Author: starbpo

Apple Inc. started the new year with discounts on iPhones in China. This shows how hard it is for the tech giant to do business in one of the world’s most popular countries. Reuters says that sales of smartphones with foreign brands in China dropped 47.4% in November compared to the same month in 2023. The data comes from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. According to a story by Reuters, this was the fourth month in a row that foreign smartphone shipments to China have gone down. In October, they went down 44.25% year-over-year. We asked Apple…

Friday was a good day for Ford Motor Co. and Rivian Automotive Inc. stocks because sales of electric vehicles (EVs) went up at both companies. Investors were especially happy for Rivian because it was no longer having problems with a lack of parts. EV sales also went up at General Motors Co. GM +0.78%, by 50% for 2024 and by 125% for the fourth quarter. GM sold 2.7 million cars, which is the most it has sold in a year since 2019 and an increase of 4%. The company Ford F +2.38% said that sales of electric, hybrid, and plug-in…

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Saturday that the economic policies that Trump will put in place won’t cause a big change in inflation. Bernanke said, “I agree that Trump policies, whatever their merits on public finance grounds, probably will have modest effects on the inflation rate.” He said this during a panel talk about the future of inflation at the American Economics Association meeting in San Francisco. Bernanke said that Trump’s promised tax cuts for 2017 are already pretty much in place. He said that changes in immigration are slow and unclear, and they won’t have a…

Stock market buyers have only been in the new year for two days, but they have already stopped the slide that was going to end a still great year, 2024. This coming week, all eyes will be on the U.S. job market, as the December jobs report comes out on Friday. And people are getting more and more excited about what ideas President-elect Donald Trump will try to put in place after he takes office on January 20. U.S. stocks fell at the end of 2024 as people’s attention turned back to high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s announcement that…

As 2024 came to a close, Chinese companies that make electric vehicles had good sales, according to new information from BYD Co. Ltd, Nio Inc., Li Auto Inc., and XPeng Inc. The numbers come at a time when China is in the middle of a price war for electric cars. The electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD BYDDY -2.16% said in a statement that it sold 514,809 EVs in December 2024, up from 341,043 EVs in December 2023. The competitor to Tesla Inc. TSLA -4.81% sold 4,272,145 cars in 2024, more than the 3,024,417 it sold the year before. Nio NIO…

A filing with the government shows that in the last week of the year, Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., increased its holdings in VeriSign Inc., a business that registers domain names. Buffett added 76,487 more shares of the company through his insurance company Geico. This brought his total number of shares in the company to 7.9 million as of Monday night. The report shows that the investor paid between $201.75 and $206.04 per share. As of today, Berkshire BRK.B +0.62% owns 13.2 million shares of VeriSign VRSN +1.02%. This number includes the stock that its other pension plans own.…

Every year, professionals on Wall Street take a guess at what they think will happen in the coming year. This shows that nobody has a crystal ball. The Blue Chip Survey of Professional Forecasters collected economic predictions from the last 21 years and was used by the St. Louis Federal Reserve to do some math. From 1993 to 2024, the regional Fed kept an eye on the study of firms, which included Wall Street giants like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, as well as top manufacturers and insurers. The end result? The predictions don’t work any better than flipping…

The forward price-to-earnings ratio is the most popular way to figure out how much a stock is worth. This is the current price of a stock divided by what analysts at brokerage firms or research firms that give information to brokers think the business will earn per share over the next 12 months. People often say that the growing forward P/E ratio for the S&P 500 is proof that stocks will go down in general. But some S&P 500 SPX +0.80% stocks did better than the index as a whole last year, even though their forward P/E rates went down.…

BERLIN — Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur, made a stir when he backed Germany’s far-right party in a major newspaper before important parliamentary elections in that Western European country. The opinion editor of the newspaper quit in protest. Germans will go to the polls early on February 23 because Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition government fell apart last month over how to get the country’s economy growing again. Musk wrote a guest opinion piece for Welt am Sonntag, a sister newspaper of Politico owned by the Axel Springer Group. It came out over the weekend in German and was his…

WEST SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico— Almost the whole island of Puerto Rico lost power early Tuesday morning as the U.S. territory got ready for New Year’s. More than 1.3 million customers were left without power. The power might not be back on for up to two days, according to the government. Before people who could afford generators could turn them on, the power went out at dawn, leaving the island in eerie silence as appliances and air conditioners turned off. A man who only gave his name as Manuel yelled, “It had to be on the 31st of December!” as…