Morning Brew Daily - Trump Reduces Beef and Coffee Tariffs & Hollywood Stars Aren’t Bankable Anymore?

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Episode 715: Neal and Toby discuss Trump’s tariff rollback on beef, coffee, and other food goods to address rising price concerns from the American people. Next, Hollywood is struggling to make hits at the box office, even when movies have a star-studded cast. Plus, Charlie Javice is fooling JPMorgan again, this time by charging luxury hotel stays as legal fees. Meanwhile, CEOs from iconic companies are getting ready to retire. Finally, what you need to know in the week ahead.  Learn more at usbank.com/splitcard  Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily. show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, will a tariff rollback finally bring down grocery store prices? Ben, movie stars just aren't putting butts in seats anymore. It's Monday, November 17th. Let's ride. It is great to be back, though. I missed hanging out with you all very much. Toby, thanks to you and our guest host for holding down the fort last week. And I got to say, that mullet is growing in very nicely. I realized you guys didn't talk about this. So I wanted to mention something that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called a small but happy. when. ChatGPT's answers will no longer be littered with M-Dashes if you tell it not to.

In the last few months, people have recognized that chat GPT uses an unusual amount of long M-dashes when it answers your questions, so it got pretty hard to disguise AI writing as anything else. But Thursday night, Altman wrote that if you tell Chat-GPT not to use M-Dashes in custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. This has been a long time coming for me personally because the MDAS holds a special place in my heart because I learned about them when I got hired to write for Morning Brew. I was reading some of my college writing recently, which don't do that, but my dash game, frankly, stunk. Then it became awesome once I was introduced to the MDash. I think it was by you yourself.

I did get a little addicted to it as a lot of people have. It is a little bit of a divisive, you know, punctuation mark into the writing community because some call it a crutch. Some say that it's just lazy writing. But then the MDASH was just corrupted for all of us when AI became so ubiquitous with using this, which helped wien people off. But hopefully now it can be reclaimed by humanity. So I'm pretty excited about this. All right. And now a word from our sponsor, US Bank. This holiday's shopping season will test your budget as much as your claim to be the family's best gift curator. Give yourself and your wallet a break by paying later with the US Bank split card. Introducing the US Bank Split World MasterCard, a new type of card that

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You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. We sought to address rising grocery prices with an order on Friday that reduces tariffs on hundreds of goods people buy for their everyday food needs, including tomatoes, coffee, nuts, beef, coffee, bananas, and avocados. After Republicans got drubbed in elections two weeks ago, the message was sent loud and clear. Americans are finding basic goods unaffordable and they want prices to stop going up. And the grocery store is Exhibit A. Average retail prices for ground beef are up 11.5% over last year, and bananas have jumped 8.6%.

Coffee, as we caffeine addicts know, is more expensive than ever. With ground rose coffee prices spiking 40% from last September, all of those price increases are much higher than the total rate of inflation, which stands at about 3% annually. Were tariffs a factor, the White House seems to acknowledge as much with the implication that reducing tariffs will also reduce prices. Erica York at the Tax Foundation said, By admitting that lowering tariffs will lower prices for U.S. consumers, the Trump administration is acknowledging what economists have pointed out all along, tariffs raise prices across the board. 74% of U.S. food imports face tariffs as of August.

The tariff reversal is also a concession that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to tariff goods that almost never come with a made-in-the-USA sticker. The U.S. hardly grows any coffee or bananas, for example, so there's no domestic industry to protect, which is a primary goal of tariffs, to protect your local producers. Toby, this means I can finally make my famous fruit salad without maxing out a credit card. The banana and the coffee, these food items were always held up as a symbol of why this tariff logic never made sense, because you're right. We literally do not have the conditions to grow these things here, so why are we tariffing them? It just makes things more

expensive for consumers. So maybe this is a tacit admission that maybe this widespread tariff plan was not necessarily the best way. They needed to be a little bit more focus. It did seem like an omission to that affordability is becoming, you know, the de facto narrative defining the rest of 2025, especially after these elections where a lot of Democrats ran on a message of affordability. So Trump has been trying to reframe how people are looking at tariffs, especially trying to rally support for them. We talked about offering the $2,000 tariff for rebate checks to Americans. Now this comes on the heels of that. So it's clear that he is looking at what just happened in these elections and saying it does look like affordability is going to be the main

