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Forget Brad and Angelina, Ben and Jenn, The Beatles, Brexit, or even Henry VIII and his wives. This is the biggest split in recent history. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have officially ended their bromance, and it looks like it will spell trouble for the house of government-subsidized cards that make up Elon’s business empire.

In a post on his Truth Social network Thursday afternoon, Trump said his administration could end the government contracts that are keeping Musk’s SpaceX alive.“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” Trump wrote.

Then he added that Musk “just went CRAZY” when Trump ordered the Feds to end the EV subsidies that were generating much of Tesla’s profits (see below). Musk was quick to fire back, hitting at what could be a major sore spot for the president: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

It all started with Musk’s Tuesday tweet that called Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” a fiscal disaster. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote. The next day the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the bill would add at least $2.7 trillion to the existing $36 trillion national debt over the next decade.

In the past 20 years, Musk’s companies have received more than $38 billion from the federal and local governments, the Washington Post reported, two-thirds of that in the past five years. Last year, Musk’s companies got $6.3 billion and they were expecting even more this year.

Besides EV subsidies, the money goes to SpaceX’s rocket programs, which also send and recover astronauts from the International Space Station, and launch Starlink satellites, which are used by the U.S. military, as well as by civilians.Musk has already shown with DOGE what he can do to Trump’s enemies. But what can he do to Trump’s friends? And what about his frenemies? And what about his enemies who once were his friends?

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Who says the government shouldn’t track your IRS and social security data through a contract with a for-profit company founded by one of Elon Musk’s best buddies?

Oh, that’s right! George Orwell intoned it was probably not ideal in his dystopic anti-Communist novel, “1984.” Since then, of course, Apple used Orwell’s novel title to sell computers in a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, and it turns out the people keenest on tracking every detail of your private life are now on the other end of the political spectrum from Big Brother. That’s right: The right wingers are now the ones making billions of dollars out of doing it.

As The New York Times points out, this story raises the question of whether President Donald Trump “might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” Big Brother would be proud as the company, called Palantir, has been quietly winning business from the Trump Administration to gather and assemble data on nearly every American, with the contracts totaling more than $1.1 billion since Trump took office. That’s what The New York Times found after digging through government contracting data. It includes a $795 million order from the Department of Defense.After a slight blip when its first quarter results failed to meet analysts’ expectations, Palantir stock has been rising fast — up 70% this year.

Powering the sales is a product called Foundry that’s already been adopted by Homeland Security to track immigrants, and by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.Foundry is now looking at sucking up data from the IRS and Social Security, leaving even Palantir employees nervous.

Another key element in its success: Co-founder Peter Thiel’s close relationship with Donald Trump, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates. Thiel also bankrolled wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against New York gossip website Gawker which ultimately shut the website down forever. Ironically the main issue at hand in that case was whether Gawker had…infringed on Hulk Hogan’s privacy.

“The relationships that Palantir’s founders...have with senior members of the Trump administration are helpful for business,” one analyst told Reuters. Goes to show it’s not what you know, but who you know, as well as what you know about everyone without their consent.

The Palantir involvement also began with Elon Musk’s disgraced DOGE operation putting Palantir forward, before Musk left his government role last week, turning on Trump and calling his budget bill “an abomination.”

