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Whirlpool says Iran war causing ‘recession-level industry decline.’ The shares are down 12%

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:05:42 +0000

Whirlpool shares tumbled Thursday after the iconic appliance maker warned that the Iran war triggered a severe downturn, underscoring how sharply higher fuel prices and collapsing consumer confidence are beginning to weigh on big-ticket purchases.

“War in Iran resulted in recession-level industry decline in the U.S. as consumer confidence collapsed in late February and March,” the company said in its earnings filing.

The comments marked one of the starkest corporate warnings yet about the economic fallout from the conflict and contrasted with more resilient spending trends recently highlighted by companies tied to travel and services.

Shares of Whirlpool, a maker of washers, dryers, dishwashers and other home appliances, dropped 12% Thursday.

CEO Marc Bitzer said Whirlpool moved quickly to cut costs and adjust pricing as macroeconomic conditions deteriorated.

“We acted decisively to address pricing and costs in the face of rapid deterioration in macroeconomic conditions,” Bitzer said in a statement. “Now, with Section 232 changes in favor of domestic manufacturers, Whirlpool Corporation is structurally positioned to win with our American-made products.”

The company also slashed its full-year earnings guidance roughly in half, cutting its forecast to a range of $3 to $3.50 a share from a prior outlook of about $6 a share. Whirlpool said it would also suspend its dividend as it prioritizes paying down debt.

Analysts at JPMorgan said the lower earnings outlook was driven by higher raw material inflation, a larger net tariff impact, and weaker price and product mix benefits.

While companies such as Uber and Disney have reported little evidence of consumers pulling back on travel, entertainment and convenience spending, the comments from the Maytag parent suggest strain may be emerging in bigger-ticket categories such as washers, dryers and kitchen appliances.

Consumer confidence, according to a University of Michigan survey, touched a record low at one point in April as the Iran war spiked gasoline prices. The stock market has rebounded since mid-April on hope the U.S. and Iran could come to a deal that ends the fighting. U.S. oil prices are still above $90 a barrel, however, as traders wait to see if a peace proposal can be worked out.

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GM: Iran war causing cost increases, but pricey vehicles continue to sell

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:13:41 +0000

A Cadillac all-electric 2025 Escalade IQ luxury SUV is displayed during press day of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, September 14, 2023.

Rebecca Cook | Reuters

DETROIT — General Motors on Tuesday said the Iran war is causing cost increases to its business, but inflated consumer expenses such as higher gas prices haven’t deterred buyers from spending on pricey vehicles.

GM CEO Mary Barra said the Detroit automaker continues to monitor any change in customer spending but, so far, the company’s vehicle mix has remained healthy.

GM said it had an $52,000 average transaction price for vehicles during the first quarter, which was in line with last year. The average new vehicle transaction price across the industry for March, the most recent data available, was $49,275, according to Cox Automotive.

“I think the biggest variable that we’re looking at is how long does the conflict last and what does it cause from a cost perspective across logistics, supply chain, and if it ends up having any impact on a shift in mix, but, to date, we really haven’t seen that,” Barra said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call Tuesday with investors.

Barra’s comments follow consumer confidence plunging to a record low in April as fears mounted over rising energy prices and the broader impact of the Iran war, according to a University of Michigan survey earlier this month.

They also come after the company reported a 9.7% decline in first-quarter sales compared with an unseasonably high March 2025. GM also said it’s dealing with tighter inventories, specifically on its full-size pickup trucks, as the company retooled for updates to the vehicles for later this year.

Barra said if there are major shifts, including a more apparent move into less expensive or all-electric vehicles, that the company feels it’s well positioned to meet those needs as well.

GM CFO Paul Jacobson and Barra said the Detroit automaker is continuing to offset higher costs as best as it can through warranty improvements, cost efficiencies and potentially by deferring some hiring.

“While our operating performance remains strong, as reflected in our excellent first-quarter results, the war in Iran has raised our costs and its duration remains uncertain,” Barra said. “We are working to offset these cost pressures by reducing spending in other areas and by continuing to find efficiencies across the business.”

The GM executives specifically singled out rising energy and logistics costs due to the Iran war and its impact on oil as driving up costs, but they declined to disclose an exact amount of the impact.

On a broader basis, GM on Tuesday said its first-quarter performance is expected to offset incremental increases in commodity and freight costs — including from logistics and higher DRAM chips — of $1.5 billion to $2 billion for the year.

Dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips are semiconductors that are essential for powering infotainment, digital clusters, advanced driver assistance systems and EV systems in vehicles.

But the DRAM costs aren’t related to the Iran war. Those price hikes are coming from increasing demand for the chips, including outside the automotive industry, according to industry experts at S&P Global Mobility.

“Automotive is not the only industry vying for DRAM. The current supply crunch is driven by the AI explosion, especially in data centers, where high-bandwidth memory (HBM) DRAM is in high demand. As a result, major DRAM manufacturers are reallocating wafer capacity to serve this more lucrative market,” according to a Feb. 26 post from S&P Global Mobility.

Jacobson on Tuesday said the company has “no real concerns” about supply chain shortages involving the Iran war, specifically concerning raw materials, at the moment.

“We’re not projecting or worried about any shortages right now, and I think the supply chain team has continued to prove their resolve through yet another challenge, as we’ve seen them do in years past,” he said.

GM on Tuesday said it has, and will continue to, divert shipments of vehicles, including its highly profitable full-size pickups and SUVs, to the U.S. instead of the Middle East amid the war.

“Usually that’s a very strong market. So after this conflict ends, I think there’s upside there,” Barra said.

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AI memory is sold out, causing an unprecedented surge in prices

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:58:45 +0000

Eugene Mymrin | Moment | Getty Images

All computing devices require a part called memory, or RAM, for short-term data storage, but this year, there won’t be enough of these essential components to meet worldwide demand.

That’s because companies like Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Google need so much RAM for their artificial intelligence chips, and those companies are the first ones in line for the components.

Three primary memory vendors — Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics — make up nearly the entire RAM market, and their businesses are benefitting from the surge in demand.

“We have seen a very sharp, significant surge in demand for memory, and it has far outpaced our ability to supply that memory and, in our estimation, the supply capability of the whole memory industry,” Micron business chief Sumit Sadana told CNBC this week at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.

Micron’s stock is up 247% over the past year, and the company reported that net income nearly tripled in the most recent quarter. Samsung this week said that it expects its December quarter operating profit to nearly triple as well. Meanwhile, SK Hynix is considering a U.S. listing as its stock price in South Korea surges, and in October, the company said it had secured demand for its entire 2026 RAM production capacity.

Now, prices for memory are rising.

TrendForce, a Taipei-based researcher that closely covers the memory market, this week said it expects average DRAM memory prices to rise between 50% and 55% this quarter versus the fourth quarter of 2025. TrendForce analyst Tom Hsu told CNBC that type of increase for memory prices was “unprecedented.”

Three-to-one basis

Chipmakers like Nvidia surround the part of the chip that does the computation — the graphics processing unit, or GPU — with several blocks of a fast, specialized component called high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, Sadana said. HBM is often visible when chipmakers hold up their new chips. Micron supplies memory to both Nvidia and AMD, the two leading GPU makers.

Nvidia’s Rubin GPU, which recently entered production, comes with up to 288 gigabytes of next-generation HBM4 memory per chip. HBM is installed in eight visible blocks above and below the processor, and that GPU will be sold as part of single server rack called NVL72, which fittingly combines 72 of those GPUs into a single system. By comparison, smartphones typically come with 8 or 12GB of lower-powered DDR memory.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang introduces the Rubin GPU and the Vera CPU as he speaks during Nvidia Live at CES 2026 ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 5, 2026.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

But the HBM memory that AI chips need is much more demanding than the RAM used for consumers’ laptops and smartphones. HBM is designed for high-bandwidth specifications required by AI chips, and it’s produced in a complicated process where Micron stacks 12 to 16 layers of memory on a single chip, turning it into a “cube.”

When Micron makes one bit of HBM memory, it has to forgo making three bits of more conventional memory for other devices.

“As we increase HBM supply, it leaves less memory left over for the non-HBM portion of the market, because of this three-to-one basis,” Sadana said.

Hsu, the TrendForce analyst, said that memory makers are favoring server and HBM applications over other clients because there’s higher potential for growth in demand in that business and cloud service providers are less price-sensitive.

In December, Micron said it would discontinue a part of its business that aimed to provide memory for consumer PC builders so the company could save supply for AI chips and servers.

Some inside the tech industry are marveling at how much and how quickly the price of RAM for consumers has increased.

