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National

Macro

Axios Macro

In an interview with CBS' 60 minutes, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that President Trump's criticism of the the central bank and its interest rate hikes played no role in the Fed's recent decisions to hold off on raising interest rates further.

The big picture: The Fed's seemingly sudden shift to pause on further interest rate hikes came after Trump's unprecedented string of negative comments about Powell and the Fed hiking rates under his leadership — stoking concerns that Trump had influenced the apolitical central bank.

Scott Pelley: You were raising interest rates at the end of last year and just in the beginning of 2019. The president sounded off on that. And you stopped raising interest rates. Was it because of pressure from the White House and the President?

Powell: Not at all. Not at all. And it's very important that the public understand that we are always going to make decisions based on what we think is right for the American people .... We will never, ever take political considerations into effect. This is a strong institution, which has a strong culture, which is as I've described it.

Other highlights: Powell also said that the president does not have the legal authority to fire him, something lawyers and fed-watchers have debated. He also said he "fully intends" to serve his four-year term.

Powell also reiterated his concern about the U.S. national debt, saying he feels like he "has a duty to speak up" when something "threatens the overall economy."

Fed chair Jerome Powell denies Trump influenced interest rate decisions

Powell also said a president can't fire the Fed chairman.

Business

Federal Reserve

Scoop: The White House triangulation plan

The plan includes EOs to address issues like education, drug pricing, the opioid epidemic and veterans affairs.

Politics

Executive orders

Donald Trump

2024 will be an election year like no other, as President Biden seeks re-election amid economic uncertainty, two wars and questions about his age. His likely foe, former President Trump, faces felony charges and vows revenge on his political enemies. Meanwhile, Americans generally are dissatisfied with those choices and are divided over immigration, race, education and more.

Politics & Policy

To prevent leaks from Trump's Friday night Mar-a-Lago speech to RNC donors, security guards made attendees put their cellphones in magnetized pouches that they carried around like purses until they left the club.

So leakers had to rely on their memories. Trump entered to Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to Be an American," then launched into one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness speeches, according to three people who were there. They said the crowd roared with laughter throughout.

1. Referring to the recent anti-Semitism controversies with Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump told the donors: "The Democrats hate Jewish people."

Trump said he didn't understand how any Jew could vote for a Democrat these days. Trump talked about how much he'd done for Israel, noting his historic decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Trump said if he could run to be prime minister of Israel, he'd be at 98% in the polls, according to three sources who were there.

2. Trump went off on what one guest called a "bizarre tangent." He described being home alone in the White House over Christmas "while the Democrats were in Hawaii."

Trump described opening his curtain to look at Secret Service agents swarming the White House lawn. "They're in the trees, on the lawn," he said. 

He said he saw agents wearing night vision goggles. "They're in blackface," Trump added, jokingly referring to the masks over the agents' faces.

Trump joked that the agents were "in blackface" because of the masks so maybe "they have to take them away," according to two sources who were there. (The sources assumed Trump was referring to the recent controversy in which the Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was caught in a racist costume in his 1984 medical school yearbook.)

Behind the scenes: The confab was for the RNC to update its donors on its activities. Secretaries Wilbur Ross and Linda McMahon attended, as did Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Guests munched on surf and turf under a tent with dangling chandeliers. Many of the private discussions turned to the 2020 race.

Trump only mentioned three 2020 Democrats in his remarks: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

He announced that he now calls Sanders "the nutty professor" instead of "Crazy Bernie."

Referring to Warren's low poll numbers, Trump said he "took her out really early" and that he doesn't want to do that to anybody else.

Trump tells RNC donors: "The Democrats hate Jewish people"

Trump said at a fundraiser that if he could run to be prime minister of Israel, he'd be at 98% in the polls

Trump addresses the Project Safe Neighborhoods National Conference on December 07, 2018 in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Anti-semitism

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2020 conventions

Republican donors in attendance called it one of Trump's weirdest lies ever. On Friday night, under a tent erected over the pool at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, President Trump claimed the media were spreading "fake news" when they said he called the CEO of Apple "Tim Apple."

