Morning Brew Daily - Trump's Exec Actions Impact Energy and Inflation & TikTok is Very Back

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Episode 501: Neal and Toby recap Trump’s inauguration and discuss the laundry-list of executive orders on trade, immigration, government efficiency, and more. Then, TikTok was finally banned… Then it went back online, with the app giving credit to President Trump. Plus, Trump launches a meme coin, Trump Coin, which sees a record spike shortly after he steps into the White House. Lastly, what you need to know for the week ahead.  00:00 - 5PM Sunset in NYC 2:40 - Trump’s 1st day in office 9:00 - TikTok is back…for now 15:30 - Trump Coin takes off 21:00 - Week Ahead 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. Download the Yahoo! Finance App (on the Play and App store) for real-time alerts on news and insights tailored to your portfolio and stock watchlists. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD 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 bird daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, there were more billionaires at Donald Trump's inauguration than the St. Bart's Marina, but which tech titans got a front row seat? Then TikTok's ban lasted all of 12 hours as Donald Trump intervened to save the app, though it's long-term future, a little murkier. It's Tuesday, January 21st.

Let's ride. Welcome back. Hope you had a great long weekend. It's so cold. My phone currently says 9 degrees here in Manhattan. However, I do have some good news. In New York, at least. Today is the first time the sun will set at 5 p.m. in months,

and we won't have another pre-5 p.m. sunset until November. So the days are getting longer, even if you can't go outside to enjoy it. I'm going sun tanning, Neil. Spring is basically sprung. Yeah, the high is 10 degrees, but the sun is so back. I'm actually fine dealing with the cold. I've gotten used to it, but the lack of sunlight has affected me. So maybe we move this pot a little closer to the south, do a couple of Florida shows.

Sounds good to me. You know what this really affects, though? Is golf on the weekend? Of course it does. Those two PMT times become a little bit more valuable. So to me, spring has sprung. Now a word from our sponsor, Yahoo Finance. Neil, so much going on in the news right now.

I don't want to jinx it, but I'm calling the Monday we just had. The newsiest Monday will get all year. Well, now you definitely jinx it. But the only way to stay on top of a day. newsday like that is to have a site like Yahoo Finance at your disposal. When you have meme coins dropping and polar vortexes, vortexing, and executive orders getting signed left and right, Yahoo Finance is there to aggregate the headlines and show you how the market is reacting.

So much of what you might see on social media or hear from your friends is noise. Yahoo Finance cuts through all that to serve you the information you need to make informed decisions about your investments. If you want to get valuable insights to navigate this period of newsiness, head to Yahoofinance. com today. Well, it is official. Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States. The president elect dropped the elect yesterday and wasted no time after his inauguration, busting out his ballpoint pen to sign dozens of executive actions to reshape the economy, immigration, and the government to implement his America first policies. Here's a rundown of the most important. Trump signed

10 executive orders related to immigration yesterday as he follows through on his campaign promises to and illegal immigration and conduct mass deportations. He also moved to end birthright citizenship and designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. On the topic of energy, Trump is set to remove the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords for the second time as he aims to boost domestic fossil fuel production. In his speech, he also promised to drill baby drill. Trump also announced on Monday that he is withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization,

citing the organization's mishandling of the COVID-19. pandemic. Trade was another hot button campaign issue from Trump, but he's taking things a little slower when it comes to enacting tariffs. He declined to issue new tariffs through an executive order and instead asked federal agencies to conduct a thorough examination of the U.S. trade practices with countries like China, Canada, and Mexico. In his speech yesterday, he also pledged to create an external revenue service to collect duties from other countries. Finally, Doge appears to be a go. in the executive order to establish the Department of Government Efficiency to identify areas of government waste.

The new agency will be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramoswamy, though the latter will soon leave to run for Governor of Ohio, according to reports. Neil, Trump's hand has to be cramping after all that signing, right? Solid rundown, Toby. Let's start with trade, because that is what investors, Wall Street, are, is watching the most closely. Trump did not institute any new tariffs on day one. It was this more broad

executive order. So you had Wall Street breathing a little sigh of relief. Okay, maybe this is just a kickoff to a negotiating period. But as he's signing this order about, you know, this broad order to review trade practices, he's gabbing it up with reporters. And he goes,

you know what? I think we'll do tariffs on Canada and Mexico 25%. I think it's going to start on February first. So maybe they're not going to come yesterday, but it appears that Trump is going to move forward with tariffs. We know how disruptive 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the U.S.'s two largest trading partners is going to be. And now there's a deadline of February 1st.

