Good morning. Andrew here. Kevin Warsh was just named President Trump’s nominee for Fed chair. Backlash to the administration’s criminal investigation of the central bank’s current leader, Jay Powell, driven by fears of Trump’s efforts to obliterate Fed independence, may have played a role here. A previous favorite for the job, Kevin Hassett, was increasingly seen as being too close to Trump since he was already director of the National Economic Council. Warsh, a longtime acolyte of the billionaire financier Stanley Druckenmiller, played a starring role during the 2008 global financial crisis as a 38-year-old Fed governor under Ben Bernanke. Warsh secretly tried to play matchmaker for some of Wall Street’s biggest firms, including a potential merger of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup — though those deals ultimately didn’t happen. We’ve got more on Warsh below. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
The big revealAfter months of teasing the markets, President Trump has nominated a familiar face to be the next Fed chair: Kevin Warsh. Warsh, a former Fed governor, has grown increasingly critical of the institution’s handling of inflation and its broad market influence in recent years. His selection comes as Trump has sought greater control of the central bank by putting in policymakers who back his push for lower interest rates. Market reaction is mixed. The dollar rebounded, with Francesco Pesole, a strategist at ING, calling Warsh “amongst the most market-friendly candidates” in an investor note this morning. That said, S&P 500 futures and Treasury bonds and notes sold off, on concerns he may be less cut-minded than others on Trump’s shortlist. What to know:
What’s next? Jay Powell’s term as Fed chair ends in May. But Warsh’s nomination faces uncertain prospects: Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and a member of the Senate Banking Committee, has vowed to block confirmation of Trump’s Fed nominees because of concerns about the Justice Department’s investigation of Powell and the Fed. Trump has suggested he wouldn’t seek to remove Powell — whether he could do so under these circumstances is unclear — while continuing to lay into the current Fed chief, whom he appointed in 2017. For his part, Powell earlier this week offered advice for his successor. “Don’t get pulled into elected politics,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday. “Don’t do it.”
Senate Democrats reach a spending deal with President Trump. The proposed accord would fund much of the government for the rest of the fiscal year. It would also provide two weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security while lawmakers and White House officials negotiate on Democratic demands to rein in federal immigration agents. It’s unclear whether Congress can pass the move in time to avoid even a short government shutdown. The U.S. trade deficit swells again. It rebounded to $56.8 billion in November, nearly doubling month-on-month. It’s a sign of the volatility wrought by Trump’s tariffs — the president previously praised October’s trade deficit as the lowest since at least 2009 — though economists have cautioned that the number doesn’t tell the full story about U.S. trade. A Panama court struck down a Hong Kong company’s lucrative port contract. The court said a deal that let CK Hutchinson, a conglomerate run by the billionaire Li Ka-shing, operate critical ports on either side of the Panama Canal was unconstitutional. The decision is a win for Trump, who has called for American control of the canal; a Beijing government official said Beijing would “safeguard” the interests of Chinese businesses. It’s unclear what the ruling means for Hutchinson’s deal to sell the two ports to a group led by BlackRock. The next A.I. race: going publicAs this week has shown, the business of artificial intelligence involves a lot of money, and the promise that it will all pay off. The latest big news in the industry — OpenAI is weighing an I.P.O. for as soon as the fourth quarter this year, according to The Wall Street Journal — further underscores both dynamics. An OpenAI offering this year would make 2026 perhaps the biggest ever for I.P.O.s. The year was already primed to see giant deals: Elon Musk’s SpaceX, currently valued at about $800 billion, is expected to go public in the next 12 months, while Anthropic, a top OpenAI rival valued at $350 billion, may do so too. OpenAI is currently raising as much as $100 billion at a valuation that may surpass $750 billion. That said, a 2026 listing could be tough for OpenAI, which is building out the executive team needed for a public company and, perhaps more important, figuring out how to poach enterprise customers from Anthropic and Google. Going public could allay investor fears about OpenAI’s stability. The company has committed to spending about $1.4 trillion on data centers and other A.I. infrastructure over the next eight years. (Yes, with a “T.”) That’s a tall order for even publicly traded tech giants like Microsoft, which shed about $357 billion in market value yesterday on investor concern about its A.I. spending. It’s an even taller order for a privately held start-up, even one with deep-pocketed investors. The big question: Which leading A.I. start-up will go public first? Anthropic has already been sounding out Wall Street underwriters for a potential I.P.O. this year, seemingly in the hopes of capturing a first-mover advantage. It’s a situation somewhat reminiscent of Lyft’s racing to go public ahead of Uber, its bigger ride-hailing competitor, in 2019. And then there’s the possibility of SpaceX merging with xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, according to Reuters, creating another publicly traded tech giant that could suck up dollars from A.I.-focused investors. To be clear, both Anthropic and OpenAI are likely to field plenty of market interest. But in a competition with stakes as high as the A.I. race, companies aren’t taking any chances.
