SEC Preparing a Proposal to Drop Quarterly Earnings Reports

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0:18NVIDIA's Developers Conference kicks off today with a new focus that reflects a big shift in the world of AI. We'll tell you more about inference in just a bit. Plus, new housing policies intended to help New York City renters might end up pushing out mom-and-pop landlords. They've been under financial pressure for years. Rents, you know, currently they get around a 3 % increase each year. If that goes down to zero, landlords fear that the financial pressure they're under could ultimately break them. And the Wall Street Journal has learned that the SEC is preparing a proposal. It would eliminate the decades-old rule for public companies to post financial results every quarter.

0:58It's Monday, March 16th. I'm Alex Oseleff for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We are exclusively reporting that the Securities and Exchange Commission is working on a proposal to eliminate the requirement that public companies post their earnings every quarter. The proposal would make that optional, or companies could just share results twice a year. We've learned that the SEC could publish this proposal as soon as next month. It then eventually goes to a vote. Any change is likely to face opposition from investors who rely on the transparency of regular disclosures.

1:37Publicly traded companies in the U.S. have reported results every three months for more than half a century. The push for semi-annual reporting gained steam late last year. President Trump has backed the idea, and supporters say it could help boost the shrinking number of public companies in the U.S. Today was the start of NVIDIA's annual developers conference. But this year, the focus for the first time isn't on graphics processing units, the powerful chips on which NVIDIA built its computing empire, and that the event is named for. Instead, the AI industry has moved into a new phase. NVIDIA's customers are less concerned today with training large AI models, what GPUs are best at, and more preoccupied with running them and generating big profits from end users.

2:23Journal reporter Robbie Whelan told our tech news briefing podcast about the AI shift to a type of computing called inference. NVIDIA dominates the world of what's known as AI training, but they don't have quite as much of a foothold in what's known as AI inference, how to run models and make them respond to your user queries faster. So we're expecting them to roll out a new chip that's going to make them a lot better and a lot faster that allow the computer brain to kind of go back into its memory and access all of its training, all the databases that have been pumped into it to teach it how to be an AI model.

3:03This is a new space for NVIDIA, but Robbie says that doesn't mean the company is in a bad position. They have more money than just about anybody in this entire space. So I don't think they're going to be too far behind when it comes to developing products quickly that serve inference computing needs. And more importantly, perhaps locking up the supply chain that is needed for it to produce inference. So, for example, right now there's a big crunch in supply of memory chips. There's only a certain number of companies that make memory chips that are usable in AI systems. And NVIDIA is one of the biggest buyers of those chips.

3:39And they have essentially locked up their supply for the next two or three years. And so there might be other competitors who are smaller who are trying to do the same thing, trying to produce usable, fast, powerful inference systems that don't have the same clout in the supply chain that NVIDIA has. There's a company called Cerebras. It's a startup that has raised a ton of money and recently did a$10 billion licensing deal with OpenAI to help OpenAI build its own custom chips for inferencing. So the entire ecosystem is seeing much more competition. And suddenly these companies that seemingly appear out of nowhere but have actually been doing research for many years, they're suddenly finding that the world is really thirsty for their product.

4:20NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said the company was ready for the era of inference in a keynote speech at the conference today. 2025 was NVIDIA's year of inference. We wanted to make sure that not only were we good at training and post-training, that we were incredibly good at every single phase of AI. And two other tech news updates. We're exclusively reporting that Reflection AI, a U.S. startup backed by NVIDIA, is investing billions of dollars to build artificial intelligence models with South Korean conglomerate Shinsegae Group. The data center will be one of Korea's biggest facilities powering AI models and will be capable of consuming 250 megawatts, roughly the same amount of energy as a small American city.

5:01The tens of thousands of chips for the data center will come from NVIDIA. The deal is an acceleration of the Trump administration's plans to combat China by exporting American technology around the world. And Tesla is preparing to go to trial. The case before the U.S. Patent Office is against a tiny French beverage wholesaler called Unibov. Unibov has claimed the rights to the term cybercab. That's a problem for Tesla, which has plans to start production of driverless robotaxis called cybercabs next month. Tesla sees the CyberCab as the key to its autonomous vehicle and robotics ambitions. In a legal filing, Tesla says Unabev is a, quote, bad-faith trademark squatter.

5:42In its trademark application, Unabev says it aims to use the name CyberCab for its own vehicle, possibly a car, boat, or plane. There's no indication the company has made a vehicle before. The patent office could make a decision as late as next year. If the case goes on that long, it could hurt Tesla's ability to market the cyber cab internationally. Tesla and Unabev didn't respond to requests for comment. Coming up, the latest on the conflict in the Middle East and why oil prices are falling again. That's after the break.

6:16Model portfolios have evolved from a one-size-fits-all solution. In a recent roundtable conversation, Jeffrey Saif of BlackRock and Alessio DeLongis of Invesco break down what's driving the next model moment, discussing how a deeper level of customization is producing a better alignment with investor goals and creating a practice differentiator for financial advisors.

