WSJ What’s News - How Corporate Leaders Are Coping With Trump’s Order Blitz

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

P.M. Edition for Jan. 22. Business leaders are scrambling to prepare as President Trump’s executive orders bring changes to everything from immigration to energy policy. WSJ reporter Chip Cutter joins to discuss how CEOs are making sense of the changes for their companies and clients. Plus, Elon Musk casts doubt on Trump’s big project to build out artificial-intelligence infrastructure. And WSJ reporter Cameron McWhirter takes us on the ground in Altadena, where a historic community of Black homeowners looks to rebuild after the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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President Trump threatens Russia with sanctions and tariffs if President Putin doesn't end the war in Ukraine. Plus, how corporate leaders are coping with the policy changes brought by Trump's flurry of executive orders. This is something that a lot of executives in industries like healthcare and hospitality, manufacturing, construction, you name it, are worried about what to do if feds show up and potentially look at records of employees and maybe conduct some sort of immigration raid.

And what it will take for a unique black community to rebuild after destruction from the Los Angeles wildfires. It's Wednesday, January 22nd. I'm Alex Osala for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. President Trump threatens sanctions and tariffs on Russia if President Vladimir Putin doesn't reach an agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

Posting today on Truth Social, Trump said he would, quote, have no other choice but to impose sanctions and tariffs on Russian goods if the countries don't make a deal soon. The statement is Trump's most forceful and public effort to end the war, though the president also stressed that he doesn't want to hurt Russia. The Kremlin didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Hours after President Trump stood next to tech leaders unveiling Stargate, the $500 billion artificial intelligence

infrastructure project announced yesterday, Elon Musk questioned whether it would ever get off the ground. Last night and this morning, Musk posted on X that two of the companies involved in the effort, OpenAI and SoftBank, didn't have the funds to make it happen. The comments offer a glimpse into the sometimes awkward dynamic between Trump and Musk and signal that Musk won't pare back his unfiltered online commentary now that Trump has taken office.

The White House and the companies didn't respond to requests for comment about Musk's social media posts. Despite Musk's comments, investors were excited about AI. Today, they turbocharged a rally in US stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq led the surge, ending the day about 1.3% higher. The S&P 500 flirted with an all-time high but closed up about 0.6% and the dollar rose 0.3 percent. The U.S. dollar rose 0.3 percent. The U.S. dollar rose 0.3 percent. The draft of executive orders that President Trump signed shortly after being sworn into office made big changes to U.S. policy on things like immigration and energy. They also sent business leaders scrambling to make sense of the changes for their companies and for their clients.

I'm joined now by Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter. Chip, you report that banks like JPMorgan Chase, companies like 3M, and several other sense of the changes for their companies and for their clients. I'm joined now by Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter. Chip, you report that banks like JP Morgan Chase, companies like 3M, and several law firms are some of those taking quick action in response to these executive orders. What are these companies worried about? Well, a lot of the CEOs out there see this raft of moves from the Trump administration and are trying to figure out how does this affect us, what do we need to do? So you see companies like JP Morgan Chase setting up war rooms just to digest the new policies,

to send out notes to their own executives about what this might mean for the bank and its clients. We have law firms like Fisher Phillips, for example, that has set up an emergency hotline that its clients can call 24 hours a day if there's an unexpected immigration raid at a company. I mean, this is something that a lot of executives in industries like healthcare and hospitality, manufacturing, construction, you name it, are worried about what to do if feds show up and potentially look at records of employees and maybe conduct some sort of immigration raid.

And so Fisher Phillips said that they are sending out guidance and people are printing out one-pagers to have at the front desk, for example. So if you're a receptionist working at a healthcare company or a construction site, whatever it might be, you know what to do if the feds show up. Who do you call? What do you say? All of that kind of stuff. And so it's this kind of tactical guidance that companies are getting just to try to figure out how to operate in this new moment. And then I think there's bigger questions about tariffs and taxes

and these policies that could really just impact companies by online and so they want to be ready for this. Is it the sheer pace of the change or is it the scale of the change? Both. There's just so much that has come so fast and companies are planners. They like to try to get ahead of this as much as possible. They want to be ready. They want to be able to advocate their views. And CEOs have tried to do this. A number of CEOs, as we've reported, have gone down to Mar-a-Lago. They've tried to be in Trump's ear to advocate their positions. But when so much is coming at them so quickly, a lot of them are really trying to figure

out how companies should respond. And so the point about setting up a war room or a hotline is just that you have a place, you have a group of people who are there to assess whatever might come up. COLLEEN O'BRIEN That was Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter. that you have a place, you have a group of people who are there to assess whatever might come up. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Chip Cutter. And in case you missed it, Chip just hosted an episode of What's News in Earnings, discussing with Wall Street Journal banking reporter Alexandra Saidi what stood out in recent bumper earnings reports from big banks and what bankers see on the horizon.