Dean Beeler, co-founder and tech chief at Juice Labs, said that a few months ago, he loaded up his computer with 256GB of RAM, the maximum amount that current consumer motherboards support. That cost him about $300 at the time.

“Who knew that would end up being ~$3,000 of RAM just a few months later,” he posted on Facebook on Monday.

‘Memory wall’

AI researchers started to see memory as a bottleneck just before OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit the market in late 2022, said Majestic Labs co-founder Sha Rabii, an entrepreneur who previously worked on silicon at Google and Meta.

Prior AI systems were designed for models like convolutional neural networks, which require less memory than large language models, or LLMs, that are popular today, Rabii said.

While AI chips themselves have been getting much faster, memory has not, he said, which leads to powerful GPUs waiting around to get the data needed to run LLMs.

“Your performance is limited by the amount of memory and the speed of the memory that you have, and if you keep adding more GPUs, it’s not a win,” Rabii said.

The AI industry refers to this as the “memory wall.”

Erik Isakson | Digitalvision | Getty Images

“The processor spends more time just twiddling its thumbs, waiting for data,” Micron’s Sadana said.

More and faster memory means that AI systems can run bigger models, serve more customers simultaneously and add “context windows” that allow chatbots and other LLMs to remember previous conversations with users, which adds a touch of personalization to the experience.

Majestic Labs is designing an AI system for inference with 128 terabytes of memory, or about 100 times more memory than some current AI systems, Rabii said, adding that the company plans to eschew HBM memory for lower-cost options. Rabii said the additional RAM and architecture support in the design will enable its computers to support significantly more users at the same time than other AI servers while using less power.

Sold out for 2026

Wall Street has been asking companies in the consumer electronics business, like Apple and Dell Technologies, how they will handle the memory shortage and if they might be forced to raise prices or cut margins. These days, memory accounts for about 20% of the hardware costs of a laptop, Hsu said. That’s up from between 10% and 18% in the first half of 2025.

In October, Apple finance chief Kevan Parekh told analysts that his company was seeing a “slight tailwind” on memory prices but he downplayed it as “nothing really to note there.”

But in November, Dell said it expected its cost basis for all of its products to go up as a result of the memory shortage. COO Jefferey Clarke told analysts that Dell planned to change its mix of configurations to minimize the price impacts, but he said the shortage will likely affect retail prices for devices.

“I don’t see how this will not make its way into the customer base,” Clarke said. “We’ll do everything we can to mitigate that.”

Even Nvidia, which has emerged as the biggest customer in the HBM market, is facing questions about its ravenous memory needs — in particular, about its consumer products.

At a press conference Tuesday at CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked if he was concerned that the company’s gaming customers might be resentful of AI technology because of rising game console and graphics cards prices that are being driven by the memory shortage.

Huang said Nvidia is a very large customer of memory and has long relationships with the companies in the space but that, ultimately, there would need to be more memory factories because the needs of AI are so high.

“Because our demand is so high, every factory, every HBM supplier, is gearing up, and they’re all doing great,” Huang said.

At most, Micron can only meet two-thirds of the medium-term memory requirements for some customers, Sadana said. But the company is currently building two big factories called fabs in Boise, Idaho, that will start producing memory in 2027 and 2028, he said. Micron is also going to break ground on a fab in the town of Clay, New York, that he said is expect to come online in 2030.

But for now, “we’re sold out for 2026,” Sadana said.

From Llamas to Avocados: Meta’s shifting AI strategy is causing internal confusion

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:50:57 +0000

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was so optimistic last year about his company’s Llama family of artificial intelligence models that he predicted they would become the “most advanced in the industry” and “bring the benefits of AI to everyone.”

But after including a whole section on Llama in his opening remarks during Meta’s earnings call in January of this year, he mentioned the brand name only once on the latest call in October. The company’s obsession with its open-source large language model has given way to a very different approach to AI, one focused around a multibillion-dollar hiring spree to bring in top industry talent that could help Meta take on the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

As 2025 comes to a close, Meta’s strategy remains scattershot, according to insiders and industry experts, feeding the perception that the company has fallen further behind its top AI rivals, whose models are rapidly gaining adoption in the consumer and enterprise markets.