We're back on this roller coaster of will he, won't he? And the global economy really hangs in the balance. So it was a two-part day where it was a little relief. And then, oh, no, here we go again. And then also energy is a big focus of Trump. He immediately pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, something he did in his first term as well. The U.S. now joins Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries outside of this global agreement meant to lower fossil fuel emissions. He also has pledged to reverse Biden's efforts to grow the U.S.'s green energy, pull out some of those EV credit. that has been kind of propping up that industry as well.

He also promised to drill baby drill, which is a little bit ironic because there's U.S. oil output hit an all-time high under Biden. Last year, the Biden administration issued a record 758 oil and gas drilling licenses. So a lot of people are looking like there's not that many more places to drill. We've been drilling, baby drilling. So that is one of his campaign promises. He said it in his inauguration speech, but already the U.S. is at all-time. high U.S. oil output. Okay, and then moving on to Doge, this Department of Government Efficiency, which is this,

I don't know, task force outside of the government led by Musk and Ramoswami that's supposed to look at federal spending and find areas to cut. Yeah, lost one of its leaders already. Ramaswami essentially confirmed on X yesterday that he's going to leave this task force and run for governor of Ohio. And that's not, you know, the only turmoil that Doge is facing in its first 12 hours of existence. Minutes after this executive order was created, Doge was hit with three different lawsuits accusing this Department of Government efficiency of violating federal transparency rules.

It's not constitutional, according to these lawsuits. So now it's locked in a legal fight. And I should add, this is going to be a huge issue for a lot of these executive orders. they're going to face legal challenges, the one around birthright citizenship, which says that, no, this is longstanding constitutional enshrinement practice where nearly anyone who is born on U.S. soil, it doesn't matter who your parents are, you can become a U.S. citizen. Trump wants to end that. That was already hit with the lawsuit. So when you do something by executive orders, when you file almost 100, as Trump did yesterday, you open yourself up to legal challenges.

So Doge, birthright citizenship, and we'll see a number of these other executive orders. get stopped in their tracks and move to the courts. And then finally, you couldn't have watched the inauguration yesterday without looking up and seeing some of the most valuable companies. The leaders are some of those valuable companies sitting courtside. You had Alphabets Sundarpechei there. Elon Musk was obviously there. Obviously there. Apple's Tim Cook showed up.

And then you have the triumvirate of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and then Sam Altman from OpenAI was also there as well. A lot of them, people were noting, had better seats, a front row seat, even better seats than people from Trump's cabinet. So that just goes to show how kind of tethered together the billionaire classes with this upcoming Trump administration. Wall Street Journal kind of did a little bit of back of napkin math and found that the market cap for the companies that had their CEOs attend was over $12 trillion. dollars and that their individual was over $1 trillion.

So a lot of money on display in front row seats at this inauguration. Well, it finally happened. TikTok went dark in the U.S. over the weekend, but its time offline ended up being shorter than Kim Kardashian's marriage to Chris Humphreys. On Saturday, TikTok took itself offline for about an hour and a half before midnight, disrupting everyone's pre-bedtime scrolling routines. But then Trump got involved. He posted on true social that he would sign an executive order.

to bring TikTok back, most likely in the form of a 90-day extension. TikTok followed that up a few hours later with a pop-up served to 170 million Americans that read, as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S. A mere 12 hours later, it was good as new, though it's currently unavailable to download on the Google and Apple App stores. Last night, Trump did follow through on his word, signing an executive order instructing the Attorney General to not enforce the ban for a period of 75. days to allow his administration to take a crack at finding an appropriate course of action going

forward. Neil Trump has mentioned that his long-term solution to saving TikTok includes the U.S. taking a 50% ownership position in the app. But so far, Bight Dance has been pretty adamant. It's not selling. So now it's time for an unstoppable force to meet an immovable object. This is total legal limbo right now because TikTok is ostensibly alive. But at the same time, there is still a law on the books that says Apple, Google, Oracle, all these U.S. companies that host it, distribute it, can't do that. That's Congress saying that. And then you have Trump coming in with the executive order saying, no, I'm not going to enforce it.

