Day: March 6, 2024

President Joe Biden is getting his annual chance to talk directly to millions of Americans with his State of the Union address Thursday night, and he’s sure to address inflation, immigration and other issues important to voters in this election year.

His remarks are likely to have significant implications for financial markets, according to Terry Haines, a veteran Washington analyst and founder of Pangaea Policy.

A…

Tesla Inc. shares on Wednesday headed for their lowest in nearly a year after a known Tesla bull cut his price target on the stock and warned that the company could post a loss this year based on GAAP accounting.

EV demand continues to slow despite repeated price cuts, companies are dumping EVs from their fleets, and hybrids compete for the “marginal EV buyer,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in his note.

“If…

U.S. Treasury yields were inching lower on Wednesday as traders digested Congressional testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who expected the central bank to cut interest rates in 2024, but reiterated that there is no rush to do that unless policymakers have “greater confidence” that inflation is moving sustainably toward their 2% target.

What’s happening

What’s driving markets

In prepared remarks for congressionally mandated appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning, Fed Chair Powell said…

The number of high-school students required to receive personal-finance instruction before they graduate is about to increase substantially — and bleak early-pandemic memories could be one factor driving the surge, some financial-literacy experts say.

“The pandemic really pulled the cover off the fact that so many Americans really had no financial resilience, and that really opened people’s eyes,” said Nan Morrison, the president and CEO of the Council for Economic Education.

“The…

Hype is slowly becoming reality.

Generative AI, hailed for more than a year now as tech’s new frontier, is steadily scoring enterprise sales. And it isn’t just Nvidia Corp. NVDA that is racking up stratospheric revenue and margins.

”It is unquestionably the theme of every [chief information officer] discussion,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive…

Dear Quentin,

I have an 8-year-old daughter with an ex-boyfriend. 

He recently passed away in a horrible accident. He wasn’t on her birth certificate, but he helped pay for school things, and bought her anything she said she wanted.

He…

Investors losing sleep over the dramatic loss of market capitalization for the stocks of the Magnificent Seven group of companies this week might consider another option: buying their bonds.

Even after the group lost a combined $233 billion in market cap on Tuesday, bond spreads and prices have remained fairly steady and are still close to where they were at the beginning of the year.

The Magnificent Seven stocks are no longer a market monolith.

After driving the bulk of the S&P 500 index’s 2023 advance, the group of seven megacap companies — typically defined as Nvidia Corp. NVDA, Apple Inc. AAPL, Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, Tesla Inc. TSLA, Meta Platforms Inc. META and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN — have seen their performance diverge in 2024.

The…

One more big retailer wants you to consider same-day delivery — for an added cost. 

Target Corp. TGT will be joining Walmart Inc. WMT, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN and other retailers in the same-day delivery game by introducing a new tier to its membership program called Target Circle 360. Available starting April 7, Target Circle 360 will cost $49 a year. Members will be able to have food, clothes and most other Target products delivered to their doorstep on the same day they order them, as long as their order totals at least $35….

Dear Quentin,

My dad and his second wife moved to Texas for their golden years. 

Unfortunately, he died unexpectedly last September. He had been battling a terminal disease. He was immunocompromised, and a double whammy of pneumonia and COVID-19 was just too much. My stepmother said if I claimed a share of their house, I would be…