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WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to stop blocking The Associated Press’ from presidential events refused Friday to take immediate steps to get White House officials to comply — an incremental development in a two-month dispute between the global news agency and administration officials over access.

The case, which has significant free-speech implications under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, centers on the government blocking AP’s access to cover events because the outlet won’t rename the Gulf of Mexico in its reports.

U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who handed the AP a victory last week in its efforts to end the ban, said it’s too soon to say that President Donald Trump is violating his order — as the AP suggests.

“We are not at the point where we can make much of a determination one way or another,” said McFadden, ruling from the bench. “I don't intend to micromanage the White House.”

The AP's lawyer, Charles Tobin, wouldn't comment about the judge's decision after the proceedings. The White House issued no immediate comment.

For two months, the White House has essentially banned AP reporters and photographers from their traditional spot covering events in smaller spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One. The AP says it’s a violation of its free-speech rights, enshrined in the First Amendment, to punish a news outlet for an editorial decision — an argument McFadden has endorsed.

In response, the White House this week issued a new press policy that occasionally lets the AP and other wire services into events it used to routinely cover at all times.

Since McFadden’s ruling took effect, an AP photographer was allowed into the Oval Office on Thursday after three days of being blocked. A reporter has yet to be allowed back in, but the White House said an AP reporter will be part of the coverage rotation on Saturday — when reporters will follow Trump in a van to where he plans to play golf.

In court, Tobin said the new policy is gamesmanship designed to diminish the outlet’s influence. “We think that the new policy really is a thumb in the nose at The Associated Press and this court,” he told McFadden.

The White House took clear steps to put last week’s ruling into effect, said Jane Lyons, an assistant district attorney who was representing the Trump team. “It is way too soon ... to say that it is a problem,” Lyons said.

McFadden said that the first few days since his order took effect gave him concerns that Trump’s team is “not proceeding in compliance here, or perhaps malicious compliance.” But the judge, appointed to the court by Trump during the president’s first term, said he has to assume that the administration is operating in good faith unless time proves otherwise.

He also wasn’t swayed by the AP’s argument that it’s unconstitutional for the president to have sole discretion over who covers him at these smaller events. The AP, mindful that a dispute over journalists’ access isn’t likely to move many in the public, has cast it as a broader issue of freedom of speech.

The AP’s decisions on what terminology to use are followed by journalists and other writers around the world through its influential stylebook. The outlet said it would continue to use Gulf of Mexico, as the body of water has been known for hundreds of years, while also noting Trump’s decision to rename it the Gulf of America.

It’s an issue likely to take months to wend its way through the courts The AP went before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals Thursday on the same issue about compliance. The Trump administration has said that it will appeal McFadden’s initial ruling.

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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social

For the world’s most successful bank, Goldman Sachs sure seems to be having trouble deciding where the economy is going. In a series of reports, as well as statements by CEO and part-time DJ David Solomon, the quintessential Wall Street bank has been calling a recession, then backing down, then calling it again. It’s a delicate balancing act for Solomon, who has seen how the Trump Administration can focus unwanted scrutiny on law firms and universities. He wants to keep his company safe.

It’s causing whiplash among Wall Street watchers, who often take Goldman’s pronouncements to the bank.

On March 30, Goldman issued the latest in a string of ever darker economic forecasts. Worried that Trump’s tariffs would swamp the economy, it predicted a 35% chance of the U.S. economy falling into recession. “The upgrade from our previous 20% estimate (of a U.S. recession) reflects our lower growth baseline, the sharp recent deterioration in household and business confidence, and statements from White House officials indicating greater willingness to tolerate near-term economic weakness in pursuit of their policies,” Goldman said in a research note.

On April 7, as the full weight of Trump’s proposed tariffs hit, Goldman’s economists raised their forecast again, from 35% to a 45% likelihood.

On April 9, they forecast a GDP loss of 1% this year and a 65% probability of the economy “entering a recession in the next twelve months.”

But an hour later and following Trump’s 90-day tariff pause, Goldman economists said a recession is no longer their base case: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession baseline forecast with GDP growth of 0.5% and a 45% probability of recession,” a group of researchers led by Jan Hatzius wrote in a report.

Then on April 14, announcing the firm’s strong first-quarter earnings, Solomon said there’s a strong chance of recession, but he wouldn’t put a number on it. “The prospect of a recession has increased with growing indications that economic activity is slowing down around the world,” he said.