Trump told the donors that he actually said "Tim Cook Apple" really fast, and the "Cook" part of the sentence was soft. But all you heard from the "fake news," he said, was "Tim Apple."

Two donors who were there told me they couldn't understand why the president would make such a claim given the whole thing is captured on video. Nobody cared, they said, and Tim Cook took it in good humor by changing his Twitter profile to Tim Apple.

"I just thought, why would you lie about that," one of the donors told me. "It doesn't even matter!"

Between the lines: This isn't the first time Trump has tried to persuade people not to trust video. As The New York Times first reported, Trump privately told a senator that the Access Hollywood tape, in which he talks about sexually assaulting women, was fake. (Trump had previously admitted the voice was his, and apologized for "locker room talk.")

Scoop: Trump lied to RNC donors about "Tim Apple" video

Republican donors in attendance called it one of Trump's weirdest lies ever.

Tim Cook, turned into 'Tim Apple' on social media after a slip-up by President Trump. Photo: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Capital

Axios Capital

Everything is a service, these days. Here's investor Mikal Khoso:

Today you can rent living space flexibly based on your needs (AirBNB, Stoop), commute from that space without ever buying a car (Wheels, Uber, Lyft), rent clothes to fill your closet (Le Tote), rent specific appliances based on your needs (Joymode) and rent the furniture you fill your apartment with (Fernish).

Why it matters: There's a lot to be worried about in this brave new world where our entire lives are dominated by rentiers, even if investors like Khoso have managed to persuade themselves that everybody wins.

Companies in the rental business are worth untold billions, whether they're renting out software (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Slack) or goods and services (IBM, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb). The people who rent out the information-economy pipes (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T) are big enough to eat any media company for breakfast (NBC Universal, Yahoo, Time Warner). When Netflix pivoted from DVDs-by-mail to streaming, the one thing that stayed sacrosanct was its subscription-based business model.

The move to a rental economy has been good for consumers — so far. According to research by Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow, inflation in the digital world is much lower than inflation in the economy as a whole, with a difference of more than 1 percentage point per year.

What's next? Price hikes are certain in a digital economy where many companies are burning cash at an unsustainable rate.

Lyft alone lost $911 million in 2018; Uber lost twice as much.

The entire minotaur business model is based on buying a dominant position in a market and then exploiting that position. Once they have stopped growing and their markets mature, for instance, companies like Salesforce and Slack have astonishing latitude to raise their prices before their clients even think about switching.

Ownership is a hedge against rental price increases. That's true in the housing market, as economists Todd Sinai and Nicholas Souleles have shown. But it's true in other rental markets, too. Owning a car is a hedge against price hikes at Uber; owning your own computer server is a hedge against price hikes at AWS, and so forth. Renting might be cheaper, but it's also more uncertain.

Inflation isn't monolithic; it hits different people differently. (In 2014, apparently, it was hitting Republican billionaires quite hard.) In a world where prices on Amazon fluctuate by the second, the cognitive cost of inflation — the amount of time we spend thinking about how much things cost — can be substantial even when inflation itself is low.

The bottom line: A world of continuously variable price is unstable and uncertain, even when overall inflation is low.

The precarious rental economy

Rental companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft are worth untold billions.

Illustration of little guy clinging to a giant dollar held by hand above him

Economy

Top stories & latest news on the Federal Reserve, real-time data, plus the biggest shifts happening in the U.S. and global economy.

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow confirmed reports that President Trump will ask Congress for $8.6 billion in additional funding to build a border wall as part of his 2020 budget proposal. 