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• Apple gets bit by tariffs: Chalk up another one for tariff turmoil. Donald Trump’s effort to get Apple to build its iPhone in America is making progress, of sorts. The tariff uncertainty has pushed research firm Counterpoint Research to revise its 2025 global smartphone shipment growth forecast to 1.9% year-on-year from 4.2%, citing “renewed uncertainties surrounding U.S. tariffs.” Apple shipments are expected to grow 2.5% year-on-year in 2025, down from a previous forecast of 4%. Samsung will also see its growth slowed by tariffs. Who wins? China’s Huawei, with shipments expected to grow at 11% for 2025.
• Google wonders: WWAMD? After arguments on how best to enforce the Federal government’s victory over Google for illegally protecting its near monopoly in online search, Amit Mehta, the federal judge overseeing the case, has a dilemma: Should he force Google to share its search engine results and advertising data with rivals? Google collects nine times as much data as all its rivals combined, which creates a real barrier to competition. But now that AI is taking a chunk out of Google’s search revenue (it hasn’t yet said how big a chunk), that’s also weighing on Mehta. No word yet on when he will issue his order but expect pushback and lengthy appeals from Google.
• Zas enough: Warner Bros Discovery shareholders said “no way” to failing CEO David Zaslav, with 59% of those who voted vetoing a pay package for senior execs that included $51.9 million for the chief (80% of WBD shareholders cast ballots on the pay question). The vote is not legally binding, but it was a severe rebuke to Zaslav and his leadership team. Since Warner Media merged with Zaslav’s Discovery Communications in April 2022, shares are down about 60%, and S&P downgraded WBD’s debt to junk status, citing its money-losing cable-network business.
• Doomed to unionize: Videogame engineers who create the game Doom, for Microsoft-owned ZeniMax, have agreed on their first union contract with the tech giant. They’ll get a 13.5% wage hike and some job security. Game designers and coders have been angling to unionize for years, especially quality-control workers who work long hours testing games for bugs. No word on whether game players will now be able to unionize.
• Car talk: China’s decision in April to halt the export of rare earth metals like dysprosium and terbium has some U.S. car and parts makers thinking of opening factories in China. The Chinese decision, part of the spat over Trump tariffs, means car production could soon screech to a halt, as the rare earths prevent overheating in magnets used in electric motors that power everything from seats to brakes and fuel injectors. The Wall Street Journal reports that several carmakers and parts suppliers are examining moving some parts making to China to avoid factory shutdowns in the U.S. if there’s a motor shortage. China’s restrictions cover only the magnets, not the finished parts, so some ideas being considered include building electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping made-in-America motors to China to have magnets installed. Not exactly a U.S. manufacturing revival. Meanwhile, Tesla sales in Europe are in free fall, nosediving 49% year on year, with only 7,261 cars sold in Europe in April, even as overall battery electric car sales rose 34.1%, said the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

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• A week after appearing in the Oval Office with a black eye (he claimed his five-year-old son, X, hit him, but Steve Bannon suggested it might have been 63-year-old Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent), and announcing that he was leaving Washington to salvage the remains of Tesla (Up 45% since late Apriil, but still down 20% since Trump took office), Musk savaged the “One Big Beautiful Bill” with a blast on X. “I’m sorry but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk tweeted. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”
• Is he upset because his DOGE project failed to deliver even 1 percent of his promised trillions of dollars in savings? Is he angry that Trump has effectively called off their bromance? Or is it all about the money? Tesla’s sales are in the dumps, the re-jigged Model Y is not going to pump sales, and the new tax bill takes aim at Tesla’s biggest source of profits: selling clean energy credits to other carmakers. Tesla’s carbon credit revenue for 2024 rose 54% from 2023 to $2.76 billion. Tesla’s net profit dropped 23% from 2023 to $8.4 billion.
• Who Benefits? A report on DOGE from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, noted more than 100 instances of Musk taking advantage of his position wielding the DOGE chainsaw to win government contracts. “Musk and individuals acting on his behalf have been involved in dozens of questionable actions that raise questions about corruption, ethics and conflicts of interest,” says the report, entitled “Special Interests Over the Public Interest.”