Still, there’s one word that hasn’t yet been uttered by Solomon: “tariffs.” As the New York Times’ Rob Copeland reported, “in a deft feat of linguistics, [Goldman] executives managed not to utter the word ‘tariff’ once,” on an hourlong call with analysts about Monday’s earnings. Solomon “unfurled a bouquet of euphemisms,” the Times reported. Speaking of “landscape changes,” “uncertainty about how certain things that are close will proceed forward,” and a change in “constructs” that affect how international businesses “interact to the U.S. and global economic system.”

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• About those Tariffs: GM’s Chevy Trax—a $20,000-ish entry-level mini-SUV that the Detroit carmaker builds in South Korea—would be “killed” by Trump’s new 25% tariffs on imported cars, a devastating blow to GM, the Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, U.S. aluminum giant Alcoa says the tariffs are going to cost it $100 million this year. The company ridiculed tariffs’ effectiveness, noting that as the U.S. imports more than 4 million metric tons of aluminum annually (most of it from Canada), the U.S. would have to build at least five new smelters to close its trade deficit for the metal. That would likely take up to a decade, cost billions of dollars, and require additional energy production equivalent to that of seven nuclear reactors, CEO William Oplinger said. “Until additional smelting capacity is built in the U.S., the most efficient aluminum supply chain is Canadian aluminum flowing into the U.S.,” he said, adding that Alcoa won’t build new capacity on the basis of tariffs. Oplinger’s comments came as the company announced first-quarter profits of $548 million, compared with a loss of $252 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 30% to $3.37 billion but missed the $3.42 billion that analysts modeled.
• Powell’s paradox: Fed chair Jerome Powell has a problem: His mandate is to ensure inflation goes down and employment goes up. The only real tool he has for accomplishing that is setting the so-called “discount rate,” the interest rate at which the Fed lends to banks, who in turn lend to consumers and businesses. Now, the TTT (Trump Tariff Turmoil) has put him in a bind. If the tariff tactics send inflation shooting up (which Powell said is “highly likely”), he’ll need to raise interest rates to get people to spend less. But that will lead to more people losing their jobs. If that happens, Powell said he’ll have to pick one: inflation or unemployment, and that, he said, would “no doubt be a very difficult judgment.” He added that “without price stability, we cannot achieve the long periods of strong labor market conditions that benefit all Americans.” That isn’t sitting well with Donald Trump, who wants Powell fired for failing to cut interest rates.
• Port problems: Remember Trump’s plan to get friendly U.S. financiers to buy two Panama Canal ports from China? Well, that deal’s hit another rock after last week’s report from Panama’s government auditor that the current port owner, Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison owed the Panamanian government $300 million. Now, a deal for Italian shipping magnate Gianluigi Aponte and U.S. asset manager BlackRock to buy the ports as part of a $22.8 billion package with dozens of shipping terminals around the world, could see the two Panama ports carved out and their transfer or sale delayed, according to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to be nine months of regulatory review. So we’ll see how this all plays out. I’m actually pretty optimistic that we’ll find a solution,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said.

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• Meta’s mistakes? Meta chief Mark “Cage Fighter” Zuckerberg, put on a suit and tie and testified in a federal courthouse in Washington this week as the Federal Trade Commission seeks to break up Meta’s world of platforms, which may force the Facebook founder to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg said he bought Instagram and WhatsApp because he saw value in the companies—not to take out competitors, as the FTC alleges. In one telling document revealed at the trial, Zuckerberg pondered a 2018 move that could have forced the spinoff. “I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company,” he wrote. “While most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up.”
• Overdraft craft: There’s even more money coming to the big banks this year, as Trump prepares to roll back the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s $5 limit on overdraft charges. Reversing the rule, which took effect in the last weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency, would restore a revenue stream of about $5 billion a year to the largest U.S. banks. It would have saved U.S. consumers the same amount, or about $225 for everyov household that pays overdraft fees. The fees “led to tens of millions of consumers losing access to banking services, as well as facing negative credit reporting that has prevented them from opening another account in the future,” the CFPB said in a statement in December. Trump’s signature is expected shortly. Meanwhile, the CFPB’s new chair, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought, scored a win for the banks when a Texas court ruled the CFPB had overstepped its powers by limiting credit card late fees to $8. The CFPB switched sides under Vought and joined the suit to overturn its own rule.
• Chipped away: On Tuesday, Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion loss from TTT since Trump slapped more export controls on sales to China-related firms. Leaving it with masses of unsold chips and orders it can’t fill, its shares fell nearly 7%. Chipmaker AMD said Wednesday that the export controls would cost it $800 million, and its stock also sank more than 7%. The law of knock-on effect held true: ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that make the newest chips, fell more than 4% because orders for its equipment didn’t meet expectations. CEO Christophe Fouque said the Trump tariffs had “increased uncertainty.”
• That Hertz: That yellow-and-black car rentals company that usually has the highest prices (Hertz surprised me with the best price last weekend when I rented a car in Nashville) saw its shares rise 56% when Trump buddy and perpetual market commenter Bill Ackman said his Pershing Square Capital Management held 4.1% of the company. This could signal a possible bid to take over the company or, at least, influence its management. Hertz came back from Covid-era bankruptcy but lost its shirt betting on a fleet of Teslas that renters found too hard to use, which led to a $200 million write down as it unloaded the Musk-made EVs. Hertz may still be in trouble. As of the end of March, short-sellers held about 40% of Hertz shares, up 19% since February.

