Earnings, earnings, earnings. This week, good news comes first and US bank stocks have been on a tear. Earnings reports lured investors back to the downtrodden shares, which has helped the sector reduce its drop this year to 13%, from as much as 29% in May. Lenders including Zions Bancorp and KeyCorp led the charge. Still, regulatory shifts and potential commercial real estate credit issues are looming, meaning there may be more bank stock woes to come.
Could this year’s tech-stock surge be at risk of sputtering? Around 170 companies in the S&P 500 Index, representing 40% of its market capitalization, are set to post results next week, including tech bellwethers Microsoft, Meta and Google parent Alphabet. The Federal Reserve will also announce its latest decision on interest rates, and Chair Jerome Powell will provide clues on whether investors were correct to wager that its expected quarter-point rate hike will be its last.
On the other side, Donald Trump is making it increasingly clear what he’d change if elected president. Policies on his list include banning babies born in the US from automatically claiming citizenship, excluding transgender people from the military and swiftly ending the war in Ukraine.
Barbie, the movie built around the Mattel Inc. doll, is shaping up as a top box-office success of 2023 with a projected opening weekend of about $158 million. The film made its debut Friday and sold $22.3 million in tickets for early screenings, more than the $19.3 million garnered by Top Gun: Maverick, the highest grossing US release in 2022. The weekend is already the most talked about in cinemas this year thanks to the simultaneous release of Barbie and Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer, a biography of the inventor of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer brought in $10.5 million in Thursday evening previews, Universal said. Boxoffice Pro is forecasting about $64.7 million for the weekend.
Hollywood helps keep California’s massive economy humming, but the state’s more than a century of long-term population growth may be over. That’s the sobering projection by state officials after the pandemic and housing costs led to California’s first population decline in 2020. The bright spot: the state is at least expected to recoup that decline in the next decade.
