Trump’s Beef With Inflation

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Luke Vargas (0:33)

The White House takes aim at soaring beef prices as food inflation rears its head. Plus, President Trump signals potential government resistance to Netflix's $72 billion Warner Brothers takeover.

Hannah Erin Lang (0:46)

It's a lot of markets here, so we'll have to see what happens.

Luke Vargas (0:50)

And the Supreme Court considers the president's power to reshape federal agencies. It's Monday, December 8th. 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. We are exclusively reporting that a group of President Trump's top advisors are looking to tackle soaring beef prices as the administration ramps up efforts to combat food inflation. Steak and ground beef have hit record highs this year, but as economics reporter Chelsea Delaney explains, there's no easy way to bring down prices, which have climbed steadily since 2021 And that inflation is becoming a bit of an economic headache for the Trump administration.

Chelsea Delaney (1:33)

A lot of food prices are continuing to climb quite a lot. So it's not just beef, it's also bananas, it's coffee prices, which have gone up about 40% in the past year. And this is really frustrating to a lot of people because the narrative coming into this year was that inflation was going to keep going down. And then it's stagnated and some of this has to do with tariffs. We've seen the Trump administration roll back some tariffs on some of these food items. But for a lot of consumers, food prices are a lot more expensive than they were before the pandemics. And so that's weighing on a lot of consumers, especially on the lower end of the income range.

Luke Vargas (2:09)

And Chelsea says that that disproportionate impact of higher food prices is creating a two track economy.

Chelsea Delaney (2:15)

It's been five years now of really high inflation for American consumers, and that's really starting to dent. What we're seeing is the economy is sort of splitting, and it's the low and middle income Americans are becoming more pessimistic about the economy. They're losing hope that inflation is going to be defeated. And that will eventually filter through into their spending habits. On the other hand, you have high income Americans which are continuing to see these big gains in the stock market, their jobs are doing well. And so yeah, we're really seeing the American economy split among those income lines.

Luke Vargas (2:48)

On Saturday, Trump called for the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to create task forces to examine whether anti-competitive behavior exists in US food supply chains. The Justice Department has also launched a new anti-trust investigation into meatpacking companies. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments today in a case testing President Trump's power over federal agencies. The case emerged after Trump fired a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission in March contradicting statutes that say certain officials can only be removed if they neglect their duties or commit other misconduct. A broad ruling in the president's favor could enable him to intensify his mission of directing agencies to implement his agenda. A ruling is expected by July.

Turning overseas, a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia crumbled this morning. The Thai military said two of its soldiers were injured yesterday in small arms fire from Cambodian troops, leading it to conduct airstrikes today on targets in Cambodia. Journal Southeast Asia Bureau Chief Gabrielle Steinhauser says the flare-up risks restarting a long-running border dispute.

Gabrielle Steinhauser (4:00)

At this point, neither side appears to be in de-escalation mode. The Cambodians, for their part, are still saying that they want to stick to the deal. They want peace. The Thais are saying that that's not true, and they started the whole thing. What I'm really watching for is what will President Trump do when he wakes up. He traveled all the way to Kuala Lumpur just six weeks ago for the ASEAN summit. He oversaw the signing of this extended ceasefire agreement according to some peace deal according to others and took a lot of credit for his role in pressuring the countries. The main way he pressured Thailand and Cambodia was that at the time he said that he would stop any negotiations on lowering very high tariff rates on both Cambodia and Thailand until they stopped fighting. And they did.