Like David Bowie once did, Federal Reserve Chair nominee Kevin Warsh is calling for ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Or maybe a Talking Heads “Burning Down the House” reference is more apt, depending on which Wall Street-er you’re talking to.

During Warsh’s confirmation hearing last week, President Donald Trump’s pick for the top job hinted at an out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new approach to monetary policy that would upend some long-standing architecture of the Fed’s decision-making. It hasn’t been an easy road. Warsh has faced grilling from lawmakers (Sen. Elizabeth Warren called him Trump’s “sock puppet”) over concerns of Fed independence. Warsh promised that Trump had never asked him to commit to cutting interest rates and that he would never agree to do so, though someone should probably tell the president that.

It seems likely Warsh will end up succeeding Jerome Powell, the current chair. A barrier was Republican Sen. Thom Tillis delaying the confirmation until the Department of Justice dropped a criminal investigation of Powell related to renovations of the Fed’s headquarters, which it did on Friday.

Tight Focus

Warsh, who worked closely with former Chair Ben Bernanke as a member of the Fed’s board of governors from 2006 to 2011, appears to want a narrow Fed mandate. When Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty asked about the Fed’s “mission creep,” pointing to climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion-related work from regional reserve banks, Warsh said the Fed should stick “to its knitting.”

He’s also said it’s time to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet, which has ballooned to $6.7 trillion as the central bank bought up mortgage-backed securities and Treasury bonds aggressively in the years following the Great Recession. Warsh has long been skeptical of quantitative easing, once calling it “reverse Robin Hood” in that it gave to the rich and took from the poor. That’s not the only change he’s hoping for:

• Bernanke and his successors, Janet Yellen and Powell, welcomed the public into the Fed’s thinking via post-meeting press conferences and forward-looking guidance. It’s a tradition Warsh didn’t explicitly say he would nix when asked, although he indicated he thinks his potential colleagues may talk too much.
• Warsh also favors replacing the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the core price index for personal consumption expenditures that excludes volatile food and energy prices. He wants to measure inflation by filtering out one-time price changes due to surprises like geopolitical events.

Reality Check: Whether Warsh would actually be able to get all this done if he takes Powell’s spot is unclear, as is how much it would help. Bank of America economist Aditya Bhave told CNBC, for instance, that Warsh’s proposal for using a new inflation gauge could mean minor spikes in inflation, such as those caused by food and energy price movements, sneak into the new reading and push inflation higher than it is in the current view.

Apple’s entering a new era 50 years after its founding. Whether it’ll be a midlife crisis or a renaissance will depend on its new leader.

After 15 years at the helm, during which Apple’s market cap rose from $350 billion to $4 trillion, Tim Cook will transition later this year to executive chairman, and John Ternus will take his place as CEO. Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs, brought his vision and a suite of products that’ve stood the test of time, even if today’s iMacs look a little different from their colorful clamshell ancestors. Cook turned that vision into an uber-profitable business.

But while Cook’s praised for his financial finesse, he’s been criticized for a lack of product innovation, with Apple recently struggling to roll out competitive AI capabilities. Ternus, who’s currently the senior vice president of hardware engineering, could change that.

The Task of Thinking Differently

Apple’s current and previous CEOs both cultivated the company according to their strengths. With Ternus, that could mean applying his tech-spertise as Apple’s head hardware exec to product innovation in the AI era:

• Considering Ternus’ timing, his first time taking the stage as CEO will likely be to introduce the next generation of iPhones this fall. The lineup’s rumored to include a long-awaited foldable device to compete with offerings from Samsung and China’s Huawei. Ternus has already begun to emerge from Cook’s shadow, leading media efforts to introduce the $599 MacBook Neo.
• Manufacturing the products Ternus will soon be the face of could get more complicated as Apple tries to extract its supply chain from China. As of early last month, Bloomberg reported that one in four iPhones was made in India. But while iPhones can be assembled in the South Asian nation, advanced components still count on China’s industrial expertise. Cook started the shift away from Chinese dependence and will be counting on Ternus to keep it going.

Getting Siri-us: Despite Apple’s struggle to meaningfully integrate AI into its products (a slightly smarter Siri doesn’t cut it), Apple’s hardware has benefited from the AI boom. Mac Minis sold out last week as buyers scooped up the compact PCs to run OpenClaw. Looking ahead, Apple’s working on a small wearable AI pin that might help it dominate the emerging market for ambient AI devices. While OpenAI is working on a wearable device of its own, and Meta has its smart glasses, the advanced supply network Cook labored to build could give Apple an edge in getting advanced devices to market.

Like everyone else in 2026, AT&T is suddenly all about the fiber. It is, quite literally, the mature thing to do.

In its earnings call last week, the telecom giant touted its robust fiber network rollout while downplaying slower phone subscriber growth. The latter trend is bedeviling the broader US telecom industry as the domestic cellular market matures, though Verizon reported 55,000 postpaid phone net additions in the first quarter today, the first growth at the start of the yeart since 2013.

Lowering the Bar

The world may be more online than ever but, as one industry insider recently told CNBC, Big Telecom has increasingly been reduced to the “dumb pipes” of the digital realm, stuck spending big to expand the infrastructure used by platform providers to garner massive profits. Worse, platforms like WhatsApp and Zoom are actively disrupting the SMS and voice call services that were once major revenue generators.

The convergence of such headwinds has led Big Telecom to turn quarterly earnings reports into a new type of “hide the ball” bloodsport:

• During a presentation in February, T-Mobile CEO Peter Osvaldik announced the company will no longer report postpaid phone subscriber additions every quarter. The move shocked analysts but kicked off a trend.
• Verizon recently said it would stop reporting separate revenue figures for wireless and wirelines or separate business and consumer subscriber figures.

“What is perhaps most extraordinary is that all three of the Big Three are making major changes to their reporting at exactly the same time,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in a recent report.

Can You Hear AI Now? The new disclosure methods are hardly the only change at Verizon since CEO Dan Schulman took over the top job in October. Following his appointment, the company quickly began laying off 13,000 employees amid Schulman’s broader plan to cut $9 billion in costs. The new boss is also an avowedly enthusiastic early AI adopter; according to the Wall Street Journal, he went as far as telling staff members to familiarize themselves with the technology by having it write their obituaries.