 |
|
|
|||||
Wall Street is hanging near its records on Tuesday following some mixed profit reports, as General Motors and other big U.S. companies give updates on how much President Donald Trumps tariffs are hurting or helping them. The S&P 500 was shaving 0.1% off its all-time high set the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 44 points, or 0.1%, as of 12:10 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was down 0.4% after setting its own record. General Motors dropped 5.8% despite reporting a stronger profit for the spring than analysts expected. The automaker said its still expecting a $4 billion to $5 billion hit to its results over 2025 because of tariffs and that it hopes to mitigate 30% of that. GM also said it will feel more pain because of tariffs in the current quarter than it did during the spring. That helped to offset big gains for some homebuilders after they reported stronger profits for the spring than Wall Street had forecast. D.R. Horton rallied 14.5%, and PulteGroup rose 9.2%. That was even as both companies said homebuyers are continuing to deal with challenging conditions, including higher mortgage rates and an uncertain economy. So far, the U.S. economy seems to be powering through all the uncertainty created by Trumps on-and-off tariffs. Many of Trumps stiff proposed taxes on imports are currently on pause, and the next big deadline is Aug. 1. Talks are underway on possible trade deals with other countries that could lower the proposed tariffs before they kick in. Companies are already feeling effects. Genuine Parts, the Atlanta-based company that sells auto and industrial replacement parts around the world, trimmed its profit forecast for the full year in order to incorporate all U.S. tariffs currently in effect, along with its updated expectations for business conditions in the second half of the year. Its stock rose 5.5% after it reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. RTX fell 2.3% after cutting its forecast for profit in 2025 but also raising its forecast for revenue. It made the changes to incorporate what CEO Chris Calio called our current assessment of the impact of tariffs, along with other changes anticipated from Washington’s recent approval of big tax changes. Coca-Cola fell 1% even though it delivered a stronger profit than forecast. Its revenue for the quarter only edged past analysts expectations, and it said that higher prices that it charged helped offset sales of fewer cases during the spring. Opendoor Technologies, a company that’s caught interest among investors looking for the next meme stock that can rally regardless of how its profits are doing, rose another 3.1% to $3.31. It’s more than quadrupled from 78 cents just two Fridays ago. In the bond market, Treasury yields sank as traders continue to expect the Federal Reserve to wait until September at the earliest to resume cutting interest rates. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been insisting he wants to see more data about how Trumps tariffs are affecting inflation and the economy before the Fed makes its next move. Thats despite often angry criticism from Trump, who has been lobbying for more cuts to rates to happen sooner. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.33% from 4.38% late Monday. In overseas markets, Japans benchmark surged and then fell back as it reopened from a holiday Monday following the ruling coalitions loss of its upper house majority in Sundays election. The Nikkei 225 shed 0.1%. Analysts said the market initially climbed on relief that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba vowed to stay in office despite a loss for his ruling coalition in an upper-house election Sunday. But the results have only added to political uncertainty and left his government without the heft needed to push through legislation. A breakthrough in trade talks with the U.S. might win Ishiba a reprieve, but so far theres been scant sign of progress in negotiating away the threat of higher tariffs on Japans exports to the U.S. beginning Aug. 1. Indexes were mixed elsewhere in Asia and Europe. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
Category:
E-Commerce
Dawn Price signs rent checks worth about $160,000 every month for 79 people that her nonprofit helps house in Laguna Beach, California. Usually, she logs into an online portal to withdraw enough from an account funded by a grant from the federal housing agency. But in February, she couldn’t. Access had been temporarily cut off for many housing organizations as part of the Trump administrations cuts and funding freezes. That was just a sea change for us for those dollars to be so immediately at risk, said Price, the executive director of Friendship Shelter, which started in 1987 as a community organization. Access was eventually restored but the episode took a toll. Government moves slowly usually, and I think what was so disorienting early on was government was moving really fast, she said. In the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump froze, cut or threatened to cut a huge range of social services programs from public safety to early childhood education to food assistance and services for refugee resettlement. Staffing cuts to federal agencies have also contributed to delays and uncertainty around future grant funds. Altogether, his policies are poised to upend decades of partnerships the federal government has built with nonprofits to help people in their communities. This vast and interconnected set of programs funded by taxpayers has been significantly dismantled in just months, nonprofit leaders, researchers and funders say. And even deeper, permanent cuts are still possible. That uncertainty is also taking a toll on their staff and communities, the leaders said. In response to questions about the cuts to grant funding, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, Instead of government largesse thats often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, the Trump administration is focused on unleashing Americas economic resurgence to fuel Americans individual generosity. He pointed to a new deduction for charitable giving included in the recently passed tax and spending law that he said encourages Americans innate altruism. But experts say private donations will not be enough to meet the needs. In 