Who’s in the room

President Trump’s tariff policy has given corporate chiefs and investors a serious case of whiplash. While the markets cheered on Wednesday’s delay on auto sector levies, setting off an impressive late-day rally, the move also adds to the confusion about what comes next.

The latest: There’s increasing buzz that agricultural products are next in line for tariff relief, as the president faces intense lobbying from his party. And the release on Wednesday of the Fed’s beige book survey of regional activity showed that companies were growing worried that the levies would push up prices.

One school of thought on Trump’s tariff plans: they could level the field before negotiations. Trump himself sees them as a tool to bolster the U.S. economy.

A way to think about this is to look at the people in his orbit. On tariffs, there are two key, and seemingly polar opposite, figures.

There’s Howard Lutnick, the former head of Cantor Fitzgerald who is a moderate on trade and now commerce secretary. And there is Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump lieutenant and a proponent of high tariffs who is generally opposed to trade deals.

Who has more influence? For now, it seems to be Lutnick. Trump’s announcement of a one-month pause on tariffs on cars coming through Canada and Mexico wouldn’t have surprised anyone who heard Lutnick’s comments earlier in the day.

“My thinking is it’s going to be somewhere in the middle,” he told Bloomberg Television about the possibility of some exemptions. “So not 100 percent of all products and not none.”

Lutnick had been signaling the likelihood of exemptions for days. On Sunday, he talked about the possibility of a rollback on Fox News, calling it a “fluid situation.” On Tuesday, he told Fox Business that Trump was “really looking carefully at that trying to figure out if there is a way in there that he can come in the middle.”

Lutnick wasn’t acting alone: On Tuesday, the country’s three biggest automakers — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis — made their case to the president, who then granted the exemption. A one-month reprieve isn’t much, but it gives automakers time to perhaps do some domestic stockpiling, or ramp up lobbying.

But the time frame is tight. Trump wants to see a plan from the carmakers that would bring manufacturing back to the United States. It won’t be easy. Detroit relies on a complex supply chain with parts that come from many areas of the world.

Trump seems to be taking ad hoc approach here, according to Jonathan Doh, a professor of international business at the Villanova School of Business and a former trade official with the Commerce Department.

“There is not a single, unified perspective regarding the efficacy and impact of tariffs,” he told DealBook, adding that it doesn’t look like Trump has “a clear long-term strategy or end game.”

Who was in the room? Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Lutnick were reportedly on the phone with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who had requested a broader set of exemptions. Trump declined, citing what he said was the flow of fentanyl over the border. (Fentanyl-related deaths have already been steeply declining, according to preliminary data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Navarro wasn’t there. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a useful role to play in the future. Remember that additional tariffs are set to take effect on April 2. Pay attention to who’s making the media rounds before then.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Elon Musk will get his day in court on OpenAI. The feud between Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., moved into a new phase when a federal judge denied Musk’s request to block Altman’s plan to transform OpenAI to a for-profit corporation from a nonprofit one. But Musk won a crucial decision when the same the judge allowed Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI to proceed. The upshot: Even if Altman manages to convert OpenAI into a for-profit — he still has to persuade several state attorneys general and a major investor, Microsoft — it could all come undone if Musk eventually wins in court. That’s a big “if.” But he has at least succeeded in slowing Altman down.

President Trump reportedly taps a former star banker to run his proposed sovereign wealth fund. Michael Grimes, a longtime adviser to Musk who recently left Morgan Stanley for a prominent role in the Commerce Department, has emerged as the front-runner to spearhead creation of the fund, Reuters reports. Trump has offered little detail about how such a fund would be structured and what it would invest in, let alone how a country that’s run chronic budget shortfalls would finance it. One possibility is revenue from tariffs, a source told Reuters.

The Supreme Court rejects Trump’s request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. The 5-to-4 decision (in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal members) was a significant ruling against one of the president’s signature cost-cutting efforts. The closely divided decision suggests that the court sees limits to Trump’s executive authority. Expect more lawsuits.

Oil prices sink amid tariff and growth jitters. Brent crude, the international benchmark, on Thursday traded below $70 a barrel for the second straight day, the lowest since 2021. Uncertainty has taken hold of oil markets on fears of further disruptions to global trade from a potential tariffs trade war, and concerns of overproduction by OPEC Plus nations. That’s hit energy stocks hard, but it could cool off stubbornly high inflation.

The Putin trade?

