Author: starbpo

NEW YORK — On Monday, Donald Trump seemed to back out of his earlier promise to debate Vice President Kamala Harris. He said that he “probably” would debate but that he “can also make a case for not doing it.” In an interview with Fox News Channel that ran Monday night, Trump was asked several times if he was going to debate Harris. He finally gave a weaker answer than he had in recent days. The former Republican president was excited to face Vice President Joe Biden when Biden was the Democratic nominee. For months, he had been saying that…

The odds on the race to be Kamala Harris’s running mate have changed since it was announced that North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has dropped out. One political betting site, Polymarket, says that Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona is now the favorite to be the Democratic candidate for vice president. His odds are 38 cents on the dollar. The price of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is 34 cents on the dollar, putting Kelly just ahead of him. Kelly, who was an astronaut and a Navy pilot, is one of the Democrats who supports stricter border control. He would help Harris’s…

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that Tesla Inc. is recalling more than 1.8 million cars in the U.S. because software may not be able to tell when the hood is not locked. The NHTSA said in a warning that the hood latch assembly might not notice that the hood is not up when it is opened. “A hood that isn’t locked can open all the way, blocking the driver’s view and raising the risk of a crash.” The NHTSA said that Tesla TSLA -4.08% is recalling Model 3, Model S, Model X, and 2020–2024 Model Y cars because…

In the past two months, Meta Platforms Inc. shares have stayed pretty much the same. Will the earnings report on Wednesday afternoon start a new trend? Investors may not be just thinking about the current quarter or even the most recent one. UBS expert Stephen Ju said that Meta META -0.47% will have a lot of positive factors going for it the rest of the year. These include Reels continuing to make money and the effect of AI tools for advertisers. But Ju and his team believe that investors’ “sentiment is beginning to weaken” as they think about how big…

PayPal Holdings Inc. surprised investors on Tuesday by reporting strong growth in transaction-margin dollars for the June quarter. This is a measure of the company’s ability to make money as it grows. Transaction-margin dollars, which show how profitable the payment processing business is, have become more important to PayPal PYPL 8.34% investors lately because they are worried about how growth will be affected by lower-margin income streams. But PayPal made progress in the second quarter. The amount of money made from transactions rose 8% to $3.6 billion, which was the best growth for the company since 2021. Before the report,…

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…