Meta is pursuing a new Llama successor and frontier AI model, codenamed Avocado, CNBC has learned. People with knowledge of the matter said many within the company were expecting the model to be released before the end of this year, but that the plan now is for that to happen in the first quarter of 2026. The model is wrestling with various training-related performance testing intended to ensure the system is well received when it eventually debuts, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

“Our model training efforts are going according to plan and have had no meaningful timing changes,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

With its stock underperforming the broader tech sector this year and badly trailing Google parent Alphabet, Wall Street is looking for a sense of direction and a path to a return on investment after Meta spent $14.3 billion in June to hire Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and a handful of his top engineers and researchers. Four months after that announcement, which included Meta purchasing a big stake in Scale, the social media company raised its 2025 guidance for capital expenditures to between $70 billion and $72 billion from a prior range of $66 billion to $72 billion.

“In many ways, Meta has been the opposite of Alphabet, where it entered the year as an AI winner and now faces more questions around investment levels and ROI,” analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets wrote in a November note to clients. The firm recommends buying both stocks.

At the heart of Meta’s challenge is the sustained dominance of its core business: digital advertising.

Even with annual sales in excess of $160 billion, Meta’s ad targeting business, driven by massive improvements in AI and the popularity of Instagram, is growing revenue north of 20% a year. Investors have lauded the company for using AI to bolster the strength of its cash cow and to make the organization more efficient and less bloated.

But Zuckerberg has much grander ambitions, and the new guard he’s brought in to push the future vision of AI has no background in online ads. The 41-year-old founder, with a net worth of more than $230 billion, has suggested that if Meta doesn’t take big swings, it risks becoming an afterthought in a world that’s poised to be defined by AI.

Until recently, Meta’s unique position in AI was the open-source nature of its Llama models. Unlike other AI models, Meta’s technology was made freely available so third-party researchers and others could access the tools and ultimately improve them.

“Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post in July 2024. “But open source is quickly closing the gap.”

He’s since started changing his tune. Zuckerberg hinted over the summer that Meta was considering shaking up its approach to open source after the April release of Llama 4, which failed to captivate developers. Zuckerberg said in July that, “We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”

Avocado, when it’s eventually made available, could be a proprietary model, according to people familiar with the matter. That means outside developers wouldn’t be able to freely download its so-called weights and related software components.

Some at Meta were upset that the R1 model released by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek earlier this year incorporated pieces of Llama’s architecture, the people said, further underscoring the risks of open source and hammering home the idea that the company should overhaul its strategy.

The company’s high-priced AI hires and leaders of the recently launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, have also questioned the open-source AI strategy and favored creating a more powerful proprietary AI model, CNBC reported in July. A Meta spokesperson said at the time that the company’s “position on open source AI is unchanged.”

The Llama 4 flub was a significant catalyst in Zuckerberg’s pivot, the people said, and also led to a major internal shake-up. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer and a 20-year company veteran who was hired as its 13th software engineer, no longer oversees the AI division, formally known as the GenAI unit, after the botched release, the people said.

Zuckerberg went on a spending spree to retool Meta’s AI leadership.

He landed on Wang, then Scale AI’s 28-year-old CEO, who was named Meta’s new chief AI officer and, in August, became the head of an elite unit called TBD Lab. Avocado is being developed inside TBD, people familiar with the matter said.

Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in June that Meta was trying to lure talent from his company with gigantic pay packages, including sky-high $100 million signing bonuses, which Meta said at the time was a misrepresentation.

Along with Wang came other tech bigwigs, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who heads the product and applied research arm of MSL, and Shengjia Zhao, who was a ChatGPT co-creator. They’ve brought with them modern methods that have become the standard for frontier AI development in Silicon Valley, and have upended the traditional software development process inside Meta, the people said.

Meta’s AI culture shift

Wang is now under pressure to deliver a top-tier AI model that helps the company regain momentum against rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the people said.

That pressure has only increased as competitors stepped up their game. Google’s Gemini 3, unveiled last month, has drawn solid reviews from users and analysts. OpenAI recently announced new updates to its GPT-5 AI model, while Anthropic debuted its Claude Opus 4.5 model in November shortly after releasing two other major models.

Analysts previously told CNBC that there’s no clear leading AI model, because some perform better on certain tasks like conversations or coding. But the one constant is that all of the major model creators have to spend a lot of money on AI to maintain any competitive edge, they said.

A hefty dose of that spending lines the pockets of Nvidia, the leading developer of AI graphics processing units. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang laid out the state of play during his company’s earnings call in November, after the chipmaker reported 62% year-over-year revenue growth. He highlighted a number of model developers as big customers, including Elon Musk’s xAI.

