Author: starbpo

When Dennis Porter helped to create the non-profit Satoshi Action Fund in 2022 and began pushing for a national bitcoin reserve, it didn’t seem likely that the US would soon be holding bitcoin. The cryptocurrency exchange FTX was about to go bankrupt, and it looked like the Biden government was completely against digital assets. The idea was kept up by Porter, who had worked in politics in Oregon at the city and state levels. A big part of his time was spent on online social networks for crypto fans. It was there that he met Mandy Gunasekara, co-founder of his…

Middle-class Many Americans are still having a hard time with high prices after the pandemic. In 2025, they may have to deal with even more inflation and a tight job market, which will put even more stress on a group that is already struggling financially. Because wealthy Americans spent money to get back at people who hurt them, the U.S. economy grew by at least 2.5% this year and avoided a recession. But things could get worse next year for people with low to middle incomes because the job market is showing signs of weakening and some experts say President-elect…

Shares of Nvidia Corp. are down more than 10% from their record high close because of at least four problems. But Joseph Moore, a Morgan Stanley analyst, thinks that soon, Blackwell will be the only thing that matters for the business. That’s the company’s new chip, and Moore thinks that by the second half of 2025, investors will only be interested in how well this new product is doing. “We have been most bullish on Nvidia when the near-term data points look mixed but the underlying dynamics are very strong,” he wrote on Friday. “We believe we are now getting…

Friday, Occidental Petroleum Corp. stock went through the roof after Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., increased its holdings in the oil and gas company, even though Wall Street was cutting its holdings. But that fits with a famous trade rule by Warren Buffett: be greedy when other people are afraid. After dark on Thursday, Buffett’s financial vehicle said it had spent $409.15 million this week to buy more 8,896,890 Occidental shares. The Berkshire BRK.A BRK of +1.37%.B +0.86% who already owned a lot of Occidental OXY +3.90% shares. It now has 264,178,414 shares, which is 28.15 percent of all…

Reports out late Tuesday night say that Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. are looking into the possibility of merging in order to better compete with foreign electric car makers like BYD and Tesla Inc. Nikkei Asia was the first to report late Tuesday that Japan’s second- and third-largest automakers are planning to join and are thinking about running their business through a holding company. The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and the New York Times all wrote about the possible merger. If it happened, it would make one of the biggest car companies in the world. Honda and…

Wall Street is excited about quantum computing as the next big thing in investing, after AI. However, IBM has not yet joined the group. There is a mistake, said Ben Reitzes, an expert at Melius Research, on Wednesday. Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.63% GOOG -0.52% and a few other names, like Quantum Computing Inc. QUBT +51.53%, Rigetti Computing Inc. RGTI +32.03%, D-Wave Quantum Inc. QBTS +16.18%, and IonQ Inc. IONQ +4.86%, have seen their share prices rise. But Reitzes said that IBM’s stock has been overlooked. In the fourth quarter, IBM’s stock has only gone up 4%. Alphabet is…

I hope everyone has a great Fed Day. Not everyone has a party. For this decision, there is, of course, the question of whether the data really back the interest rate cut that most people think is going to happen. But what about the bigger picture? How well did the Federal Reserve do in the first place at fighting inflation? According to one study paper, inflation mostly went down because of things other than the Fed’s plan to raise interest rates. One estimate, based on the Federal Reserve’s own model of the economy, says that the rate hikes slowed down…

In 2025, there is a 73% chance that the U.S. stock market will go up. As of Dec. 16, the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF VTI -0.49% showed that the market had already given a return that was well above average for the year, 28.2%. This makes the odds seem too good to be true. This is three times the average calendar-year return for the U.S. market since 1794, which was 9.2% (according to a database made by Edward McQuarrie, a retired professor at Santa Clara University). But the odds that the market will go up in a given year…

On Tuesday, shares of Intuitive Machines Inc. kept going up because the company plans to send its second historic journey to the moon’s surface early next year. The stock of Intuitive Machines (LUNR +7.42%) finished the day up 10.7%, its biggest daily gain since November 29th, when it rose 13.2%. Intuitive Machines stock is up 2.3% on Tuesday, putting the company on track for its longest winning streak since November 11, 2024, a five-day run that finished on that date. In 2024, the stock is up 419.4%. The latest exchange data shows that 20.5% of Intuitive Machines’ public float of…

A person who knows about the private-equity firm Ares Management Corp. told MarketWatch that the company still wants to invest in other NFL teams after its historic move to buy a 10% share in the Miami Dolphins. A source said that Ares ARES +0.02%’s minority investment puts the value of the whole Dolphins franchise at $8 billion. This is part of a trend that private equity firms expect to see more of in U.S. major sports teams. Ares’s co-heads of sports, media, and entertainment, Mark Affolter and Jim Miller, said in a statement, “The Miami Dolphins represent an iconic franchise…