• Jamie Dimon and the debt crisis: That One Big Beautiful Bill Act could be the end of U.S. economic power unless the U.S. takes steps to address its spiraling national debt. “You are going to see a crack in the bond market, OK?” JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said last week. “It is going to happen.” Bond markets have been spooked by the prospect of the bill passing, leading to a selloff in benchmark 10-year Treasuries that sent yields up nearly a 0.25% to 4.418% this month. Moody’s stripped the U.S. of its triple-A credit rating, citing the government’s debt pile. Now the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has weighed in, noting the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt and strip health care from 10.9 million more people by 2034. And it gets worse: If interest rates stay at their current rate, the bill would add $5 trillion to the existing $36 trillion debt. One major problem is that the bill cuts taxes ($3.7 trillion) by three times as much as it cuts spending ($1.2 trillion), just as tariffs are pushing up inflation and interest rates, making it more expensive to pay down the debt and leaving bondholders with dollars’ worth less than they had paid for them. On Wednesday, Dimon’s warnings got a boost from GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who said he’ll vote against the bill unless it cuts the debt. “This is immoral, what us old farts (are) doing to our young people,” Johnson said on CNBC.
• About those trade deals… The U.S. has still failed to reach a permanent trade deal with China, and Donald Trump thinks he may know why. Chinese president Xi Jun ping is “VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!,” Trump wrote on in a 2 a.m. tweet on Truth Social on Wednesday. Key sticking points: U.S. restrictions on advanced technology for China and Trump’s decision to revoke visas for Chinese students. The U.S. is angered by China’s recent restrictions on rare earths, which may prompt U.S. automakers to open operations in China just to get at the desperately needed minerals. Meanwhile, Trump also decided this week to block the export of some U.S. aerospace tech that is helping China build its first modern commercial jetliner, the C919. When planning began in 2008, U.S. firms rushed to sell avionics, engines, and other resources. But now the U.S. sees China as a rival, not a market for its own wares, and China is calling the plane one of the “pillars of a great power.” Some 40% of the plane is made by U.S. and other Western companies.
• Friends in high places: CZ Zhao, the Binance founder who spent four months in a U.S. prison on a federal money-laundering conviction, just got a break from the Securities and Exchange Commission: The enforcers have dropped a lawsuit against Zhao and Binance for allegedly lying to regulators about its operations in the United States and mishandling customer money. Coincidentally in May, Trump’s family business, World Liberty Financial, said it was facilitating a $2 billion deal between Binance and an Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund.

• The Joke’s on you: Byron Allen, the former comedian turned broadcast mogul and Weather Channel owner, is selling his 28 broadcast TV stations, which run across all four major networks, after failing to meet their debt payments on time. Allen made a $30 billion bid for Paramount $PARA last year and offered Disney $10 billion for ABC and other properties. The sale price has not been disclosed.
• Reddit blasts Anthropic: Endless rabbit hole platform Reddit has sued AI firm Anthropic, saying the bot maker continued to use its data even after the two failed to reach an agreement on data sharing. Reddit licenses your conversations to other AI firms to train bots, but it wants Anthropic, which calls itself the home of ethical AI, to stop. It cited an article that Anthropic engineers wrote on using Reddit to train AI models. Anthropic’s own “Constitution” tells its chatbot to choose the response that most respects property rights.
• Put that back: A nationwide police action targeting organized shoplifting gangs snared hundreds of alleged criminals in raids across 28 states last week. The blitz, led by Illinois’ Cook County regional organized crime task force, involved more than 100 jurisdictions and over 30 retailers including Home Depot, Macy’s, Target, Walgreens, and Kroger. Hard numbers on the scope of shoplifting are hard to come by, but the National Federation of Retailers says its members report shoplifting incidents were up 93% from 2019 to 2023.
• Painful labor: The employment market is weakening, according to payroll data from ADP: Private sector job creation nearly stopped in May, growing just 37,000, well below a Dow Jones forecast of 110,000. Trump found a target to blame for the poor showing: Fed Chair Jerome Powell. “‘Too Late’ Powell must now LOWER THE RATE. He is unbelievable!!! Europe has lowered NINE TIMES!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.* Buy now, pay…never? In a sign that economic gloom is increasing, defaults on lay-away plans are rising. Klarna , a leading buy-now, pay-later company, reported a 17% jump in defaults, losing $99 million across 99 million customers in the first quarter (that’s a massive jump from its $30 million loss a year earlier).
• Sick of that Peloton? Remember that pandemic-era Peloton ad with the lead actor who thought they’d never be fit enough for their partner? Well, if your Peloton isn’t bringing you the results you want, you can now sell it back to the company! Not for a profit, of course, but they’ll rehab it and resell it. Sellers will get 70% of the resale price, and a discount on the very thing they were trying to get rid of: another Peloton.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A unanimous Supreme Court made it easier Thursday to bring lawsuits over so-called reverse discrimination, siding with an Ohio woman who claims she didn’t get a job and then was demoted because she is straight.