“We run OpenAI. We run Anthropic. We run xAI because of our deep partnership with Elon and xAI,” Huang said. “We run Gemini. We run Thinking Machines. Let’s see, what else do we run? We run them all.”

At no point did Huang reference Llama, although elsewhere on the call he said Meta’s Gem, “a foundation model for ad recommendations trained on large-scale GPU clusters,” drove an improvement in ad conversions at Meta in the second quarter.

Wang isn’t the only Meta exec feeling the heat.

Friedman has also been tasked with producing a breakout AI product, the people said. He was responsible for Meta’s September launch of Vibes, a feed of AI-generated short videos, which is widely viewed as inferior to OpenAI’s Sora 2, they said. Former employees and creators told CNBC that the product was rushed to market and lacked key features, like the ability to generate realistic lip-synched audio.

Although Vibes has attracted more interest to the company’s stand-alone Meta AI app, it trails the Sora app as measured by downloads, according to data provided to CNBC by Appfigures.

Pressure is being felt across Meta’s AI organizations, where 70-hour workweeks have become the norm, the people said, while teams have also been hit with layoffs and restructurings throughout the year.

In October, Meta cut 600 jobs in MSL to reduce layers and operate more quickly. Those layoffs impacted employees in areas like the Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, or FAIR, and played a key role in chief AI scientist Yann LeCun’s decision to leave the company to launch a startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

LeCun declined to comment.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, says people move on.

Getty Images

Zuckerberg’s high-stakes decision to turn to outsiders like Wang and Friedman to lead the company’s AI efforts represented a major change for a company that’s historically promoted long-tenured workers to top posts, the people said.

In Wang and Friedman, Zuckerberg has handed the controls to experts in infrastructure and related systems, rather than consumer apps. The new leaders also brought a different management style and one that’s unfamiliar inside Meta.

In particular, insiders told CNBC that Wang and Friedman are more cloistered in their communications, a contrast to a historically open approach of sharing work and chatting on the company’s Workplace internal social network

Members of Wang’s TBD Lab, who work near Zuckerberg’s office, don’t use Workplace, people familiar said, adding that they’re not even on the network and that the group operates like a separate startup.

However, Zuckerberg isn’t giving the new AI leadership team complete autonomy. Aparna Ramani, engineering vice president, who has been with Meta for nearly a decade, has been put in charge of overseeing the distribution of computing resources for MSL, the people said.

And in October, Vishal Shah was moved from leading the company’s metaverse initiatives within Reality Labs, where he’d been for four years, to a new role as vice president of AI Products, working with Friedman. Shah is considered a loyal lieutenant who has helped act as a bridge between the company’s traditional social apps like Instagram and newer projects like Reality Labs, the people said.

Meta confirmed last week that it plans to cut resources to its virtual reality and related metaverse initiatives, shifting its attention to its popular AI-infused glasses developed with EssilorLuxottica.

‘Demo, don’t memo’

One of the biggest points of tension between the old and the new is in the realm of software development, people familiar with the matter said.

In creating products, Meta has traditionally sought input from numerous groups responsible for areas like front-end user interface, design, algorithmic feeds and privacy, the people said. The multistep process was intended to ensure some level of uniformity among the company’s apps that attract billions of users each day.

But the many internal tools built over the years to help coders create software and features weren’t developed to accommodate foundation models. Meta’s new AI leaders, notably Friedman, view them as bottlenecks slowing down what should be a rapid-fire development process, the people said.

Friedman has called for MSL to use newer tools that have been calibrated to incorporate multiple AI models and various kinds of coding automation software often called AI agents, the people said.

“They have this mantra now saying ‘Demo, don’t memo,'” Lovable CEO Anton Osika said in October at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, about Meta’s new development process.

Osika said Meta employees have been using Lovable’s tools to more quickly build internal apps, specifically referencing the company’s finance teams, which have turned to Lovable to create software for tracking head count and planning.

An illustration photo shows the event of Meta launching the Vibes platform, Suqian City, Jiangsu Province, China on September 26, 2025.

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

While Meta continues retooling its app development methods and pushes toward releasing Avocado, the company has been experimenting with other AI models on its products. Vibes, for instance, relied on AI models from Black Forest Labs and Midjourney, a startup that counts Friedman as an advisor.

