuts this year, and then there were 10 who said they thought there could be multiple. Then on Friday and on Monday, we heard from two Fed officials, both of whom were appointed to their jobs by Donald Trump, saying they thought the Fed could cut interest rates at the very next meeting. Now, Powell's testimony today suggests that those two officials are maybe on their own, that that may be more of an outlier view, even among the people who are more open to cutting interest rates. So you have a lot going on right now because the outlook is very uncertain. And officials are starting to chafe a little bit against the idea of waiting much longer to see how this plays out.
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Alex Osola
That was WSJ chief economics correspondent Nick Timiros. Thanks, Nick.
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Nick Timoros
Thanks so much.
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Alex Osola
Stocks rallied today on news that the ceasefire between Iran and Israel appears to be taking hold. All three major U.S. indexes were up. The S&P 500 rose about 1.1%, the Dow added roughly 1.2%, and the Nasdaq closed about 1.4% higher. U.S. home prices rose in April at the slowest annual pace in nearly two years. The S and P corelogic Case Shiller National Home Price Index, which measures home prices across the country, rose 2.7% since April last year. Mortgage rates around 6% are keeping monthly payments high, pricing out buyers and cooling previously overheated housing markets. And US Consumer confidence slipped in June, reversing an improvement in May. The Conference Board's monthly survey showed its consumer confidence index falling to.93 from 98.4 last month. The survey's closely watched labor market indicator also fell, and consumers turned more pessimistic about future business conditions. Coming up, how stablecoins may become a threat to the consumer payments industry that's after the break. Last week, the Senate passed a bill to regulate stablecoins, digital tokens meant to represent a fixed amount of fiat currency such as the US Dollar. Now investors seem to be betting that stablecoins could represent a threat to the existing consumer payment industry. Following the bill's passage, shares of crypto companies such as Circle and Coinbase surged, while shares of Visa and MasterCard are on track for their worst monthly performance in a couple of years. But the quickest path for stablecoins to make it into consumers wallets may be working with those existing players. Telus Demos, host of WSJ's take on the Week podcast and Hurt on the street writer, is here with more. So tell us, who are stablecoins particularly appealing for?
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Telus Demos
A stablecoin is basically a way to have a US Dollar without actually having a US dollar in your hand. For somebody who wants US Dollars but doesn't have access readily to be able to hold them, a stablecoin is a fantastic way to do that because it represents a tokenized version of a dollar and you can have it anywhere.
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Alex Osola
I understand why merchants would want to find a way to use stablecoins because it means they don't have to pay for credit card fees, but what advantages do they offer for consumers?
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Telus Demos
If you're a consumer who again doesn't really have ready access to US Dollars, then you would not only want to hold stablecoins but then also pay with them. For the rest of us, though, for people who do have dollars and cards that run with dollars and things like that, it's an interesting question of what why you'd want to pay with a stablecoin instead of paying from your bank account, maybe you hold a lot of your money in stablecoins and you want to spend from that. And so you can then essentially pay from your crypto wallet to anybody who takes credit cards and essentially pay with the coins that are in your crypto wallet.
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Alex Osola
Does that eventually spell the end for credit card networks because people will be moving money through blockchains?
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Telus Demos
It's not really clear to me at least, and I'm open to hearing more about why people want to pay directly with stablecoins, whether or not they want to do a crypto payment directly. Which means essentially that you're using a blockchain network, whether that's Coinbase's base network or Ethereum or Solana, one of the many kind of blockchain networks out there. You can do it that way or you can use some other method, you know, an intermediary like a credit card network that can essentially do the same thing, but just using that card network to move that token around rather than using the blockchain directly?
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Alex Osola
That was co host of WSJ's take on the Week podcast and Heard on the street writer Telus Demos. Thanks Telus.
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Telus Demos
Thanks for having me.
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Alex Osola
One of the richest men in the world has spent the past few months personally headhunting top AI talent Mark Zuckerberg has fired off emails and WhatsApp messages to hundreds of AI researchers and engineers, all offering them hundreds of millions of dollars to join a new superintelligence lab, Tech reporter Megan Bobrowski told our Tech News Briefing podcast. Why Zuckerberg got so personally involved, that.
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Megan Bobrowski
Shows how important this is to him, right? Like how existential AI is to the company, at least in Mark Zuckerberg's eyes, he views this as one of the most important things that his company needs to be focusing on right now. And so he wants to have the top talent who can get him there, who can get Meta to be one of the biggest, best players in the space. And the way that he's trying to do that is by offering people $100 million pay packages and personally reaching out to them himself.
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Alex Osola
To hear more from Megan, listen to tomorrow's episode of Tech News Briefing. And finally, corporate America's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are going incognito. Recognizing that flaunting such initiatives may attract unwanted scrutiny from the Trump administration, courts or influen activists, companies are finding ways to keep their DEI strategies under the radar. WSJ columnist Callum Borchers writes about work, life and career, and he told our your Money Briefing podcast how these companies do it.
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Unknown Announcer
Some of the common steps that companies are taking are just tinkering with the DEI acronym itself or scrapping it altogether. For example, I met recently a former DEI chief who is now called Chief Impact and Inclusion Officer. So you see businesses that are trying to keep that inclusion element, tying it explicitly to the business impact and trying to signal to potential critics, hey, we're doing this for bottom line reasons. You've also seen companies that have disbanded their DEI departments keep many of the same components and they'll just call them employee engagement efforts or something a little bit blander like that. And another strategy is partnering with a third party when you're hiring. So for example, there's a nonprofit called OneTen that matches employers with people who don't have four year college degrees but do have the right skills for the job. And and the group's CEO pointed out to me that people of color are disproportionately large shares of the non college educated job seekers. So that's one way that businesses can indirectly access a diverse applicant pool without explicitly saying that's their goal.
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Alex Osola
To hear more from Callum, listen to today's episode of youf Money Briefing. And that's what's news for this Tuesday afternoon. Additional audio in this episode, courtesy of Reuters. Today's show is produced by Anthony Banci with supervising producer Michael Cosmides. Additional support by Coleman Standifer. I'm Alex Osola for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.