Federal Reserve officials are worried that President-elect Trump's trade and immigration policies will stoke inflation, according to minutes from their latest policy meeting released on Wednesday.

Why it matters: Higher tariffs and mass deportations could make America's bumpy battle against inflation more difficult. In that scenario, the Fed could keep interest rates higher for longer — and put the central bank on a collision course with Trump.

What they're saying: Fed officials agreed during a two-day policy meeting last month that inflation would continue to decline toward its 2% target. But that's now more uncertain, and the process might take longer than previously thought.

• Progress in bringing inflation down has already stalled and Trump's policies look more inflationary than not.
• "As reasons for this judgment, participants cited recent stronger-than-expected readings on inflation and the likely effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy," the minutes say.
• Officials also said supply chain disruptions from geopolitical events, strong consumer spending and quicker home price increases were other potential reasons why inflation might be harder to beat.

The big picture: The Fed lowered interest rates by a quarter percentage point at the end of its Dec. 17-18 meeting. But new economic projections released alongside that decision showed the median Fed official expected just two rate cuts in 2025 — half as many as anticipated just three months earlier.

• The projections also showed higher inflation for a longer period than previously thought. At a press conference, Fed chair Jerome Powell told reporters that some officials had factored potential impacts from Trump's policies into those projections.

The minutes released on Wednesday don't mention Trump by name, but they do show the extent to which officials fretted over the upside risks to inflation — even as details about potential trade and immigration policies remain fuzzy.

• All Fed officials agreed that "uncertainty about the scope, timing, and economic effects of potential changes in policies affecting foreign trade and immigration was elevated."
• Notably, a few officials said it could be hard to assess whether any upward pressure on inflation will be fleeting or stick around.
• "[I]t might be difficult to distinguish more persistent influences on inflation from potentially temporary ones, such as those stemming from changes in trade policy that could lead to shifts in the level of prices," the minutes show.

The other side: One Fed governor, Christopher Waller, said in a speech on Wednesday that he expects further rate cuts in 2025 and that tariffs wouldn't notably stoke inflation.

• "If, as I expect, tariffs do not have a significant or persistent effect on inflation, they are unlikely to affect my view of appropriate monetary policy," Waller said.

The bottom line: Trump said interest rates were too high at a press conference on Tuesday — reminiscent of his Fed criticism during his first term.

• No one knows how Trump's policies will weigh on the economy. For now, inflation is no longer on the back-burner for the Fed as it was when the central bank first started cutting rates.

• US special operations forces are shifting their focus after decades of counterterrorism.
• Competition with China and Russia is reshaping how SOF supports the joint force.
• A senior Pentagon official said that special operations is also returning to its "roots."

A senior Pentagon official said this week that the role of US special operations is changing as the US faces increasing competition and challenges from China and Russia.

With the threat of a conflict against a powerful and advanced adversary looming, special operations forces are returning to their "roots," Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said.

The direction of special operations forces (SOF) is adapting to the largest challenges facing the US — a rapidly growing Chinese military and Russian state set on expansion by force.

Maier said during a conversation with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank on Tuesday that SOF is "still doing counterterrorism, crisis response, those have been the persistent missions," but the priority is shifting towards "increasingly where we can support other elements, largely in a support role, for those strategic competition elements."

That means playing a big role in solving challenges facing the joint force, like more modern adaptations to using artificial intelligence, as well as the traditional functions of SOF, such as "being that sensor out there and providing the necessary input to decision makers to better understand a situation," noted Maier, who previously led the Pentagon's Defeat-ISIS Task Force overseeing the campaign across Iraq and Syria that relied heavily on American special operators.

Special operators are the US military's most highly trained troops, the go-to teams for small raids and secretive missions, but they lack the numbers and firepower to go up against larger conventional forces for long.

Much of the US' special operations presence in over 80 countries around the world is focused on working closely with foreign militaries, law enforcement, and embassies to keep a finger on the pulse. For the past 20 years, the US has relied on these forces for some the most unconventional and difficult missions, like teaming with partner forces to fight enemies or running shadowy helicopter assaults to kill or capture key leaders.

Maier said he views it as both a continuation of the counterterrorism and crisis response that SOF has been doing for decades and also a step back to its origins.

"We're going back to the proverbial roots of supporting the joint force with some of the hardest problems against peer adversaries," Maier said.

With the so-called War on Terror, SOF has spent over 20 years operating in counterterrorism and unconventional warfare roles, fighting quietly in a variety of environments across the world and maintaining relationships that provide the US with information on tactics of specific groups and deeper understandings of regional and security issues.

