Delayed Oura IPO Signals a Chill for the IPO Market

The latest company to delay its IPO is Aura, a sign that this year's hot IPO market has gone cold. Plus, RFK Juniors plans to overhaul the food system are finding resistance from the White House. There is still vocal support for the Maha agenda, but when it gets down to how are we actually going to do this? There are a number of people in the White House who are balking at what the agenda would entail, and AI agents promising to help people maximize their money could pose a problem for banks. It's Tuesday, September 29th. I'm Alex O'Sullef for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Aura, a San Francisco-based company that makes a ring fitness tracker, was planning to list on the NASDAQ as soon as this month. He was hoping to be valued at more than $15 billion. But today, the company said it was postponing its listing, and it's not the only company doing so. Cory Dribush, who covers IPOs for the journal, says there's more uncertainty in today's market. So, the uncertainty in the market is more that we're not seeing great performance from riskier companies or new companies coming to list. And investors are pushing back, they're saying we don't want to take this risk if we might not get rewarded for it. When SpaceX went public in June, we called it the Goldilocks IPO. Everything went great for their offering. And at the end of June, so a couple weeks after SpaceX had its IPO, on average, companies that had gone public in 2026 were trading up 24% from their IPO price. That is considered really good. As of this morning, on average, companies that went public in 2026 were up less than 1% from their IPO price. We've seen a real retreat from these types of companies. Cory says that investors right now are worried about high gas prices and interest rates affecting consumer spending, and about AI safety, as you've heard a lot from us recently. There's a lot going on today that wasn't happening a few months ago when a lot of these companies filed confidentially for an IPO with these grand plans that they were going to go public in September and October. So investors maybe were willing to pay up more a few months ago for companies out of just this excitement, the animal spirits, if you will. And now they're being more discerning and a little more concerned. We're not in what bankers would call a quote-unquote "risk on" market right now. We're in a more conservative market. In Washington today, President Trump promised not to hem in the AI industry with regulations. He had lunch with about two dozen CEOs and industry leaders. And after the lunch, standing next to Invidia's Jensen Wong and Elon Musk, he doubled down on that message, saying that, quote, "self-regulation is very important." In other AI developments today, open AI held its annual developer conference. CEO Sam Altman announced new products, including a group of AI agents called dots. They're intended to compete with Meta's Muse agent, which has been downloaded more than three million times since it launched earlier this month. Dots are remarkably capable, always on agents, built to handle really anything you can think of. They bring AI into a whole new form factor to work and give you more time and attention so you can do the things that you care about. Today's event also attracted protesters. Reports of AI systems going rogue have made headlines recently, and yesterday, open AI scrapped the planned release of a new model over safety concerns. Open AI says the dots agents come with safety and privacy protections so they stay within the scope of user's instructions. Here's something kind of surprising. In a year, Americans are leaving money on the table. Instead of refinancing their mortgages or putting their cash in high interest accounts, many people tend to just leave it. Journal reporter Ben Glickman is the latest to call this "the laziness tax." The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says that more than $7 trillion sits in bank checking accounts that aren't paying much interest, if any. Now though, Ben reports that AI might be coming to run your financial life, and that could be a big problem for banks, then, okay, laziness. Is that really the culprit here? Is there something else going on? The idea is like people are busy. No one really has the time or energy to be adjusting where your checking account balance is sitting every day. But obviously, if you were to take the time to do something like investigate the highest yield account possible, you could earn 3.5%, 4%, 4.5% on your idle money. It would just take a lot of work of opening a new bank account and transferring your money to it. Laziness, busyness, I could go either way. So this is potentially where AI comes in, and it could help you sort of get some of that money that you might be leaving on the table because you simply don't have the bandwidth. What kinds of things could AI actually do? So this is still sort of conceptual at this point, but the idea is that you would tell your agent, you're like AI personal assistant, that you want to maximize how much you're earning on your money, and it would look at all of your accounts, and it would say, "Oh, look, you have this cash here that's earning 0.1% interest. I can very easily move that into an account that earns much more than that." And then you would have to basically do nothing, and the AI chap out would do that for you. The reason people are talking about this now is that an Apollo executive recently mentioned this and said that banks should be worried. Why is that? Economist for Apollo Torcin's Lock posted over the weekend that if everyone's AI bought or to move their funds into the highest-yielding account, sort of at the same time, that would be something like an AI bank run. And those are very scary words if you write about banks or work at a bank. It's very much hypothetical at this point. This is not necessarily like coming now or anytime soon. Why would that cost