Tuesday, January 13, 2026 · 129 newsletters

Trump Goes After Powell

powell-probe · venezuela · ice-shooting · apple-gemini · ai-agents · china · vision-pro · credit-cap

Published on Tuesday, January 13, 2026.

Pulled from 131 newsletters sent to read@madho.net over the weekend and yesterday. The Powell story ate everything; here's the signal cut from the noise, organized by trend.

The Big Macro Story: A Criminal Probe of the Fed Chair, and Markets Shrugged

Every business and politics writer led with the same thing today: the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas, ostensibly tied to his congressional testimony on the headquarters renovation. Three living former Fed chairs (Yellen, Bernanke, Greenspan) plus four former Treasury secretaries signed a joint letter warning the move resembles "how monetary policy is made in emerging markets with weak institutions," per Bloomberg. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today reproduced Powell's response in full: "The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."

The "why" was the dominant frame. Matt at Crooked framed it bluntly: Trump promised on the trail to "immediately bring prices down" and instead launched a legal assault on the one person with the most direct power to fight inflation. Ian Millhiser at Vox argued the 2024 presidential immunity ruling is the load-bearing wall; without it, this probe would be unimaginable. Matt Stoller put the Powell move alongside Trump's new attacks on credit card companies, big landlords, and defense contractors as a single political pivot from "Make America Wealthy Again" to "affordability" after Democrats romped in the 2025 elections.

Why markets didn't panic. JVL at The Bulwark offered the sharpest theory: Trump is a real-estate guy and Big Tech is propped up by cheap money, so a market beholden to the Magnificent Seven (now 34% of S&P 500 value) won't object to politically-coerced rate cuts as long as the result is a return to ZIRP. Alex Wilhelm at Cautious Optimism catalogued the day's other Trump moves with characteristic exhaustion: ICE rioting, Trump claiming to be the head of Venezuela, threats to dissolve NATO to steal Greenland from Denmark.

Side plotlines. Trump also floated a 10% cap on credit card interest rates on Truth Social, sending Visa, Mastercard, and Capital One tumbling, per Chartr. Analysts at Jefferies told Chartr there's "no executive authority" to do this, but bank stocks sold off anyway. Gold and silver both hit record highs on Powell news. Bankless ran "Trump vs. Powell" as its lead.

Venezuela: A War for Oil Where the Oil Companies Won't Come

This was the day's second-biggest cluster. Paul Krugman had the most pointed piece: Trump convened oil executives in the East Room on Friday expecting a chorus of praise for his Venezuela adventure; instead, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told him Venezuela is "uninvestable" under current conditions. Trump responded on Sunday by saying he was "inclined" to block Exxon from investing there. Krugman's kicker: "Trump launched a war for oil without talking to the oil companies first." The same day, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned 20,000 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling and received zero bids.

Gov Brief reported Trump signed a national emergency order Friday night to shield $2.5 billion in Venezuelan oil from legal claims, with officials saying the US will manage those sales "indefinitely." Sunday, Trump posted a meme calling himself "Acting President of Venezuela" and shared one suggesting Rubio should be president of Cuba. He's branding it the "Donroe Doctrine." Pirate Wires Daily noted the Philadelphia sheriff is now publicly threatening to arrest ICE agents in her city; the rhetoric of civil-war agitation is becoming bipartisan. SpyTalk ran a separate piece on Iran's largest unrest since 2022 (roughly 540 dead, 10,000 arrested), with Trump warning he may intervene militarily.

ICE and Renee Good: A Story About What Cameras Can and Cannot Prove

Judd Legum at Popular Information had the definitive accounting: Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother, was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on January 7. Multiple bystander videos show Ross was standing in front of the vehicle when he fired the first shot, then to the side for the second and third. Trump publicly claimed Good "violently, willfully, and viciously ran over" the agent; the video evidence shows the car never touched him. The FBI is blocking state law enforcement from running an independent investigation while selectively leaking to partisan outlets. Minnesota officials are calling it a cover-up.

The most interesting companion piece came from Anni Sternisko, Dominic Packer, and Jay Van Bavel at The Power of Us, who used the Good footage to explain why high-definition multi-angle video keeps failing to settle disputes. The eye captures only 1 to 2 degrees of the visual field in high resolution; the rest is brain-stitched, and social identity reliably shapes what gets stitched together. "What we confidently have 'seen with our own eyes' is not a perfect replica of the world." Lincoln Square's Max Burns flagged the polling: "this radicalization of ICE is staggeringly unpopular," and protests honoring Good erupted in cities across the country over the weekend.

AI: Apple Picks Google, and the "Boring Infrastructure" Thesis Hardens

The day's tech bombshell, per Techmeme: Apple signed a multi-year deal to use Gemini and Google Cloud to power Siri's features in 2026, with Apple saying Google's tech "provides the most capable foundation" for Apple Foundation Models. Elon Musk immediately complained this is "an unreasonable concentration of power for Google" (they also have Android and Chrome). The subtext, as @signulll put it on X: "there was zero chance Apple would ever leverage OpenAI long term on iOS." OpenAI's strategy of competing with every platform simultaneously is starting to cost it.

The "boring infrastructure" thesis is forming. Tina He at Every argued that in a world where AI agents fire vendors at 2:17 a.m. based on ruthless economics, the companies that win aren't the ones with the best models; they're the ones that own the boring, essential plumbing AI must flow through but cannot replace. Guillermo Flor at The AI Opportunity made the parallel case for physical AI: software was the warm-up, and humanoid robots are becoming "labor as an API." Startup Archive excerpted Elon's latest Diamandis interview, where he predicts more Optimus robot surgeons than human surgeons within three years.

