# Fed Leadership, AI IPOs, and Supply Chain Pressures

**Podcast:** WSJ What’s News
**Published:** 2026-01-30

## Transcript

President Trump prepares to tap Kevin Warsh as his pick for Fed chair.
Plus the White House and Democrats close in on a deal to avoid a government shutdown, and Apple shares tread water as investors look past a bumper earnings beat to a looming chip shortage.
That tells you something about people potentially concerned with these cost pressures that may be coming down the line for the components that go into the iPhone that could hit Apple's margins.
President Trump is expected to nominate Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve today, ending months of deliberations that had seen a number of candidates effectively auditioning for the job.
So what would a Warsh-led Fed look like?
Here's Journal Finance Editor Alex Francos.
Warsh is very much the candidate that Wall Street and Markets probably are most comfortable with.
And that's been his big reservation.
But clearly he got comfortable with Warsh, and that's the way it's going.
The White House and WASH didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Jerome Powell's term as current Fed chair ends in May.
We are exclusively reporting that OpenAI is targeting Q4 for its blockbuster IPO.
Journal venture capital reporter Berber Jin says that marks an acceleration of the company's original listing plans as Rival Anthropic also eyes a potential IPO by year's end.
OpenAI's calculus is that whoever goes out first will definitely benefit from a lot of the attention that will come from being the first generative AI company to be a public company, and will be able to access a lot of the public money that is basically just waiting to be put into this new wave of Gen AI companies.
You have to remember that these businesses lose a lot of money.
It costs a lot to build next generation models and to also power chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude.
And there's going to be a limit to how much these companies can keep raising in the private market.
Anthropic expects to break even for the first time in 2028, according to projections shared with investors last year, two years earlier than OpenAI.
NewsCorp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Apple posted record quarterly sales yesterday after the market close, with iPhone revenue jumping 23% from a year earlier to more than $85 billion dollars.
That beats Wall Street expectations, but as tech reporter Rolf Winkler told me, it didn't generate much of a pop for Apple's shares in off-hours trading.
What's a company got to do to impress investors?
Is one thing you wonder about this earnings?
The stock is flat on this report, which was gargantuan.
As the CFO put it to me, the company increased its revenue this quarter versus the year ago by 20 billion dollars.
People are upgrading to this new iPhone 17 in crazy numbers.
For all the hand-wringing about Apple is behind in AI and they don't have this, they don't have that.
What this quarter just proved is it doesn't matter.
People keep buying iPhones.
No one's going to buy an Android device because it's got some killer AI feature that is must-have, and yet the stock's not reacting.
And Rolf explained this to us.
It seems like the root of investor concern here seems to be around parts costs and a potential hit to margins as a result.
The concern is memory prices and prices for other components.
There's other components, specialized glass fiber that is going up in price.
So this is all stuff that AI hyperscalers are demanding in much greater amounts, and suddenly Apple is not the only Goliath in the electronics supply chain.
And people are looking to later this year and thinking that's going to start flowing through their financial statements.
What does that mean for the bottom line?
That was the journal's Rolf Winkler.
According to one supply chain analyst report, Apple may choose not to raise prices for next year's iPhone 18 lineup and instead take a hit to its gross profit margins.
After the killing of Renee Good and Alex Predi in Minnesota, Democrats suddenly had a tremendous amount of leverage over the White House on the operations of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
And the Republicans knew this, the White House knew this.
In fact, they didn't even try to put up a fight.
Now what exactly they end up giving is unclear, and what Democrats ask for is unclear.
But they were just out of time on this spending package.
So they agreed to this stepgap bill.
It's gonna probably take a little time to bump through Congress, so there could actually be technically a temporary shutdown over the weekend, although no one will really notice.
And then they'll have a couple weeks to figure out what exactly they want to do.
Now the Democrats could try to cut a deal quickly just to have some imprint on new policy, or they could go to the mat, fight over possibly the removal of Kirsten as the Secretary of DHS, and that could be obviously a lot more complicated.
So Democrats have to figure out an ongoing trip by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to proceed here, but they're gonna have aimed at increasing business between the countries.
It's very dangerous for them to do that, and it's even more dangerous, I think, for Canada to get into business with China.
Canada's not doing well.
Uh, they're doing very poorly.
And you can't look at China as the answer.
Starmer's talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping follow Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's own trip to China, where the countries agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and Canadian agricultural products.
That triggered Trump to threaten a hundred percent tariffs against all Canadian imports in the event of a free trade agreement between China and Canada, something Kearney said he's not pursuing.
Last night, Trump also warned that he might de-certify Canadian-made aircraft and apply 50% tariffs on imports in retaliation for what he described as the country's refusal to certify U.S.-made Gulf Stream jets.
Panama's Supreme Court has annulled the contract for Hong Kong company CK Hutcheson to operate two ports at either end of the Panama Canal.
Hutchison can't appeal a Supreme Court ruling, but it can request clarifications that could delay the termination of its operating license.
The ruling hands President Trump a victory for his security ambitions in the Western Hemisphere and his desire to dent China's influence there.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to reopen commercial airspace over Venezuela and ease some sanctions on its battered oil industry.
That comes as Venezuela's National Assembly yesterday approved changes to hydrocarbon laws to allow U.S.
companies more autonomy to operate in the country.
And finally, how's this for a pre-flight checklist, passport, boarding pass, and Costco membership card?
I'm in Costco, Iceland.
Let's go check it out.
Merci.
So you can today we're standing outside of Costco, but we're in Spain.
Costco in Japan.
I'm so excited right now.
Journal reporter Stu Wu says that with locations in 13 foreign countries, Costco centric tourism is becoming a thing for the brand's American devotees.
There are these huge Costco fans who will fly to some of the most famous cities in the world, like Tokyo and Paris.
And instead of going to the Louvre or some of the other touristy things you might expect, they take a train or a car and they go all the way to the suburbs and they go to Costco.
They go there to see what the locals are buying in bulk, and they test out some of the stuff in the food court.
If you go to TikTok, YouTube, you'll find these videos of people taking you through the Costco and saying, whoa, they have fish jerky in Iceland, or look at these pallets of foie gras in France, or this like kangaroo-shaped potato snack in Australia.
Like for instance, I went to the one in Japan.
Instead of a chicken bake, they have a beef bulgogee bake.
Costco in Japan is a wonderland if you love Japanese food and products.
So far, it looks exactly like an American Costco.
Trash bags here cost $40 and 31 cents.
Back home, 1999.
And do they have the same dollar fifty hot dog, or did they substitute it with something French like a Jean Bombert?
There are the things are like 90% the same.
They got the rotisserie chicken, they got the Kirkland jeans.
It's sort of like the 10% where you'd realize, oh, these things, you know, you wouldn't find in America.
So a lot of it is when you step into one of these Costco's, it feels like home, but also you find out what really matters to the locals.
And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning.
Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer.
Our supervising producer was Daniel Bach, and I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal.
We will be back tonight with a new show.
Otherwise, have a great weekend and thanks for listening.