5 things to know before the stock market opens on Friday, August 8

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

Economists and investors have spent the last week wondering who would replace Adriana Kugler on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors after her abrupt resignation. On Thursday, they got their answer: President Donald Trump said he would nominate Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Miran will serve out the remainder of Kugler’s term, which ends Jan. 31, 2026, Trump said, while the president searches for a permanent replacement. Miran’s appointment to the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee — which still needs Senate confirmation — would put a Trump loyalist on the board at a time when the White House is pressuring the central bank to lower interest rates.

Some of the biggest names in tech have showered the White House with special deals this week. OpenAI kicked things off Tuesday when it announced it would give the federal government access to the enterprise version of ChatGPT for just $1 through the next year. A day later, Apple CEO Tim Cook presented Trump with an engraved gift as he announced that the company would expand its domestic investments. (But as CNBC’s Kif Leswing reports, Cook has so far avoided making the ultimate concession: a fully made-in-America iPhone.) Most recently, a government agency on Thursday said Amazon‘s cloud business agreed to give the government as much as $1 billion in discounts through 2028. Speaking of OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman will join CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in the 8 a.m. ET hour to discuss the launch of the company’s GPT-5 model. Watch CNBC live here.

While those tech companies raced to curry favor with the Trump administration, Intel‘s CEO got a public shaming. Trump said in a Truth Social post Thursday morning that CEO Lip-Bu Tan is “highly CONFLICTED” and “must resign, immediately.” The president gave no explanation in his post, but Trump’s comments follow a report that Sen. Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel’s board chair questioning Tan’s ties to Chinese companies. Trump’s reprimand comes just months into Tan’s tenure at Intel’s helm. The former CEO of Cadence Design Systems was brought in as the company looks to reverse its trend of declining sales. Shares slid more than 3% in Thursday’s session, further sinking the stock amid an already-tough quarter. Follow live markets updates here.

Rubber is meeting the road for Crocs, the maker of those clog-themed shoes. Shares lost more than 29% of their value in Thursday’s session, marking their worst day in 14 years. Driving the sell-off was the shoemaker’s poor outlook: The Colorado-based company caught Wall Street off guard by sharing expectations for a year-over-year revenue decline of 9% to 11% in the current quarter. Investment firm Baird called the guidance “disappointing,” while Needham said the company is facing a “dramatic deterioration of trends” in the back half of 2025.

Is work from home so last-year? New data expected next week from CRBE shows that’s increasingly the case, CNBC’s Diana Olick reports. Companies are tracking and enforcing office attendance at the highest level since 2020, according to the forthcoming survey. On average, firms surveyed said they wanted employees in office 3.2 days per week. If this type of reporting piques your interest, make sure to subscribe to Olick’s weekly Property Play newsletter.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Ashley Capoot, Kif Leswing, Annie Palmer, Fred Imbert and Diana Olick contributed to this report.