For almost an entire year, Donald Trump has begged the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates and supercharge the American economy. And for almost an entire year, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has barely budged. Now, as the president prepares to appoint Powell's successor, amenability seems to be top of mind. 'I don't think he should do exactly what we say,' Trump told The Wall Street Journal today of the future chair. But 'I'm a smart voice and should be listened to.' Trump himself appointed Powell to the chairmanship during his first term, but their relationship has since soured. The president's nickname for him is 'Too Late,' referencing Powell's reluctance to lower interest rates as quickly and as dramatically as Trump would like. He has also called Powell a 'moron' and a 'numbskull.' Tensions peaked in July when, during a visit to one of the Fed buildings currently under renovation, Powell fact-checked some of Trump's claims directly to his face. This week, Trump called Powell a 'bad head of the Fed.'...

The web services provider will secure the funding through a liability management transaction designed to reduce leverage and bolster liquidity. Existing lenders, including Blackstone, GoldenTree Asset Management, and Pimco, will participate in the deal. Under the agreement, lenders have extended maturities on part of Newfold's debt to 2029. Other obligations will be discounted, while creditors receive tighter covenants in return. The financing is priced at 5.75 percentage points over the benchmark. Newfold has about $3.5bn of debt outstanding, equivalent to roughly six times earnings, according to people familiar with the matter. Moody's cut the company to Caa3 in October, citing weak liquidity and an approaching maturity on its revolving credit facility. The transaction follows months of negotiations and reflects a broader trend of private equity-backed companies using liability management to stabilise capital structures amid higher interest rates and slower operating performance. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

Until recently, tariffs rarely made headlines. Yet today, they play a major role in U.S. economic policy, affecting the prices of everything from groceries to autos to holiday gifts, as well as the outlook for unemployment, inflation and even recession. Tariffs are taxes on imports of goods, usually for purposes of protecting particular domestic industries from import competition. When an American business imports goods, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sends it a tariff bill that the company must pay before the merchandise can enter the country. Because tariffs raise costs for U.S. importers, those companies usually pass the expense on to their customers by raising prices. Sometimes, importers choose to absorb part of the tariff's cost so consumers don't switch to more affordable competing products. However, firms with low profit margins may risk going out of business if they do that for very long. In general, the longer tariffs are in place, the more likely companies are to pass the costs on to customers....

A company that most people have never heard of is among the year's best-performing technology firms'and a symbol of the complex, interconnected, and potentially catastrophic ways in which AI companies do business these days. CoreWeave's IPO in March was the largest of any tech start-up since 2021, and the company's share price has subsequently more than doubled, outperforming even the 'Magnificent Seven' tech stocks. On Wall Street, CoreWeave is regularly referred to as one of the most important companies powering the AI revolution. In the past few months, it has announced a $22 billion partnership with OpenAI, a $14 billion deal with Meta, and a $6 billion arrangement with Nvidia. CoreWeave's business model consists of buying up lots of high-end computer chips, and building or leasing data centers to house those chips. It then rents out those assets to AI companies that need computing power but prefer not to take on the huge up-front costs themselves. If this is straightforward enough, CoreWeave's financial situation is anything but. The company expects to bring in $5 billion in revenue this year while spending roughly $20 billion. To cover that gap, the company has taken on $14 billion in debt, more than half of which comes due in the next year. Many of these loans were issued by private-equity firms at high interest rates, and several use complex forms of financial engineering, such as giving the money to newly formed legal entities created for the explicit purpose of borrowing on CoreWeave's behalf (more on that later). CoreWeave also faces $34 billion in scheduled lease payments that will start kicking in between now and 2028....