Business

Boeing's strike and its shrinking cash pile

Boeing's troubles have turned into a crisis of cash. Some 33,000 machinists in the International Association of Machinists (IAM) have walked out, halting production of its flagship 737 Max.

Nvidia beats and still falls

Nvidia's second-quarter revenue rose 122 per cent to $30 billion, ahead of consensus forecasts.

Buffett is sitting on $277bn of cash

Berkshire Hathaway's second-quarter filings sent markets a clear message about valuations.

Intel stops paying its dividend

Intel suspended its dividend with its second-quarter results, ending thirty-two years of uninterrupted payouts.

CrowdStrike's outage: who pays?

A faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems around the world on 19 July, grounding airlines and disrupting hospitals and banks.

Prime Day: The ad business behind the discounts

Amazon's tenth annual Prime Day brought in an estimated $14.2 billion in online sales, a record.

Who actually pays a 10% tariff?

Donald Trump has proposed a universal baseline tariff of ten per cent on all imports and a sixty per cent levy on Chinese goods, and corporate finance departments are arguing over what it would cost them.

Nvidia becomes the world's most valuable company

Nvidia overtook Microsoft on 18 June to become the world's most valuable listed company, with a market value of $3.34 trillion.

Nvidia's boom: peak or plateau?

Nvidia's data centre revenue reached $22.6 billion in the first quarter, up 427 per cent from a year earlier.

Apple's record $110bn buyback

Apple has authorized a $110 billion share buyback, the largest in American corporate history, alongside a modest dividend increase.

Meta spends more, investors flee

Meta Platforms shares fell 10.5 per cent in a single session after first-quarter results that were, on the face of it, solid.

Bank profits hold up in a higher-for-longer world

First-quarter results from Wall Street's biggest banks showed how well they have adapted to high interest rates.

Reddit's IPO lets the public in

Reddit’s shares rose forty-eight per cent on their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, after the company priced its offering at $34, the top of the marketed range.

Big Tech is now in the power business

Amazon has paid $650 million for a data centre campus wired directly to Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power station.

Capital One's real prize in Discover: the network

Capital One has offered $35.3 billion in stock for Discover Financial, one of the boldest bank deals since the 2008 financial crisis.

NYCB's office loans come due

New York Community Bancorp’s earnings went badly wrong. The lender made a sudden $552 million provision and cut its dividend by seventy per cent, a sign that losses on commercial property are now reaching bank balance sheets.

Valentine's Day: The chocolate crisis

Cocoa futures have broken records, passing $5,000 per metric ton after crop disease and extreme weather hit the main growing regions of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

Meta pays its first dividend

Meta Platforms announced its first quarterly dividend, of $0.50 a share, together with a $50 billion addition to its share buyback programme.

Seven stocks, almost a third of the market

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Tesla now account for nearly twenty-eight per cent of the S&P 500's market value.

New Year's Eve: A dead year for deals

Global mergers and acquisitions volume fell to roughly $3 trillion in 2023, the lowest in a decade, and advisory fees fell with it.

Japan wants US Steel. Washington may say no

Nippon Steel has offered $14.9 billion for US Steel, or $55 a share, a forty per cent premium that the industrial logic can easily justify.

Companies rush to borrow before rates fall

Borrowing conditions for American companies have improved remarkably in a few weeks.

OpenAI's boardroom drama and Microsoft's $13bn exposure

Sam Altman was pushed out of OpenAI over a weekend and reinstated days later, an episode governance scholars will study for years as farce.

Black Friday: Retailers finally have the right amount of stock

Black Friday found American shops with tidy shelves, sensible stock levels and hardly any panic clearance sales.

WeWork's collapse: how leases became debt

WeWork has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, ending one of the most extravagant valuation bubbles venture capital has produced.

Halloween: The zombie companies are rising

Ten-year yields are near 5 per cent and base rates stand at 5.5 per cent, and the companies kept alive by cheap money are running out of time.