topic here. So let's try to print out a message showing that we cure you and we are going to try to make these food items more affordable. So the question is, are these food items going to be more affordable? There's a famous saying when it comes to inflation that prices take the elevator up and the stairs down. Now, grocers have set the expectation that you're going to pay a lot for bananas or coffee or anything in their aisles. So they don't have a lot of incentive. to lower prices that quickly. So economists generally are saying that if prices do come down, it won't be like we go, now that there's lower tariffs on these goods.

It's not like you're going to go to the grocery store this morning and you're going to see coffee be half the price it is. And there's still a lot of tariffs on the goods. Just look at Brazil. There was a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports. We get a third of our coffee from Brazil. The tariff rollback that was announced on Friday just reduces those by 10%. So there's still 40% tariff.

on coffee and a bunch of the other agriculture products that we import from Brazil. So if you are going to see price increases, it will take a lot of decreases. It will take a lot of time and they probably won't be substantial. I guess the conclusion here is that prices won't be going up because of tariffs. And the other conclusion, too, is that the big albatross that is still percolating in the background is the Supreme Court threat to Trump's entire tariff agenda where the Supreme Court is, they've heard arguments about Trump's use of emergency power. to impose these widespread tariffs.

If that goes against Trump, we could see some of these tariff revenue refunded to people. So there's a lot kind of going on in the background right now, but you do see a gradual dismantling of this broad-based approach to tariffing countries, especially when it comes to things like bananas that, you know, you can't necessarily grow in Iowa. You can't grow coffee here as well. So good to see if you are someone who is a caffeine addict like me and yourself that these prices may be coming down slowly. but surely.

For a long time, Hollywood has been a star-driven business. Put a movie star in your film, and that star puts butts in seats. But of late, there's been a decoupling of that relationship. After The Hunt starring Julia Roberts cost $70 million to make, it gross just $3.3 million at the box office in a month. Christy, a biopic featuring Sidney-Sweeney, brought in just $1.3 million in its first weekend in the U.S., one of the worst openings for a new release ever across 2000 screens,

and Glenn Powell and The Running Man made just $28 million against a reported budget of $110 million. The list goes on, movies featuring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Margot Robbie, The Rock, and more have played to mostly empty theaters. None of the 25 dramas or comedies in theaters released in the past three months have become a hit, despite featuring massive stars garnering critical acclaim and relatively large marketing pushes. October 2025 brought in just $445 million total at the box office. the lowest October ever recorded outside the pandemic and less than half the adjusted October 2019 total of $1 billion. Neil, everyone is pointing fingers at each other. Studios are looking at audiences and saying, you want originality, but only show up for sequels. Fingers are being pointed at the media for reporting the Dyerbox office reports and prices are up to with many saying that the theater experience is worse overall.

Whatever the reason, Star Power alone isn't enough to get people to turn out anymore. So people have been declaring movie theaters dead for the better part of 20 years when Netflix first came on the scene. Everyone could just watch anything at home. I remember every expert and analysts went up and said, all right, movie theaters are dead. And then when COVID came and movie theaters were closed, everyone declared movie theaters were gone. And still after the pandemic, they started to slowly inch back.

This time, though, feels a little bit different. Maybe you have a bunch of people who followed the industry very closely over the past multiple decades saying something's going on here doesn't look good at all. Matt Bologna, who's probably the most closely watched Hollywood journalist out there, said, it's the fall of Rome. It's the real-time disintegration of a 100-year-old industry. Owen Gleberman is the chief film critic for Variety said it has seriously begun to look like the bottom is falling out.

And then Kevin Goet, who wrote a new book, How to Score, and Hollywood said, it's not a phase. It's an evolution. You can't reverse. So it sure seems like there is some sort of secular decline here. in movie theaters because something is going wrong when all these typically bankable stars can't bring any butts in seats. The issue is, too, is that these movies are relatively well received by audiences or at least by critics. I mean, Die My Love, which features Jennifer Lawrence.