6:43New York City's mom-and-pop landlords have been a fixture of the city's housing landscape for years. These days, though, they're facing extinction. Recent laws limiting rent increases paired with higher mortgage rates and other rising costs have made it hard to make a living. And that was before Mayor Zoran Mamdani's recent housing proposals that could push even more landlords to the brink. Rebecca Picciotto covers residential real estate for the journal and joins us now. Rebecca, Mayor Mamdani has proposed freezing rents and increasing property taxes by 9.5 % for all of the city's real estate.

7:15You write that this adds to the stress of being a mom-and-pop landlord. Why is that? Yeah, so the financial stress of mom-and-pop landlords goes back probably to the great financial crisis, but their problems got especially worse after the passage of this 2019 law, which basically meant that landlords could not convert their rent stabilized units to market rate after a tenant moved out. It passed in 2019, then you get the pandemic, then you get spikes in interest rates and inflation. And so it meant their costs were going up, but they weren't able to raise rents or their revenue with it. And so as a result, they've been under financial pressure for years.

7:55Rents, you know, currently they get around a 3 % increase each year. If that goes down to zero, landlords fear that the financial pressure they're under could ultimately break them. We should note that a City Hall spokesman said that the mayor's coming housing plan would include efforts to lower insurance costs and reform the property tax system to help with struggling rent-stabilized properties. Now, you say in your story that 90 % of the multifamily buildings in New York have corporations as landlords, citing a housing research nonprofit. Are they affected by these financial pressures too? Yeah.

8:29Anyone who owns a rent stabilized property in New York City is going to be under pressure with that property. But corporate landlords have other investments, often bigger portfolios of market rate apartments that they can offset the losses of the rent stabilized properties with. So as a result, you've had this growing presence of corporate ownership while the individual ownership shrinks. Do you have a sense of whether this shift will benefit tenants or hurt them? I think there are arguments on both sides, right? Like corporate owners do have the resources to keep up their buildings. They'll have these apps where you can make a tenant request and they'll get to you hopefully soon.

9:05So in that sense, the operational efficiency of a corporate owner could be beneficial for tenants. But I spoke to a representative from a tenant advocacy group who basically said, small landlords, they often live on the first floor of the building. They know their tenants just by nature of having lived in the neighborhood for sometimes decades. This tenant's rights representative said, you know, a smaller landlord is more willing to work with the renter if they fall behind on their rent payments before just immediately evicting them than potentially corporate owners. That was WSJ reporter Rebecca Picciotto.

9:40Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks so much for having me.

9:46President Trump said in a press conference today that Iran didn't have many missiles left and that the U.S. was striking the manufacturing plants where Iran made missiles and drones. This is a paper tiger that we're dealing with now. It wasn't a paper tiger two weeks ago. It's a paper tiger now. As you heard on this morning's show, the president wants other countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping waterway that Iran has effectively shut down. Trump said today that several countries have told him they're on the way to help reopen the strait. He didn't name the countries, but then also said that the U.S.

10:18didn't need the help. Most U.S. allies haven't agreed to take part. Germany has rejected Trump's call for other countries to deploy warships to protect the strait. Japan and Australia have indicated that they're unlikely to send ships. And the U.K. and France said that they're considering possible action but haven't made any commitments. In the meantime, a handful of oil tankers have made it through. A Pakistani-flagged crude oil tanker has crossed the strait while broadcasting its location, the first non-Iranian vessel known to have done so since the start of the conflict. An Indian government official said that two India-flagged tankers also passed safely through the strait over the weekend with their signals off.

10:57Efforts to restore the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf lifted U.S. stocks, while oil prices gave up some of their recent gains. Futures for Brent crude, the international benchmark, retreated back to just over$100 a barrel. Still, the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. has risen 25 percent to$3.72 a gallon since the day before the war began. All three U.S. indexes closed higher today, with the Nasdaq leading the gains and finishing up 1.2 percent. All 11 sectors of the S &P were up. You heard about NVIDIA's developers conference earlier in our show today, and the chip maker added 1.6 % in trading.

11:38And finally, amid all the turmoil in the world, there's at least one positive trend. Crime in the U.S. is way down. Last year, the homicide rate fell to at least a 125-year low. Other reported crimes, such as robbery and theft, have also continued to drop after the COVID-19 pandemic. So, of course, you're probably wondering, what's driving this? Theories range from an influx of federal funding during the pandemic to stepped-up police enforcement. Some also attribute the trend to longer-term societal shifts, like drinking less and spending more time alone. But some researchers say that victimization surveys don't line up with the fall in reported crime.

12:17So the real picture may be a bit less clear for some offenses. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bansi and Pierre Bien-Aimé with supervising producer Tali Arbel. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

12:47What's driving the markets this week? What's on investors' minds as they look ahead? Find out on the markets podcast from Goldman Sachs, a breakdown of market moves and macro signals in 10 minutes or less. The markets podcast from Goldman Sachs. Listen now.