Author: starbpo

Bavarian Nordic stock went up again on Friday after the company that makes the measles vaccine said it was now trying to get permission to vaccinate teens. The only mpox vaccine allowed in the U.S. and Europe is Bavarian Nordic. The World Health Organization has called mpox a global health emergency because it has spread in Africa and other places. On Friday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that this year there have been 17,541 cases, with 517 deaths, in 12 countries. 17.83% of Bavarian Nordic shares are BAVA. The price of BVNRY 14.81% went up 19%…

Last week, mortgage rates dropped a lot. This week, they went up a little, but they were still much lower than they were a year ago. For now, people who want to buy a house are staying away. Data provided by Freddie Mac FMCC 0.88% on Thursday showed that the average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.49% as of August 15. One basis point is equal to one hundredth of a percentage point. It’s up two basis points from the week before. The 30-year bond had an average rate of 7.09% a year ago. It went up from…

The numbers show that builders cut back on new projects in July, which is why the number of new homes built dropped 6.8% from the previous month. The number of home starts dropped from 1.33 million in June to 1.24 million per year, the government said Friday. That many homes would be built in a year if they were built at the same rate every month like they were in July. It wasn’t as fast as Wall Street thought it would be, at 1.34 million per month. All of the numbers have been changed to account for the seasons. The…

As of the first week of August, the University of Michigan’s measure of consumer confidence rose from 66.4 the previous month to 67.8. It’s the first rise after four months of falls. Wall Street Journal asked economists and found that most of them thought the reading for August would be 66.6. Important facts: The study says that a measure of how consumers felt about the current situation dropped from 62.7 in July to 60.9 in August. That level hasn’t been that low since December 2022. But a measure of how they feel about the future went up from 68.8 to…

More and more, stores are putting money into lowering the prices of everyday things. Walmart Inc. is leading the way in this trend, which will likely help it gain more market share. The company D.A. Davidson said this and released a new price-tracking database on Friday. The database had been in the works for 18 months. “We are releasing this work now for two reasons: after 18 months, we have enough data; and the trend in grocery prices has become a hot-button issue after some prices went up,” analysts Michael Baker and Keegan Cox wrote in a commentary about the…

The publicly traded companies created from the AT&T breakup — the seven so-called Baby Bells — outperformed the U.S. market. It’s possible that splitting Google into several different companies will be good for Alphabet GOOGL 1.03% shareholders in the long run. Investors didn’t react that way when the U.S. Justice Department said it was thinking about doing something like that after the company lost a huge trade case. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) shares fell 2.3% on August 14, the first trading day after the Justice Department’s news. The S&P 500 SPX 0.20%, on the other hand, rose 0.3%. On August…

During a lengthy news conference on Thursday, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, attacked Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, for wanting to stop companies from raising the prices of groceries and other food items. Trump said, “They probably can’t do it legally, and that will make prices go up” when asked if the government should set food prices. The Harris campaign said she will talk about the price-gouging ban on Friday when she gives a speech on economic policy in North Carolina, which is a swing state. However, the campaign hasn’t given many details about the plan…

And vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris is trying to get people to vote for her in the grocery store by saying that she is the only one who can lower food prices for Americans. Harris unveiled her economic plan this week, which includes a call for a government ban on price gouging. This would stop grocery stores, food suppliers, and other businesses from allegedly charging customers more for the same things. In light of the fact that many grocery shops and other stores are lowering their prices, the question is how much of a difference such a ban would really…

It’s been almost 50 years since the first day of trade in U.S. gold futures, and the precious metal is having a great time: so far this year, there have been 28 record-high settlements. And gold may still have room to go because Western buyers and central banks around the world are buying a lot of it. In a commentary released this week, Adrian Ash, head of research at BullionVault, said, “Central banks have bought a lot of gold in the last five years, nearly one out of every ten ounces produced by the mining sector.” ‘Central bank demand gold…

A big problem for many Americans in the upcoming presidential election is the sky-high cost of housing. Vice President Kamala Harris’s new plan to bring them down may appeal to some key voting blocs. Record-high housing prices make it impossible for many renters in the U.S. to ever become landlords. “I know what it means to own a home.” A house is just one part of what’s going on. It’s more than money and more than that. Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, said in a speech in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, “Owning a home is a sign of the pride…