Splurge – LSD News

JPMorgan expands $1.5 trillion economic security splurge into Europe

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:14:27 +0000

JPMorgan Chase will extend a $1.5 trillion investment program designed to bolster U.S. economic resilience across Europe, the Wall Street giant said on Tuesday.

The 10-year Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI) was launched in the U.S. last October with the aim of facilitating, financing and investing in industries deemed critical to American economic security and resilience.

It was announced in November that the U.K. would be brought into the plan, which is focused on several key areas, including supply chains and manufacturing, defense and aerospace, energy independence, healthcare, and strategic technologies like AI.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe have for too long relied on “unpredictable sources for things like critical minerals that are essential to collective security and prosperity.”

“Now, it is in our best interest to address these challenges together — because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it,” he said.

The SRI’s key pillars are divided into around 30 subsectors, ranging from shipbuilding to spacecraft, nuclear energy, cybersecurity and the production of high-speed projectiles.

European aerospace and defense has seen an investment boom in recent years, with regional leaders and the NATO military alliance committing to ramping up spending on security.

The pledges are widely expected to boost European firms’ bottom lines, with regionally headquartered companies already reporting record order backlogs and huge upswings in income over the past year.

In 2025, the Stoxx Europe Aerospace and Defense index — home to the continent’s biggest defense companies, including Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Rheinmetall — surged 56.5%, with some regional defense players more than doubling in value.

So far this year, the index has gained 4.3%.

Chuka Umunna, a former British member of parliament who will be leading JPMorgan’s SRI initiative in the U.K., told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that the bank’s strength is “built on the strength of the U.S.”

“The strength of the U.S. has three pillars to it: military might, economic prowess and the strength of its alliances,” he said. “And one thing that has become very clear is that the U.S. and the West have become too reliant on unreliable and unpredictable supply chains and sources for those things that are critical to its national economic security and resilience.”

Umunna said in Europe, there will be five key countries that the SRI will focus on — the U.K., France, Germany, Poland and Italy. But, he added, all EU and NATO member states will be included in the strategy.

In his 2026 letter to JPMorgan Chase shareholders, sent earlier this month, Dimon said the U.S. had allowed itself to become too dependent on unreliable sources for materials essential to national security, such as critical minerals, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing output.

“This is us putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak,” Umunna said of the bank’s SRI plan. “Unless you start to invest and seek to develop our capabilities here in the West in these particular markets, we’re going to continue to have the exposure we have.”

He pointed to energy, where the U.K. imports more than 40% of its energy needs, and semiconductors, where Umunna said the West was too reliant on East Asian economies for procurement.

“These are all things we are going to need to scale up and build capacity in,” he told CNBC. “We’re delivering this through the usual global banking products that we would use, but where you’ve got an SRI-aligned company, we will seek to lean in more. For example, from a credit point of view, you will potentially see JPMorgan doing smaller size deals, if they are in this space, than you would otherwise expect.”

Best Buy hikes sales forecast as shoppers upgrade tech, splurge on devices

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 06:04:42 +0000

A Best Buy store in Pinole, California, US, on Monday, Nov. 24, 2025. Best Buy Co. is expected to release earnings figures on November 25.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Best Buy hiked its full-year forecast Tuesday, as it topped Wall Street’s quarterly sales expectations and customers turned to the retailer to upgrade laptops and splurge on new gaming consoles and smartphones.

The consumer electronics retailer said it now expects revenue of between $41.65 billion to $41.95 billion for the full year, higher than its previous range of $41.1 billion to $41.9 billion. It expects adjusted earnings per share of $6.25 to $6.35, compared with its prior range of $6.15 to $6.30.

Best Buy said it expects full-year comparable sales, a metric that tracks sales online and at stores open at least 14 months, to range between a 0.5% rise to a 1.2% increase, compared with its previous expectations for a 1% decline and a 1% climb.

On the company’s earnings call, CEO Corie Barry said Best Buy saw “better-than-expected” sales in the quarter because of strong results across computing, gaming and mobile phones, as well as growth in wearables and headphones. She said sales rose across both its website and stores.

She said customer shopping behavior in the most recent three-month period was about the same as what Best Buy has seen for the past several quarters.

“Customers remain resilient, but deal focused and attracted to more predictable sales moments,” such as back-to-school sales and Best Buy’s October sale that coincided with Amazon’s Prime Day event, she said.

And she said, “while customers continued to be thoughtful about big ticket purchases in the current environment, they are willing to spend on high priced point products when they need to or when there is technology innovation.”

Here’s how the retailer did for the three-month period that ended Nov. 1 compared with what Wall Street was expecting, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Earnings per share: $1.40 adjusted vs. $1.31 expected
Revenue: $9.67 billion vs. $9.59 billion expected

Shares were up about 5% Tuesday. Best Buy’s stock has dropped roughly 7% this year. That compares with the 15% gains of the S&P 500 during the same period.