That role is now changing, albeit just as important. In a 2023 article for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, David Ucko, a professor and expert on irregular warfare, argues that leaders in Washington need to examine how to best use SOF for newer challenges against Russia and China. That includes irregular warfare, which is "highly relevant" to strategic competition with China.

But, Ucko notes, special operators fill a particular role in military operations and shouldn't be given missions that other US agencies or groups can also do.

One of the deepest challenges these secretive forces face is the widening surveillance by spy satellites and recon drones.

SOF missions often have multiple objectives like foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare; special operators can, for example, help boost a US ally's defense tactics against a foreign aggressor, such as Taiwan and China.

Allied special forces played critical roles in World War II, shaped by the need for specialization in unconventional missions and innovative tactics, such as sabotage behind enemy lines and disrupting German supply lines. In North Africa, British Special Air Services and Commonwealth Long Range Desert Group commandos aided in disrupting Axis troops deployments and airpower.

During the Cold War, special operators played a role in deterring the Soviet Union's influence, maintaining presence in and relationships with Western Europe and other areas.

All of that historical context is informing SOF's priorities today, as the US faces similar challenges against China and Russia and their activities across the world, Maier said.

"The differences, I think, here are some of the fundamental changes in adversaries' ability to access technology," he added, and their ability to "use different types of techniques than maybe we saw in the Cold War."

Both China and Russia are actively engaged in bolstering their irregular warfare tactics, including reconnaissance, disinformation, electronic warfare, cyberspace and space efforts, and psychological warfare.

In its report on China's military growth over the course of 2023, the Pentagon noted that China is expanding its capabilities towards a vision of future conflict it calls "intelligentized warfare" focused on AI, data, and controlling information spaces.

Other elements, such as China's campaigns in Taiwan to influence domestic politics and opinions on unification, are also notable.

Destructive brush fires are erupting across California as firefighters say there's "no possibility" of containment. The Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, and Woodley fires come as powerful winds slam northwest Los Angeles.

• Whatnot closed a fresh $265 million Series E round at a roughly $5 billion valuation.
• CEO Grant LaFontaine plans to use the funds to add new features for sellers and enter new countries.
• Whatnot is betting that live shopping will eventually be commonplace in the US and other markets.

Investors are betting big that live shopping is here to stay.

Livestream app Whatnot announced on Wednesday that it closed a $265 million Series E funding round, bringing its valuation to around $5 billion.

The round was co-led by Greycroft, DST Global, and Avra Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Durable Capital Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

Whatnot hosts livestreams across categories including fashion, collectibles like sports cards and sneakers, and niche items like vinyl records and "storage unit finds." It makes money by taking a cut of the sales on its platform, which operates in North America and Europe.

Launched in 2019, Whatnot was an early entrant in the US in the live shopping category. Live selling drives hundreds of billions in annual sales in Asia but has been slower to gain adoption in other markets. The category has recently picked up steam in the US, driven in part by the popularity of TikTok Shop, which helped consumers get accustomed to buying from social media and livestreams.

"As consumers get used to purchasing in that format, as sellers start to build better businesses around it and then unlock really good inventory around it, adoption is just going to continue to increase," Whatnot CEO Grant LaFontaine told Business Insider.

Whatnot said it crossed $3 billion in livestream sales last year, roughly double what it pulled in for 2023.

In 2025, Whatnot also stands to benefit if TikTok, one of its biggest competitors, is banned in the US as mandated by a divestment law.

Whatnot's expansion plans in 2025

Whatnot plans to use its new quarter-of-a-billion dollars in funding for marketing, product, and engineering, as well as to support its expansion into new markets like Australia, LaFontaine said.

On the product side, the company wants to improve its merchant tools, including analytics and inventory management, and introduce new selling formats that could make livestreams more effective, he said. It's also investing in improving customer support. It plans to launch more product categories and double down on goods that performed well last year, such as golf items, as well.

Heading into 2025, LaFontaine said he expects the live-shopping phenomenon to lead to the creation of a new class of e-commerce content creators, a trend TikTok has also been driving.

"Just because you're entertaining on YouTube doesn't mean you have all the skills to be good at Whatnot," he said. "Live and social commerce will tend to create a new wave of its own influencers."

Whatnot said it's raised about $746 million in funding since its 2019 launch.

• Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta.
• Its new content-moderation policy is a huge change — and it could be an improvement.
• Mark Zuckerberg's "apology tour" from the past few years seems to be officially over.

