An inspirational tale for the interns currently wrapping up their summer of filing and happy hours: Target announced yesterday that COO Michael Fiddelke, who started at the company with an internship two decades ago, will be stepping into the CEO role. The shakeup at the top comes after years of declining sales for the chain due to steep competition and customer boycotts.

Fiddelke will take the helm in February, so current CEO Brian Cornell will have one more office holiday party in the role before they release him from his corner office to wander around the tumbler cup aisle until retirement (he’ll become executive chair of Target’s board of directors).

The soon-to-be chief exec comes to the job as the ultimate Target insider. Fiddelke started at Target as a finance intern in 2003, scoring a permanent analyst role the following year. Since then, he’s worked in the company’s merchandising, operations, and HR departments before stepping into the COO and CFO roles, the latter of which he held from 2019 to 2024. Now, his plans include reestablishing Target as an elevated shopping experience by focusing on a “style and design North Star.”

It’s not the turnaround Wall Street was hoping for…Target’s stock ended trading down more than 6% after the announcement. Analysts were hoping an outsider would step into the role to help shake the retailer out of its current funk.

He’s got a big job ahead

Target spent the pandemic doing gangbusters as consumers snapped up tons of tech and housewares, but when inflation started to rise, all those discretionary item sales dried up. In the first quarter of 2022, Target’s profits had dropped 52% from a year earlier. Since then:

• Target has been losing ground to rivals like Walmart and Amazon over the last few years.
• The chain also faced backlash from right-wing groups over its Pride merch.
• Additionally, its profits and store visits have been impacted by consumer boycotts after the company rolled back its DEI initiatives earlier this year.

Now what? Yesterday, Target reported declining sales as well as decreasing store and website traffic for fiscal Q2—though it still managed to beat Wall Street’s expectations. Incoming CEO Fiddelke tried to rally the troops after the news broke by calling on employees to go the extra mile to help Target get back on top.—MM

Trump calls for Fed Governor Lisa Cook to resign. President Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointed Federal Reserve governor, “must resign, now!!!” after the leader of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte, claimed she submitted fraudulent information to banks on mortgage loan documents. Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is considering firing Cook for cause. It’s his latest swipe at the independence of the central bank, which hasn’t lowered interest rates like the president wants. Pulte, a Trump ally who has made similar allegations against prominent critics of the president, asked the DOJ to investigate Cook, alleging she had requested mortgages in Atlanta and Michigan and claimed both properties as her primary residence. Cook said she would not be “bullied to step down.”

“Almost all” Fed officials supported leaving rates unchanged, per meeting minutes. The minutes from the Fed’s July meeting are out, and they suggest that the two officials who voted against keeping interest rates steady were alone in that effort—but it still represented the first time since 1993 that more than one Fed governor dissented from a rate decision. The minutes show that most Fed officials remained more concerned about the possibility of rising inflation than problems in the labor market, though that could change going forward since the meeting took place two days before disappointing jobs data came out. The issue is politically fraught since President Trump has been pushing for a cut (see above).

Texas House passes redistricting bill. After a fight that involved Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state and being forced to have police escorts when they returned, the Texas House yesterday passed the redistricting bill President Trump requested, sending it to the state’s Senate for a final vote. If the Senate passes the bill unchanged, it will advance to the governor’s desk, but if it alters the bill, the two versions will have to be reconciled. The new map, which could add five seats for Republicans in Congress, could set off a flurry of gerrymandering efforts around the country. California’s Governor has vowed to respond with his own redistricting, a move that former President Barack Obama endorsed yesterday.—AR

There’s a new way to watch Pat McAfee interview guests sitting in their cars. ESPN’s eponymously named direct-to-consumer app launched today, finally making all of the Worldwide Leader’s traditional TV products available on streaming for people who don’t pay to watch cable television.

• ESPN, the TV channel, is on the lowest basic cable tier, which means everyone paying for cable, including people who say “sportsball,” already pays for ESPN.
• In 2011, ESPN was in 100 million homes and had generated hundreds of billions in revenue over three decades through a subscription/advertising model that was heavily insulated from cord-cutting. But as of today, ESPN is down to 61 million subscribers, per the NYT, as Americans increasingly flee from their cumbersome cable packages.

Bundles: The standalone ESPN app is $29.99 per month; it will stay the same price when bundled with Disney+ and Hulu for a year before it jumps to $35.99. Disney is betting that a bundle will reduce churn.

Separations: The NFL bought a 10% stake in ESPN earlier this month. Not long after, a documentary about Colin Kaepernick from Spike Lee four years in the making was scrapped, signaling that investigative journalism at the expense of the NFL may be hard to find on ESPN.

Bottom line: The new app, which also has interactive AI features, primarily targets cord-nevers, not necessarily cord-cutters. Anyone already paying for ESPN on cable can access the app for free.—DL

The state with the smallest population and only two escalators just opened up a new frontier in crypto. Wyoming released the first state-backed stablecoin in the US this week, fittingly named Frontier Stable Token, or FRNT.

One year after Wyoming announced that it wouldn’t wait around for a federally issued stablecoin, the state’s new currency debuted on Ethereum, Solana, and several other blockchains.

• As stablecoins frequently are, it’s backed by tangible assets. In this case, that’s cash and short-term Treasuries to keep the coin pegged to the US dollar.
• But in a public service twist, interest generated by the Wyoming reserves that back FRNT will go toward public school funding, officials have pledged.

FRNT may also avoid federal oversight. The recently signed GENIUS Act, which introduced a regulatory framework for stablecoins, appears to apply to businesses but not state governments, according to Bloomberg.

State officials envision use cases like…brokering public-private contracts (e.g., an energy deal) in FRNT, or locals using the coin to pay for their morning coffee.

The Cowboy State is having a busy week: The SEC’s new crypto-friendly chair, as well as Eric Trump and other people of crypto influence, attended the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium over the past few days. Top economists and policymakers from around the world are also arriving for the 48th annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, where Fed Chair Jerome Powell is expected to hint at his interest-rate intentions in a speech tomorrow.—ML

A bean who judges you for doomscrolling just surpassed ChatGPT as the No. 1 most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store. The app, Focus Friend, comes from Hank Green, a YouTuber with 2.47 million subscribers, and it uses his genius for grabbing people’s attention to get us all to look away from a screen for once.

In Green’s words, the app succeeds in “hacking your brain” by adding a little bean to your phone who is trying to finish knitting projects. The bean gets distracted and looks sad if you use your apps, so the only way to help it out is to keep off your phone until the timer you set ends. Plus:

• There are in-app purchases available, but no ads. “It’s about letting people be in control of their attention, not selling their attention to someone else,” Green said in a video.
• It also doesn’t collect or share user data.

It’s not the first app based on the Pomodoro Technique of punctuating focused work time with short breaks, but it’s probably the first to top the charts on the strength of a busy anthropomorphized legume.—AR