Best Buy has been waiting for some of the key catalysts that tend to drive its business, such as higher housing turnover that leads to appliance purchases, the tech innovations that spark demand for devices and expert advice, and the increased willingness by inflation-weary consumers to splurge on discretionary items.

Some of that tech innovation appears to be gaining momentum with sales of the Nintendo Switch 2, new iPhones and AI-enabled laptops. The company called out those merchandise categories as strengths in the most recent three-month period.

Best Buy’s net income for the fiscal third quarter fell to $140 million, or 66 cents per share, from net income of $273 million, or $1.26 per share, in the year-ago period. Adjusting for one-time items, including stock-based compensation and restructuring charges, Best Buy reported earnings of $1.40.

Revenue rose from $9.45 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Best Buy’s comparable sales increased 2.7% year over year. That was the company’s highest comparable sales growth in four years, Barry said.

In the U.S., the metric jumped 2.4%, as shoppers bought computers, gaming systems and mobile phones, but purchased fewer appliances and home theaters.

Getting ready for the holidays

Best Buy’s annual revenue has dropped for the past three years. With the updated guidance, the company expects annual revenue to be slightly higher than last year’s total of $41.53 billion.

Still, like other retailers, Best Buy said it’s continuing to see shoppers spend selectively and seek out value, and anticipates that will carry into the holiday season, Barry said on a call with reporters.

“We absolutely are seeing people make trade offs,” she said.

For instance, she said, some customers are buying TVs in the middle or lower tier of its price range rather than premium TVs. However, she said Best Buy’s reputation as a specialty retailer with many different brands and price points is helping it attract more low-income and younger customers.

As the holiday season heats up, Barry said the company is ready for key sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday and will have “deals across the spectrum for whenever people want to shop.”

Even so, the retailer gave a cautious outlook for the holiday quarter, saying it expects sales trends to decelerate from the previous quarter. Bilunas said the company expects comparable sales during the period to range from a 1% decline to a 1% increase.

On the company’s earnings call, he said Best Buy is seeing “positive growth” in the fourth quarter and a roughly similar trend to the third quarter, but faces tougher year over year comparisons and may see waning trends in some categories like gaming and wearables. In gaming, Nintendo Switch 2 sales haven’t been as strong as they were closer to the June launch.

“Obviously, the holiday is never easy to predict,” he said.” What we do believe is that we have a range of scenarios and the range we’ve provided gives us a great place to plan and plan our business operationally.”

Higher tariffs will be a complicating factor for the rest of the year, both in how they affect the company’s costs and consumer spending. On the company’s earnings call, Bilunas said higher tariffs so far haven’t had a meaningful impact on Best Buy’s prices or its sales. He said growth is coming from more unit sales.

Compared to other industries, he said, consumer electronics are a very promotional category and that’s muted the impact on average selling prices, he said.

Trying out Meta glasses, Sharkninja appliances

At Best Buy’s stores, the company has tried to give customers more reasons to try products by adding more vendor demos, Barry said on the company’s earnings call. For example, she said more than 50 of its locations have immersive showcase areas for Meta’s latest AI-enabled glasses, and demand for in-person demos has outpaced available appointments.

It has launched most of its pilot showrooms with Ikea, which it is testing in 10 stores across Texas and Florida. And other vendors, including Breville and Sharkninja, are also showing off items for home baristas and chefs or customers looking for health and beauty devices in its stores, she said.

Barry said “very early reads are positive and we are excited to monitor customer response during the holidays.”

To help drive growth, Best Buy also launched a third-party marketplace in mid-August to expand the brands and the items that it sells. About three months into the launch, the company has more than 1,000 sellers and 11 times more individual items available for online customers than it did before, Barry said on the earnings call.

So far, she said the company is seeing higher sales in categories like accessories and small appliances. She said customer return rates for marketplace items have run lower than first-party purchases, and more than 80% of marketplace product returns by customers have been at stores.

As the marketplace grows, she said it’s driving higher profits and creating new opportunities for Best Buy to sell online ads.

Despite the positive signs, some of Best Buy’s categories, including appliances, continue to lag.

Chief Financial Officer Matt Bilunas said the appliance category is “probably the most difficult one that we have in the market today.” He said historically, the company has sold new premium appliances and sets of appliances.

With the slower housing market, he said the company is seeing more shoppers replace a product that’s broken rather than buy a washer and dryer pair, and promotions haven’t been as effective. To speed up sales, Best Buy plans to increase its labor in the department, speed up deliveries to better compete with rivals and even make some items available same day, he said.

“And hopefully as housing and different things change, then the market starts to swing back to something that might be a little bit more normal,” he said.

Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Introduces ‘The Splurge’ Upgrade

LSD News Szerkesztőség — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 17:37:22 +0000

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled “The Splurge,” a comprehensive set of protocol upgrades aimed at addressing a variety of challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem. In his latest blog post titled “Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 6: The Splurge,” Buterin delves into the technical intricacies of upcoming enhancements that seek to propel Ethereum toward a more performant, secure, and scalable future.

“The Splurge” is designed to tackle a collection of “little things” in Ethereum protocol design that don’t neatly fit into existing upgrade categories. According to Buterin, these elements are “very valuable for Ethereum’s success” but require a dedicated focus due to their complexity and significance.

What Is Ethereum’s ‘The Splurge’?

The key goals of The Splurge include bringing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a more performant and stable “endgame state,” integrating account abstraction directly into the protocol to enhance security and user convenience, optimizing transaction fee economics to increase scalability while mitigating risks, and exploring cutting-edge cryptographic techniques to significantly improve Ethereum in the long term.

Buterin emphasizes the need to refine the EVM, stating that “the EVM today is difficult to statically analyze, making it challenging to create highly efficient implementations, formally verify code, and make further extensions over time.” The introduction of the EVM Object Format (EOF) is the first step in the EVM improvement roadmap, scheduled for inclusion in the next hard fork. EOF introduces features such as the separation of code and data, the banning of dynamic jumps in favor of static jumps, the removal of gas observability within EVM code, and the addition of an explicit subroutine mechanism.

EOF lays the groundwork for further upgrades like the EVM Modular Arithmetic Extensions (EVM-MAX) and the integration of Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) capabilities. These enhancements aim to make the EVM more efficient for advanced cryptographic operations without relying heavily on precompiles. “After EOF is introduced, it becomes easier to introduce further upgrades,” Buterin notes.

Account abstraction has been a long-standing goal for Ethereum, aiming to allow smart contract code to control transaction verification. “At the core, account abstraction is simple: allow transactions to be initiated by smart contracts, and not just EOAs,” Buterin explains. This capability could enable a range of applications, from quantum-resistant cryptography to seamless key rotation and improved wallet security.

ERC-4337 serves as a current solution for implementing account abstraction without modifying the core protocol. It introduces a new object called “user operations” and separates transaction processing into validation and execution phases. However, Buterin points out inefficiencies in this approach, particularly the “flat ~100k gas overhead per bundle.”

EIP-7702 is proposed to bring the convenience benefits of account abstraction to all users, including externally owned accounts (EOAs), by integrating it directly into the protocol. This move could unify the ecosystem and eliminate the need for relayers in privacy protocols. “EIP-7702 makes the ‘convenience features’ of account abstraction available to all users, including EOAs, today,” Buterin writes.

While EIP-1559 has improved average block inclusion times and fee predictability, Buterin acknowledges imperfections in its implementation. He notes that “the formula is slightly flawed” and “doesn’t adjust fast enough in extreme conditions.” The proposed EIP-7706 aims to address these issues by introducing multidimensional gas fees, allowing for separate pricing and limits for different resources like calldata, state reads/writes, and state size expansion.

“Multidimensional gas has two primary tradeoffs: it adds complexity to the protocol and to the optimal algorithm needed to fill a block to capacity,” Buterin explains. However, he suggests that the benefits in efficiency and resource management could outweigh these complexities.

The introduction of Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) aims to improve the randomness in Ethereum’s proposer selection process. “Ideally, we would find a more robust source of randomness,” Buterin states. VDFs could offer a solution by providing outputs that are computationally intensive to produce but easy to verify, reducing the potential for manipulation. Challenges remain, such as “unexpected optimization” through hardware acceleration or parallelization. “Currently, there is no VDF construction that fully satisfies Ethereum researchers on all axes,” Buterin admits, indicating that further research and development are needed.

Moreover, Buterin explores the “far future of cryptography” by discussing advanced concepts like indistinguishability obfuscation and one-shot signatures. He refers to these as part of the “Egyptian god protocols,” extremely powerful cryptographic primitives that could revolutionize blockchain technology. Indistinguishability obfuscation allows for the creation of “encrypted programs” that perform arbitrary computations while keeping internal details hidden. “With obfuscation and one-shot signatures together, we can build almost perfect trustless third parties,” Buterin asserts.

Potential applications include secure DAOs and auctions, universal trusted setups, and simplified verification of zero-knowledge proofs. Despite their promise, these technologies are still in their infancy. “There is a heck of a lot left to do,” Buterin concedes. Implementations of indistinguishability obfuscation currently face significant performance hurdles, and practical quantum computers capable of enabling one-shot signatures remain theoretical.

By tackling EVM improvements, account abstraction, transaction fee optimization, and exploring the frontiers of cryptography, Buterin aims to keep Ethereum at the forefront of blockchain innovation. While acknowledging the complexities and trade-offs involved, he remains optimistic. “Extremely powerful cryptography could change the game completely,” he concludes.

At press time, ETH traded at $2,627.

Ether price, 1-week chart | Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView.com

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com