Mark Zuckerberg's changes to Meta's content-moderation policies are potentially huge.

To fully understand their gravity, it's useful to look at how Meta got here. And to consider what these changes might actually mean for users: Are they a bow to an incoming Trump administration? Or are they an improvement on a system that's gotten Zuckerberg and Co. into lots of heat before — or a little of both?

Content moderation has always been a pit of despair for Meta. In its blog post announcing the changes Tuesday, Meta's new head of policy, Joel Kaplan, talked about wanting to get back to Facebook's roots in "free speech." Still, those roots contain a series of moderation fires, headaches, and constant adjustments to the platform's policies.

Starting in 2016, moderation troubles just kept coming like a bad "We Didn't Start the Fire" cover. Consider this roundup:

• Fake news.
• Macedonian teens.
• Russian troll farms.
• Hillary Clinton's team blaming Facebook for her loss.
• Mark Zuckerberg responding to that idea by calling it "pretty crazy."
• Cambridge Analytica.
• Alleged manipulation by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
• WhatsApp inciting lynchings in India.
• Facebook Groups spouting health misinformation like making kids drink bleach or DIY skin cancer treatments.
• The Rohingya Muslim genocide.
• COVID-19 misinformation.
• The Hunter Biden laptop story.
• "Stop the Steal" Facebook groups used to organize January 6.
• The Facebook Files and whistleblower leaks about Instagram and teen mental health.

Whatever your political alignment, it seems like Meta has been trapped in a vicious cycle of making a policy — or lacking a policy — then reversing itself to try to clean up a mess.

As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic, Zuckerberg has a history of sometimes blaming external forces when he's faced with situations like some of the ones above.

That's maybe until now. As Zuckerberg posted on Threads on Wednesday: "Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better."

Maybe the big changes were already brewing this past September when Zuckerberg appeared at a live event and said: "One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were."

In other words, as of this week, the apology tour seems to have ended.

What will Meta's changes mean for you and me, the users?

What will the changes mean? Who knows! I can make a few predictions: The "community note" system might work pretty well — or at least not worse than the current human- and AI-led fact-checking system.

There might be more content in your feeds that you don't like — political speech that you find abhorrent, for example.

It's also possible that while certain content might exist on the platform, you won't actually come across it because it will have been downgraded. "Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach" has been X's mantra (though considering the flow of truly vile content that has proliferated my feed there in the past year or so, I don't think that's been particularly effective).

One other piece of the announcement is that Meta will focus its AI-powered filtering efforts on the highest-risk content (terrorism, drugs, and child endangerment). For lesser violations, the company said it will rely more on user reports. Meta hasn't given details on how exactly this will work, but I imagine it could have a negative effect on commonplace issues like bullying and harassment.

A large but less glamorous part of content moderation is removing "ur ugly" comments on Instagram — and that's the kind of stuff that will now rely on user reporting.

It's also quite possible that bad actors will take advantage of the opening. Facebook is nothing if not a place to buy used furniture while various new waves of pillagers attempt to test and game the algorithms for profit or menace — just consider the current wave of AI slop, some of which appears at least in part to be a profitable scam operation run from outside the US.

What do the changes mean for Meta?

If these changes had been rolled out slowly, one at a time, they might have seemed like reasonable measures just on their face. Community notes? Sure. Loosening rules on certain hot political topics? Well, not everyone will like it, but Meta can claim some logic there. Decreasing reliance on automatic filters and admitting that too many non-violations have been swept up in AI dragnets? People would celebrate that.

No one thought Meta's moderation before the announced changes was perfect. There were lots of complaints (correctly) about how it banned too much stuff by mistake — which this new policy is aiming to fix.

And switching from third-party fact-checkers to a community notes system isn't necessarily bad. The fact-checking system wasn't perfect, and community notes on X, the system Meta is modeling its own after, can be quite useful. Even acknowledging that, yes, X has sometimes become a cesspit for bad content, the root cause isn't the community notes.

Still, it's impossible to weigh the merits of each aspect of the new policy and have blinders on when it comes to the 800-pound political gorilla in the room.

There's one pretty obvious way of looking at Meta's announcement of new, sweeping policy changes about moderation: It's a move to cater to an incoming Trump administration. It's a sign that Zuckerberg has shifted to the right, as he drapes himself in some of the cultural signifiers of the bro-y zynternet (gold chain, $900,000 watch, longer hair, new style, front row at an MMA match).

