Trump is fed up

The US Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates where they are. Bloomberg News senior economics reporter Enda Curran explains why Donald Trump isn't happy. Plus: The challenge of reviving US copper production, how Microsoft is standing by its climate goals, and is MAMUWT (Musk Always Makes Up With Trump) really a thing?

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It seems like hardly a week goes by without President Donald Trump unloading on the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates. On Wednesday he ratcheted up his ongoing criticism, questioning the intelligence of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and even floating the idea that he could run the central bank himself.

"We have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed," Trump told reporters. "Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed? I'd do a much better job than these people."

Depending on your perspective, the president's remarks are either another assault on the Fed's much-cherished political independence or merely the cut and thrust of daily politics. Trump isn't the first president to criticize the Fed, even if he is likely among the most vocal to do so.

What is clear, however, is that there are many opinions out there about whether it's time to cut rates. Team "yes" points to the biggest increase in tariffs in a century and signs that companies are hiring at a slower pace. Team "no" says the economy is in fairly good shape, with employment holding up and inflation slowing.

The Fed indicated on Wednesday that it wants to wait and see how things play out. Powell and his monetary policy colleagues decided to hold rates steady in a range of 4.25% to 4.5% for a fourth straight meeting, saying uncertainty over the economic outlook was still high but had diminished. At the same time, officials downgraded their estimates for economic growth this year while lifting their forecasts for unemployment and inflation.

Trump leaving Air Force One. Photographer: Al Drago/Getty Images

It remains to be seen how Trump's tariffs will impact consumers and companies. The housing market, retail spending and manufacturing are among pockets of the economy that are clearly slowing. But the central bank gave little clue about when a rate cut might arrive.

There's another reason why Trump wants lower interest rates: to bring down the cost of government debt. As he seeks congressional approval for lower taxes that threaten to blow out the deficit, Trump says rate cuts are needed to bring down the burden for government borrowing.

US Treasury figures released last week showed the government shelled out some $776 billion in interest costs on the federal debt in the past eight months. That's up 7% from the same period in the previous fiscal year, when the interest burden already climbed to the highest since the 1990s.

Economists warn that the Fed shouldn't play a role in fiscal policy and that, even if it were to cut rates in an attempt to assist the government's borrowing profile, such a move would only backfire as inflation expectations would take off and bond yields would increase as demand for US debt weakens.

But for now Trump appears undeterred and dwelled on the issue when he spoke to reporters on Wednesday, saying it would be "nice" if the Fed cut rates by as much as 2.5 percentage points. He made his rationale for his critique of Powell plain and simple: "He's costing the country a fortune," according to Trump.

In Brief

An overnight meeting between President Trump and his national security team ensured tensions remain high in the Middle East, with speculation rife the US is close to joining Israel's attacks against Iran.
The top US bank regulators plan to reduce a key capital buffer by up to 1.5 percentage points for the biggest lenders after concerns that it constrained their trading in the $29 trillion Treasuries market.
Indonesia's Bali airport saw dozens of flights canceled because of a volcanic eruption nearby.

Firing Up the US Copper Industry

Michael Cross at Freeport's smelter in Arizona. Photographer: Caitlin O'Hara for Bloomberg Businessweek

Freeport-McMoRan Inc.'s only US copper smelter—a hulking metal-processing facility at the edge of an old Arizona mining town—spits neon flames from its furnace like an industrial volcano. Here, hundreds of employees work around the clock to transform vats of concentrated molten metal into neat, purified slabs, which are then shipped to a refinery in El Paso, Texas, the next step on their cross-country journey to become coils for electric wiring.

On a sweltering day in May, plant operators are decked out in heat suits and fire-resistant visors, transferring heaps of metallic powder into industrial-scale ovens with machines that look like soup ladles for giants. It's a rare example of entirely made-in-America copper, an almost extinct part of the supply chain that President Donald Trump is hell-bent on bringing back.

Talk of the metals industry usually conjures images of sprawling mining operations or the finished goods churned out at the end, from cookware to electronics to plumbing. To get from one to the other, smelters and refineries are an essential part of the process, using heat, acid and chemicals to convert raw materials into their purest forms. The process has become almost prohibitively expensive in the US because of regulation, energy costs, labor and a glut of cheap Chinese competition.

A tangle of pipelines and steel beams, the Freeport smelter on the outskirts of Miami, Arizona, was one of several industrial processing facilities built near the turn of the 20th century to accommodate a flurry of mining in the American Southwest. Today it stands almost alone, one of the very last copper smelters operating in the country.

Jacob Lorinc, James Attwood and Yvonne Yue Li write about the challenges to bringing back this piece of the domestic supply chain: The US Has More Copper Than China But No Way to Refine All of It

Microsoft's Climate Goals

Brian Marrs at Microsoft's headquarters. Photographer: Grant Hindsley for Bloomberg Businessweek

Five years ago, Microsoft Corp. set a goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030 and removing all its historic emissions from the atmosphere by 2050. But the company's artificial intelligence investments have made meeting those targets harder—by a lot. Today, Microsoft's total planet-warming impact is 23% higher than it was in 2020 in part because of its vast expansion of emissions-intensive data centers, according to its 2025 sustainability report.

Despite its actions, Microsoft says slashing carbon remains a priority. Michelle Ma spoke with Brian Marrs, the company's senior director of energy and carbon removal, about how the tech giant plans to meet its climate commitments. Like many things involving AI or climate goals, the answer isn't entirely clear. "It is important to recognize we're at the very beginning of generative AI and what it will look like," Marrs says. "Servers and data centers will evolve and do more with less." Here's an excerpt:

Microsoft made a string of record carbon removal purchases this year, including a 3.7 million-metric-ton deal with CO280, a startup that captures CO₂ from pulp and paper mills, and a 6.8 million-metric-ton deal with AtmosClear, which is developing a carbon capture facility in Louisiana. What's the strategy behind these?

We're signing long-term deals, and we're trying to send a demand signal that is not a single year or two years. That's the way most carbon is transacted today in the voluntary carbon market. We signed some foundational deals for bioenergy carbon capture and storage. Those are really landmark deals in that they're bringing in traditional industries like the pulp and paper industry, finding new revenue streams, and investing in American technology and jobs to grow investment and innovation in forest land and rural communities. These larger deals use a little bit more proven technology. But we've also taken pioneering deals. And we've worked with the whole ecosystem of other startups to help build up other carbon removal pathways.

Keep reading: Microsoft Inks Record Carbon Removal Deals as Emissions Rise

On the Latest Elon, Inc.

Photo illustration by 731. Photos: NASA (1), Getty Images (2), Bloomberg (1)

On this week's episode of the Elon, Inc. podcast, host David Papadopoulos and Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin chat about the latest in the Elon Musk-Donald Trump drama and how it feels like it's just a matter of time before Musk (and little X) are back in the Oval Office sparring with reporters (and playing on the floor). Will the apologies help Musk secure eased restrictions for self-driving cars and access to Trump's "golden dome" missile-defense project?

Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

Big Incentives

$100 million

That's how much OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta Platforms Inc. has offered his employees in signing bonuses, with even larger annual compensation packages, as the company seeks to build a top artificial intelligence team. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting for a new "superintelligence" group.

The Cookie Business

"Once you see it on social media, and also when you tell your friends or your family that you're going to the States, everyone says, 'Oh, you should get Crumbl cookies.'"

Merle Behrens

A 17-year-old visitor to New York from Germany

Crumbl has built its viral desserts into a big business, with franchisees operating more than 1,100 stores in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada. Now, Wall Street is getting in.