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• The potential inheritance squabble: Elon Musk has had at least 14 children by four women, but an investigation by The Wall Street Journal suggests he may be using X to recruit yet more women to have his children via remote insemination.
• The X gamble: New financial disclosures show just how bad a bet X was for Musk and his co-investors. Revenue fell 66% in 2023 at X’s U.K. operations. Musk recently “sold” X to xAI, his artificial intelligence company, for a reported $32 billion, down $12 billion from his 2022 $44 billion purchase of the platform then known as Twitter. Last autumn, Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in X by 79%, valuing the whole platform at only $9.4 billion.

• Doesn’t ad up: Count advertisers—and the media and tech companies that rely on them—among the casualties of the TTT. With tariffs on and off and maybe on again, companies have no idea what their goods will sell for, or even what goods they’ll be selling next week. That means they’ve got no idea what to advertise. “You’re going to introduce uncertainty about how they make stuff, let alone what’s going to happen to consumers in terms of their propensity to buy,” Brian Wieser, an ad industry consultant, told the New York Times.
• Chasing check bouncers: JPMorgan Chase is suing more customers who they say embezzled tens of thousands of dollars each in the so-called “infinite money glitch” last year. The glitch credited customer accounts instantly for remotely deposited checks, even if they bounced a few days later. Some customers would write bad checks, deposit them in a Chase ATM, and immediately withdraw the full value of the check before it bounced. Videos began circulating in late August showing people celebrating the withdrawal of wads of cash from Chase ATMs shortly after bad checks were deposited. Global paper check fraud hit $26.6 billion in 2023, according to Nasdaq.

All that tariff turmoil. All that trading. All those profits! Your 401k may be going down, but the profits at top banks are going up. Goldman Sachs recorded even more gold arriving in ever more sacks, with a first quarter net profit of $4.74 billion, up 15% from the same period last year, even as revenue only grew by 6% to $15 billion. Equity trading revenue was a big piece of that, spiking 27% to $4.2 billion, driven by market volatility linked to the Trump tariff turmoil. However, investment banking did not do so well: Advisory revenue from mergers and acquisitions fell by 22% to $792 million, and investment banking fees fell 8% year-on-year. “Clients have become more cautious,” said CEO David Solomon. That hasn’t hurt Solomon personally. He took home $39 million last year and was awarded an $80 million bonus if he stays in place for five more years.

Citigroup said profits rose 21% to $4.1 billion even as revenue climbed only 3% to $21.6 billion. Shares rose 3% on the news, but they are still down 24% since Trump was sworn in. CEO Jane Fraser appeared to be whistling a happy tune when she said that “When all is said and done, and longstanding trade imbalances and other structural shifts are behind us, the U.S. will still be the world’s leading economy, and the dollar will remain the reserve currency.” Revenue from equity trading rose 23% to $1.5 billion, above the $1.4 billion estimate, as the bank said “increased market volatility” led to more trading.

At Bank of America profits climbed 11% to $7.4 billion as revenue rose 5.9% to $27.51 billion. A big contributor is what the bank calls net interest income (and what you might call a sucker punch): It’s the difference between that 0.01% interest they pay on the money in your checking account and the 8.5% return they get for lending that same money to the dry cleaner up the block. NII hit $14.6 billion in the quarter, above the StreetAccount estimate of $14.56 billion. “Consumers have shown resilience,” said CEO Brian Moynihan. PT Barnum might have put it differently. BofA shares are down 20% since Trump’s inauguration.