Meta is also altering its approach to infrastructure, and is increasingly turning to third-party cloud computing services like CoreWeave and Oracle for developing and testing AI features as it builds out its own massive data centers, the people said.

The social media giant announced in October that it signed a joint venture agreement with Blue Owl Capital as part of a $27 billion deal to help fund and develop the gargantuan Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The company said at the time that the partnership provides the “the speed and flexibility” Meta needs to build the data center and support its “long-term AI ambitions.”

Despite the company’s challenges in 2025, Zuckerberg’s message to employees and investors is that he’s more committed than ever to winning. At the top of the company’s earnings call in October, Zuckerberg said MSL is “off to a strong start.”

“I think that we’ve already built the lab with the highest talent density in the industry,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re heads down developing our next generation of models and products and I’m looking forward to sharing more on that front over the coming months.”

WATCH: Data center demand driving infrastructure credit

John F. Kennedy airport Terminal 4 system outage resolved after causing delays

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:37:40 +0000

Travelers passing through John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 4 faced delays Sunday after operations went “down” around noon, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The agency did not immediately provide details about the outage but said it was resolved a few hours later. Passengers had reported long, stagnant lines as early as 11:20 a.m.

“An assessment was conducted by technicians and the internet connection is now back online,” the Port Authority said. “The team is working on getting passengers on their way safely and as soon as possible.”

Delta Air Lines, which operates out of Terminal 4, was not affected, according to the Port Authority.

Claudia Hernandez, a traveler in the terminal, posted a video on X showing what appeared to be long lines. She said that it appeared the airport servers were down.

“I’m still waiting at the moment, we got here at 11:20 a.m. and the line has not moved at all,” Hernandez wrote. “We got notified of the issue at the moment we got to the terminal to check our bags.”

Jeffrey Ashton, who was trying to fly standby, said he watched “madness” unfold as lines stretch and barely moved. He observed some “tense moments” between airline staff and passengers as the wait dragged on.

“There were just so many people and the lines were not moving,” Ashton said. “People were just standing there and waiting. And there were really no announcements, so you were getting information, like thirdhand or secondhand.”

The outage took place at the start of what is expected to be a record-breaking week of Thanksgiving travel.

It also follows the end of a 43-day government shutdown, which had strained the aviation system. Air traffic controllers and other essential airport workers went without pay for more than a month, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to order a reduction in service at major hubs across the country.

Miran says he doesn’t see tariffs causing inflation, putting him in minority on Fed committee

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 16:17:42 +0000

Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran said Friday that he doesn’t anticipate President Donald Trump’s tariffs will have an inflationary effect on the U.S. economy.

“I’m clearly in the minority in not being concerned about inflation from tariffs,” he said on CNBC’s “Money Movers.” “But that was also true in 2018-2019, and I think I probably could take a little victory lap about that.”

“There will always be relative price changes, but whether or not it’s inflation that’s macroeconomically significant of the type that monetary policy should respond to is a different question,” he added.

His comments come after the Fed governor was the lone dissenter among 12 Federal Open Market Committee voters from the central bank’s decision Wednesday to slash its benchmark overnight lending rate by a quarter-percentage point, instead calling for a half-point reduction.

When explaining the reason for his decision, Miran said he doesn’t “see any material inflation from tariffs.”

“I see no evidence that it’s occurred,” the policymaker said, pointing to the lack of difference in inflation rates between import-intensive core goods and overall core goods. “If you thought tariffs are driving inflation higher, you’d think imports would be differentially inflating at a higher pace.”

Miran additionally cited “no discernible trend difference” between U.S. core goods inflation and that in other countries. “If I thought that tariffs were driving any material inflation in the United States, I’d look for evidence,” he continued.

However, most measures show inflation running above the Fed’s 2% target this year, and the full committee’s forecast indicated it won’t come back to that level until 2028.

In the second half of the year, Miran expects growth to come in stronger, as he said economic headwinds such as uncertainty around Trump’s trade and tax policies caused growth in the first half to be weaker than he had hoped. He also believes Trump’s immigration policies will bring about disinflation in the economy.

“If you add millions of new immigrants into a country in a short period of time, it’s going to drive shelter prices up,” he said. “If you close that border, and then you have negative debt migration … that’s going to have a very disinflationary effect.”