The Vision Pro update is brutal. Ben Thompson used the first live sporting event broadcast in Vision Pro to argue Apple still doesn't understand its own product: the experience could be amazing, and Apple actively ruins it. Read alongside the Gemini deal, the picture of Apple as a maintenance-mode company gets sharper.

Regulation arrives. Per Snacks, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed to "take action" against Grok after a third-party analysis found X is generating thousands of nonconsensually undressed images per hour. The UK's Internet Watch Foundation has also flagged sexualized images of children produced by the tool. This may be the first real test of whether a major economy will rein in a major AI company.

Fintech and Strategy: Risk Cannot Be Destroyed, Only Transferred

A surprisingly cohesive cluster of long-form writing. Matt Brown at Matrix wrote my favorite piece of the day: the thermodynamics of financial services. Risk, like energy, cannot be destroyed; only transferred or transformed. Fintechs that reduce both cost and friction without understanding which form of risk they just inherited are how blowups happen. Square traded underwriting risk for fraud and chargeback risk; the question is always whether the transformation is intentional.

Dwayne Gefferie made the adjacent point for PSPs: "Payments got cheaper. Complexity did not." When you can buy "good enough" acquiring from half the market, you don't win by adding more "good enough." Matt Klein at The Overshoot ran a long piece arguing Japan may have finally exited its post-bubble stagnation, which would explain the yen-rate disconnect more benignly than the "debt unsustainability" frame.

China: A Cold Hebei Winter and a Feminist's Middle East Trip

Trivium China led with rural Hebei villagers shivering through the winter because of campaign-style coal-heating bans, a valuable case study in what happens when top-down quantitative targets override local sense, gas subsidies get phased out, and no single authority owns emissions, pricing, and rural livability simultaneously. Tech Buzz China had the Temu Phase 3 story: at Pinduoduo's December shareholders' meeting, co-chairman Zhao Jiazhen said they'll "recreate a Pinduoduo" over the next three years by heavily investing in China's supply chain, signaling a shift from cross-border arbitrage to deep supply-chain reinvestment. Elephant Room's Biyi had the most arresting essay of the day: a Han feminist CEO accompanying Chinese entrepreneurs on a "Digging for Gold in the Middle East" trip through Riyadh, Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, beginning with the moment her business-class flight refused to serve her a glass of champagne.

Politics & Democracy: "Well, I Should Have"

Democracy Docket and Marc Elias both led with the same exchange: a reporter reminded Trump that after 2020 he had threatened to use the National Guard to seize ballots, and Trump responded "Well, I should have," only adding that he didn't know if the Guard was "sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats." Elias treated it as the lead indicator for 2026.

NYC and Lifestyle: Nurses on Strike, Family-Tied Real Estate, and the TikTok Girlies Vote

Gothamist had two big locals: nearly 15,000 NYC nurses began a strike at Manhattan and Bronx hospitals (reps say it could last weeks), and property records reveal family ties in the bankruptcy sale of more than 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments owned by Pinnacle Group. Emily Sundberg at Feed Me reported that WSJ filled its newly created "talent coach" role, part of a broader trend (NYT, The Cut, CNN all hiring video-first talent). Casey Lewis at After School tallied 1,000+ TikTok "ins and outs" videos to map 2026 girlie consensus: messiness over perfectionism, a retreat from AI/digital toward analog, "heteroflexible" as the fastest-growing sexuality of 2025, dating apps becoming the new LinkedIn, and 75,000 Redditors now dating ChatGPT.

Grace Notes

Anand Giridharadas shared a photo essay from India as a "timeline cleanse." Drew Nieporent, the restaurateur behind Tribeca Grill and Nobu, did the Monday Media Diet at Why is this interesting?. Ernie at Tedium ran a beautiful long piece on the history of x86 virtualization and why it shouldn't have worked. Tom at Marketing Ideas tied the Rippling subway ad next to NYC's new mayor and Maduro's Nike tracksuit into the same lesson: brands that don't experiment have a 0% chance of being lucky. Pirate Wires had a long Mike Solana feature on California's "Billionaire Wealth Tax" ballot proposition and a late-November amendment that would treat founders with super-voting shares as owning the company in proportion to their voting rights, not their equity. David Callaway set up next week's Davos as Trump's first return since 2020, with European leaders shifting from appeasement to "hesitant opposition."

Three Takeaways for You

The Powell story is a regime-change story, not a one-off. When three living former Fed chairs and four former Treasury secretaries from both parties sign a joint letter saying America is starting to look like an emerging market with weak institutions, that's not a partisan complaint, that's a credibility cliff. Watch the dollar and the long end of the curve more than the S&P this week.

The "boring infrastructure" thesis is the most useful AI frame I read today. Tina He's argument that AI agents will fire your vendor at 2:17 a.m. is what makes the Apple-Gemini deal interesting: Apple just outsourced the model layer and kept the on-device privacy and distribution layer, which is exactly the "essential plumbing AI must flow through" bet. Operators should be asking themselves which layer of their stack survives that 2:17 a.m. evaluation.

If you only read three pieces, I'd suggest: Matt Brown's "The Thermodynamics of Risk" (the cleanest mental model of the week), Paul Krugman's "The Ignominious Death of Drill, Baby, Drill" (the funniest summary of what's actually happening with Venezuela), and The Power of Us on video evidence (the most important piece of social-science writing this week, because every political fight of 2026 will be a fight over what video does and doesn't show).