Don't worry. So you have multiple parts of the government saying multiple different things to these companies. And so much money is on the line. The law states that you will be fined $5,000 per user. You just mentioned that TikTok has 170 million U.S. users. So it's unclear whether Apple and Google are going to say, well, Trump's not going to prosecute me. So that's okay. I will still host TikTok.

But it seems like they're not doing that because you check this morning. And it looks like TikTok is not on those major app stores. So it's existing in this liminal space right now where it is alive, but it's not alive. It's like when you wake up in the morning and you're sensibly awake, but you're definitely not getting out of bed. That is where TikTok is right now. It's not sustainable. We'll see if anything could get done in the next 75 days, but it's not even sure that Trump is able to do this. The law that was passed allows for a 90-day extension if there is, quote, significant progress on a deal to sell TikTok.

But that only kicks in before the law kicked in, and the law has already kicked in. So this is perhaps not legal what Trump is doing. We're all kind of throwing our hands up in the air about what is the future of TikTok as we have been for the last couple months. It does look like TikTok is this political football too because everyone remembers that in Trump's first administration, he was very gung-ho about blocking it, about banning it. He led the charge here initially, but then totally flipped his tune as he realized that it could be advantageous to him to come across as a savior of TikTok to a lot of young people who use the app. and a lot of people were criticizing TikTok for basically posting a Trump ad saying that, hey, Donald Trump is going to save this app. That was the language that was written in the pop-up that everyone was served.

So Trump comes away with his major political victory where he looks like he did save the app to the 170 American, 170 million Americans who still want to send meme videos to their friends that they probably won't watch. Zooming out, though, it looks like the only truly permanent solutions to keep TikTok online appear to be, one, you have to pass a law that supersedes or reverses that initial law, which is not going to be easy considering the widespread bipartisan support of that initial law. Or you force a sale to an acceptable buyer, and there are these groups that are putting forth perplexity in AI app that has a market cap about a tenth of the size of Byt Dan said,

hey, we'll put our name up there. And then there's also this group led by Kevin O'Leary, who says, like, we have the funds together to make something happen. So still, you used the term liminal space a lot. I think that's a perfect encapsulation of where we are right now with TikTok. Meanwhile, other apps aren't waiting to see what's going to happen to TikTok two pounds. Instagram made a couple of moves on Sunday, which was the day that TikTok went dark for about 12 hours or released a video editing app similar to Capcut, which is TikTok's sister

app that allows you to do video editing. And that's been super popular. it also extended the length of reels from 90 minutes to three minutes. So they think 90 seconds to three minutes. No 90 minute reels out there. When was the last time you watched a 90 minute reel? That's what I do. So yes, 90 seconds to three minutes.

So Instagram thinks this is a golden opportunity to bring users over who don't know what's going on with TikTok to them. So we'll see how that boosts Instagram's user base. Up next, Trump launched a meme coin. It's time to refresh your yard during spring. backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three-burner gas grill, or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together.

Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th, Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Throughout U.S. history, President elects usually spend the months leading up to their inauguration divesting from any business dealings in order to fend off conflicts of interest. Not Donald Trump, quite the opposite. On Friday night, days before being sworn in, Trump shockingly launched his own meme-linked cryptocurrency, Trump coin, which spiked 600% overnight and made him billions of dollars on paper. As of Sunday morning, the coin represented the longtime real estate development. developers, 89% of his total net worth, as much as $58 billion on paper. That would make him one of the world's 25 richest people. And remember, this coin didn't even exist two days prior.

The Trump's weren't done milking the meme cow Sunday night, Trump's wife Melania, launched her own coin called Melania, which shot up to a market cap of $5 billion and actually sent Trump coin prices trending down. These developments have flabbergasted, both the crypto industry and presidential ethics watchdogs for different reasons. For crypto execs who had high hopes that Trump would remove barriers to growth, they're worried that his meme coin ploy could hurt the sector's credibility. For people who study government ethics, the coin represents an unprecedented scheme to profit off of elected office.

We're in uncharted territory. Absolutely. And initially the reaction is to just laugh at it or just say that, wow, this is just another thing that Trump is doing. Like, I can't believe he launched a meme coin, but it does really open up a Pandorix box of legal and ethical considerations, because this is a potential money faucet for the Trump administration. On average, if you look at kind of the mechanics of this coin, Trump's various entities that he control can sell about 24 million coins per month back into the market.

