What a Weaker Dollar Means for Businesses and the World

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0:33What a sliding U.S. 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 Qatar really frightened a lot of leaders in the region and led them to question whether they can rely on the U.S. for their security. It's Wednesday, January 28th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

1:17The U.S. dollar is steadying this morning after sliding yesterday in the biggest one-day decline since April's global tariff turmoil. Stock futures are also gaining ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision today, where the central bank is expected to hold rates steady after three consecutive cuts. Here's Journal Finance editor Alex Frankos. The dollar fell yesterday and has been falling pretty much since Donald Trump came into office a year ago, but took another leg down at the beginning of this year, and it's now at a four-year low against other major currencies like the euro, the pound, the Swiss franc, the Australian dollar, the Chinese yuan.

1:53So it's a really interesting backdrop. We got the Fed meeting. The Fed's not expected to do anything, but it has been cutting rates. And that plays into dollar weakness when the Fed is cutting interest rates that makes it slightly less attractive to own dollars. That's part of it. But the bigger thing that economists and currency traders are talking about is the geopolitics. You know, we start the year with Venezuela, with Greenland, you know, threats of new tariffs against Canada, Korea, and all these things are very destabilizing. Speaking in Iowa yesterday, President Trump said he wasn't concerned about the dollar.

2:26And 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.

3:01It'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.

3:17Japan's SoftBank 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 by the end of the first quarter in order to help fuel its growth plans. NewsCorp, 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 H200 chips to Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance. The first approval covers several hundred thousand H200 chips worth around$10 billion, with Chinese authorities expected to rubber stamp more imports of the advanced chips in the coming months.

4:02And NVIDIA's success has been a boon for suppliers, like memory chipmaker SK Hynix, 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 chip-making 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.

4:33Two 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 Malson says the announcements from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are a foreign policy 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.

5:20They are opposed to Iranian influence, but they're also concerned about the fallout from any of these attacks and the risk of a wider war in the region. Jared told us that regional powers are reconsidering ties with the U.S. and the value of its defense guarantees following attacks on Qatar in the wake of last year's 12-day war between Israel and Iran, in which the U.S. also targeted Iran's foremost nuclear site. 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 U.S. for their security.

5:58The Trump administration extended Qatar a new security guarantee, almost like NATO-like protections. And that's going to be tested if the U.S. does attack Iran, where the Iranians have specifically warned, we've reported, they warned Oman, the UAE, Turkey, and Qatar, the U.S. bases in the region, would come under attack if they're attacked. The White House has said Trump is monitoring the situation in Iran very closely, with a U.S. aircraft carrier arriving in the region yesterday. Coming up, more aftermath from last weekend's killing of Alex Preddy, as President Trump sends his border czar to Minnesota, and the administration faces a federal court deadline to justify its deployments to the state.

6:42That's after the break.

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7:19Minnesota 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.

8:02Hours 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 Preddy last weekend, a Border Patrol agent and a Customs and Border Patrol officer. That's according to a preliminary DHS report into Preddy'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 Preddy, and it maintained that Preddy had violently resisted officers.

8:44Preddy's killing has ignited bipartisan scrutiny of immigration enforcement operations and calls for an investigation, including from Republican Senate Majority Leader Tom Thune. The death of Alex Preddy was a tragedy, and there should be a full and impartial investigation into the shooting. I'm glad that the president is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota, and I hope that his arrival will help restore order to the situation. Thune was referring to President Trump sending border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to reset the federal government's relationship with the state. Seen as likely to favor a more targeted approach to immigration operations, Homan faces the challenge of delivering enough arrests to fulfill the president's promises of mass deportation.

9:30Well, that potential shift to a lower-key strategy in the state isn't winning over congressional Democrats, who are demanding that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem step down, among them Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Kristi Noem is a liar. She's vicious. She's also incompetent. Donald Trump must fire her at once before another American is killed under her watch. Two Republican senators have joined Democrats in calling for Noem to step down, a prospect 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.

10:17Minnesota 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 Preddy 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.

10:50You 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 Freddie 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.

11:25And 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.

11:53We've seen these videos in Burge 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 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.

12:23And 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.

12:57citizens. 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 for 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?

13:28It's like, what does the federal government presence look like here going forward? Lots to be negotiated here, and we'll keep monitoring the situation, of course. Laura Casisto is the Journal's Deputy Law Bureau Chief. Laura, thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And that's it for What's News for this Wednesday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer was Sandra Killhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.

14:03Enterprises are already creating efficiencies with agentic AI, particularly in areas like finance, HR, and IT, says Jason Gerzadas, CEO of Deloitte U.S. Those will continue to proliferate and strengthen, and it'll change the work that gets done, and work will increasingly be delivered through agentic capabilities. Gerzadas believes the most transformative impacts of agentic systems are still to come. It will fuel innovation. It will fuel the pivot into market creation, market diversification strategies that will open up new markets to clients and to organizations who are looking for growth and looking for differentiated access to new markets, which I think is the most exciting thing.

14:43Visit Deloitte.com to learn how your enterprise can help successfully leverage agentic AI. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes. Custom content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.