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Just three weeks ago, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell spoke to reporters after the central bank had kept its key interest rate unchanged for a fifth straight meeting and said the job market was “solid.”His assessment was important because if the job market is healthy, there is less need for the Fed to cut its key interest rate, as President Donald Trump has demanded. Two days later, the Labor Department issued a report that cast doubt on that assessment, showing hiring was weak in July and much lower than previously estimated in May and June.So, there will be a lot of attention paid by Wall Street and the White House to Powell’s high-profile speech Friday at the Fed’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. If the famously data-dependent Powell shifts gears and takes a gloomier view of the job market, that could open the door for a rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September.Powell could also stick to the cautious approach he’s maintained all year and reiterate that the central bank needs more time to evaluate the impact of Trump’s sweeping tariffs on inflation.Most economists expect Powell to signal that a rate cut is likely this year, but won’t necessarily commit to one next month. That could disappoint Wall Street, which has put high odds on a September cut.Powell’s speech, his last address at Jackson Hole as chair before his term ends in May, will occur against a particularly fraught backdrop. About a week after the jobs numbers, the latest inflation report showed that price growth crept higher in July. Core prices, which exclude the volatile food and energy categories, rose 3.1% from a year ago, above the Fed’s 2% target.Stubbornly elevated inflation pushes the Fed in the opposite direction that weak hiring does: It suggests the central bank’s short-term rate should stay at its current 4.3%, rather than be cut. That would mean other borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans, and business loans, would stay elevated.“So the plot has thickened,” said David Wilcox, a former top Fed economist and now director of economic research at Bloomberg Economics and also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. “The dilemma that the Fed is in has become, if anything, more intense.”Powell is also navigating an unprecedented level of public criticism by Trump, as well as efforts by the president to take greater control of the Fed, which has long been independent from day-to-day politics.Most observers credit Powell for his nimble handling of the pressures. An iconic moment in his tenure was Trump’s visit to tour the Fed’s renovation of its office buildings last month. Trump had charged that Powell mismanaged the project, which had ballooned in cost to $2.5 billion, from an earlier estimate of $1.9 billion.With both the president and Fed chair in white hard hats on the building site, in front of cameras, Trump claimed the cost had mushroomed even further to $3.1 trillion. Powell shook his head, so Trump handed him a piece of paper purporting to back up his claim.Powell calmly dismissed the figure, noting that the $3.1 billion included the cost of renovating a third building five years earlier.“That was just such a classic Powell,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG. “He just doesn’t get fazed. He’s got a humility that oftentimes I think is lacking among my colleagues in economics.”Powell appeared to at least temporarily assuage Trump during the tour, after which the president backed off his threats to fire the Fed chair over the project.The attacks from Trump are the latest challenges for Powell in an unusually tumultuous eight years as Fed chair. Not long after being appointed by Trump in 2018, Powell endured the president’s criticisms as the Fed slowly raised its key rate from the low levels where it had remained for years after the 2008-2009 Great Recession.Powell then found himself grappling with the pandemic, and after that the worst inflation spike in four decades that occurred as government stimulus checks fueled spending while crippled supply chains left fewer goods available.Powell then oversaw a rapid series of rate hikes that were widely predicted to cause a recession, but the economy continued plugging ahead.In his latest attempt to pressure the Fed, on Wednesday Trump called on Fed governor Lisa Cook to step down, after an administration official, Bill Pulte, accused her of mortgage fraud. Pulte is head of the agency that regulates mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Cook said in a statement that she wouldn’t be “bullied” into resigning and added that she was preparing to answer the charges.For Powell, there’s a difficult decision to make on interest rates. The Fed’s “dual mandate” calls for it to keep prices stable while seeking maximum employment. But while the weak jobs data suggest the need for a cut, many Fed officials fear inflation will get worse in the coming months.“There is still a fair amount that’s still outstanding,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Fed’s Atlanta branch, said in an interview, referring to tariff-led price hikes. “One feedback we’ve gotten both in our surveys and from direct conversations (with businesses) suggests that many still are looking to see the price that they charge their customers increase from where we are today.”Other economists, however, point to the sharp slowdown in housing as a sign of a weak economy. The housing market remains mired in a slump partly due to elevated mortgage rates, even though sales of existing homes did rise in July. Consumer spending has also been modest this year, and growth was just 1.2% at an annual rate in the first half of 2025.“There’s not a lot to like about the economy right now outside of AI,” said Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro. “The weakness in the economy isn’t about tariffs,” but instead the Fed’s high rates, he added. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
