Author: starbpo

Here are some of President Donald Trump’s main economic initiatives and their present status as he gets ready to mark the 100th day of his current term in office. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, his tenure as president-elect, and his first few months in office are the sources of these proposals. While other plans target immigration, income taxes, the corporate tax rate, electric vehicles, cryptocurrencies, and a popular social media platform, his tariff schemes target a wide range of imported goods. Two tables that follow Trump’s activities are included below. Trump is in his second term as president, having served the…

Wall Street’s odds-on favorite to lead the Federal Reserve lays out his vision of a central bank that retreats back behind its high walls Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve governor seen by Wall Street as the front-runner to replace current Fed Chair Jerome Powell, on Friday sharply criticized fundamental practices of the central bank. Speaking before a standing-room audience at a conference on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Washington, Warsh said the central bank talks too much, gets too involved in social issues of the day and lets lawmakers not pay…

Thursday saw stocks close higher, with the S&P 500 completing a market downturn and continuing its winning run for three sessions. But as stocks aim to end a strong week, investors are getting excited due to the activation of a rare, positive technical indication. Following President Donald Trump’s announcement earlier this week that tariffs on imports from China would shortly drop from their current level of 145% and that he was not contemplating a move to remove Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, stocks plunged. The wide nature of the rally was especially appealing to stock market bulls. The great majority…

Deliveroo, a delivery platform based in the United Kingdom, announced on Friday that DoorDash Inc. had submitted a bid to acquire it. This would be the latest international expansion for DoorDash and further industry consolidation. According to Deliveroo, DoorDash (DASH) expressed interest in paying cash to purchase the business at GBP1.80 per share, or $2.40, after receiving the proposal on April 5. The Wall Street Journal reported that Deliveroo was valued at $3.6 billion in the offer. DoorDash chose not to respond. The stock has up over 42% over the last 12 months and ended Friday’s trading session up 0.3%.…

Wall Street was a little surprised by Alphabet Inc.’s profits. But will the company’s stock actually be affected by that beat? According to a note sent to clients by Mark Shmulik, an analyst at Bernstein Research, Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) “delivered a pristine quarter.” However, he questions if investors are giving fundamentals enough consideration in a market where headlines dominate the conversation. Although Alphabet’s stock increased by almost 2% on Friday, it’s unclear if the company is ready for long-term growth. As Shmulik noted, it was “too early to do a victory dance… in a cyclical sector that’s about to go…

The Senate Banking Committee’s senior Democrat, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, questioned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday about why he provided Wall Street insiders with “inside information” about President Donald Trump’s tariff plans rather than the general public. Bessent stated that the tariff dispute between the United States and China would soon de-escalate during a closed-door, invitation-only event held by JPMorgan Chase (JPM) on Tuesday. Stock prices skyrocketed once news of his comments reached the media. After then, Trump addressed reporters, thereby endorsing Bessent’s statements. Warren expressed her concern in a letter to Bessent on Friday that Bessent gave “a room…

President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act into law on Jan. 5. New rules are expected to go into effect soon, under which some people with pensions who had previously been ineligible for full Social Security benefits will be subject to the same rules as everyone else. In the Help Me Retire column, Alessandra Malito answered a reader’s questions about the new rules, including spousal benefits. MarketWatch readers left dozens of comments, with some strongly against the changes. You can read the piece, and join the conversation, here. Big changes for people with student loans The Trump administration…

Concerned about the future sales prospects of Nvidia Corp.? Joseph Moore, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, is not. In a Friday note to clients, Moore dismissed the worry that some customers may have that they may have to reduce their expenditures for artificial intelligence technology as they try to analyze current inventories. “The idea that we are in a digestion phase for AI is laughable given the obvious need for more inference chips which is driving a wave of very strong demand,” he stated. Both training AI models and allowing those models to infer conclusions based on fresh data are…

Following President Trump’s tariffs, shipping-container traffic between China and the U.S. fell sharply, reigniting fears of pandemic-era shortages at American supermarkets. Based on a 15-day rolling timeframe, estimates of container ships leaving China for the United States suggest a sharp decline in recent weeks. In a note released Friday, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, cautioned that if layoffs begin to affect some of the 19 million workers in the retail industry and the 9 million employed in trucking-related jobs in the United States, there could be “empty shelves in U.S. stores in a few weeks,” along with…

Property taxes are intensely local, but the concern about their sharp upward trajectory in recent years has gone national – and new data shows why. More than 72% of metropolitan areas with at least 200,000 residents saw above-average increases in property-tax bills last year, according to Attom, a property-data and real-estate analytics firm. Nationally, the average property-tax bill on a single-family home increased by 2.7% in 2024. But in 157 of these 217 metropolitan areas, those bills jumped by more than that. One year earlier, just over half of these areas saw above-average tax hikes, according to Attom data. In…