That episode is right before this one in the What's News feed. Coming up, what it will take for black homeowners in Altadena to rebuild their community after the catastrophic LA fires. That's after the break. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young son.

But her maternal instincts take a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best, yet fiercest, part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Nightbitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Stream Nightbitch January 24 only on Disney+. The wildfires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area in recent weeks have claimed dozens of lives, hundreds of homes and businesses, and innumerable communities. One of those most affected was in Altadena, an area with a rare community in which most black households owned homes. 81% of black households in Altadena owned homes compared to 32% across Los Angeles County.

Now residents aren't sure whether they can rebuild the community as it was. Wall Street Journal reporter Cameron McQuarter has been reporting on the destruction there. So Cameron, set the scene for us a little bit. How badly was Altadena affected by the fires? For African Americans living in Pasadena, it was a goal to get up there and it was decimated.

It's a strange decimation. I saw whole rows of houses gone. Then right next to it, there'd be a wooden house that was still standing. Very random. Wow, sounds like it. What was the feeling of some of the people who you spoke with there? Mostly shock. The area has been cleared out when I was there

by the National Guard and the police. And so no one was being allowed through except for media. But on the outskirts, there were lots of people trying to get in to see what had happened to their homes. Edna Allen had lived there for decades and had run a very popular daycare center. And she really considered herself, as she put it, sort of the granny of the community.

I raised all my kids, my grandkids, my great-grand. I started daycare in 2000. And I've been doing the daycare for like 25 years now. Well, I was. When we got to Altadena, the second house I visited was Edna's. And you could see that it had been this really cared for little home.

There was this beautiful oak tree in the front of the house. And then in the back there had been a beautiful orange tree with oranges still on it, but all withered and many had dropped to the ground. The leaves were all curled and the house was completely gone. And when I got back to her, she took it really well because I think she had girded herself for that, but she was very worried about her financial future. The money that I'm getting right now, I'm going to try and find a place to stay.

My daughter has a daycare, see if they'll give us some kind of waivers where I can get my kids down there. Other than that, I'm going to have to shut down. What does rebuilding look like for some of the residents of this part of Altadena? This is the great fear of many of the African Americans living in this sort of northwest section of Altadena. This is going to require a lot of capital and huge battles with insurance companies and already people are getting emails and texts from developers and speculators trying to buy the land and if you have nothing as many of them do

suddenly someone's offering you a pot of money and and you're gonna take it and then and then where are you gonna go? So it's a real difficult situation, and I don't know what the answer is going to be. Edna Allen and other African-American long-time residents of Alta Dena were very worried about speculators and very increasingly resistant, and hoping that they would fight to rebuild and rebuild what they had. If you just look at the African-American community here

in Alphadena, do you think it's gone? I believe it's gone right now. Like everyone's gonna just go somewhere else? No, I believe they're gonna rebuild. We're not going nowhere. I believe they're gonna rebuild. That was a report by Cameron McQuirter, who covers US News for the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks so much, Cameron. Thank you. When a trader says, let's throw some chum in the water, do you know what that means? Unless you're a trader yourself and understand finance speak, chances are you don't know that it refers to spoofing, a practice where traders make a large order that they cancel before it goes through in an effort to manipulate the market. Now though, compliance software firms are using artificial intelligence to crack the arcane and coded language that traders use in order to catch people committing financial

crime. But WSJ reporter Richard Vanderford told our tech news briefing podcast that this technology does come with some risks. A big risk that has come up in lots of different AI contexts is bias. That you might inadvertently train an AI on data that incorporates some kind of bias, whether it's like a racial bias or gender bias or any other kind of bias. And now you're using it to automate a process so it's replicating that bias at scale. That's something regulators really worry about in any kind of context, not just finance. you're using it to automate a process so it's replicating that bias at scale. That's something regulators really worry about in any kind of context, not just finance.

Regulators also want to know how it works. There's a principle called explainability where the firms using it have to be confident they can explain how the model produced the results it produced. It can't just be like a black box and, oh, we trust it because it's always worked in the past. And you can hear more about that it because it's always worked in the past. And you can hear more about that story on tomorrow's Tech News Briefing podcast. And that's what's news for this Wednesday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienneme and Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Michael Kosmitis. I'm Alex Osala for The

Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.