Right now, 80% of the coin's liquidity is locked up by Trump-controlled entities. and if you kind of use a proxy of the prices as of Sunday, that would amount to an income stream of over a billion dollars per month, which adds up to, you know, 12 to 15 billion dollars per year. So the implications of that are pretty far reaching. He basically has this money faucet that he can tap into to do what he wants with. And what does that mean? Does that mean that a potential foreign government or a foreign actor could funnel money into Trump going to ask for, you know, favors. It does open up some of those ethical mind fields that a lot of people were saying, whoa, this is not necessarily something you want the president of the United States

doing. Yeah, Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly worked for Trump the first time around, he's a crypto investor, certainly criticized this decision a lot. This was a quote that he posted on X. Now anyone in the world can essentially deposit money into the bank account of president of the USA with a couple clicks. Every favor, geopolitical, corporate, or personal is not. Now on sale right out in the open. Now let's talk about the crypto industry's reaction because there were really high hopes. Trump was going to come in and deregulate the sector and get rid of Gary Gensler, who's the SEC chair, who was cracking down.

And now he launches the meme coin. And I think they are feeling a little bit of whiplash because, you know who else launches meme coin? You know, like people like Hawk Dua do what's called a rugpole. They, they, all the prices go up and then they sell everything and they make off the, make off with the money. And the regular investors don't make they lose at all because typically meme coins trade on attention. And when that attention goes away, they go down to zero leading regular folks who invested holding the bag. So there was a lot of criticism from crypto leaders, former coin base execs, venture capitalists in the crypto industry saying,

man, this is not a good look for our industry. We finally, we wanted to be taken seriously. We funneled $10 million into your inauguration fund. We're hoping for a lot of serious policy moves that, you know, give us credibility as an industry, and this undercuts all that. So there was a chorus of crypto execs saying this is not what we're looking for, dude. One thing that did happen, though, is a lot of people got very rich off this coin, because it went nuclear after it launched.

if you just kind of scan the blockchain and see some of the trades that were issued. I always scan the blockchain in my fair time. You saw, I mean, it was based on Salana, so it is all out there in the open to see. And the holder who saw the highest gained almost 19,000 percent. They had a position worth $270,000. Although you did see a lot of the biggest holders start to sell. Investors who saw over 10,000 returns were some of the most frequent. 10,000 percent returns were some of the most frequent sellers, which, you know, makes sense.

I mean, these are insane numbers that we're talking about. So there was a lot of money being passed around. It was a very frothy time for the crypto market. It has since come down a little bit. Prices were a lot below the peak during the inauguration. It was funny, too, that Maloney coin ended up taking some of the, you know, the trading fear around Trump coin and putting it towards Melania coin. So maybe there's some, you know, spousal rivalry right now.

But yeah, it is pretty crazy that suddenly, in the crypto industry, you can wake up and have nothing and then turn that into something worth $50 billion in the span of 24 hours. It literally did not exist 40 hours ago, and now it is one of the biggest meme coins in the world. You think this week has already been wild? Well, we're just getting started, baby. Here's what you need to know about the biggest events in the week ahead. A potentially historic winter storm is about to smack parts of the south with levels of snow and ice they haven't seen in. decades or perhaps ever. New Orleans could get 10 inches of snow today, the city's biggest snowfall on record. Florida issued a winter storm watch for the first time in 11 years, and Houston

suspended all flights from both its airports at midnight Monday. Travel could be non-existent because these cities are simply not prepared for this kind of weather. Houston, for instance, has zero snow plows. Zero. They typically pre-treat roads for winter weather using brine, but there's not enough of the mixture for 16,000 lane miles of roads the city handles. That is a crazy stat. So congrats on the snow day, Houston. But you might be snowed in for longer than you're expecting. The National Weather Service says that this is basically the coldest air we've seen in many years.

Nearly all of the lower 48 states except for South Florida are seeing freezing temperature. So northern Florida, even the kind of my neck of the woods, Tampa area, are seeing freezing temperature. So pretty crazy that nearly 300 million Americans are about to experience below average close to freezing temperatures. Oh, he hope everyone is staying warm and safe. Speaking of snow, the World Economic Forum has begun in the Swanky resort town of Davos, Switzerland. It's the annual gathering of business and political leaders who say they want to tackle climate change but also arrive there on private jets. This year, though, the pretense of corporations saying they want to help make the world a better place may be tossed aside because there has been a vibe show. shift since Trump's election.

