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|  |  | Thursday, September 18, 2025 | |  | | Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Nvidia’s chips are getting banned in
China. A recent report says Beijing is telling its top tech firms not to buy Nvidia’s U.S.-made AI chips, a decision CEO Jensen Huang said he’s “disappointed” with. | Big pharma flinches over Trump’s tariff threats. Eli Lilly and GSK are the latest to announce they’re pouring billions into U.S. manufacturing as they try to shield themselves from levies on imported medicines. | The SEC just delayed disclosure deadlines — again. Hedge funds get a major reprieve as new Form PF disclosure rules get delayed for a third time, pushing potential compliance out to at least October 2026. | Jerry is no longer part of Ben & Jerry’s.
The ice cream company co-founder said he’s quitting the company because parent company Unilever won’t allow Ben & Jerry’s to speak out about world events. | | | SPONSORED |  | It’s not tech stocks or crypto… it’s gold | Gold is up 40% this
year, reminding investors why it’s long been a safe bet in uncertain times. Now, with markets on edge, more investors are adding gold to diversify and protect their portfolios. | | | CUTTING IT CLOSE | The Federal Reserve finally reached for the scissors. On Wednesday, central bank chief Jerome Powell announced a 25-basis-point cut — the first of the year — bringing rates down to 4-4.25%. Officially, the move was about easing pressure on a job market that just posted 22,000 payrolls. Unofficially, it came with President Donald Trump breathing fire about “TOO LATE!” cuts, a new Fed governor who doubles as his economic adviser, and a White House lawsuit to remove Fed governor Lisa Cook. The backdrop looked less like
monetary policy and more like a political cage match.
The famous “dot plot” gave the game away. One policymaker wanted no cuts at all. Another — widely believed to be Stephen Miran, the first dual-hatted Fed governor and White House adviser in nearly a century — wanted to go twice as far, calling for a 50-basis-point slash. Powell tried to play referee, insisting (perhaps futilely) that politics belongs elsewhere in Washington. The dots, though, had
fingerprints all over them.
Markets, meanwhile, barely blinked. The S&P 500 stayed near record highs with traders already betting on more cuts in October and December. Inflation is still above target, unemployment is edging up, and the labor market is shrinking under revisions — the makings of a “jobless expansion.” But if Wall Street has learned anything in the Trump era, it’s that bad news for workers is often good news for stocks. Rate cuts are supposed to soothe the economy.
Right now, they might just be greasing the ticker. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the latest from the cutting room floor. | | WATT A COMEBACK | Larry Ellison used to be the punchline of Silicon Valley — a leather-jacketed database mogul who mocked the cloud as “gibberish” while Amazon, Microsoft, and Google built fortunes on it. He was the yacht guy, the island
guy, the relic who made billions but missed out on the zeitgeist. But then the AI compute crunch hit, and suddenly the least fashionable man in tech had the only thing anyone wanted: power, racks, and contracts that actually guaranteed both.
Oracle just dropped a number so absurd it looked like a government budget line item: $455 billion in signed obligations, up 359% from last year. Wall Street spat out its coffee, the stock had its best day since
1992, and for one surreal afternoon, Ellison leapfrogged Elon Musk as the world’s richest man. Ellison’s comeback wasn’t about making Oracle cool — it was about making Oracle unavoidable, the grumpy landlord of the AI boom renting out compute the way utilities rent out electrons.
Ellison’s reinvention is built on substations and signatures, not software magic. Investors now talk about Oracle less like a cloud company and more like a utility with a console — one whose marquee tenant
may or may not be OpenAI. The risks are real: one whale account, billions in capex, and a utility grid that may or may not keep up. But for now, Ellison has pulled off the rarest pivot in tech: not dazzling people into loving him, but boring them into needing him. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on the mogul who plugged back into relevance. | | | SPONSORED | | It’s not tech stocks or crypto… it’s gold | Gold is up 40% this year, reminding investors why it’s long been a safe bet in uncertain times. Now, with markets on edge, more investors are adding gold to diversify and protect their portfolios. | | | MORE FROM QUARTZ |
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