Reuters World News - TikTok music fight, Fed caution and Trump’s inner circle

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has pushed back on the timing of a rate cut. European Union leaders have unanimously agreed to extend 50 billion euros in aid to Ukraine, overcoming weeks of resistance from Hungary. We go inside Donald Trump’s inner circle to find out how smoothly things are going, compared with four years ago. Plus, Universal’s fight with TikTok over music rights leaves the platform short of tunes. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, the Fed shoots down Wall Street's hopes for an early rate cut. The European Union agrees an aid deal for Ukraine. A rare glimpse into Trump's inner circle. And a licensing dispute means a TikTok without Taylor Swift or Drake. It's Thursday, February 1st. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Jonah Green in New York. And I'm Carmel Crimmons in Dublin.

The Federal Reserve is in no rush to start lowering interest rates. If the economy evolves broadly as expected, it will likely be appropriate to begin dialing back policy restraint at some point this year. Chair Jerome Powell there dashing expectations that the central bank will cut borrowing costs in March. The longer time frame sent stocks tumbling. Powell hailed the strength of the U.S. economy, but he's not ready yet to declare victory on inflation. The lower inflation readings over the second half of last year are welcome.

But we will need to see continuing evidence to build confidence that inflation is moving down sustainably toward our goal. In Brussels, a thousand tractors have blocked major thoroughfares. Farmers are trying to pressure the European Union to help more with taxes, rising costs and cheap imports. But inside the EU summit, a breakthrough for Ukraine. The bloc has agreed a 50 billion euro aid deal for Kiev, overcoming weeks of resistance from Hungary.

Andrew Gray is in Brussels. How badly does Ukraine need the money right now? It's an open question. It depends a little bit on how you analyze it, but the bottom line seems to be that Ukraine is okay for now, but we'll need this money in the coming weeks or months. Ukraine basically uses Western aid to pay for a lot of the things that you would expect a government in normal times

to be paying for social payments, pensions, things like that, because Ukraine is really plowing all of its revenue onto the military side at the moment and to the war itself and prosecuting the war against Russia's invasion. So that means this money is the money that Ukraine needs to kind of keep functioning and keep going as a normal country, as a normal state, even in the middle of the war. Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don't mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product. You have a product that's killing people.

Senator Lindsay Graham, among the lawmakers Wednesday, to grill tech CEOs on Capitol Hill. Senators hammered the heads of social media companies meta, X, Snap, Discord, and TikTok, saying they had failed to do enough to protect children's mental health and shield them from sexual predators. Iran's Revolutionary Guards have scaled back deployment of their senior officers in Syria

due to a spate of deadly Israeli strikes. Sources have told Reuters that the pullback is driven partly by Tehran's wish to avoid being sucked directly into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Tesla will hold a shareholder vote to shift its incorporation to Texas from Delaware. CEO Elon Musk wants to make the move after a judge in the tiny state voided his $56 billion pay package.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday cast doubt on a bipartisan effort to tighten border security, saying President Joe Biden doesn't need new laws to tackle the problem. From what we've heard, this so-called deal does not include, from what we've heard, these transformational policy changes that are needed to actually stop the border catastrophe. Johnson's remarks signal that a compromise being negotiated in the Senate faces long odds of passage. And Donald Trump has called on lawmakers to reject any deal ahead of the November election.

Actor Alec Baldwin has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the onset shooting death of a cinematographer. A grand jury indicted the actor on January 19th, reviving a criminal case that had been dismissed months earlier. Bitter infighting, caddy backstabbing, general chaos, traits you won't find in the current Trump campaign. Political correspondent Nathan Lane has a story out, revealing the inner workings of the effort to re-elect Donald Trump which is going surprisingly smoothly so far. Nathan, how is this campaign different from Trump campaigns of the past? So I think if you look at 2016,

Trump was just coming on to the political scene. He had a really, really small team, kind of widely panned as not professional. Of course, he won in 2016, despite that. And so what we found from our reporting is different now is he's running a very tight, disciplined ship. He's got two veteran political operatives, Susie Wiles and Chris Lassavita, who are co-campaign managers. And so far, through the initial stages of the primary, they've got a tight core group of

people, all of whom seem to be working well together. And there's a limited number of leaks. There's no infighting that we saw in past campaigns. And so so far, no matter what you think about Trump, I think it's fair to say that the campaign operations are working the way he wants them to. And it seems like they're getting results. What are they doing right? So they set out from the very beginning to undercut Ronda Santis's campaign. And so they've been very effective at that. On top of that, they've helped him land major endorsements. They've lobbied state Republican parties to change the rules for how delegates are allocated to benefit Trump. And perhaps their biggest or at least most incredible achievement is figuring out a way to campaign on multiple criminal indictments, figuring out a way to turn something that is obviously a negative.

Nobody wants to face an criminal indictment into something that you can campaign on. And they've done that effectively, at least with respect to a large portion of a Republican electorate. TikTok is starting to run short on tunes. Universal has started pulling its songs from the social media platform. That means no Taylor Swift, no Drake, no Billy Elish, no BTS. In a letter addressed to its artist and songwriter community, Universal accused TikTok of trying to build a music-based business without paying fair value for the music.

TikTok has described Universal's narrative as false and has said its actions were not in the best interests of artists and fans. Dawn Chimalesky covers entertainment business. So at the core of this dispute is a question of compensation. Universal music argues that its musicians, its songwriters and artists are not being compensated in a way that would reflect its music's importance to TikTok, which reaches over a billion users. The label also contends that artificial intelligence and recordings created with artificial intelligence have flooded the platform, which has the effect of diluting the royalty pool for human artists, can also. also it raises the question of online safety issues. So coming from Generation X, albeit at the younger end of that spectrum, I'm not really on TikTok. So for people like me, can you explain why music is so important to the platform and why losing it might be such a big deal?

So music has been core to the TikTok experience from its earliest days when users would perform karaoke. And it remains an integral part of the platform experience now. It's a place where establish bands such as the Rolling Stones go to reach a global audience that tends to be young with catchy hooks from the tracks. And it is a place where dance is also a key part of the experience where everyday users will perform short dance performances that they share with the community. So music is a core part of the TikTok experience. And finally, comedians in New York are redefining what it means to let it all hang out there. The nudity only gets to, gets you so far. Because like the audience, they forget you're naked after the first 30 to 90 seconds.

That stand-up comedian Billy Proceda, who hosts naked comedy, a monthly show at a sex-positive space in Brooklyn. Yes, the performers are nude, but comedian Chloe CUNA says it's not sexual. Honestly, I think it's kind of a little bit of a liberating thing because it's nudity in this totally non-sexual way. Prasita says the audience is normally filled with comedy fans, the curious or nudists looking for a space to disrobe socially. But the main goal of the show is to entertain.

You can do all the naked riffs you want, but then they will want jokes. And I like to think I book good comics who tell good jokes. That's it for today's episode of Roiders World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.