Terms like ESG, DEI that had dominated Davos for the past decade, have been replaced by more explicit business concerns like dealmaking and deregulation. Yeah, and a number of world leaders are not even attending the event this time around India, Prime Minister Modi isn't showing up either as Chinese President Xi Jinping. Handful of European leaders aren't coming either. President-elect, or no, now President Donald Trump is not expected to attend, though. is expected to address the event via video. So it is losing a little bit of its sheen here as they're trying to figure out how to,

you know, what is its place now in kind of the global and business worlds. Earning season picks up the pace after Big Banks kicked off proceedings with blowout numbers last week. In the coming days, we'll hear from Verizon, American Express 3M, and more. But the highlight is later this afternoon when Netflix drops its Q4 financials. The company is firing on all cylinders. now as the undisputed king of streaming, which shares up more than 75% in the past 12 months. And I don't see why it would give up its throne anytime soon. It's coming off the release of Squid Games too, although I am fully Apple TV pilled now after binging all of Severance

over the weekend. So I'm back on the premier TV bandwagon. The Oscar nominations will be released on Thursday after multiple delays due to the wildfires in Los Angeles. In the category of best picture, the brutalist is the favorite, but odds makers have Conclave, Anora, and Amelia Perez, not that far behind. Best actor is going to be intriguing. Adrian Brody will likely get a chance for his second best actor win for The Brutelist, while Timothy Chalemay will try to become the youngest winner of that award for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in a complete unknown. So I did see Conclave over the weekend, and it was incredible. Turns out that Oscar-nominated movies are pretty good, so I'm tripling down. Well, not yet. It hasn't been nominated yet.

That's true. You're manifesting that. It was great. Also, the Brutalist is a favorite to win a lot of awards, a lot of nominations as well. But it did get some heat over the weekend because it emerged that the film used AI to enhance Adrian Brody's Hungarian accent for some scenes. Apparently, Hungarian is one of the hardest languages to perfect the nuances of pronunciation. The director came out and said, hey, we were on a tight budget, $10 million here. We were trying to stretch it.

So we use this Ukrainian re-speecher startup that finesses delivery. So I don't have a huge problem with it, although some film bus said that it should be disqualified from nominations due to its use of AI. In sports, can we just fast forward to Sunday already? It's championship weekend in the NFL with two spots in the Super Bowl on the line. In the early game, the Eagles take on the Washington commanders, followed by the Buffalo Bills, playing the Kansas City Chiefs and the refs. I can't believe how much I've become anti-chiefs in the last few days. But Neil, I know you included this segment because you went to an Eagles game. The Eagles win, actually.

It is big news, but sure, give us a little quick rundown about how you, and actually our executive producer, Emily, went to the game. How was it? Yeah, Emily and I went to the game separately. But we were there on Sunday in Philadelphia. If you saw it on TV, it was snowing really hard towards the second. and have so much fun. It was a great win.

Very much a nail biter. A lot of nerves going on. People would go to the bathroom and different, you know, quarter commercial breaks and we'd all be like, oh my God, are we going to win or not? But the Eagles came through much, much thanks to Seguan Barclay, who was just a god among men. So it was just, it was a lot of fun. I'm really glad I had a chance to go.

And you never sat down the entire time. You stood up. No, I mean, the seat was like completely wet. There was snow piling up. everyone around for four straight hours. We just stood up and it went by in a blink of an eye. So I really want to go to the next game. That's what this made me think of. But I have to prep for the podcast on Monday. So I can't go to the next game. But yeah, fly eagles fly. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday for any questions, comments,

or feedback. Send an email to morning brewdaily at morningbrew.com. And if you're enjoying the show, spread the word, share it with a friend, family member, or a coworker who's always asking for podcast wrecks, or instead of scrolling through your contacts, just take Toby's recommendation. I want you to share today's episode with a fellow cinephile. As someone who saw one potentially Oscar-nominated film this weekend, I just can't go back to those big commercial box office hits anymore, so share the pod with someone with similarly elevated movie-going tastes. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Lute is our producer, Olivia Graham.

is our associate producer. Yucchinawa Ogu is our technical director. Garrett Peck is on audio. Hair and makeup is chugging hot cocoa. Toby, marshmallows are no marshmallows. Marshallows all the way. Of course. Dan and Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Aw. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a one person a one person, $1.6 million dream package, the biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

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