Critics loved that movie. It opened to $2.8 million at the box office. The Springsteen Biopic also had relatively positive reviews, brought in just $21 million. And then Good Fortune, which is a Keanu Reeves comedy was well reviewed. It had a budget of 30 million, only earned about $16 million. So it's just the math isn't mathing right now, which begs the question, why do studios keep making these movies? One, there's awards season eligibility. If you want to have, you know, Oscar fodder, you need to have a theatrical run to be eligible for these best picture awards. And then two, there is a longer lifetime for these movies as well. I mean, Die My Love was purchased by a streaming service movie for $24 million, the rights to that. So technically they could have a second

life on these streaming platforms. But also, audiences technically are saying, we want original films. We don't just want another, you know, Predator movie. And yet, if you look at how Predators' ninth installment did at the box office, it actually crushed. So maybe we're not necessarily voting with our wallets the way we are saying with our mouths. Yeah, well, movies are doing actually well. And, you know, there's no surprise here. It is franchises over the summer, which I will add, was the least attended summer box office since 1981. 26 movies collected at least $20 million at the North American box office. 20 of them were franchises of some sort.

Okay, let's move on to our winners of the weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that are fully meal-prepped with a hearty soup. I won the pre-show Tush Push, so I get to go first. And my winner is Charlie Javis because she defrauded JPMorgan once, and now, according to the bank, she's doing it again, and there seems to be nothing Jamie Diamond can do about it. The largest bank in the U.S. is accusing Javis of racking up exorbitant legal bills, which they are on the hook for that are about to be as expensive for J.P. Morgan as the

original fraud itself. On Friday, lawyers for the bank said that Javis has spent money on bougie meals, luxury hotel upgrades, and the moisturizer cellulite butter, then sent the receipts to J.P. Morgan. In total, J.P. Morgan says it's paid over $142 million in legal fees for Javis and her co-conspirators so far, nearly as much as the $175 million they were duped out of in the first place. Here's the quick backstory if you forgot about this saga. Back in 2021, J.P. Morgan bought Javis's Fintech startup Frank for $175 million, but soon had buyers remorse after learning that most of Frank's user base had been made up. The bank sued Javis and earlier this year,

she and her colleague Olivier Amar were convicted of fraud by a jury and Javis was sentenced to seven years in jail. Unfortunately for J.P. Morgan, a clock, Laws in the acquisition agreement makes them responsible for Javis and Amar's legal fees. And as this bill has soared, they've been desperately trying to back out of the arrangement, saying the sum is, quote, an unprecedented and shocking amount that has exceeded any semblance of reasonableness. Indeed, it appears that Javis' more than $60 million in fees alone is tens of millions more than Elizabeth homespent on her defense. Toby, what would you buy if Jamie Diamond was paying your bills and why is it also cellulite butter?

I mean, I would probably order a little room service to go at the same. Cellulite butter is obviously going on the bill. The issue for J.P. Morgan is technically they have the right to recoup these fees if it proves that they have been defrauded, but it looks like they're never going to get most of this money back because the amounts that Javis and Amar owe the bank and the federal government are just well in excess of their actual existing wealth. So it's kind of almost a Sam Bankprint-Fried moment where you don't have the assets to pay back the money that you allegedly defrauded them out of.

Also, she went for the absolute top. lawyers here. The who's who of a legal defense team. She was initially defended by Alex Spiro, who has represented Elon Musk, Eric Adams. Then she went for celebrity attorneys, Jose Baez and Ronald Sullivan, who defended Harvey Weinstein. And then now she's appealing her criminal conviction. And she hired the same appeals attorney that represented Sam Bankman-Feed. So these billable hours are just shocking. Why not if someone else is paying your bills? Exactly. And looking through these documents, you're seeing that these lawyers are suddenly working 24-hour days.

Sometimes one was charging over $2,000 an hour. So it is just this crazy world that J.P. Morgan is looking through the receipts and going, how is this even humanly possible? They're saying it's not humanly possible. We should have gone to law school. Now, I want to give Javis a moment to respond. Her spokesperson said, Charlie says she has nothing to do with that. And it's a ridiculous allegation.

