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New CBS Sunday. The Grammys, baby. History will be made live, unfiltered, unexpected, bigger than ever. Bigger stars, bigger performances. Music's biggest night is getting bigger. Now you see what all the hype is about. Trevor Noah hosts the Grammy Awards live.
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Anything is possible.
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CBS Sunday and streaming on Paramount. What a sliding US Dollar means for businesses in the world, Plus, a big day for chip stocks as AI spending booms. And a pair of Middle east leaders say they won't help the US With a possible strike on Iran as allies reconsider ties with Washington.
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Both the Iranian and the Israeli strikes on Doha in Qatar really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on the US for their.
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It's Wednesday, January 28th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal and here is the AM Edition of what's news, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. The US Dollar is steadying this morning after sliding yesterday in the biggest one day decline since April's global tariff turmoil. Stock futures are also gaining ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision today where the central bank is expected to hold rates stead three consecutive cuts. Here's Journal finance editor Alex Frankos.
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The dollar fell yesterday and has been falling pretty much since Donald Trump came into office a year ago, but took another leg down in the beginning of this year. And it's now at a four year low against other major currencies like the euro, the pound, the Swiss franc, the Australian dollar, the Chinese yuan. So it's a really interesting backdrop. We got the Fed meeting. The Fed's not expected to do anything, but it has been cutting rates and that plays into dollar weakness. When the Fed is cutting interest rates, that makes it slightly less own dollars. That's part of it. But the bigger thing that economists and currency traders are talking about is the geopolitics. We start the year with Venezuela, with Greenland, threats of new tariffs against Canada, Korea and all these things are very destabilizing.
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Speaking in Iowa yesterday, President Trump said he wasn't concerned about the dollar. And Alex said that Fed into Wall street speculation that he wouldn't mind a weaker currency which could boost US Manufacturing and exports.
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To be clear, the dollar has fallen, but it's still relatively strong in historical terms. And for the dollar to fall a little bit, that's actually stimulative for the economy. It makes our exports more attractive to overseas buyers. A lot of American companies make a lot of money abroad. And when the dollar weakens, their profits abroad, go up and it flatters the bottom line. So that can actually be really good for stocks. That's partly why I think the president said he's fine with it. It's just very unusual for a president or even a Treasury secret indication of what they care about the dollar. For decades, the policy among Democrats and Republicans in office was we have a strong dollar policy and we don't comment on it.
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Japan's SoftBank is in talks to invest a further $30 billion in OpenAI, adding to its more than 10% stake in the startup. It comes as the maker of ChatGPT is looking to raise $100 billion by the end of the first quarter in order to help fuel its growth plans. News Corp. The owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Well, growth is also on the mind of chip giant Nvidia, which today got the green light from China to sell its first batch of H200 chips to Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance. The first approval covers several hundred thousand H200 chips worth around $10 billion, with Chinese authorities expected to rubber stamp more imports of the advanced chips in the coming months. And Nvidia's success has been a boon for suppliers like memory chip maker SK Hynix, which this morning posted record earnings for the final quarter of 2025. That echoes bumper growth for Europe's largest listed company, ASML. It said that orders for its chipmaking equipment exceeded expectations and a sign that clients like TSMC continued to spend big on the semiconductors powering the AI boom in spite of fears of a market bub. Two US Allies in the Middle east have ruled out the use of their airspace and territory for a potential attack on Iran. Journal correspondent Jared Malson says the announcements from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are a foreign policy setback for the Trump administration.
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It narrows the number of options that the US has, and it's also a sign that the US Is potentially more isolated in the region if President Trump decides to launch a strike on Iran. That's significant because the US if it's going to do this, wants to have American allies on its side. These are two countries that are really rivals of Iran that historically have been concerned about Iranian meddling in the region. They are opposed to Iranian influence, but they're also concerned about the fallout from any of these attacks and the risk of a wider war in the region.
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Jared told us that regional powers are reconsidering ties with the US and the value of its defense guarantees following attachments. Attacks on Qatar in the wake of last year's 12 day war between Israel and Iran, in which the US also targeted Iran's foremost nuclear site.
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Both the Iranian and the Israeli strikes on Doha in Qatar really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on the US for their security. The Trump administration extended Qatar a new security guarantee, almost like NATO like protections. And that's going to be tested if the US does attack Iran, where the Iranians have specifically warned, we've reported they warned Oman, the uae, Turkey and Qatar the US Bases in the region would come under attack if they're attacked.
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The White House has said Trump is monitoring the situation in Iran very closely with a US Aircraft carrier arriving in the region yesterday. Coming up, more aftermath from last weekend's killing of Alex Preddy as President Trump sends his border czar to Minnesot and the administration faces a federal court deadline to justify its deployments to the state. That's after the break.
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Hey, this is Alex from what's News. Thanks so much for being a listener of the show. If you're looking for more insights and tools to understand the latest headlines, consider becoming a subscriber to the Wall street journal. Visit subscribe.WSJ.com whatsnews to subscribe now.