The Senate confirmed Miran to the Fed Board of Governors on Monday, a day before this week’s policy meeting began. He had been picked by President Donald Trump in August to fill former Governor Adriana Kugler’s seat following her abrupt resignation.

Miran is set to serve on the board for the remainder of Kugler’s term, which expires on Jan. 31, 2026. He said during a confirmation hearing earlier this month that he will take an unpaid leave of absence from his position as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors while serving out the term rather than resign entirely.

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Google suffers cloud outage, causing disruptions for OpenAI, Shopify and other services

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 13:36:58 +0000

A visitor walks past a Google Cloud sign at the booth of Google during the Hanover technology Fair (Hannover Messe) on April 22, 2024 in Hanover, northern Germany, with Norway as partner country.

Ronny Hartmann | AFP | Getty Images

Google’s cloud suffered significant global outages on Thursday, knocking down or disrupting a number of large internet services.

“We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” a status page from Google Cloud showed, indicating that the outages began at 10:51 a.m. PT. “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.”

Later in the day, Google said that customers were “still experiencing varying degrees of impact” and that engineers were working to recover service, but that the company didn’t have an ETA for the fix.

The outages are a setback for Google, which is trying to keep pace in cloud infrastructure with larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The cloud unit, led by Thomas Kurian, has been one of the faster-growing segments of Google in recent years and is benefiting from demand for artificial intelligence products and services.

E-commerce software vendor Shopify, a major Google cloud customer, said in a post on X that it’s “aware of an issue impacting several services.” And OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it was experiencing some problems related to single sign-on “and other log-in methods.” The company said in a social media post that its “engineering teams are working to mitigate these issues.”

The Downdetector website showed over 13,000 reported incidents for Google Cloud at around 11:30 a.m. PT, though that number was down dramatically by early afternoon.

“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,” a Google spokesperson said in an email, and pointed to the dashboard for updates.

Alphabet has been slashing cuts, implementing layoffs in its sales, customer experience, internal deal and go-to-market teams, CNBC reported in February.

While Downdetector also showed reports of disruptions with AWS, a spokesperson for the company said there were no issues.

Google’s status page said the incident had caused problems for 13 of its cloud services, across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Other web services that appeared to suffer disruptions included Amazon’s Twitch, CoreWeave’s Weights and Biases, Elastic, GitLab, LangChain, Microsoft’s GitHub, Replit and Intuit’s Mailchimp.

In a post on X Thursday evening, Kurian said all services are back up and running.

“We have been hard at work on the outage today and we are now fully restored across all regions and products,” Kurian wrote. “We regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Starting late morning Pacific time, Cloudflare said on its status site that it was experiencing problems. Cloudflare is a major web security and content distribution network provider. The stock fell 5% on Thursday.

“This is a Google cloud outage,” a Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the “limited” number of services using Google Cloud were impacted. Its core services continued to operate normally.

“We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures,” Cloudflare’s page said. “We are continuing to investigate this and we will update “this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level.”

Google Trends pointed to a spike in users searching “Firebase,” which is one of Google’s developer platforms for building and managing web and mobile apps.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Google buyouts highlight industry’s cost-cutting efforts

‘Don’t fight the Oval Office’: Investors are finally taking Trump seriously and it’s causing a volatility spike

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:39:42 +0000

A portrait of the 40th US President Ronald Reagan is seen in the background as US President Donald Trump participates in the swearing-in ceremony for Paul Atkins, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Saul Loeb—AFP via Getty Images)

High returns in stocks causing investors to move away from traditionally safe assets: Study

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:02:09 +0000

Return on stock markets has a weak link with one’s decision to invest in equity and mutual funds according to a research paper by RBI economists. But it is slowly influencing the savers to move away from traditional safe instruments like fixed deposits and post office savings schemes.

“Stock market returns have a statistically insignificant relationship with the investment decisions in equity and mutual funds,” said a research paper titled ‘Determinants of Household Saving Portfolio in India: Evidence from Survey Data’ by Chaitali Bhowmick, Sapna Goel, Amit Kumar, Rekha Misra, Preetika and Satyananda Sahoo. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Reserve Bank of India.

The returns in the stock market, represented by BSE Sensex returns, do not exhibit any statistically significant relationship with assets like shares and mutual fund investment, the authors note. “Extant literature posits that the relationship between stock market return and stock market investment is not straightforward.”