The justices’ decision affects lawsuits in 20 states and the District of Columbia where, until now, courts had set a higher bar when members of a majority group, including those who are white and heterosexual, sue for discrimination under federal law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court that federal civil rights law draws no distinction between members of majority and minority groups.

“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ — without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group — Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Jackson wrote.

The court ruled in an appeal from Marlean Ames, who has worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for more than 20 years.

Though he joined Jackson’s opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted in a separate opinion that some of the country’s “largest and most prestigious employers have overtly discriminated against those they deem members of so-called majority groups.”

Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, cited a brief filed by America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller, to assert that “American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans.”

Two years ago, the court’s conservative majority outlawed consideration of race in university admissions. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has ordered an end to DEI policies in the federal government and has sought to end government support for DEI programs elsewhere. Some of the new administration’s anti-DEI initiatives have been temporarily blocked in federal court.

Jackson’s opinion makes no mention of DEI. Instead, she focused on Ames’ contention that she was passed over for a promotion and then demoted because she is heterosexual. Both the job she sought and the one she had held were given to LGBTQ people.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars sex discrimination in the workplace. A trial court and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Ames.

The 6th circuit is among the courts that had required an additional requirement for people like Ames, showing “background circumstances” that might include that LGBTQ people made the decisions affecting Ames or statistical evidence of a pattern of discrimination against members of the majority group.

The appeals court noted that Ames didn’t provide any such circumstances.

But Jackson wrote that “this additional ‘background circumstances’ requirement is not consistent with Title VII’s text or our case law construing the statute.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump threatened to cut Elon Musk’s government contracts as their fractured alliance rapidly escalated into a public feud Thursday.

Hours after Trump lamented his breakup with Musk and said he was “disappointed” in his former backer and adviser and Musk responded on social media, Trump escalated the feud by threatening to use the U.S. government to hurt Musk’s bottom line.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote on his social media network. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The breakup between the president of the United States and the world’s richest man is unfurling much like their relationship started — rapidly, intensely and very publicly.

As President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office on Thursday with Germany’s leader, he lamented his soured relationship with Elon Musk, his adviser-turned-social media antagonist. Trump said he was “very disappointed” with Musk after the billionaire former backer lambasted the president’s signature bill of tax cuts and spending plans.

“Whatever,” Musk wrote on his social media platform while responding to Trump in real time.

Musk later offered up an especially stinging insult to a president sensitive about his standing among voters: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Musk retorted. “Such ingratitude,” Musk said in a follow-up post.

Politicians and their donor patrons rarely see eye to eye. But the magnitude of Musk’s support for Trump, spending at least $250 million backing his campaign, and the scope of free reign the president gave him to slash and delve into the government with the Department of Government Efficiency is eclipsed only by the speed of their falling out.

Musk announced his support for Trump shortly after the then-candidate was nearly assassinated on stage at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally last July. News of Musk’s political action committee in support of Trump’s election came days later.

Musk soon became a close adviser and frequent companion, memorably leaping in the air behind Trump on stage at a rally in October. Once Trump was elected, the tech billionaire stood behind him as he took the oath of office, flew with him on Air Force One for weekend stays at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, slept in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom at the president’s invitation and joined his Cabinet meetings wearing a MAGA hat (sometimes more than one).