Alphabet spends more, grows less, and pays for it

Alphabet's shares fell 9.5 per cent in a single session after its third-quarter results, wiping $160 billion off its market value.

Banks' profit peak is here

JPMorgan Chase reported net interest income of nearly $23 billion for the third quarter, helped by high policy rates and its ability to pay depositors little.

The UAW strike's bill for Detroit

The United Auto Workers have gone on strike against Detroit's 'Big Three', General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, in a dispute that could reset labour costs across the industry.

Arm's IPO: scarcity is the selling point

SoftBank bought Arm for $32 billion in 2016 and now wants a valuation approaching $64 billion while selling just nine per cent of the British chip designer to the public.

The Treasury needs more money, and companies will feel it

On 2 August the US Treasury raised its quarterly refunding to $103 billion, the first increase in coupon issuance since 2021.

Why banks are selling their best loans

Banks are selling high-quality corporate loans to private credit managers and other institutional buyers, when they might be growing their balance sheets or putting spare cash into yielding assets.

Prime Day: What Amazon's discounts say about inflation

Shoppers spent an estimated $12.7 billion over Amazon's two-day Prime Day, an event that has become a rough gauge of how American consumers are holding up and what retailers can charge.

Banks passed the stress test. Now comes the real test

All twenty-three banks in the Federal Reserve's annual stress test passed in late June, showing on paper that they could survive a severe fall in commercial property prices and a global recession.

Why company defaults are creeping up

Company defaults are rising, but by an unfamiliar route. In past downturns bankruptcies followed a sudden fall in sales, or a breach of covenants that strict bank lenders chose to enforce.

The debt deal that changes almost nothing

The 27 May agreement suspends the federal debt ceiling through 2025, and its authors have hailed it as a triumph of bipartisan restraint.

Memorial Day: The debt deal is done. Now comes the bill

Negotiators agreed on 27 May to suspend the debt ceiling, and Washington's political drama ended in its usual anticlimax.

Office towers face a $1.5trn refinancing problem

About $1.5 trillion of commercial real estate debt matures before the end of 2025, according to Morgan Stanley, and office loans are the hardest part of it to refinance.

First Republic's final quarter: $100bn walks out the door

First Republic Bank lost $102 billion of deposits in the first quarter, according to the earnings report it finally published on 24 April.

The real cost of the banking crisis: customers want interest

JPMorgan Chase opened the first-quarter bank earnings season with record net revenue of $38.3 billion and a 52 per cent jump in net income.

Why Credit Suisse bondholders lost everything before shareholders

The Fed's quiet bailout of banks' bad bond bets

Banks borrowed a record $152.9 billion from the Federal Reserve's discount window, according to the H.4.1 balance-sheet release published on Thursday, 16 March.

Private credit's borrowers are feeling the squeeze

The Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) now resets above 4.55 per cent, up from almost nothing a year ago, and private credit funds are paying their limited partners double-digit gross yields.

Super Bowl: $7m for 30 seconds, and what it says about confidence

Thirty seconds of advertising during Super Bowl LVII, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, cost a record $7 million.

Meta's new growth story: buying back its own shares

Meta Platforms reported bland fourth-quarter revenue and a lacklustre outlook, and its shares rose 23 per cent in a day, adding roughly $90 billion of market value in a few hours.

Banks' easy profits are about to end

America's largest commercial banks reported record headline profits for the fourth quarter, lifted by a big rise in net interest income (NII).

Tech's layoffs are really about profits

Amazon announced 18,000 corporate layoffs as 2023 began, following similar cuts at Meta, Salesforce and Alphabet.

Boxing Day: The $816bn problem of returned presents

The National Retail Federation expects US consumers to return about $816 billion of merchandise in 2022, and the post-holiday flood of returns is where retail margins go to die.

The debt bill companies have pushed to 2024

US junk bond issuance struggled to pass $100 billion in 2022, the lowest annual total since the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.

The companies that only survive on cheap money