Talk about the cellulite butter, the hotel upgrades, the meals. And the spokesperson added that Javis, when she was a job, J.P. Morgan employee, because they did acquire her startup, that she always followed all of the policies. The spokesperson said, as an employee, she did purchase ice cream and other items in accordance with J.P. Morgan's Code of Conduct. She never sought reimbursement for anything that wasn't expressly permitted. Under the guidelines, she was given any suggestion otherwise is simply incorrect. She's just like me for real. She ordered ice cream as well, so she's got a sweet tooth. I don't blame her for that. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the

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Kayak, got that right. My winner of the weekend? My ties, because a whole lot more of them are about to be sipped by big-name CEOs easing into retirement. It happens slowly and then all at once, but corporate boardrooms are changing in front of our eyes. On Friday, longtime Walmart boss, Doug McMillan said he'll step aside early next year. Over at Apple, the board is speeding up its search for his successor, according to reports, meaning Tim Cook could hand over the keys as soon as 2026.

And Bob Eiger has been openly talking about bowing out of Disney early next year too. What a run it's been for these three-star CEOs. Under Cook, Apple stock has nearly 20x since he's. took the helm in 2011. Walmart shares have quadrupled since McMillan took over in 2014, and Disney is now five times the size since Iger first took the reins starting way back in 2005. Neil, Corporate America is on a first name basis with these guys. Talking about another camera improvement to an iPhone and e-com push or a media brouhaha with no mentions of Tim, Doug, or Bob is going to feel a little weird. But the world moved on from MJ, Tim, and Kobe.

And we got LeBron, KD, and Steph. Now it's time to see. see who steps into their shoes. Yes, as Axios wrote and put into context, these leaders really do matter globally. They've been at the helm of these companies for over a decade. And each of these companies is really important to the broader global economy. About one in every five people around the world uses an iPhone, about one in every 50 people on Earth visits a Disney property each year. And then when he comes to Walmart, it's the world's largest retailer.

It has the most revenue and has the most employees of any company in the world. So there does seem to be a lot of corporate upheaval at these places, but they all say they have very sound succession plans in effect. And at least in Walmart's case, which is the only one that's actually happened, it looks like the transition is going very smoothly and has been planned out for many years. These were kind of outliers across corporate America, though, because the average CEO tenure across the S&P 500 is now just over seven years, which is well below the 10 years that these guys reigned over their companies for 1,600. 50 U.S. CEOs have left their jobs in the first nine months of 2025. So that is on pace with 2024 and it's on pace to be the highest in decades. So we are seeing or entering a time above Heval right now. If you want to read between the lines, I mean, they want leaders fluent in AI coming in. You know, we have this geopolitical board game that you have to play. There looks like cost

cutting measures are going to be a big part of the new reign of CEOs as well. So it's just a fascinating time that we go through these big periods of upheaval right now, and it's symbolic that these big three names, these names that you're on a first name basis with, are stepping to this side to make way for the new crop of leaders. Yeah, let's just talk about Walmart for a second because it has been a remarkably stable company in terms of a executive management perspective. The new guy coming in to replace McMillan, let me find his name. It's Ferner. He is only the fifth CEO since the founder of Walmart, Sam Waltman. McMillan's there, been there since 2014 has done a remarkable job of growing Walmart's business from, you know,

we talked about this a few weeks ago, actually, where when McMillan came in in 2014, Walmart thought it was too big to even grow any further. And then he raised wages for employees. He spruced up the stores and then the big push into e-commerce, which hit $100 billion in revenue in 2024. It's growing at 20% a year. And now the next CEO is going to have to figure out how AI factors into the picture. Walmart has already done a partnership with OpenAI and ChatGPT to get, you know, shopping integration in there. So that's the big question is where do they make money besides e-commerce and their physical stores? They've done a lot, they've done a big push into advertising and other sources of revenue. So we'll see how the new guy does at Walmart.