“I’ll be honest, I think he missed the place,” Trump said Thursday. “He got out there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t in this beautiful Oval Office.”

Musk bid farewell to Trump last week in a subdued news conference in the Oval Office, where he sported a black eye that he said came from his young son but that seemed to be a metaphor for his messy time in government service.

Trump, who rarely misses an opportunity to zing his critics on appearance, brought it up Thursday.

“I said, ‘Do you want a little makeup? We’ll get you a little makeup.’ Which is interesting,” Trump said.

The Republican president’s comments came as Musk has stewed for days on social media about Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” warning that it will increase the federal deficit. Musk has called the bill a “disgusting abomination.”

“He hasn’t said bad about me personally, but I’m sure that will be next,” Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office. “But I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot.”

Observers had long wondered if the friendship between the two brash billionaires known for lobbing insults online would flame out in spectacular fashion. It did, in less than a year.

“Look, Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump said.

The president said some people who leave his administration “miss it so badly” and “actually become hostile.”

“It’s sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it,” he said.

He brushed aside the billionaire’s efforts to get him elected last year, including a $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes in Pennsylvania. The surge of cash Musk showed he was willing to spend seemed to set him up as a highly coveted ally for Republicans going forward, but his split with Trump, the party’s leader, raises questions about whether they or any others will see such a campaign windfall in the future.

Trump said Musk, the CEO and founder of Tesla, “only developed a problem” with the bill because it rolls back tax credits for electric vehicles.

“False,” Musk fired back on his social media platform as the president continued speaking. “This bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!”

In another post, he said Trump could keep the spending cuts but “ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.”

The bill would unleash trillions of dollars in tax cuts and slash spending but also spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over a decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, which for decades has served as the official scorekeeper of legislation in Congress.

Besides Musk being “disturbed” by the electric vehicle tax credits, Trump said another point of contention was Musk’s promotion of Jared Isaacman to run NASA.

Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination over the weekend, days after Musk left his government role.

“I didn’t think it was appropriate,” Trump said, calling Isaacman “totally a Democrat.”

Musk, reverting to his main form of political activity before he joined forces with Trump, continued slinging his responses on social media.

He shared some posts Trump made over a decade ago criticizing Republicans for their spending, musings made when he, too, was just a billionaire lobbing his thoughts on social media.

“Where is the man who wrote these words?” Musk wrote. “Was he replaced by a body double!?”

Shares of Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker fell sharply Thursday as investors feared his dispute with President Donald Trump will hurt the company.

Tesla plunged closed down more than 14% as a disagreement over the U.S. president’s budget bill turned nasty. After Musk said that Trump wouldn’t haven’t gotten elected without his help, Trump implied that he may turn the federal government against his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Trump wrote on his social messaging service Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

The drop on Thursday wiped out nearly $150 billion from Tesla’s market value, partially reversing a big runup in the eight weeks since Musk confirmed that Tesla would testing an autonomous, driverless “robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, this month.

Investors fear Trump might not be in such a rush to usher in a future of self-driving cars in the U.S., and that could slam Tesla because so much of its future business depends on that.

“There is a fear that Trump is not going to play Mr. Nice Guy when in come to autonomous,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. “The whole goal of robotaxis is to have them 20 or 25 cities next year. If you start to heighten the regulatory environment, that could delay that path.”

Trump’s threat to cut government contracts seem targeted more to another of Musk’s businesses, SpaceX, his privately held rocket company that received billions of dollars to send astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, provide launches and do other work for NASA. The company is currently racing to develop a mega rocket for the space agency to sent astronauts to moon next year.

A subsidiary of SpaceX, the satellite internet company Starlink, appears to also have benefited from Musk’s once-close relationship with the president.

On a trip with Trump to the Middle East last month, Musk announced that Saudi Arabia had approved his satellite service for aviation and maritime use. Though its not clear how much politics has played a role, a string of other recent deals for the company in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and elsewhere has come as Trump has threatened tariffs and sent diplomats scrambling to please the president.