But at the same time, BSE returns, however, significantly induce investments away from safe and traditional instruments like fixed deposits and post office savings instruments in urban areas, highlighting that some substitution may be underway, the authors say.

Interest rate on term deposits positively influences saving decision in assets like fixed deposits and post office savings while house prices have a mixed impact across rural and urban areas on savings in financial assets.

The empirical findings suggest that as the household income rises, the likelihood of owning financial assets and maintaining a well-diversified portfolio also rises. Additionally, the analysis reveals that occupation groups associated with higher job security and regular income streams tend to have higher saving propensity and a greater proportion of risky financial assets in their portfolios.At the macro level, despite an increase in annual savings (i.e., flow) in financial assets, outstanding asset holding (i.e., stock) observed from various rounds of the All-India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) exhibits preponderance of physical assets, as a disproportionately higher share of households’ wealth is still allocated towards physical assets such as land and buildings.The authors admit limitations to the study because of lack of quantitative data availability. The study analyses the determinants of household savings in India for the period – 2014 to 2022 using ‘Aspirational India’ database of Consumer Pyramids Household Survey data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CPHS-CMIE) which has qualitative information.

Roche stock drops 5% after report its Wegovy challenger is causing patients to vomit

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:51:07 +0000

Roche Holding AG’s shares slid the most in more than a month after its closely-watched experimental obesity pill was tied to side effects, raising questions about the drugmaker’s competitiveness in the hottest new pharmaceutical market.

Roche dropped as much as 5% in early trading in Zurich on Thursday after releasing results of a small study that showed high rates of nausea and vomiting, as well as other side effects. The company presented the findings late Wednesday to a packed audience at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting in Madrid.

Though Roche’s study only lasted four weeks, investors are tracking it after encouraging early data on the effectiveness of the drug, known as CT-996, sent the company’s shares soaring in July. Roche is pushing its experimental obesity drugs forward quickly in a bid to catch up with Novo Nordisk A/S and Eli Lilly & Co. in the weight-loss market, which is forecast to top $130 billion annually by the end of the decade.

Roche argued that gradually increasing the dose could mitigate side effects. Five out of six patients who slowly took more reported nausea, while one developed chronic reflux and two had vomiting, the Swiss drugmaker said. Patients who increased their dose more quickly were more likely to have side effects, with six out of seven developing nausea and chronic acid reflux, and five of seven reporting vomiting.

“It’s a long road ahead for Roche,” said Barclays Plc analyst Emily Field. Based on typical timing for patient trials needed for approval, the company may not bring its first weight loss drug to market until 2030, she said.

Novo’s shares climbed as much as 3.8% in early trading in Copenhagen. Lilly’s shares rose 2.2% in New York on Wednesday.

“Roche has the biopharma firepower to potentially compete in this space, but the non-definitive data likely leave investors on the sidelines,” waiting to see how the pill performs in bigger and more definitive studies, BMO Capital Markets’ Evan David Seigerman said in a note.

The results came a few hours after Novo presented what many investors said was reassuring data on its obesity pill, known by the nickname amycretin. Patients who took the highest dose of Novo’s pill for 12 weeks had a 75% rate of nausea, though with a lower dose, that rate dropped to 31%.

Roche sees its results from the first stage of clinical trials as encouraging and plans larger studies, said Manu Chakravarthy, Roche’s global head of cardiovascular, renal and metabolism product development.

“The whole point of doing a phase one study is to actually push the dose and get to the limits of tolerability so that you understand what the limits of tolerability are,” Chakravarthy said.

In addition to the nausea and vomiting seen in many patients, Roche said one person also had elevated levels of the digestive enzyme lipase. High lipase levels can be a sign of a problem with the pancreas. Patients’ heart rates also tended to increase by about 15 beats a minute, a level that some who asked questions during the presentation said was much higher than is typical for weight loss drugs.

In addition to the pill, which works similarly to Novo’s Wegovy shot, Roche presented data on an injectable medicine this week that is closer to Lilly’s Zepbound. Side effects on the shot were higher than expected but can be addressed, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Roche’s pill is a simpler molecule than its shot and both Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound, potentially allowing the challenger to sidestep the supply shortages that have plagued the field’s leaders so far. It still has a way to go, however.

“We really need to see how the drug works in a larger patient population,” said Jared Holz from Mizuho Securities in New York. “We view Novo and Lilly as still the clear leaders in the space.”

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