You got to think McMillan is like, this was time for me to step aside because what do you mean I got to loop in AI to Walmart? Like, what are you even talking about? So I do think, you know, it's the end of one era and they're not entering the next. And I was shocked about the news about Tim Cook, too. I never thought about his tenure. But he has been the first Apple CEO since Steve Jobs in 2011. He's been there forever. It feels like a little bit less time.

I mean, a lot of people make fun of them for the lack of innovation and how each iPhone seems to just be marginally improved on the other. But if you just look at the amount of revenue he's brought in, how he's made services, just this massive division within Apple. And the fact that the Apple is a massive company, over $4 trillion now. So he's done well, even though he's not as visionary or sexy of his CEO as Steve Jobs was. Yeah, Apple, when he came in Apple's market cap in 2011 was $350 billion.

It's now at $4 trillion today. So he's done a few things right. It's Monday. So here's your preview of the big events in the week ahead. YouTube TV subscribers firing up their tellies tonight will see an old friend who hasn't been around lately Monday night football. That's because Disney and YouTube TV owner Google resolved their unusual. tense contract standoff after 15 long days that left channels like ESPN, ABC, and more in the dark for 10 million YouTube TV subscribers. As a result of the deal, all Disney-owned channels

have returned immediately, and both companies are hailing a fair agreement. Yeah, I mean, CARES disputes have become nastier and more public than ever before. I mean, I would assume a lot of you listening never even considered what a CARES dispute was, but now with these streaming apps having more power to, you know, weaponize users, outrage in real time. the fact that these are such high profile events that are going dark. Now we are seeing these happen again and again. So big win for sports fans, though, because it was really annoying that it would blackout, like right in the middle of college season, right in the middle of NFL season.

So now your football is back. Yeah. Too bad. It's not a great matchup, though. Cowboys, Raiders. The Eagles are already running away with the NFC East. Okay. Over on Wall Street, the week's earnings slate is all about Nvidia and retailers.

The most valuable company in the world reports its quarterly financials at a time. time when investors have begun biting their nails over the cost of the AI buildout, which NVIDIA sits in the center of. But don't forget about the retailers who may be a more important litmus test for the economy. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Gap will give us the lowdown on the American consumer, the engine of the U.S. economic machine. As one analyst put it, at the end of the day, it really does have more to do with how many yoga pants and cheeseburgers a consumer wants to buy. Yeah, I mean, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, NVIDIA, 2x4s, Christmas gifts, AI chips. We are getting a whole swath of the economy this week. Also, we're getting the September jobs report, which has obviously

been massively delayed on a Thursday. Those figures are probably going to be too stale to actually use. We have seen numbers from private surveys, probably fill in the gaps better for the labor market. So it actually is probably more illuminating to look at these company earnings reports than the government data that has been so far behind schedule. And finally, your theater kid friends, including myself, have been waiting for this all year. Wicked for Good, the second chapter to the hit musical adaptation, hits theaters on Friday. And people seem to be pretty excited to return to Oz with Cynthia Arrivo and Ariana Grande. Fandango says that Wicked For Goods sold the most pre-sale tickets for a PG movie in history.

And it's the biggest advanced ticket seller of 2025. Maybe Witches Who Can Bel is just what the box office needed. Yeah, you don't need movie stars. You just need obviously an awesome and epic story. I also feel like there's been an insane product push to go along with this movie. I mean, I've seen eye shadow palettes, tooth. brushes, donut holes from Duncan All in that signature pink and green. This franchise lends itself so well to brandable products because you literally can just make normal things one pink and one green

and suddenly it's a wicked brandon. And I will say I did end up ordering, you know, the munchkins from Dunkin Dottas because I don't know, it looks pretty good to me. But yes, it is a massive marketing and product push. I feel like in a post-Barby world, we are seeing these movies become events these days. And Wicked is just a prime example of that. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning. with us and have a wonderful start to the week. For any feedback on the show, send a note to Morning Brew Daily at Morningbrew.com or slide into our DMs on Instagram at MB Daily Show.

Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer, our associate producers, our Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup hasn't been to the movies, or work for that matter, in ages. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great. Show today, Neil. Let's read it back tomorrow.

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