A few blocks east and north over at JPMorgan Chase, revenue rose 8% to $46 billion, beating expectations, and profits were up 9% year-over-year to $14.64 billion. All that turmoil, all those trades: Trading revenue jumped 48% to $3.8 billion. Shares were up 4% on the news, but are still down 12.7% since January 20. Still, storm clouds are gathering, as the cliche goes, and Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, once an ardent Trump fan, told The Financial Times in a rare interview that he’s nervous.

Dimon said the U.S. has remained “a haven” because of its prosperity, rule of law, and economic and military strength, but he said that economic position is threatened by Trump’s tariff turmoil. “A lot of this uncertainty is challenging that a little bit,” said Dimon. “So you’re going to be reading about this nonstop until hopefully these tariffs and trade wars settle down and go away so people can say, ‘I can rely on America.’ The markets are very volatile, it scares people.” And he urged Trump to start talking to China. “I don’t think there’s any engagement right now…it doesn’t have to wait a year. It could start tomorrow,” said Dimon.

Google built an illegal monopoly in digital advertising, violating federal antitrust law, Judge Leonie Brinkema said on Thursday, slamming the internet giant for illegally tying its publisher ad server and its advertising marketplace. Brinkema said in a 115-page ruling that Google broke the law to build its control of the technology that places advertisements on pages across the web.

The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology let the company charge higher prices and take a bigger commission on each sale. “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” wrote Judge Brinkema. The decision adds to Google’s woes and could endanger its business model.

In August, another federal judge ruled Google’s search function had developed an illegal monopoly. He begins hearings next week on breaking up the company and could force Google to sell its Chrome browser. Judge Brinkema will next have to rule on a Justice Department request to force Google to sell parts of its ad tech business that it has acquired over the years. The U.K. and the European Union have also ruled Google’s practices illegal monopolies and are weighing huge fines. Google shares were down 1.5% at midday Thursday, and they’ve fallen about 23% since Jan 20.

The cases were originally brought under the Trump Administration as part of an attack on Big Tech’s monopoly and were continued by the Biden Justice Department. However, court watchers say this isn’t about leveling the playing field—it’s about controlling which posts Big Tech takes down and how their search results are skewed, a cause dear to Trump’s heart. Peter Salib, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, told Yahoo Finance that Trump’s motivation for going after companies like Meta and Google is to curb censorship of conservative content.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion.

The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google’s namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation.

After the U.S. Justice Department targeted Google’s ubiquitous search engine during President Donald Trump’s first administration, the same agency went after the company’s lucrative digital advertising network in 2023 during President Joe Biden’s ensuing administration in an attempt to undercut the power that Google has amassed since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.

Although antitrust regulators prevailed both times, the battle is likely to continue for several more years as Google tries to overturn the two monopoly decisions in appeals while forging ahead in the new and highly lucrative technological frontier of artificial intelligence.

The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

Brinkema’s 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps.

The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google’s $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.

The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller.

After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.

“For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.” Brinkema wrote. “Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features.”

Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld.

The Justice Department “failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive,” Brinkema wrote. “Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices.”

That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately comment on the judge's decision.

In a statement, Google said it will appeal the ruling.

“We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

Analysts such as Brian Pitz of BMO Markets had been predicting that Google would likely lose the case, helping to brace investors for the latest setback to the company and its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., whose shares declined 1% in afternoon trading. Alphabet's stock has plunged by 20% so far this year.

As it did in the search monopoly case, Google and its corporate parent Alphabet vehemently denied the Justice Department’s allegations. Their lawyers argued the government largely based its case on an antiquated concept of a market that existed a decade ago while underestimating a highly competitive market for advertising spending that includes the likes of Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Amazon, Microsoft and Comcast.

The market as drawn in the Justice Department’s case didn’t include ads that appear on mobile apps, streaming television services, or other platforms to which internet users have increasingly migrated, prompting Google lawyer Karen Dunn to compare the government’s definition a “time capsule with a BlackBerry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card” during her opening statement when the trial began last September.

At trial, the Justice Department’s lawyers emphasized the harm to news publishers that has arisen from Google’s alleged dominance of the marketplace. Witnesses from Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and other newspapers, and News Corp., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, testified about the difficulties they have faced and what they said was a lack of alternatives to Google’s ad tech. Those companies rely on online advertising to fund their news operations and make their articles free to consumers on the internet, government lawyers have argued.

Now, government is in position to try to dismantle that byzantine ad system. When the case was filed more than two years ago during the Biden administration, the Justice Department asserted Google should be forced to sell, at a minimum, its Ad Manager product, which includes the technology used by website publishers and the ad exchange.