The Fed’s infamous Jackson Hole Symposium kicks off. Central bankers from around the world gather in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Thursday for the Kansas City Fed’s annual three-day symposium, which this year is titled “Challenges for Monetary Policy.” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will give the keynote speech Friday morning. The event seemingly comes at the perfect time, as the Federal Reserve last month cut interest rates for the first time in over a decade. Minutes from the Fed’s July meeting out Wednesday showed officials saw the cut as a “mid-cycle adjustment.”
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China warns new tariffs will take the trade war to the next level. The U.S. is set to levy tariffs on $100 billion worth of Chinese goods beginning Sept. 1, and doing so would “lead to an escalation of economic and trade friction,” said Chinese Ministry of Commerce Spokesman Gao Feng at a news briefing on Thursday. The comments come one day after the Pentagon said watching China was its “number one priority” due to its theft of intellectual property and its attempts to push the “push the United States out of [the Indo-Pacific] theater.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook has a fan in the White House. “Others go out and hire very expensive consultants, Tim Cook calls Donald Trump directly,” the president said Wednesday while taking questions from reporters. Cook last week raised concerns to the president about how Apple is subject to tariffs, but its South Korean rival Samsung is not.
Sean Spicer is embroiled in a “Dancing with the Stars” controversy. The casting of former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has received pushback from staffers at ABC, with host Tom Bergeron saying he hoped the season would be “free of inevitably divisive bookings from ANY party affiliations.” Spicer says he is seeing his participation as “an opportunity to have some fun.”
Bezos parties backstage with Katy Perry and Lil Nas X. The Amazon CEO threw a post Prime Day concert for 45,000 employees at Seattle’s CenturyLink Stadium on Tuesday evening and was seen with Katy Perry and Lil Nas X, TMZ reports. The event featured Perry’s first-ever live performance of the hit song “Never Really Over.”