One measure of SpaceX’s success: A private financing round followed by a private sale of shares recently reportedly valued it at $350 billion, up from an estimated $210 billion just a year ago. Tesla shares initially got a lift from his support of Trump. In the weeks after Trump was elected, Tesla shares soared, hitting an all-time high on Dec. 17. But they gave back those gains during Musk’s time as head of a government cost-cutting group as Tesla’s reputation took a hit. They’ve recently popped higher again after Musk vowed to focus much more on Tesla and its upcoming launch of driverless taxis.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting on Wednesday following some potentially discouraging updates on the U.S. economy.

The S&P 500 was edging up by 0.2% in afternoon trading, as momentum slowed following a big rally that had brought it back within 2.8% of its all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 26 points, or 0.1%, as of 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.5% higher.

The action was stronger in the bond market, where Treasury yields fell following a pair of weaker-than-expected reports on the economy. One said that activity contracted for U.S. retailers, finance companies and other businesses in the services industries last month, when economists were expecting to see growth. Businesses told the Institute for Supply Management in its survey that all the uncertainty created by tariffs is making it difficult for them to forecast and plan.

A second report suggested U.S. employers outside of the government hired far fewer workers last month than economists expected. The report from ADP said private employers hired just 37,000 more workers than they fired, down from the prior month’s 60,000.

That could bode ill for Friday’s more comprehensive jobs report coming from the U.S. Labor Department, which is one of Wall Street’s most anticipated data releases each month. So far, the U.S. job market has remained remarkably resilient despite years of high inflation and now the threat of President Donald Trump’s high tariffs. But weakness there could undermine the rest of the economy.

To be sure, ADP’s report historically has not been a perfect predictor of what the U.S. Labor Department’s report will say.

“Whether this report is accurate or not, traders and investors will read today’s number as a dark result for trading today,” according to Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. “This may be the tip of an iceberg, but it also could be a false start.”

Following the reports, traders built up expectations that the Federal Reserve will need to cut interest rates later this year in order to prop up the economy, which in turn caused the fall for Treasury yields. The weaker-than-expected ADP report also pushed Trump to call on Fed Chair Jerome Powell to deliver cuts to rates more quickly.

“‘Too Late’ Powell must now LOWER THE RATE,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “He is unbelievable!!! Europe has lowered NINE TIMES!”

The Fed has yet to cut interest rates this year after slashing them through the end of last year. Part of the reason is that the Fed wants to see how much Trump’s tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation. While lower interest rates could boost the economy, they could also give inflation more fuel.

Longer-term Treasury yields have also been rising in recent weeks because of reasons outside the Fed’s control. Investors have been demanding the U.S. government pay more in interest to borrow because of worries about whether it’s set to add trillions of dollars to its debt through tax cuts under discussion on Capitol Hill.

On Wall Street, Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 1.5% after delivering a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Wells Fargo rose 0.8% after the Federal Reserve on Tuesday lifted restrictions placed on the bank in 2018 for having a toxic sales and banking culture. Wells Fargo has spent the better part of a decade trying to restore its image with the public and convince policymakers that it had changed its ways.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that Delta Air Lines has sued for a technology outage last summer, fell 5.1% despite reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue fell just short of Wall Street’s target, as did its forecast for revenue in the current quarter.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia as the wait continued for more updates on trade talks that could convince Trump to lower his tariffs. Hopes for such deals have been a big reason U.S. stocks have roared back after falling roughly 20% below their record two months ago.

But nothing is assured, and Trump early Wednesday said of China’s leader Xi Jinping, “I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!”

The European Union’s top trade negotiator, Maroš Šefčovič, met Wednesday with his American counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.37% from 4.46% late Tuesday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks traders’ expectations for what the Fed will do with overnight interest rates, eased to 3.88% from 3.96%.

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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.