# AI Spending Boom and Dollar Weakness Impact Markets

**Podcast:** WSJ What’s News
**Published:** 2026-01-28

## Transcript

What a sliding US 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 Khaltsar are really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on the US for their security.
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 ChatGPT is looking to raise 100 billion dollars 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 NVIDIA, which today got the green light from China to sell its first batch of H-200 chips to Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Byte 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 a sign 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 Melson says the announcements from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are a forey 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 any of these attacks and the risk of a wider war in the region.
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 the U.S.
for their security.
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 Predi last weekend, a border patrol agent and a customs and border patrol officer.
That's according to a preliminary DHS report into Predi'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 Pretty, and it maintained that Pretty had violently resisted officers.
The death of Alex Pritty was a tragedy.
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 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 Pready 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 Predi 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?
You know, 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 and birds that seem 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 Tenth 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 that 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 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 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 or 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 the things we'll see sort of negotiated this week, right?
Is like, what does the federal government present?
Safe viso steuer.
Hold it to work.