There’s no shortage of headlines these days about how much Wall Street loves rate cuts. Markets have been tripping over themselves in search of new records as sobering news about unemployment piles up, seemingly guaranteeing a reduction by the Federal Reserve this week. But President Donald Trump’s unprecedented politicization of the central bank, replete with five months of seemingly nonstop schoolyard insults directed at the Fed Chair and now his attempt to fire a Fed governor, may be changing that calculus.

David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, warns that the expected rate cut this week will actually increase risks for stocks, bonds and the dollar if it’s perceived to be driven by political pressure and doesn’t align with the central bank’s forecasts for the economy. Wall Street bond and stock investors, who have been cheering the Fed’s expected resumption of interest cuts after a nine-month pause, should instead take a cautious stance and look to diversify after the recent rally, Kelly wrote in a note Monday. “To the extent that the Fed’s decision this week is seen as a capitulation to political pressure, a new layer of risk is being added to US financial markets and the dollar,” Kelly said. —David E. Rovella

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Hedge funds secured a victory in Washington after a top Wall Street regulator said it would let a Japanese firm clear yen interest rates swaps for US customers. Trade groups had asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to approve the Japan Securities Clearing Corp. request, arguing it would provide better liquidity. The long-standing bid had been controversial because of how JSCC handles customer collateral and bankruptcy protections.

Despite the concerns, the groups said in a December letter that their members had been deprived of “the opportunity to fully access the competitive pricing and liquidity available to non-US person market participants permitted to clear through JSCC.”

Google-parent Alphabet on Monday joined an elite group of companies valued at more than $3 trillion, including Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple. The stock’s most recent jump was fueled by a long-awaited antitrust ruling that avoided the most punitive measures sought by regulators, including the sale of Alphabet’s Chrome browser. The court decision came in the wake of Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings, which showed that demand for artificial intelligence products is lifting sales.

Susan Monarez will offer new details on her ouster as head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a congressional hearing, including that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed that all policy and personnel decisions would have to be cleared by the agency’s political staff. Monarez—who was fired just weeks into the job as CDC director—is set to testify in front of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on Wednesday.

Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic with no professional medical or scientific background, has replaced many of the agency’s key medical advisors. On Monday, he announced five new appointees to his hand-picked panel of experts that advises the government on immunization policy. One of his earlier appointees, Robert Malone, a scientist who studied messenger RNA, has spent years espousing debunked theories about the safety of Covid vaccines, at one point claiming the shots were “causing a form of AIDS.” At a June meeting, Kennedy’s revamped vaccine panel voted to remove the mercury-like compound thimerosal from multi-dose vaccines, an ingredient the anti-vaccine movement has falsely linked with autism despite decades of evidence showing it to be safe.

This may come as little surprise to the growing number of workers losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, but more than three quarters of companies’ usage of Anthropic’s Claude AI software involved automation patterns, often including “full task delegation,” according to a research report the startup released on Monday.

Businesses in other words are overwhelmingly relying on Anthropic’s AI software to automate rather than collaborate on work. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has previously issued particularly dire predictions, claiming AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level jobs and that people should stop “sugarcoating” what lies ahead.

Asked whether the report reinforces Amodei’s prediction, Anthropic’s head of external affairs, Sarah Heck, said, “We don’t know. This data shows something new is happening.”

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