Together, every piece of this loudly signals Zuckerberg either a.) genuinely believed he'd been forced to cave on moderation issues in the past, or b.) knows making these changes will please Trump. I don't really think the distinction between A and B matters too much anyway. (Meta declined to comment.)

This probably isn't the last of the changes

I try to avoid conflating "Meta" with "Mark Zuckerberg" too much. It's a big company! There are many smart people who care deeply about the lofty goals of social networking who create policy and carry out the daily work of trust and safety.

Part of me wonders how much Zuckerberg wishes this boring and ugly part of the job would fade away — there are so many more shiny new things to work on, like AI or the new mixed-reality smart glasses. Reworking the same decade-old policies so that people can insult each other 10% more is probably less fun than MMA fighting or talking to AI researchers.

Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta. Scaling it back, allowing more speech on controversial topics, and outsourcing fact-checking to the community seems like a short-term fix for having to deal with this unpleasant and thankless job. I can't help but imagine that another overhaul will come due sometime in the next four years.

• Growing up, I wasn't valedictorian, but I strived for perfectionism.
• Now that I'm a parent, I don't want my son to want to be the best at everything.
• I want him to be happy above all things.

In high school, I was never in the running to be valedictorian, captain of any sports team, or president of any club. Even so, I was no stranger to certain markers of perfectionism that were just a bit less boldfaced.

I often felt weighed down by the looming dread of coming tests, even if I knew the material backward and forwards. I'd go to school when I felt sick so I could avoid missing something important and then falling behind. I'd feel exhausted by the juggle of extracurriculars, but paring back didn't feel like a viable option — I was no quitter. And I was concerned about being a great and supportive friend who always showed up and said and did the right thing.

But now that I'm a parent, I don't want my child to do the same as I did.

It's not bad to be a perfectionist

None of these qualities are bad — hey, striving to be a great friend is a great thing. Caring about what I do, being dependable, and having a conscientious stake in the way I impact others are attributes that have, for the most part, benefited me in my career and personal life. However, being steadfast in these values has also led to a perfectionist mentality that doesn't serve me.

The American Psychological Association defines perfectionism as "the tendency to demand of others or oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation." Historically, that has tracked for me, but as a parent of a toddler, I've grappled with my inclination toward the high standards I demand of myself and those closest to me. Because, frankly, I don't want my son to concern himself with being the best. And I definitely don't want him to expect perfection from his loved ones.

I want him to be happy, to make smart and thoughtful choices, to be a compassionate friend, to work hard, and to be kind to himself. Crucially, I want him to be open to the growth that comes from making mistakes rather than being stuck in feelings of self-loathing when he inevitably missteps.

I know I'm modeling behaviors

So, I'm working to welcome my own missteps and actively eschew any notions of personal perfection. I know that modeling behaviors is one of the most effective ways parents (even if passively) teach their kids. Research shows that children as young as infants take cues from behaviors and patterns modeled to them, which is sometimes called "observational learning." Essentially, kids and babies are sponges, and if I can help it, I'd like to help my little sponge learn how to be his best, most resilient self — which does not mean collecting every A+, gold star, trophy, or accolade.

With that in mind, I'm learning to be kind to myself and abandoning even a subconscious intention to be a perfect role model — someone who deftly excels at work and in her personal life at all times, who consistently makes time for both exercise and sleep, who is always patient, measured and responsive rather than reactive. If my son never sees me get frustrated, I'm not helping him develop the tools that'll help him regulate his emotions when he experiences a tough situation that elicits a range of feelings beyond those that are comfortable, positive, happy, or neutral.

Even so, I absolutely want the best for him, which means near-constant wondering and worrying about whether or not I'm exposing him to a wide enough range of hobbies, correctly encouraging — but not forcing — him to try new foods, buying toys he likes that are also educational, letting him have too much screen time, and the list goes on. I may not be able to stop endlessly wrestling with thoughts about his well-being, and I'm not sure if that qualifies as perfectionistic pondering.

What I am sure about is my aim to be the best parent I can be to my child. But I've realized that my version of being the best parent is a far cry from being a perfect parent. Perfection is limiting, suffocating, and bland. Striving for an ever-evolving "best for me" framework is my preference. And when I mess up, I'll be happy for my son to observe as I'm hopefully able to stop, notice, reflect, and move forward in a more aligned way.

If you’re experiencing issues sending or receiving money with Apple Cash today, you’re not alone. Apple says its Apple Cash service is experiencing a multi-hour outage on Wednesday.