Author: starbpo

SoFi Technologies Inc. reported better-than-expected results for its June quarter on Tuesday. Origination numbers rose across all of the company’s financial technology products. “Promising signs of life in home loan originations, which were the highest since 2021,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho. He also said that personal loan defaults went down for the first time since the first quarter of 2022. SoFi stock was up as much as 8.5% early Tuesday, but it has since lost some of its gains and is now only up about 1%. The neobanking business made $17.4 million, or 1 cent per share,…

A new white paper is making waves on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. It says that the Treasury Department is working together to boost the economy for political reasons, which could lead to inflation rising again. The paper, which came out last week, says that the Treasury Department’s choice to keep using short-term Treasury bills to pay for a huge portion of the U.S. debt is the same thing as purposely messing with the economy. The people who wrote it came up with a term for this: “activist Treasury issuance.” In the beginning of the paper, co-authors Stephen Miran…

When Advanced Micro Devices Inc. reports earnings on Tuesday afternoon, the important number probably won’t be in the report. It’s more likely that investors will pay close attention to a statement that AMD’s management usually makes on its earnings call. That’s how much the company thinks its MI300 AI program will bring in over the course of the whole year. Cantor Fitzgerald’s C.J. Muse wrote over the weekend, “If AMD is unable to raise the guide, we see further downside risk for shares.” He pointed out that the company had previously predicted that the metric would bring in more than…

A market-moving force might be about to hit a stock market that is moving very quickly. In the past week, U.S. stocks were extra shaky as investors dealt with a sharp drop in big-tech stocks and a shift toward small-cap and value stocks. This change from big to small has been one of the main market trends in July. It’s become so common that it has its own name: the “great rotation.” The change was going to happen in many ways. NVDA stock went up almost 150% in the first half of 2024, and META stock went up over 42%.…

It looks like buyers may have bet too soon when they thought the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates quickly between now and the end of next year. Traders are expecting 175 basis points of cuts over the next 18 months, which is the most since early March, according to an email from Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank. Reid said that the only time the central bank has cut interest rates that much was when the U.S. economy was shrinking. One time was in the mid-1980s, when real rates were still very high. Between now and the end of next…

Monday, shares of Tesla Inc. went up because the company’s stock chart showed its first bullish moving-average crossing signal in more than a year. Yesterday, Tesla’s stock (TSLA 5.30%) fell 12.6%, the first time in three weeks that it had gone down. This morning, it went up 3.8%. It’s been six weeks since the last such streak stopped on January 26. The worst day of the selloff was July 24, when shares fell 12.3% after Tesla reported a profit for the second quarter that was lower than expected and announced that its much-anticipated “robotaxi” event would not happen until October…

The Delaware Basin is in Texas and New Mexico. On Monday, Occidental Petroleum Corp. said it had agreed to sell parts of it to Permian Resources Corp. PR 0.10% for around $818 million. The energy giant said it had sold other assets worth a total of $152 million. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK.B 0.05% owns a 29% share in the company, which is worth about $15 billion. Occidental OXY -0.35%, based in Houston, said that the $970 million in proceeds would be used to pay down debt as part of a previously announced $4.5 billion to $6.0 billion divestiture…

When she spoke to a major teachers union in Houston on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris talked about the Biden administration’s work to forgive student loans. She did this to show how different the White House’s record is from the way Republicans handle this problem. So far, the Biden administration has forgiven more than $168 billion in student loans for some groups of borrowers. Officials at the White House are also working on a plan to forgive even more loans for a wider range of borrowers. People who have worked for the government or certain nonprofits for at least 10…

The numbers show that consumers’ confidence in the U.S. economy stayed at an eight-month low in July. This was due to frustration with long-lasting inflation, especially among low-income families that are feeling the pinch the most. The University of Michigan said Friday that the final reading of the consumer mood index for July was 66.4, up a little from the first reading of 66.0 earlier in the month. The snow level has dropped four months in a row, though, and it’s now the lowest it has been since last winter. It is also a long way below its all-time high…

Since inflation in the U.S. is falling and worries that the economy is getting too hot are subsiding, experts are pretty sure that the Federal Reserve will lower its key interest rate for the first time this cycle in September. It’s not clear what will happen next. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG Economics, said, “The ground is rough, and the Fed is walking a tightrope.” The Fed has kept its policy rate steady at between 5.25% and 5.5% for the past year. That’s a lot higher than the nearly 3% rate that’s considered “neutral.” The central bank kept policy…