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.
FOOT LOCKER FALLS
Shares of Foot Locker tanked 27 percent on Friday after the retailer released first quarter earnings that missed Wall Street estimates. CEO Mary Dillon pointed the finger at the "macroeconomic backdrop" and the need to aggressively mark down prices to clear out excess inventory. Now the company is anticipating squeezed margins for the upcoming quarters, with lower demand and higher levels of theft continuing to cut into profits.
VICE MEDIA DECLARES BANKRUPTCY
In what feels like the end of an era for a certain brand of millennial-focused digital journalism, Vice Media declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday. The company had struggled to find its financial footing after its rapid rise in the 2010s. The bankruptcy comes just one month after fellow digital news outlet BuzzFeed News shut down.
RETAIL ROUNDUP
Target, Home Depot, and Walmart all reported this week in a whirlwind of earnings that presented a mixed picture for the sector. Shares of Target are down nearly 4 percent for the week after seeing a surprise drop in online sales. Walmart's stock is also down despite beating estimates on earnings and revenue, with the likely culprit being a lower-than-expected adjusted earnings guidance for the coming quarter. Finally, Home Depot posted its worst revenue miss in 20 years.
NETFLIX RISES
Netflix's stock surged 9 percent on Thursday as investors got excited about the streaming giant's new advertising model. The company said that 25 percent of its new subscribers went with its cheaper, ad-supported tier that launched late in 2022. The bump marks a turnaround for Netflix, which has struggled recently to keep up subscriber growth.
SILICON VALLEY BANK CEO APOLOGIZES
Greg Becker, former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, told lawmakers this week that he was "truly sorry" for how the failure of the lender impacted customers and shareholders. At the same time, he defended his decision to go on vacation amid the collapse. Meanwhile, regional bank stocks rallied amid a surge in investor confidence in the sector, which has struggled since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March. Shares of PacWest, for example, jumped 18 percent after falling 21 percent last week.
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.
