WSJ What’s News - Trump’s Beef With Inflation

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

A.M. Edition for Dec. 8. The White House takes aim at soaring beef prices as worsening consumer sentiment pushes the president to tackle rising inflation. Plus, President Trump signals potential government resistance to Netflix’s $72 billion Warner Brothers takeover. And WSJ’s Anat Peled details the grueling conditions that Palestinian prisoners endured while locked up in Israeli detention centers. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The White House takes aim at soaring beef prices as food inflation rears its head. Plus, President Trump signals potential government resistance to Netflix's $72 billion Warner Brothers takeover. It's a lot of markets here, so we'll have to see what happens. And the Supreme Court considers the president's power to reshape federal agencies. It's Monday, December 8th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

We are exclusively reporting that a group of President Trump's top advisors are looking to tackle soaring beef prices as the administration ramps up efforts to combat food inflation. Steak and ground beef have hit record highs this year, but as economics reporter Chelsea Delaney explains there's no easy way to bring down prices, which have climbed steadily since 2021. And that inflation is becoming a bit of an economic headache for the Trump administration. A lot of food prices are continuing to climb quite a lot. So it's not just beef. It's also bananas.

It's coffee prices, which have gone up about 40% in the past year. And this is really frustrating to a lot of people, because the narrative coming into this year was that inflation was going to keep going down. And then it's stagnated. And some of this has to do with tariffs. We've seen the Trump administration roll back some tariffs on some of these food items. But for a lot of consumers, food prices are a lot more expensive than they were before the pandemics. And so that's weighing on a lot of consumers, especially on the lower end of the

income range. And Chelsea says that that disproportionate impact of higher food prices is creating a two-track economy. It's been five years now of really high inflation for American consumers, and that's really starting to dent. What we're seeing is the economy is sort of splitting, And it's the low and middle-income Americans are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. They're losing hope that inflation is going to be defeated. And that will eventually filter through into their spending habits. So on the other hand, you have high-income Americans, which are continuing to see these big gains in the stock market, their jobs are doing well.

And so, yeah, we're really seeing the American economy split among those income lines. On Saturday, Trump called for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to create task forces to examine whether anti-competitive behavior exists in U.S. food supply chains. The Justice Department has also launched a new antitrust investigation into meatpacking companies. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments today in a case testing President Trump's power over federal agencies. The case emerged after Trump fired a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission in March, contradicting statutes that say certain officials can only be removed if they neglect their duties or commend. other misconduct. A broad ruling in the president's favor could enable him to intensify his mission

of directing agencies to implement his agenda. A ruling is expected by July. Turning overseas, a U.S. brokered ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia crumbled this morning. The Thai military said two of its soldiers were injured yesterday in small arms fire from Cambodian troops, leading it to conduct airstrikes today on targets in Cambodia. Journal's Southeast Asia Bureau Chief Gabrielle Steinhauser says the flare-up risks restarting a long-running border dispute. At this point, neither side appears to be in de-escalation mode. The Cambodians, for their part, are still saying that they want to stick to the deal. They want peace.

The ties are saying that that's not true, and they started the whole thing. What I'm really watching for is what will President Trump do when he wakes up. He traveled all the way to Kuala Lumpur just six weeks ago for the ASEAN summit. He oversaw the signing of this extended ceasefire agreement according to some peace deal according to others and took a lot of credit for his role in pressuring the countries. The main way he pressured Thailand and Cambodia was that at the time he said that he would stop any negotiations on lowering very high tariff rates on both Cambodia and Thailand until they stopped fighting.

And they did. And now I think the big question is, what is he going to do if they keep fighting? Coming up, Israel opens up about the conditions faced by former Palestinian prisoners. We have got that story from our reporter in Tel Aviv and the latest on markets, including the week ahead for the Fed

and reaction to Netflix's deal to buy Warner Brothers after the break. Israel's public defender's office has issued a rare acknowledgement of the grueling conditions that Palestinian prisoners endured while locked up in Israeli detention centers. An audit found that conditions for Palestinian prisoners deteriorated severely after the attacks on October 7, 2023, and included extreme overcrowding, hunger, and near-daily beatings for many. In a sign of just how punishing the conditions were, the report called the circumstances, is, quote, one of the most severe detention crises that the state has known.

