Business

➚ BUY: Cook. Apple’s $500 billion US investment promise over the next four years has earned praise from the president, though it isn’t far off from what Apple would have spent anyway as it continues to lessen its reliance on China — a shift that predates Trump.

➘ SELL: Jobs. Starbucks, Meta, Workday, and HSBC are all laying off corporate staff, though for varying reasons. Economists are on alert as to whether a spike in corporate reductions, combined with recent federal firings and funding cuts, will cool a labor market that remains uncomfortably hot for the Fed’s liking.

Trump wants stiffer chip controls… Unilever fires CEO… BP abandons green pivot… LNG demand to surge, Shell says… Flacks: check your codewords…Milei is making fútbol great again…

The owners of Donald Trump’s former hotel in Washington are quietly shopping the rights to the property, which has reemerged as a hot watering hole for the MAGA crowd and those looking to influence it.

Investment bank BDT & MSD Partners has been sounding out potential buyers for the lease to the old Trump International Hotel as it continues to negotiate with the Trump Organization, people familiar with the matter said. A deal could be worth around $300 million, a discount to the $375 million the Trump family sold it for in 2022.

The hotel, opened in a landmarked Post Office building in 2016, embodies the boom and bust of Trump’s political and commercial fortunes. During Trump’s first term, it served as a kind of bazaar for politicians, foreign officials, and executives seeking favor or access.

The hotel hosted an Azerbaijani Hanukkah party, Franklin Graham’s gathering in defense of persecuted Christians, and a delegation of Saudi officials on a monthslong lobbying push against legislation that would have allowed families of 9/11 victims to sue the kingdom, according to documents later made public by House Democrats, who investigated potential violations of presidential ethics rules.

The crowds thinned after Trump left office, and the hotel was sold to a Miami investor who reopened it as a Waldorf-Astoria. The Spa by Ivanka closed, as did the lobby boutique of Brioni, the Italian clothier whose suits Trump favors.

One thing the hotel never did was make money: It lost $74 million between 2016 and 2020, financial records show. BDT & MSD bought the debt out of foreclosure last summer for a fraction of its face value. The Wall Street Journal reported last month the Trump family’s interest in reacquiring the hotel.

A spokeswoman for BDT & MSD declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

Slowing economic growth, tariff realities, and continued regulatory scrutiny have finally hit the markets. The S&P 500 fell below its pre-inauguration levels, bond yields keep slipping, and the US dollar has weakened. The 30-day tariffs’ reprieve given to Mexico and Canada expires next week.

The giddiness on Wall Street is starting to give way to trepidation, especially as falling markets aren’t turning out to be the check on Trump’s actions that many had hoped. The writing was on the wall when the president paid little attention to the DeepSeek bombshell that wiped out trillions of dollars of stock-market value. His insistence this week that tariffs will go ahead “on time, on schedule” further suggests that of Trump’s two priorities — a soaring stock market and a retributive, America First trade policy — the latter is winning. (Elon Musk, meanwhile, wants his credit from the bond market, though he’s not getting it.)

• One good read: Center-right economist Oren Cass explains how even liberals like Paul Krugman and Janet Yellen are backing away from the conventional wisdom that all tariffs are bad. “What’s remarkable about the collapsing orthodoxy is that we are not learning something new so much as rediscovering what wiser economists knew all along,” he writes. “A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced — something made here for something made there.”

DOGE is also trying to assert control over the Federal Reserve, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller and Shelby Talcott report, which could inflame inflation fears. Polls have repeatedly found that Republicans believe the Fed leans left, and the criticism of the San Francisco Fed’s purported focus on DEI policies in the wake of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 fanned those flames.

Independent agencies like the Fed are “part of the executive branch — and they’ve got to be accountable to someone,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Semafor. “They’re sure not accountable to Congress. They ignore us.”

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Executives from US Steel and Nippon Steel have been seeking meetings with senior Trump administration officials, a last-ditch effort to salvage their $15 billion merger. US Steel’s chief executive, David Burritt, has been in touch with staffers about meeting with Vice President JD Vance, while Nippon Steel has tried to schedule top executive Takahiro Mori with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, people familiar with the communications said.

Neither effort has yielded an official calendar slot yet. But it shows that US Steel and Nippon refuse to give up on a merger that two presidents have said they’ll block and that shareholders have begun to sour on, judging by US Steel’s slowly sliding stock price. The two companies have sued a rival steelmaker for meddling in its deal and stirring up opposition.

• Further reading: A transcript, newly filed in that lawsuit, of a call between Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves and a top US Steel shareholder is worth a read: “This deal can be killed very quickly… You note that the conversation stepped up a few notches this week and I was behind all that.”

A Ukrainian peace deal may be near, but there’s little sign that corporate America is interested in reentering Russia. Big Western companies were stung with writedowns and firesales as they fled under political or humanitarian pressure in 2022. And Russia’s biggest draw — its 80 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — may not attract US companies that, mindful of the drilling boom in the 2010s that bankrupted many of their peers, are already reluctant to expand their capacity at home.

“You’d have to be a pretty cavalier player to contemplate returning to Russia under Putin,” Rice University research fellow Jim Krane told Semafor. “Russia’s record of political interference, asset seizures, and outright expropriation is long and well-documented. The cases are myriad and the losses are breathtaking.”

But just as some companies continue to do business in China despite documented intellectual property theft, human rights issues, and executive risk, some businesses will no doubt renew their pursuit of the Russian market. The likeliest returners are those that never fully left: PepsiCo, Philip Morris, Mars, Nestlé, P&G, and Mondelēz, all continue to sell their products in Russia, according to the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.

A key trade deal between the US and Africa may not survive in its current form, Semafor’s Yinka Adegoke reports.

A key source of doubt about the future of the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) is Trump’s pursuit of tariffs against free trade partners: The US president signed a January executive order that calls on his administration to review all US trade deals, and some analysts are awaiting the April outcome of that review for clues as to AGOA’s future.

“The idea of a preferential trade deal is a difficult one in the current environment,” one expert said.