A Hollywood deal that bets on scalePeter Chernin, one of the entertainment industry’s savviest operators, has agreed to sell his North Road film and television studio to Mediawan, the big European content company, The Times’s Lauren Hirsch and Brooks Barnes report. The largely stock-based deal values North Road, the company behind Netflix’s hit reality show “Love is Blind,” at roughly $900 million, according to The Times. “We are building one of the largest independent studios in the world,” Pierre-Antoine Capton, Mediawan’s C.E.O., told The Times. “There is a real need for greater scale right now,” Chernin said, noting the consolidation wave sweeping the entertainment industry, underlined by the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery. As legacy entertainment companies bulk up to compete with tech platforms like YouTube and Amazon’s Prime Video, independent production companies like North Road, which sell shows and movies to streaming services, say they must also get bigger, especially overseas. “The buyers are truly global at this point,” Chernin said. “The sellers should be, too.” Chernin will stay on as nonexecutive chairman and join Mediawan’s board. He co-founded North Road in 2022 as the latest phase of the independent producing and investing part of his career. (He was a top executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. until 2009.) North Road began with funding from Providence Equity Partners and the Qatar Investment Authority, which each put in $150 million. North Road’s film credits include “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Back in Action,” starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz. Its other TV shows include the Apple TV drama “See.” Mediawan has grown quickly through acquisitions. It was founded in Paris in 2015 by Capton, a veteran media executive; Xavier Niel, a telecommunications billionaire; and Matthieu Pigasse, a prominent financier. In 2022, Mediawan invested in Plan B Entertainment, the Oscar-winning production company co-founded by Brad Pitt. Mediawan produces more than 400 scripted television shows, reality series, documentaries and films each year. Its hits include “Adolescence” on Netflix and “Slow Horses” on Apple TV. Chart of the day: a secondaries surgeA record number of investors are selling their ownership stakes in private companies and private investment funds to other investors. Sales of these secondhand assets, known as secondaries, surged to $240 billion in 2025, a new report from Jefferies shows. The growth reflects the desire of investors to cash in after a multiyear slowdown in initial public offerings and acquisitions that has led to a backlog probably Even with the I.P.O. market expected to rebound, the volume of secondary sales this year will probably match last year’s, Jefferies analysts predict.
Talking A.I. with the C.E.O. of IntuitEvery week, we’re asking a leader about artificial intelligence. Sasan Goodarzi, who leads the financial technology company Intuit, told DealBook that customers don’t care about A.I. His answers have been condensed and edited. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about baking A.I. into your products? Customers absolutely do not care about A.I. Yelling from mountaintops about A.I. is not useful. What is useful is, how do I get stuff done for you? How have you told your employees to think about A.I.? It’s something we embarked on long before ChatGPT came out. But when that happened, I called an emergency staff meeting, and I asked everyone to write no more than a two-pager on how we accelerate or rethink what we were doing. And be ready by Monday. And how did that go? Most of my staff thought I had lost my mind. But we spent all of Monday reading these couple of pages, and the net of it was, we declared that in six months we were going to have Intuit Innovation Day to showcase “done for you” experiences. Ultimately, none of it was baked. But it was a forcing function. What we showed that day was the biggest propellant to where we are today. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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