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Tuesday, September 16, 2025 | |
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Good morning, Quartz readers! |
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HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW |
Wall Street is racing ahead of the Fed. As the economy has gotten messier, prediction markets see a small interest rate cut as a lock, but investors are racing to predict the central bank’s next several moves. |
Trump amps up his push to oust Lisa Cook. Before the Fed meets this week, the president’s lawyers filed paperwork with an appeals court, saying her case for staying on the Fed board was “meritless.” |
Crusade against the Fed is heading into “new territory.” Trump’s attempts to influence monetary policy have left the central bank to defend its independence as it wrestles with both inflation and slowing growth. |
Google joins the $3 trillion club. Stock of its parent company, Alphabet, popped on the heels of an antitrust ruling that eased breakup
fears and as cloud growth continues to show that AI is paying off. |
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A MESSAGE FROM PACASO |
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JOIN THIS
FORMER ZILLOW EXEC BEFORE SEPTEMBER 18 |
Why did 10k+ investors and the VCs behind Uber and eBay invest in Pacaso? Founded by a former Zillow exec, they’ve made $110M+ in gross profit to date. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker
PCSO. |
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Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a
ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals. |
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TRUMP SKIPS A BEAT |
President Donald Trump is back on the warpath against the calendar. On Monday, he revived his call to scrap quarterly earnings reports, saying companies should only have to open the books twice a year. He cast it as
long-term thinking — China has 50- to 100-year plans, while the U.S. has analysts squinting at 90-day blips (“Not good!!!” the president wrote) — but the timing raises eyebrows. Those 10-Qs have lately featured plenty of reminders about tariff costs, slowing growth, and all the other things a politician might prefer to skip in a not-so-highlight reel.
This isn’t Trump’s first run at this. In 2018, the SEC under his first term tested the waters on “reducing burdens” around quarterly
reporting. After a round of comments, the four-times-a-year rule stayed put. This time, the backdrop is different: a White House skeptical of official data streams, a new SEC chair promising to be business-friendly but investor-minded, and a job market where even routine revisions have become political lightning rods. Changing the rule wouldn’t be quick. By law, the SEC has to slog through proposals, comments, and final approvals — meaning no switch can be flipped overnight.
Still,
the push fits a larger pattern of slowing or sidelining official numbers that can cramp Washington’s official narrative. Stretching corporate reports to six months, questioning jobs data, and even hinting at pauses in monthly releases all point to a foggier economic dashboard. And that comes with real-world costs. Investors can price in bad news; what they can’t stomach is no news. If markets end up driving half-blind, the risk isn’t just confusion — it’s higher borrowing costs, slower growth, and the kind of uncertainty that bleeds into
everyday life. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the politics of starving investors of information. |
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TOK ABOUT A CLOSE CALL |
TikTok’s clock stopped just short of midnight. On Monday, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. and Chinese negotiators had sketched out a framework to save the app, days before a ban was set to kick in.
Posting on Truth Social, he described a deal for a “certain” company beloved by America’s youth, leaving little suspense about which one. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed the terms were nailed down and said Trump and Xi Jinping will finalize the pact in a Friday call. For now, TikTok lives to scroll another day.
But the deal doesn’t untangle the bigger mess. Talks in Madrid produced six hours of wrangling, not just over TikTok but over trade at large. U.S. officials said
China came armed with “aggressive asks,” while Beijing countered by hitting Nvidia with a surprise antitrust probe into its 2020 Mellanox acquisition. The move clipped the chipmaker’s stock and underscored how tech sits at the center of this standoff. TikTok may be the headline, but the subtext is a fight over who controls the digital infrastructure of the 21st century.
And that’s why the framework feels less like closure and more like an intermission. ByteDance gets breathing room,
but Washington and Beijing remain locked in disputes over chips, tariffs, and market access. China is now investigating U.S. suppliers such as Texas Instruments; the U.S. still bars Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs from China. Even when an app survives, the larger economic clash keeps grinding on — proof that in this trade war, no deal is ever just about one platform. Quartz’s Alex Daniel has more on TikTok’s most important algorithm: global politics. |
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A MESSAGE FROM PACASO |
|
JOIN THIS FORMER ZILLOW EXEC BEFORE SEPTEMBER 18 |
Why did 10k+ investors and the VCs behind Uber and eBay invest
in Pacaso? Founded by a former Zillow exec, they’ve made $110M+ in gross profit to date. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO. |
|
Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals. |
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