🌏 Staying put

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ByQuartz Staff

PublishedMay 7, 2025

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Image for article titled 🌏 Staying put — Photo: Andrew Harnik (Getty Images)

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Yuan small step. China’s central bank cut interest rates to bolster its economy amid continuing trade tensions and global market volatility.

Holding pattern

The Federal Reserve stood pat on interest rates Wednesday, continuing to hold the benchmark range steady at 4.25–4.5%, sticking to a cautious stance as it juggles sticky inflation and a cooling U.S. economy. But this wasn’t business as usual — Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned of rising risks in regard to both inflation and unemployment, and he gestured toward the possibility of stagflation.

Powell said the U.S. economy is in “solid shape” but admitted that his gut says “uncertainty about the path of the economy is extremely elevated.” That’s largely because of tariffs.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — including a massive 145% duty on Chinese imports — aren’t officially factored into the Fed’s decisions, but Powell acknowledged their potential to complicate the inflation picture. If those price shocks prove temporary, the Fed may hold course. But if they stick? Well…

The Fed will “wait and see and watch” as the tariffs change things over the coming weeks and months. But with growth slowing, inflation lingering, and tariffs looming, waiting might not get easier.

Powell remains focused on inflation and employment, not the president’s social media tirades directed at him. But the Fed chair’s path forward looks anything but easy. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on how tariffs could force the Fed’s hand.

Siri, not sorry

Apple may be Google’s biggest customer — and, increasingly, its biggest threat.

During testimony on Wednesday in the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Alphabet, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, revealed that the company is exploring how to fold AI-powered search into its browser, Safari. That news sent Alphabet’s stock tumbling 8%, and for good reason: Now, an era where Google remains the default search engine is far from guaranteed.

Apple is already in talks with startup Perplexity, and Cue said that company, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude could be part of a future where users select their AI engine of choice for searches. Cue said those tools aren’t perfect yet, but they’re already good enough that “people will switch.”

Meanwhile, Apple still collects upward of $20 billion a year from Alphabet for making Google the default search engine on its iPhones — a deal that’s partially at the heart of the federal government’s antitrust case.

Cue didn’t suggest that Apple’s potential AI-powered search engines would dethrone Google as the default any time soon. But Apple, quietly, might be building a future where users — and not Google — get to decide how they search. Quartz’s Niamh Rowe has more on how Apple could reshape Google’s bread and butter.