Trump Considers Early Naming of Next Fed Chair
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We've exclusively reporting that Donald Trump is considering naming the next Fed chair early in a bid to undermine current chair Jerome Powell. Powell has come under increasing pressure over the central bank's take it slow approach to cutting interest rates.

According to our reporting, some names being considered are former Fed Governor Kevin Walsh, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, the Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and a few others. An early announcement from the President could allow the chair-in-waiting to influence investor expectations about the likely path for rates, attempting to steer monetary policy before Powell's term ends.

Oil giant Shell is denying that it's in takeover talks with UK rival BP. This morning's statement comes after a journal report Wednesday that Shell was holding early stage talks to acquire BP.

Shell also said it is now bound by UK takeover rules, meaning it can't make an offer for its peer in the next six months unless it does so with the agreement of BP's board if a rival suitor emerges or if there is a material change in circumstances. A BP spokesman declined to comment.

And shares of Nvidia closed trading yesterday at a record high, with the chipmaker also reclaiming the title of largest company by market size from Microsoft. That comes as Nvidia is moving into cloud computing. While new cloud competition would be worrying for Amazon, given its high margins, and for Microsoft and Google, given there are already macro concerns about IT spending trends, Nvidia is also on the defensive.

After being the beneficiary of deals with cloud companies that see most of them rent its AI chips, helping Nvidia secure an estimated 80% market share in that business, all of the cloud giants are developing their own custom AI chips. Stock markets in Asia ended the day mixed, while European markets are gaining in midday trading, and US stock futures are up ahead of Nike earnings due out later today.

And we have a lot more coverage of the day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast. You can add it to your playlist on your smart speaker or listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three? You can with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast hyperscaler for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs.

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