Why it matters: The request, first reported by Reuters on Sunday, will certainly provoke another partisan slugfest over wall funding, which led to a historic government shutdown earlier this year and a national emergency declaration after Trump failed to secure funds. The proposal will include $5 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security to continue building sections of the wall and $3.6 billion for the Pentagon’s military construction budget, according to Reuters. 

In a statement responding to the proposal, Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said: "Congress refused to fund his wall and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government. The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again. We hope he learned his lesson."

Go deeper: Trump to release budget proposal with big defense spending increase

Trump to ask Congress for $8.6 billion in new wall funding

It would include $5 billion for DHS and $3.6 billion for the Pentagon's military construction budget.

Trump border wall

Media Trends

Axios Media Trends

CNN is significantly expanding their partnership with Twitter to better serve advertisers on the platform, where user growth is booming for the global news brand.

Why it matters: The partnership gives advertisers the opportunity to buy ads around the most buzzworthy Twitter videos from CNN, like a hot one-liner from a presidential debate or a dramatic moment during an exclusive interview.

Previously, advertisers could only buy video by content category, but not targeted specifically to CNN.

Twitter will work with CNN to boost the exposure of videos from top events so that marketers can capture some of the most valuable moments at scale. 

The big picture: News as a content vertical is typically slow to innovate, but Twitter's investment in news over the past year has made it easier for newsrooms to take advantage of new advertising and editorial products, since their content is very well-suited for the platform. 

The bottom line: If you want to own advertising around a specific debate, town hall or interview aired on CNN ahead of 2020, this will be one of the most effective ways to do so. 

CNN expands Twitter partnership around viral moments

The partnership gives advertisers the opportunity to buy ads around the most buzzworthy Twitter videos from CNN

Photo: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Technology

Media

Elon Musk

Social Media

Axios AM

More than a dozen books about Trump's Washington are on the way from prominent journalists who signed lucrative deals, with a subgenre of five major books that are entirely or partly about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The big picture: One reason for the burst of books — money. Publishers are paying big advances, for some nearing or topping $1 million. "Trump has dominated everything else, so it only makes sense that that would include the publishing industry," said Matt Latimer of Javelin, a literary agency that has handled James Comey, Cliff Sims and other hot names.

There's a tight pack promising the real story on Kavanaugh: 

First will be "The Hill to Die On" — April 9 from Politico's Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer — covering Congress from Election Day '16 to the shutdown. Jake says: "Every page — literally — has something new. ... But since you mentioned Kavanaugh — we have the definitive story about how he got confirmed."

The N.Y. Times' Carl Hulse will be out June 25 with "Confirmation Bias," which "goes all the way through Kavanaugh and the midterms into this year."

Ruth Marcus, a Harvard Law graduate who's a Washington Post columnist and the deputy editorial page editor, is on book leave for a Kavanaugh project that covers "who he is, what happened, what it means." Ruth told me: "I’m going back to my first love, which is reporting, not opinionizing."

The Times' Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin will cover Kavanaugh's early years in "The Education of Brett Kavanaugh." They wrote: "Already the ugly tweets have started coming in, an indication of the polarized world in which we're operating. 'Grats on the money grab,' wrote one person ... Others have suggested we title the book 'The Smear' or 'The Crucible.'"

Journalists cash in on Trump's Washington

A subgenre of five upcoming books are entirely or partly about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Axios

Sunday's top stories

Fed chair Jerome Powell denies Trump influenced interest rate decisions

Scoop: The White House triangulation plan

Trump tells RNC donors: "The Democrats hate Jewish people"

Scoop: Trump lied to RNC donors about "Tim Apple" video

The precarious rental economy

Trump to ask Congress for $8.6 billion in new wall funding

CNN expands Twitter partnership around viral moments

Journalists cash in on Trump's Washington

Exclusive poll: Young Americans are embracing socialism

The most popular companies in America, ranked by partisan leaning

U.S.-China trade talks: Consensus reached on "many key issues"

Nicolás Maduro thanks military for overcoming U.S.-led coup: Report