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Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance at a town hall meeting in Minneapolis last night. Police booked the suspect behind the incident on suspicion of third degree assault. Omar, who gained attention as a member of the progressive squad of Democratic lawmakers, has frequently drawn the ire of Trump, who on Monday said that the DOJ and Congress were looking at her and suggested she had profited from Minnesota's Mac massive welfare fraud scandal. Responding to those comments, Omar told the Journal that Trump had an unhealthy and disturbing obsession with her and the Somali community and that in spite of him calling for investigations against her for years, they have found nothing. Hours before last night's incident, Trump criticized Omar and her country of birth at a rally in Iowa, saying that Somalia was a disaster and good at only one pirates. Back in Washington, the Department of Homeland Security says that two federal immigration officials fired shots at Alex Preddy last weekend, a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Patrol officer. That's according to a preliminary DHS report into Preddy's killing sent to Congress yesterday, which revised prior comments from the agency that just one agent had fired shots. The report didn't say how many shots were fired or which shots killed Preddy, and it maintained that Preddy had violently resisted officers. Pretty's killing has ignited bipartisan scrutiny of immigration enforcement operations and calls for an investigation, including from Republican Senate Majority Leader Tom Thune. The death of Alex Priddy was a tragedy, and there should be a full and impartial investigation into the shooting. I'm glad that the president is sending Tom Holman to Minnesota, and I hope that his arrival will help restore order to the situation. Thune was referring to President Trump sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to reset the federal government's relationship with the state. Seen as likely to favor a more targeted approach to immigration operations, Homan faces the challenge of delivering enough arrests to fulfill the president's promises of mass deportation. Well, that potential shift to a lower key strategy in the state isn't winning over congressional Democrats who are demanding that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem step down. Among them Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Kristi Noem is a liar. She's vicious. She's also incompetent. Donald Trump must fire her at once before another American is killed under her watch. Two Republican senators have joined Democrats in calling for Noem to step down, a prospect Trump has so far ruled out. Meanwhile, lawyers for the Trump administration have until this evening to respond to a Minnesota federal court judge in a suit brought by the state alleging that the immigration crackdown there amounts to an unconstitutional occupation by federal troops. Minnesota is alleging First Amendment and Tenth Amendment violations, though, as Journal Deputy Law Bureau Chief Laura Kasisto is here to discuss, recent enforcement operations have been bringing up other potential constitutional issues as well. Laura, let's start with the killing of Alex Preddy over the weekend, which, given that he was a protester, raises speech concerns and as we have reported, Second Amendment questions around his possession of a firearm.
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Yeah, I think both of those things are true. So broadly speaking, in Minneapolis, what we're seeing is a clash over this question. But you have the right to protest. You have the right to protest obnoxiously. You can swear, you can yell, you can scream. What you can't do is threaten the life of law enforcement officers or put their lives in danger. And really, in both the case of Preddy and before this, Renee Nicole Good, where we've seen the kind of clash, and the question, right, is were they in any way threatening the lives of these law enforcement officers in a way that kind of crossed over the line of peaceful protest or not? And then there's a fascinating tension brewing right now over the Second Amendment, which is that Freddie appears to have had some kind of a firearm on him. And there are some reports that he, in fact, was authorized, had a license to carry this. And so then the question then becomes, there are a lot of Second Amendment advocates on the right. Right. Who are supporters of the Trump administration who would very strongly say that you should be able to carry a firearm at a protest as long as you're not using it to threaten people. And so I think that's also where we're seeing some of the tension and some of the back and forth. Right. You know, the initial reports from the Trump administration were sort of saying he was sort of threatening law enforcement in a very kind of violent way. We've seen these videos emerge that seem to contradict that. And so that, again, will be kind of where legally the rubber starts to hit the road.
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And, Laura, that's just half of it. Right. Because the actions of law enforcement and the tussle over who's in charge of enforcing law and order in places like Minneapolis have been bringing forward Fourth and Tenth Amendment questions as well.
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Absolutely. And so, yes, these protests are about ice's presence in Minnesota and in particular, the kind of aggressiveness with which they are enforcing immigration laws, which raises two other broader legal questions. And so one of these is this Fourth Amendment question about unreasonable search and do they have the right to yank people out of their cars and ask them if they're US Citizens, do they have the right to go into people's homes? And there's a lot of sort of tension points there. The answer is that to some degree, that they do. They do have the right, if they have reasonable suspicion that people are in the country illegally, to stop people, to ask for identification. If you are not a citizen, you should be carrying identification, showing that you're in the country legally. But where we're starting to see some tension is they are oftentimes also pulling over U.S. citizens legally. We think that right now, based on some Supreme Court president, they can probably do that. But certainly it's raising concerns that this is overly aggressive. And then the tantamentical question that that then raises is then what the state has sort of said is this is interfering with our sort of sovereign authority as a state, sending these immigration officers in in large numbers. We're creating just a climate of fear in our state. And so you've seen them also sort of sue the federal government and say, we want you out of here. And that, I think, is one of the things we'll see sort of negotiated this week. Right. Is like, what does the federal government presence look like here going forward?
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Lots to be negotiated here, and we'll keep monitoring the situation. Of course. Laura Kasisto is the Journal's deputy law bureau chief. Laura, thank you.
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Y. Thank you so much for having me.
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And that's it for what's news for this Wednesday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bock and Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer was Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show, and until then, thanks for listening.