Western businesses may be skittish about the prospect of a return to Russia, but investors appear game to get in on a piece of the action — potentially with Wall Street’s help.

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are among the banks that are offering ways for investors to pour money into the red-hot rally in Russian financial assets, including the ruble, according to Bloomberg. Spokesmen for both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase declined to comment to DealBook on the report.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shows no signs of letting up on the battlefield. But President Trump has signaled that he’s open to engineering a diplomatic thaw with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in the hopes of negotiating a peace deal. “It’s time to end the senseless war,” he said in an address to Congress on Tuesday, offering little detail as to how.

Investors appear to be betting on a breakthrough, at least judging by the recent runaway performance of the ruble and the MOEX Russia stock index, the benchmark exchange. On the flip side, Europe’s vows to bolster military spending to help defend Ukraine has led to a startling rally in European defense stocks.

Thanks to Western sanctions, investing in Russia is anything but straightforward, Bloomberg’s Kerim Karakaya and Sujata Rao explain:

Since U.S. and European investors are blocked from accessing rubles directly, the derivatives contract, called a non-deliverable forward or NDF, essentially gives traders a legal workaround to profit if the currency continues to surge in value.

DealBook hears that the NDF trade is still a relatively niche one for investors, and that demand for these contracts hasn’t meaningfully appreciated since Trump returned to office.

Still, the ruble is soaring. It has gained roughly 20 percent this year — outperforming most stocks, gold and Bitcoin. And the MOEX has climbed roughly 25 percent over the same period (in local currency terms).

Other emerging Russia trades involve buying and selling dollar- and euro-denominated bonds issued by Russian companies as well as ruble bonds, Bloomberg reports. But it appears the brunt of the action is coming from trading hubs, like the Middle East, where investors have more freedoms to invest in Russian assets.

But the trade is seen as extremely high risk. “People are massively overestimating the upside for Russia-related assets,” Pavel Mamai, co-founder of hedge fund Promeritum Investment Management, told Bloomberg. ​​

Discord is abuzz with I.P.O. chatter

Hopes for a blockbuster I.P.O. year were dampened when the calendar for listings went nearly dry. But there’s at least some reason for optimism.

Discord, the social chat app popular with video gamers, has met with investment bankers in recent weeks to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, two people familiar with the matter tell DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch and The Times’s Mike Isaac.

Discord was last valued by private investors in 2021 at roughly $15 billion.

The public offering of a well-known tech start-up could provide a much-needed jolt for private companies considering going public. The I.P.O. market was already challenged heading into 2025. Strong valuations in the private market and high interest rates dampened enthusiasm. And now the uncertainty of President Trump’s economic policies have only added to the doldrums.

Shares of SailPoint Technologies, one of the few major tech companies that went public this year, are down about 4.6 percent since it debuted last month. (SailPoint also listed in 2017.)

But there are positive signs. CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing services for artificial intelligence, filed for an I.P.O. this week. The Nvidia-backed company has surged, generating $1.9 billion in sales last year, an eightfold jump over the previous year. (Its losses also widened to $863 million from $594 million.)

Bankers have cautioned DealBook that some of the biggest and most well-funded private companies are not likely to rush toward the public market anytime soon.

Discord was founded by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, tech workers who originally decided to build a video games studio. The app, which allows people to chat over text, voice and video for free, saw a boom in use during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Microsoft discussed buying the start-up in 2021 for a reported $10 billion, though no deal materialized.

The business model. Discord, used by more than 200 million people every month, doesn’t rely on advertising, but instead has a “freemium” model in which people can pay subscription fees for upgraded features, like custom emojis and higher-quality voice and video chat. It debuted an online shop in 2023 where people can pay to enhance their profiles and add custom graphics to their digital avatars.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

• Apollo Global Management is said to be exploiting a Depression era program in which the private equity giant can gain access to government-subsidized loans meant for affordable housing to invest in its own portfolio businesses. (The Lever)

• Hot off its I.P.O. news, CoreWeave is said to be losing some business from Microsoft, the cloud computing provider’s biggest customer. (FT)

Politics, policy and regulation

• The Trump administration is expected to introduce its plans for a strategic crypto reserve at tomorrow’s White House summit on digital tokens. (Cointelegraph)

• Italy is said to be having second thoughts about closing a $1.6 billion deal that would make Elon Musk’s Starlink one of its secured satellite-based communications systems in light of U.S.-Europe geopolitical tensions. (Bloomberg)

Best of the rest

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