2021, $267 billion was granted to nonprofits from all levels of government, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute published in February. While the data includes tax-exempt organizations like local food pantries as well as universities and nonprofit hospitals, it underestimates the total funding that nonprofits receive from the government. It includes grants, but not contracts for services nor reimbursements from programs like Medicare. It also excludes the smallest nonprofits, which file a different, abbreviated tax form. However, the figure does give a sense of the scale of the historic and, until now, solid relationship between the public sector and nonprofits over the last 50 years. Now, this system is at risk and leaders like Price say the cost of undoing it will be catastrophic. Government funding to nonprofits reaches far and wide The Urban Institutes analysis shows more than half of nonprofits in every state received government grants in 2021. In the vast majority of the country, the typical nonprofit would run a deficit without government funding. Only in two Congressional districts one including parts of Orange County, California, and another in the suburbs west of Atlanta would a typical nonprofit not be in the red if they lost all of their public grant funding, the analysis found. But in Orange County, famous for its stunning beaches, mansions and extraordinary wealth, funders, nonprofits and researchers said that finding surprised them. In part, that’s because of major economic inequalities in the county and its high cost of living. Taryn Palumbo, executive director of Orange County Grantmakers, said nonprofits are not as optimistic about their resiliency. They are seeing their budgets getting slashed by 50% or 40%, she said. Or theyre having to look to restructure programs that they are running or how theyre serving or the number of people that theyre serving. Last year, the local Samueli Foundation commissioned a study of nonprofit needs in part because they were significantly increasing their grantmaking from $18.8 million in 2022 to an estimated $125 million in 2025. They found local nonprofits reported problems maintaining staff, a deep lack of investment in their operations and a dearth of flexible reserve funds. The foundation responded by opening applications for both unrestricted grants and to support investments in buildings or land. Against this $10 million in potential awards, they received 1,242 applications for more than $250 million, said Lindsey Spindle, the foundations president. It tells a really stark picture of how unbelievably deep and broad the need is, Spindle said. There is not a single part of the nonprofit sector that has not responded to these funds. Every topic you can think of: poverty, animal welfare, arts and culture, civil rights, domestic abuse… Theyre telling us loud and clear that they are struggling to stay alive. Charitable organizations have held a special role in the U.S. One of the founding stories of the United States is the importance of the voluntary sector, of neighbors helping neighbors and of individuals solving social problems. While other liberal democracies built strong welfare states, the U.S. has preferred to look to the charitable sector to provide a substantial part of social services. Since the 1960s, the federal government has largely funded those social services by giving money to nonprofits, universities, hospitals and companies. Several new policies converged at that time to create this system, including the expansion of the federal income tax during World War II and the codification of tax-exempt charitable organizations in 1954. Then, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations started to fund nonprofits directly with federal money as part of urban renewal and Great Society programs. It was a key approach of midcentury liberalism of addressing issues of poverty, sort of making a reference to civil rights and racial inequality, but not growing the size of government, said Claire Dunning, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Conservatives also tended to support working through local, private, nonprofit organiations, though for different reasons than liberals, she said. With various expansions and cuts during different presidencies, the federal government has continued to fund nonprofits at significant levels, essentially hiding the government in plain sight, Dunning said. The size and importance of the nonprofit apparatus became suddenly visible in January when the Trump administration sought to freeze federal grants and loans. Dunning said the speed, hostility and scale of the proposed cuts broke with the long legacy of bipartisan support for nonprofits. People had no idea that the public health information or services they are receiving, their Meals on Wheels program, their afterschool tutoring program, the local park cleanup were actually enabled by public government dollars, she said. A coalition of nonprofits challenged the freeze in court in a case that is ongoing, but in the six months since, the administration has cut, paused or discontinued a vast array of programs and grants. The impacts of some of those policy changes have been felt immediately, but many will not hit the ground until current grant funding runs out, which could be in months or years depending on the programs. Private donations can’t replace scale of government support Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach has an annual budget of about $15 million, $11.5 million of which comes from government sources. Price said the government funding is braided in complex ways to house and support 330 people. They’ve already lost a rental reimbursement grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But the Samueli Foundation stepped in to backfill those lost funds for three years. That kind of support is extremely unusual, she said. We dont know of any large-scale private philanthropy response to keeping people housed because its a forever commitment, Price said. That person is in housing and is going to need the subsidy for the rest of their lives. These are seriously disabled people with multiple issues that theyre facing that they need help with. She also believes that even in a wealthy place like Orange County, private donors are not prepared to give five, six or eight times as much as they do currently. Donors already subsidize their government grants, which she said pay for 69% of the actual program costs. We are providing this service to our government at a loss, at a business loss, and then making up that loss with these Medicaid dollars and also the private fundraising, she said. She said her organization has discussed having to put people out of housing back on to the streets if the government funding is cut further. That would be, I think, a signal to me that something is deeply, deeply wrong with how were looking at these issues, said Price, adding, If I was placing a bet, I would bet that we have enough good still in government to prevent that. ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Elon Musk fought court cases on opposite coasts Monday, raising a question about the billionaire that could either speed his plan to put self-driving Teslas on U.S. roads or throw up a major roadblock: Can this wildly successful man who tends to exaggerate really be trusted?In Miami, a Tesla driver who has admitted he was wrong to reach for a dropped cell phone moments before a deadly accident, spoke of the danger of putting too much faith in Musk’s technology in this case his Autopilot program.“I trusted the technology too much,” said George McGee, who ran off the road and killed a woman out stargazing with her boyfriend. “I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes.”In unusual coincidence, regulators arguing an Oakland, California, case tried to pin exaggerated talk about the same Tesla technology at the center of a request to suspend the carmaker from being able to sell vehicles in the state.Musk’s tendency to talk big whether it’s his cars, his rockets or his government costing-cutting efforts have landed him in trouble with investors, regulators and courts before, but rarely at such a delicate moment.After his social media spat with President Donald Trump, Musk can no longer count on a light regulatory touch from Washington. Meanwhile, sales of his electric cars have plunged and so a hit to his safety reputation could threaten his next big project: rolling out driverless robotaxis hundreds of thousands of them in several U.S. cities by the end of next year.The Miami case holds other dangers, too. Lawyers for the family of the dead woman, Naibel Benavides Leon, recently convinced the judge overseeing the jury trial to allow them to argue for punitive damages. A car crash lawyer not involved in the case, but closely following it, said that could cost Tesla tens of millions of dollars, or possibly more.“I’ve seen punitive damages go to the hundreds of millions, so that is the floor,” said Miguel Custodio of Los Angeles-based Custodio & Dubey. “It is also a signal to other plaintiffs that they can also ask for punitive damages, and then the payments could start compounding.”That Tesla has allowed the Miami case to proceed to trial is surprising. It has settled at least four deadly accidents involving Autopilot, including payments just last week to a Florida family of a Tesla driver. That said, Tesla was victorious in two other jury cases, both in California, that also sought to lay blame on its technology for crashes.Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Miami case argue that Tesla’s driver-assistance feature, called Autopilot, should have warned the driver and braked when his Model S sedan blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles-an-hour in an April 2019 crash. Tesla said that drivers are warned not to rely on Autopilot, or its more advanced Full Self-Driving system. It says the fault entirely lies with the “distracted driver” just like so many other “accidents since cellphones were invented.”Driver McGee settled a separate suit brought by the family of Benavides and her severely injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.McGee was clearly shaken when shown a dashcam video Monday of his car jumping a Key West, Florida, road and hitting a parked Chevrolet Tahoe which then slammed into Benavides and sent her 75 feet through the air to her death. Asked if he had seen those images before, McGee pinched his lips, shook his head, then squeaked out a response, “No.”Tesla’s attorney sought to show that McGee was fully to blame, asking if he had ever contacted Tesla for additional instructions about how Autopilot or any other safety features worked. McGee said he had not, though he was heavy user of the features. He said he had driven the same road home from work 30 or 40 times. Under questioning, he also acknowledged he alone was responsible for watching the road and hitting the brakes.Summarizing the testimony, Tesla said in a statement after the court adjourned that McGee had “stated the simple truth that we all know: If he had just paid attention to the road instead of searching for his dropped cell phone and pressing the accelerator which he was doing for over a minute before the crash this tragic accident would never have happened.”But lawyers for the Benavides family had a chance in the courtroom at parrying that line of argument, asking McGee if he would have taken his eyes off the road and reached for his phone had he been driving any car other than a Tesla on Autopilot.McGee responded, “I don’t believe so.”The case is expected to continue for two more weeks.In the California case, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is arguing before an administrative judge that Tesla has misled drivers by exaggerating the capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features. A court filing claims even those feature names are misleading because they offer just partial self-driving.Musk has been warned by federal regulators to stop making public comments suggesting Full Self-Driving allows his cars to drive themselves because it could lead to overreliance on the system, resulting in possible crashes and deaths. He also has run into trouble with regulators for Autopilot. In 2023, the company had to recall 2.3 million vehicles for problems with the technology and is now under investigation for saying it fixed the issue though it’s unclear it has, according to regulatory documents.The California case is expected to last another four days. Condon reported from New York. Bernard Condon and David Fischer, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||