Online home buying platform Opendoor Labs will pay $62 million to the FTC “to settle claims that it used misleading marketing practices to persuade people to sell their homes on the site.” According to the Commission, the...more
Groundwork effectively laid over the past few weeks, the Fed made good on expectations to again raise short-term interest rates on Wednesday, boosting them by 75bps as part of the central bank’s ongoing efforts to cool...more
The International Monetary Fund is out with a new warning that “the world could soon be on the brink of a global recession”—the result of the economies in the U.S., China, and Europe slowing “more sharply than anticipated” as...more
DOJ officials have sued poultry processors Cargill, Sanderson Farms, and Wayne Farms over an alleged 20-year “scheme to deceive workers and suppress wages.” The three defendants and “18 others listed in the lawsuit as unnamed...more
Amazon announced this week that it is acquiring One Medical, “a network of primary care clinics,” as part of its plans “to become a player in the health care industry.” The $3.9 billion deal still requires “approval from One...more
The European Central Bank is raising interest rates today for the first time in more than a decade “as it ramps up its fight against record high inflation across the countries that use the euro.” Like central bankers...more
Netflix’s bad (but not as bad as expected, thank you) year rolls on. The streaming giant announced this week that it lost 1 million subscribers in Q2, the “largest subscriber defection in company history, but . . . far short...more
As big bank earnings season rolls on, Goldman Sachs has emerged as an early winner. Even thought profits fell “nearly 50 percent from a year ago, to just under $3 billion,” analysts had been expecting far worse. That...more
New CPI figures showed U.S. inflation topping the already high expectations for June. Prices were up 9.1% from a year earlier, all but confirming another big rate hike from the Fed as it struggles to “wrestle under control”...more
Billionaires these days . . . . We’re away for a week, and Elon goes and blows everything to hell. After announcing that, actually, he would not be buying Twitter for the $44 billion he promised back in April, Musk presided...more
The flurry of recent bid-sweetening activity from Frontier and JetBlue has prompted Spirit Airlines to delay today’s planned shareholder vote on the Spirit/Frontier mashup. Spirit stakeholders will now vote on the deal on...more
Despite a very rough patch of late, Disney CEO Bob Chapek has won reappointment as top Big Mouse exec. Chapek “could remain at the helm of Disney until at least 2025” and has a lot to tackle, including a flagging stock price,...more
6/29/2022
/ Acquisitions ,
Anti-Fraud Provisions ,
China ,
Digital Currency ,
Disney ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Pinterest ,
Social Media ,
Stock Markets ,
Wal-Mart
Auditing giant Ernst & Young will pay $100 million to U.S. authorities as part of a deal to resolve claims that “some of its auditors had cheated on ethics exams—and that the firm had done nothing to stop the practice.” That...more
6/28/2022
/ CRISPR ,
Crypto Exchanges ,
Cryptocurrency ,
Electric Vehicles ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Germany ,
Oil & Gas ,
Russia ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Spirit Airlines ,
Volkswagen
Wednesday was Fed decision day, and the central bankers didn’t disappoint. Chair Powell and crew went BIG, opting for a 75 bps rate hike—the Fed’s largest single-day move since 1994—in an effort to convey the seriousness with...more
All the hits—and let’s be honest . . . mostly inflation and its staying power—from Treasury Secretary Yellen’s trip to the Hill on Tuesday, including admissions that her and Chair Powell’s frequent use of the term...more
Jobs Report Friday. Here’s what we’re watching for in the numbers, including speculation about some easing in the historically tight labor marke...more
Back at it. Hope all had a great Memorial Day break. Despite our first week of gains on the Street in a good long while, pessimism is the name of the game for most in the U.S. economy at the moment. Front and center: the...more
Broadcom is in the throes of negotiations that would see it pay nearly $60 billion for VMWare Inc. in “what would be one of the biggest takeover deals of the year.” News of the potential deal by Broadcom, “a semiconductor...more
Chinese central bankers unexpectedly cut a benchmark interest rate today, an “unexpected policy shift” in an era of rate hikes that “economists said would likely help the country’s moribund housing market but bring only...more
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal took dramatic action this week, firing two top execs, freezing “most new hiring,” and announcing plans to slash spending “as the social media company tries to change its business trajectory while...more
Peloton’s quarterly earnings report showed that the company’s early-pandemic boom times are now firmly behind it, as the connected fitness bike maker delivered losses of $757 million for the first three months of 2022—“far...more
5/11/2022
/ Apple ,
Biden Administration ,
Cryptocurrency ,
Financial Institutions ,
Financial Markets ,
Imports ,
Pfizer ,
Price Inflation ,
Private Equity ,
Stock Markets ,
Tariffs
Despite Friday’s confirmation of another month of robust job growth, Wall Street couldn’t shake a “relentless decline” that’s going on 6 weeks now and was fueled on Monday “by new data from China that added to concerns about...more
U.S. job openings remained strong, “with 11.5 million positions listed as available in March, underscoring the continuing strength of the labor market.” The number of workers voluntarily leaving jobs “also reached a high” in...more
In a major reversal of recent trends, workers at an Amazon warehouse not far from the first to unionize just last month rejected a similar effort to organize by a 2-1 margin. The result “was a setback for the upstart Amazon...more
New GDP figures in yesterday showed slight, inflation-adjusted contraction of the U.S. economy (just .4%), but the decline “masked evidence of a recovery that economists said remained fundamentally strong.” Especially...more