Author: starbpo

On Tuesday, shares of Paramount Global fell after news came out that Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, which controls Paramount (Para, -7.85%), had called off merger talks between Skydance Media and the media and entertainment giant Paramount. The move comes after weeks of tensions surrounding the deal, which saw Paramount’s CEO and several board directors quit, new bidders come forward and angry shareholders who thought the deal with Skydance would benefit Redstone at the expense of them. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the news that the talks did not work out. The Journal said that Redstone is now more likely…

Stocks in Tesla Inc. could go up after Thursday, when shareholders vote on CEO Elon Musk’s huge pay package, unless they vote against it. Thursday is the day of the vote on whether to give Musk the controversial $56 billion package. Musk said that a huge majority of small shareholders are in favour of the pay package. However, some institutional investors, proxy advisors, and even judges are against it. Ben Kallo, a research analyst at Baird, said that about 45% of Tesla’s shareholders are institutions, 42% are individual investors, and the rest are people who work for the company. As…

A proposed rule would erase unpaid medical bills from people’s credit reports. This is good news for people who are trying to get their finances back on track after a health emergency, the Biden administration said Tuesday. Most of Americans’ medical debt was already taken off their credit reports by the three main credit bureaus. However, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new rule would erase most of the remaining medical debts that show up. The CFPB says that if the rule is made official, it will erase up to $49 billion in medical debts from the records of 15 million…

Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Inc. Elon Musk has been very critical of artificial intelligence lately, but he just dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. A document filed on Tuesday showed that the Superior Court of California threw out the complaint without prejudice. The court’s calendar showed that there would be a meeting about the case on Wednesday at 10 a.m. in San Francisco. Musk had previously sued Altman and other top people at OpenAI, saying that they put making money ahead of helping people. The CEO of Tesla (TSLA, -1.80%), who used to be on the OpenAI…

Apple Inc.’s stock price went up a lot on Tuesday, adding about $215 billion to the market capitalization of the company and bringing it closer to becoming the biggest U.S. company again. Shares of Apple AAPL, +7.26% went up 7.3% on Tuesday, which was the best single-day percentage gain since 2022 and only the third gain of more than 7% in the last three years. The stock went up the most in both the S&P 500 SPX and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA that day. Its rise added nearly 92 points to the Dow. Bloomberg says that since November…

There is a good chance that the U.S. stock market will do even better in the months before November 8. Based on the average monthly returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) since it was founded in 1896, the chart below shows the historical trends. If you look closely, you’ll see that the Dow’s average return is higher in each of the five months before Election Day, from June to October. These months are not election years. The differences are especially big from the end of summer to the beginning of autumn. September is especially interesting because, on average,…

The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday that Christy Goldsmith Romero, who is in charge of derivatives, is the clear favourite to lead the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. after Chair Martin Gruenberg quit. Gruenberg said at the end of last month that he would step down once a new leader is chosen. An independent report that was very harsh found a “hostile, abusive, unprofessional,” and misogynistic work environment at the banking regulator. This led to calls for Gruenberg’s removal. Goldsmith Romero is on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission right now. He was a special inspector general for the Troubled Asset…

Are you planning to buy a house? A report released Monday by the American Enterprise Institute says that to reach that goal, you’ll likely need to make close to six figures and have $13,000 saved. The average first-time buyer in 2023 made a down payment of $12,789 and had a credit score of 728. They also made a median income of $97,000. The study was done by a right-leaning think tank. To do its research, AEI looked at information from the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, government-run businesses, public records of sales, and home assessments. About 78% of all first-time…

There’s a new angle to the tip debate now. People in the U.S. are thinking about which workers to tip and how much to pay them. Former President Donald Trump says that people who get tips shouldn’t have to give the IRS any of their money. At an event in Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump said that if he wins the election, he will work to stop the federal government from taxing tips. In a state with a big leisure and hospitality industry, he said, “This is the first time I’ve said this, and hotel workers and people who get…

On Monday, GasBuddy called the drop in petrol prices at the pump a “ultra-rare” double-digit weekly drop during the summer driving season. However, this probably has nothing to do with the Biden administration’s decision to release all of the fuel from the nation’s petrol reserve. The average price of regular unleaded petrol in the U.S. fell about 10 cents from the week before, to $3.40 per gallon on Monday, according to GasBuddy. This was the second week in a row that prices went down. That information comes from more than 12 million separate price reports for more than 150,000 petrol…