The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
MEMESTOCK: TUPPERWARE
Something funny happened on the way to the kitchen this week. Stock for legacy brand Tupperware, which had been struggling mightily to remain on the New York Stock Exchange as it dipped below a dollar, started to rise. And up it went, climbing more than 260% in the last month. It seems memestock investors have made it the new golden child. Even with the meteoric rise from where it had been, the stock is still down 33 percent since the beginning of the year.
BIG TECH
One of these things is not like the other…Meta and Alphabet stocks shot up after the companies released their earning reports this week. Ad dollars are flowing once again to the biggest tech companies and it's showing in their profits. On the other hand, Microsoft tumbled despite a strong quarter as investors were concerned about a slower ramp-up in artificial intelligence than expected. Next week, we'll round out the Big 4 tech giants when Apple releases its report. At the end of the week Meta was up 10 percent, Alphabet was up 9 percent, and Microsoft was down 2 percent.
HIGH SEAS, LOW SKIES
The dichotomy was also seen in the travel industry. Royal Caribbean stock shot up after crushing expections in its earnings report; investors were expecting earnings of $1.58 per share but the actual number was $1.70 ($1.82 adjusted). The cruise liner says people are turning their spending from goods to experiences, and that has helped the vacation company immensely. Up in the air, worries about domestic air travel hit Alaska Airlines and Southwest with both reporting that travel is slowing, especially within the U.S. Royal Caribbean stock ended the week up 6 percent, but Alaska Air and Southwest were both down almost 9 percent.
FORD SLOWS DOWN
One of the big announcements coming out of Ford's earnings report is that the auto giant is pulling back on plans to crank out 600,000 electric vehicles this year. Now it says 2024 is when it expects to hit that annual number, but that also changes its plan to hit 2 million EVs by the end of 2026. Investors took note, sending the stock 4 percent for the week.
LOWER WAGE INCREASES = GOOD NEWS
A true Catch-22: a new report shows wage growth is slowing, which isn't great if you were hoping for a big raise this year, but is very good news for the economy because it could curb inflation. There was other good news on the inflation front this week (despite the Fed raising rates a quarter of a percent). In June, consumer prices rose at the slowest rate that we've seen in two years. During his press conference on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said experts at the central bank are no longer forecasting a recession.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
