WSJ What’s News - What a Weaker Dollar Means for Businesses and the World

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

A.M. Edition for Jan. 28. The dollar is steadying following its biggest one-day decline since April’s global tariff turmoil. That’s after President Trump said he wouldn’t mind a weaker currency. WSJ editor Alex Frangos explains why that statement caused such a selloff. Plus it’s a big day for the AI trade as Nvidia begins selling its chips in China and suppliers post record earnings. And two Middle East leaders say they won’t help the U.S. in a possible attack on Iran as allies in the region reconsider their ties with Washington. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a sliding U.S. dollar means for businesses in the world, plus a big day for chip stocks as AI spending booms. And a pair of Middle East leaders say they won't help the U.S. with a possible strike on Iran as allies reconsider ties with Washington. Both the Iranian and the Israeli strikes on Doha in Qatar are really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on. the U.S. for their security. It's Wednesday, January 28th. 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. The U.S. dollar is steadying this morning after sliding yesterday in the biggest one-day decline since April's global tariff turmoil. Stock futures are also gaining ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision today, where the central bank is expected to hold rates steady after three

consecutive cuts. Here's Journal Finance Editor Alex Frankos. The dollar fell yesterday and has been falling pretty much since Donald Trump came into office a year ago, but took another leg down the beginning of this year, and it's now at a four-year low against other major currencies like the euro, the pound, the Swiss franc, the Australian dollar, the Chinese yuan. So it's a really interesting backdrop. We got the Fed meeting. The Fed's not expected to do anything, but it has been cutting rates. And that plays into dollar weakness when the Fed is cutting interest rates. That makes it slightly less attractive to own dollars. That's part of it. But the bigger thing that economists and currency traders are talking about is the geopolitics. You know, we start at the year with Venezuela,

with Greenland, you know, threats of new tariffs against Canada, Korea, and all these things are very destabilizing. Speaking in Iowa yesterday, President Trump said he wasn't concerned about the dollar. And Alex said that fed into Wall Street speculation that he wouldn't mind a weaker currency, which could boost U.S. manufacturing and exports. To be clear, the dollar has fallen, but it's still relatively strong in historical terms. And for the dollar to fall a little bit, that's actually stimulative for the economy. It makes our exports more attractive to overseas buyers. A lot of American companies make a lot of money abroad.

And when the dollar weakens, their profits abroad go up. And it flatters the bottom line. So that can actually be really good for stocks. That's partly why I think the president said he's fine with it. it's just very unusual for a president or even a treasury secretary to give any indication of what they care about the dollar for decades. The policy among Democrats and Republicans in office was we have a strong dollar policy and we don't comment on it. Japan's soft bank is in talks to invest a further $30 billion in OpenAI, adding to its more than

10% stake in the startup. It comes as the maker of Chatchip is looking to raise $100 billion by the end of the first quarter in order to help fuel its growth plans. News Corp, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Well, growth is also on the mind of chip giant invidia, which today got the green light from China to sell its first batch of H-200 chips to Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Bight Dance. The first approval covers several hundred thousand H-200 chips worth around $10 billion, with Chinese authorities expected to rubber stamp more imports of the advanced chips in the coming months. And NVIDIA's success has been a boon for suppliers, like memory chipmaker S.K. Heinex,

which this morning posted record earnings for the final quarter of 2025. That echoes bumper growth for Europe's largest listed company, ASML. It said that orders for its chipmaking equipment exceeded expectations and assign that clients like TSMC continued to spend big on the semiconductors powering the AI boom in spite of fears of a market bubble. Two U.S. allies in the Middle East have ruled out the use of their airspace and territory for a potential attack on Iran. Journal correspondent Jared Malsin says the announcements from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab

Emirates are a foreign policy setback for the Trump administration. It narrows the number of options that the U.S. has, and it's also a sign that the U.S. is potentially more isolated in the region if President Trump decides to launch a strike on Iran. That's significant because the U.S., if it's going to do this, wants to have American allies on its side. These are two countries that are really rivals of Iran that historically have been concerned about Iranian meddling in the region. They are opposed to Iranian influence, but they're also concerned about the fallout for many of these attacks and the risk of a wider war in the region. Jared told us that regional powers are reconsidering ties with the U.S. and the value of its

defense guarantees following attacks on Qatar in the wake of last year's 12-day war between Israel and Iran, in which the U.S. also targeted Iran's foremost nuclear site. Both the Iranian and the Israeli strikes on Doha in Qatar really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on the U.S. for their security. The Trump administration extended Qatar a new security guarantee, almost like NATO-like protections. And that's going to be tested if the U.S. does attack Iran, where the Iranians have specifically warned, we've reported. They warned Oman, the UAE, Turkey, and Qatar, the U.S. bases in the region, would come under attack if they're attacked. The White House has said Trump is monitoring the situation in Iran very

closely with a U.S. aircraft carrier arriving in the region yesterday. Coming up, more aftermath from last weekend's killing of Alex Pretti as President Trump sends his borders are to Minnesota, and the administration faces a federal court deadline to justify its deployment to the state. That's after the break. Adobe Acrobat Studio, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docks, your permits, your moves, AI levels of your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cools, flex those two. Drive, design, deliver, make it sing.

AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance at a town hall meeting in Minneapolis last night. Police booked the suspect behind the incident on suspicion of third-degree assault. Omar, who gained attention as a member of the progressive squad of Democratic lawmakers, has frequently drawn the ire of Trump, who on Monday said that the DOJ and Congress were looking at her and suggested she had profited from Minnesota's massive welfare fraud scandal.

Responding to those comments, Omar told the journal that Trump had an unhealthy and disturbing obsession with her and the Somali community, and that in spite of him calling for investigations against her for years, quote, they have found nothing. Hours before last night's incident, Trump criticized Omar and her country of birth at a rally in Iowa, saying that Somalia was a disaster and good at only one thing, pirates. Back in Washington, the Department of Homeland Security says that two federal immigration officials fired shots at Alex Pretti last weekend, a Border Patrol agent and a customs and border patrol officer. That's according to a preliminary DHS report into Preddy's killing sent to Congress yesterday, which revised prior comments from the agency that just one agent had fired shots.

The report didn't say how many shots were fired or which shots killed Preddy, and it maintained that Preddy had violently resisted officers. Preddy's killing has ignited bipartisan scrutiny of immigration enforcement operations and calls for an investigation, including from Republican Senate Majority Leader, The death of Alex Priddy was a tragedy, and there should be a full and impartial investigation into the shooting. I'm glad that the president is sending Tom Holman to Minnesota, and I hope that his arrival will help restore order to the situation. Thune was referring to President Trump sending Borders Tsar Tom Homan to Minnesota to reset the federal government's relationship with the state. Seen as likely to favor a more targeted approach to immigration operations,

Homan faces the challenge of delivering enough arrests to fulfill the president's promises of mass deportation. Well, that potential shift to a lower-key strategy in the state isn't winning over congressional Democrats who are demanding that DHS Secretary Christine Nome stepped down. Among them, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Christine Nome is a liar. She's vicious. She's also incompetent. Donald Trump must fire her at once before another American is killed under her watch. Two Republican senators have joined Democrats in calling for Nome to step down. A prospect Trump has so far ruled out.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the Trump administration have until this evening to respond to a Minnesota federal court judge in a suit brought by the state alleging that the immigration crackdown there amounts to an unconstitutional occupation by federal troops. Minnesota is alleging First Amendment and Tenth Amendment violations, though as journal Deputy Law Bureau Chief Laura Korn. Casisto is here to discuss. Recent enforcement operations have been bringing up other potential constitutional issues as well. Laura, let's start with the killing of Alex Pretti over the weekend, which given that he was a protester raises speech concerns, and as we have reported,

Second Amendment questions around his possession of a firearm. Yeah, I think both of those things are true. So broadly speaking in Minneapolis, what we're seeing is a clash over this question, but you have the right to protest. You have the right to protest obnoxiously. You can swear, you can yell, you can scream. What you can't do is threaten the life of law enforcement officers or put their lives in danger. And really, in both the case of Preddy, and before this, Renee, Nicole, good. Where we've seen the kind of clash and the question, right, is were they in any way threatening the lives of these law enforcement officers in a way that kind of crossed over the line of peaceful protest or not? And then there's a fascinating tension brewing right now

over the Second Amendment, which is that Freddie appears to have had some kind of a firearm on him, and there are some reports that he, in fact, was authorized, had a license to carry this. And so then the question then becomes, there are a lot of Second Amendment advocates on the right, right, who are supporters of the Trump administration, who would very strongly say that you should be able to carry a firearm at a protest as long as you're not using it to threaten people. And so I think that's also where we're seeing some of the tension and some of the back and forth, right? the initial reports from the Trump administration were sort of saying he was sort of threatening law enforcement in a very kind of violent way. We've seen these videos in Burge that seemed to

contradict that. And so that again will be kind of where legally the rubber starts to hit the road. And Laura, that's just a half of it, right? Because the actions of law enforcement and the tussle over who's in charge of enforcing law and order in places like Minneapolis have been bringing forward fourth and 10th Amendment questions as well. Absolutely. And so, yes, these protests are about ICE's presence in Minnesota and in particular the kind of aggressiveness with which they are enforcing immigration laws, which raises two other broader legal questions. And so one of these is this Fourth Amendment question about unreasonable search, and do they have the right to yank people out of their cars and ask them if they're U.S. citizens?

Do they have the right to go into people's homes? And there's a lot of sort of tension points there. The answer is, to some degree, that they do. They do have the right if they have reasonable suspicion that people are in the country illegally to stop people to ask for identification. If you, you are not a citizen, you should be carrying identification, showing that you're in the country legally. But where we're starting to see some tension is they are oftentimes also pulling over U.S. citizens. Legally, we think that right now, based on some Supreme Court president, they can probably do that. But certainly it's raising concerns that this is overly aggressive. And then the 10th amendment, in quote, question that that then raises is then what the state has sort of said is this is interfering with our sort of sovereign authority as a state sending these immigration officers in.

in large numbers. We're creating just a climate of fear in our state. And so you've seen them also sort of sue the federal government and say, we want you out of here. And that, I think, is one of things we'll see sort of negotiated this week, right? It's like, what does the federal government presence look like here going forward? Lots to be negotiated here. And we'll keep monitoring the situation, of course. Laura Casisto is the journal's Deputy Law Bureau Chief. Laura, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And that's it for what's news. For this Wednesday morning, today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Hattie Moyer, our supervising producer with 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.