bank's money? Right now, banks benefit hugely from basically having very low cost deposits. You put your money or your paycheck via direct deposit into a checking account, banks pay you potentially no interest, potentially very little interest. What they can do with that money is they lend it out in the form of other loans that get interest of 3, 4, 5, 10, 20%. They pocket the difference between those two interest rates. If banks have to pay a lot more to have these deposits, then all of a sudden their profits get squeezed. It could also result in something like banks needing to raise interest rates on loans on the other side of the book in order to compensate for more expensive deposits. Would you do it? I would not do it. Not even with a little bit of money, like a hundred bucks. As part of my professional obligation to investigate these things, I might have to do it. But would I let any AI buy it, handle my checking balance? No, I would not. Looking forward to that Gonzo story. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Glickman. Thank you, Ben. Thanks for having me. Bond yields Rose again today with a new 19-year high for the 10-year treasury. But a speech from a top-fed official gave stocks a bit of a boost. New York Fed President John Williams today suggested that the Central Bank could wait until December before raising interest rates again. That made stocks perk up a bit from earlier in the day, but they still closed lower. The Dow led the losses and closed down 0.3%. Coming up, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning a big cut to the ranks of senior military officers. That's up to the break. In news from the Trump administration, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning to announce a 20% cut to the number of senior officer ranks, the positions reserved for generals and admirals. Pentagon officials say he'll make the announcement in a speech to service members tomorrow, when he's expected to lay out his priorities for the Pentagon for the coming year. These cuts are double the 10% reduction to the top positions that Hegseth ordered last year. And he's long been vocal about his view that the military senior ranks are too big. We recently published an episode about Hegseth's goals behind his military overhaul, and how those changes are going over, we'll leave a link in the show now. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been working to revamp America's food system, part of his pledge to the Make America Healthy Again movement. Two years ago, the Trump campaign was on board, but now some of Kennedy's biggest efforts are running into resistance from the White House. Journal Health Policy reporter Liz Esley White joins me now to discuss. So Liz, how is it that some people within the Trump administration are clashing with Kennedy? Yeah. On Kennedy's food agenda, in particular, there is still vocal support for the Maha agenda, but when it gets down to how are we actually going to do this? There are a number of people in the White House who are balking at what the agenda would entail. So for example, one of the pieces of Kennedy's reform effort is to define what an ultra-process food is, and there are a lot of people in the White House with concerns that this would cover most food in US grocery stores, and could potentially affect food prices, affect international trade agreements, and there has been some heated meetings back and forth between HHS and other members of the White House of the administration. Right. Remember that at a press conference. conference last month, Kennedy was expected to announce the official definition of ultra-processed food. And that didn't happen. Was this the reason why? That's right. The HHS officials had talking points ready to go. They had, you know, red, white and blue lighting. It was a big shipping. But some White House officials were caught off guard. They didn't know the announcement was happening and they put the brakes on it. And so they were only able to say that it was still being worked on. Food companies were really concerned that the definition of ultra-processed food would put more burden on them. What do disagreements in the administration about the definition mean for them? Food companies think this is good news for them because they were very wary of this definition. And they are very worried that some of these changes could have unintended consequences and would mean that consumers are really confused about what they're eating and what they should be worried about. A lot of food industry representatives have been pointing out that this could really harm their businesses. It could harm prices for Americans at the grocery store. And that could also be a boom to the plaintiff's bar, which has been working on litigation regarding ultra-processed food. What could this mean for the midterms? Many of Kennedy supporters helped put Trump in the White House. Are they upset about these delays to the agenda? We've seen a number of Maha influencers say you really need us in this election and to get our support, you need to do more for us. And so we've seen the White House meet with Maha influencers in April. And we've seen that they did like a regenerative agriculture, executive order, things that are meant to appeal to Maha voters. But I think there are a lot of them that are reconsidering their support. And then we also want to see how Maha gets blamed or craze for its role in the midterms. Whether it can actually help turn out, red-leaning voters or whether people view it as really irrelevant, I think we'll end up shaping a lot of Kennedy's influence in the second half of the Trump term. That was WSJ Health Policy reporter Liz Esley White. Thank you Liz. Thank you guys. And that's what's news for this Tuesday afternoon. Additional sound, courtesy of Reuters. Today's show is produced by Anthony Bancy and Dani Lewis with supervising producer Tally Arbell. I'm Alex Ocele for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.