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E-Commerce
Its no secret that Tesla stock (Nasdaq: TSLA) has had a horrible 2025. After ending 2024 with a bang, the electric vehicle maker’s shares declined rapidly as competition increased, CEO Elon Musks involvement in politics turned off many of Tesla’s liberal customers, and President Donald Trumps tariffs sank global markets. Today, Tesla shares sit at around $320a far cry from their all-time high of more than $488 set in December. Meanwhile, things are looking up for the stock prices of two Chinese electric vehicle makers Nio and XPeng. Though these brands are not especially well known in America, their stocks are traded on U.S. markets, and each company has seen its share prices surge this yearparticularly in the last week. Heres what you need to know. XPeng Inc. stock is up over 90% in 2025 XPeng is a Chinese electric vehicle company that was founded in 2014. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker XPEV. And since the year began, those shares have surged. Since January, XPEV shares have risen a staggering 91% as of yesterdays market close. Yesterday alone, the companys share price surged more than 11%, and today, in premarket trading as of the time of this writing, XPEV shares are up another 2% to $23.24. XPeng Inc. is one of the many EV players in China, and it currently has a market cap of around $20 billion, making it much smaller than Chinas EV king BYD, which is currently worth around $133 billion. Of course, XPeng is also minuscule next to Tesla and its $1 trillion market cap. Yet XPeng has something these other carmakers donta stock price that has surged in 2025. As noted by BarChart, XPeng has seen success with its new models this year in China, which has helped fuel sales. The company has also seen exports grow in several foreign markets in 2025, including Europe. But what has most recently helped Xpeng stock this week in particular is its Q2 financials. The company reported gross second-quarter margins of 14.3%, 3.8% higher than in the previous quarter. These growing margins are helping fuel the companys bottom line, something that is quite remarkable considering the EV price wars in China right now. Price wars usually lead to reduced margins as automakers compete to lower the sticker price of cars. Even better from an investors point of view: Quarterly sales surged 125.3% year-over-year. Deliveries also hit a record quarterly high of 103,181. Nio stock is up than 14% in the past two days But XPeng isnt the only Chinese EV maker having a great week. Nio Inc. (NYSE: NIO), a Chinese EV company also founded in 2014, saw its stock price surge yesterday. NIO shares jumped over 9.2% to close at $5.54 yesterday. Today, the EV makers shares are up another 5.3% in premarket trading as of this writing. But unlike Xpeng, Nio shares arent up because of a quarterly report (the company reports its Q2 of fiscal 2025 results on September 2). Instead, Nio shares are up because the company has announced a new affordable SUV. As reported by CNBC, this week Nio unveiled its new ES8 SUV. The ES8 is designed for affordabilitysomething seen as critical in Chinas increasingly crowded EV market. The vehicle will be priced at around 308,800 yuan, which is just around $43,000. It also comes with a battery subscription plan, which allows owners to upgrade or swap batteries via a monthly fee. Nio has traditionally targeted the high-end EV market in China, but with the release of the ES8 SUV, coming in September, the company is targeting a new segmentand investors seem bullish about the move. In June, Nio reported its Q1 2025 results, in which it revealed 42,094 EV deliveriesup 42.1% from the year earlier. Sales grew 18.6% for the quarter versus a year earlier, but had declined by 43.1% from the earlier quarter. Revenues grew 21.5% YOY to $1.6 billion. As of yesterdays stock price surge, Nio is valued at around $11.8 billion.
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E-Commerce
The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday.The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783 million worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities.The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who wouldn’t have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three liberals. The high court did keep the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directive blocked for future funding with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.The decision marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs say the decision is a “significant setback for public health,” but keeping the directive blocked means the administration can’t use it to cut more studies.The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12 billion of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups, had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and couldn’t be sent to the claims court.They said that defunding studies midway through halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”In June, U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing. He later added: “Have we no shame.”An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place. Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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