Journal reporter Anad Pellet is based in Tel Aviv and spoke to our Caitlin McCabe. Annette, you write that this report details some pretty awful conditions. Can you walk us through what it says and how the audit was conducted? So the audit was conducted by the Public Defender's Office, which is an office in the Israeli Justice Ministry. This office has been conducting biennial audits of the Israeli prison system. since 1999 as part of its role to protect the rights of detainees and prisoners. So the team of auditors that visited the facilities, the eight facilities,

they found that prisoners were suffering from extreme starvation. Some prisoners said that they were restricted from accessing drinking water. We had other cases where they saw things with their own eyes like lack of hygiene products that they could use, for example, soap to clean themselves, and they saw the overcrowding. So the public defender's office said its team found that living space for 90% of Palestinian prisoners is below three square meters. And in one prison called Kziot Prison, the facility was at double its capacity. So nine to 12 prisoners per cell and half of them were sleeping on the floor. Some of the most severe allegations that they heard about was a lot of violence. So the

prisoners said that they suffered severe and unprovoked violence from prison staff on an almost routine basis. And something important is that the prisoners said that they were denied medical care. It was almost impossible for them to see a doctor. This was a combination of what they saw with their own eyes, as well as what they heard from hundreds of prisoners. Your story notes that the audit covered the years, 2023 and 2024, were obviously in the final days of 2025 now. Do we have a sense of between that time, prison authorities were alerted about these conditions and if anything changed? Yeah, so right after visits, the team of auditors, the lawyers who visited, they would actually tell the commanders of the prisons about specific issues they heard. And sometimes that did

bring to a slight improvement, but the report notes that the conditions remain overall very difficult. So they were alerted, but conditions did not change dramatically. And Annette, what do we know about Israel's prisons? Who operates them? So the Israeli prison service is overseen by a far-right national security minister called Itamar Benkvir, and he has boasted and really done this repeatedly throughout the war on social media and speeches that he has made conditions for Palestinian detainees worse, and this has included cutting their rations of food. What we've seen during the war as well is that Benkvir has at times gone into certain

detention centers that house Palestinian prisoners and has even bragged of how poor their conditions are. So for him, it's kind of a point of pride. We should say that a spokesperson for Bangabir didn't immediately respond to a request for comment for the report. Now, it's important to note that there are two systems for basically holding Palestinian prisoners. We have the IPS, the Israeli prison system, and then we also have military facilities. One of the most notorious ones is called Sedei Man, which had a lot of allegations of severe abuse, including alleged sexual abuse. We're talking here, the audit focused on the Israeli prison service. But we should also note that according to a separate report by Physicians for Human Rights

Israel, a rights group, at least 98 Palestinian prisoners have died since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023. So that pretty much breaks down to 46 in the Israeli Prison Service and 52 in facilities run by the military. And that's a very high number. Wow. And so what has the Israeli Prison Service said in response about this audit? So the Prison Service admitted that there was severe overcrowding. They said that their facilities have been swollen by the detention of thousands of Palestinians since the start of the war. It also said that its staff follows the law, but it didn't actually respond to request for comment on hunger, beatings, or other allegations of abuse in the report. And it's pretty strange because the person overseeing

the prison service, Benghvir, has actually taken pride in worsening conditions of living. That's journal reporter Annette Pellad, reporting from Tel Aviv. Thanks, Annette. Thanks for having me. President Trump has said he'll be involved in a possible regulatory review of Netflix's $72 billion deal to acquire Warner Brothers in his first public comments about the sale. Trump was speaking to reporters before a Kennedy Center event yesterday, where he said the takeover could be a problem because of the market share Netflix would control. He also said he had a lot of respect for Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos, noting they met last week in the Ovalon. office. We are exclusively reporting that IBM is in advanced talks to acquire data infrastructure company Confluent for around $11 billion. People close to the deal said the sale could be announced as soon as today, but said talks could still fall apart. Confluent provides technology that

helps to manage streams of real-time data used in large AI models and had a market value of around $8 billion on Friday. And investors are bracing for one of the year's most highly anticipated Fed meetings this week. The central bank is expected to cut rates by a quarter percentage point amid some concerns about slowing job growth and an unemployment rate that has been ticking higher. Though as markets reporter Hannah Aaron Lang explained on this week's episode of WSJ's take on the week, the cut could be good for stock investors. Investors' expectations about this meeting whether or not policymakers will cut rates has actually shifted pretty drastically over the last month or so.

We had less than 50% chance of a cut based on interest rate future prices a month ago. Last time I checked, we're now at 90%. So the vast majority of traders are expecting an interest rate cut at the meeting this week. And of course, this comes as we've seen data suggesting there are maybe cracks in the labor market. That's something, of course, that central bankers will want to. address and maybe some questions about the health of the consumer as well. But of course, if the Fed obstacle rates, that will provide a boost to stocks. Fed officials will get one more chance to assess the labor market with Tuesday's job openings data and labor turnover survey coming before they

make their policy decision. For more analysis on the Fed, check out the latest episode of WSJ's take on the week. And that's it for what's news for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.