Stock Market News: Inflation cools, stocks jump as Netflix, Tesla rise

U.S. stocks ended solidly higher on Wednesday, led by a gain of more than 1% in the Nasdaq after a report showed inflation subsided further with consumer prices registering their smallest annual increase in more than two years.

The data underscored expectations the Federal Reserve may let interest rates stand after one more 25 basis point hike expected at its July policy meeting.

Shares of big tech-related companies, which tend to be sensitive to higher interest rates, gave the S&P 500 its biggest boost.

Twitter Inc
on Wednesday was hit with a lawsuit accusing it of refusing to pay at least $500 million in promised severance to thousands of employees who were laid off after Elon Musk acquired the company.

Courtney McMillian, who oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of total rewards” before she was laid off in January, filed the proposed class action in San Francisco federal court.

McMillian claims that under a severance plan created by Twitter in 2019, most workers were promised two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service if they were laid off. Senior employees such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.

But Twitter only gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did not receive anything, McMillian claims.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday finalized rules aimed at increasing the resilience of the $5.5 trillion money market fund industry, but scrapped a proposed new pricing model that had been strongly opposed by asset managers.

The SEC’s decision not to impose “swing pricing” represents a major victory for asset managers including BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity, which operate some of the industry’s largest money market funds.

The industry had argued the pricing mechanism, meant to deter hasty investor redemptions in times of market stress, would make money market funds unattractive and be challenging to implement.

Money market funds saw massive outflows in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting the U.S. government to intervene to stabilize them. The panic was reminiscent of 2008 when a run on money market funds threatened to freeze up global markets and prompted the government to backstop the sector.

Some congressional Democrats say three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over at least two years.

Their Wednesday report urges federal agencies to investigate and potentially go to court over the information H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer shared with Meta.

The lawmakers tell the IRS, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the IRS watchdog the findings “reveal a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy.”

The tax prep companies say they take the privacy of their customers seriously. Meta says its system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it’s able to detect.

Domino’s Pizza customers can now order food through Uber Eats and Postmates apps, the pizza chain announced on Wednesday.

Domino’s franchises will handle food deliveries, and the initial rollout will begin this fall in four pilot markets before expanding around the U.S. by the end of 2023. 

Lucid Group said its second-quarter production dropped from the previous three months while deliveries stayed flat, sending the shares of the luxury electric-vehicle maker down about 6% on Wednesday.

The Saudi Arabia-backed startup has been struggling to ramp up production in the face of supply chain issues, while a price war started by market leader Tesla in January has intensified competition.

Lucid delivered 1,404 vehicles in the quarter to June 30, compared with 1,406 deliveries in the previous quarter. Its production fell 6% sequentially to 2,173 vehicles.

The company had trimmed its 2023 production forecast and reported a lower-than-expected first-quarter revenue in May as it took a hit from Tesla’s price war and rising interest rates.

Global public debt surged to a record $92 trillion in 2022 as governments borrowed to counter crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with the burden being felt acutely by developing countries, a United Nations report said.

Domestic and external debt worldwide has increased more than five times in the last two decades, outstripping the rate of economic growth, with gross domestic product only tripling since 2002, according to the Wednesday report, released in the run up to a G20 finance ministers and central bank governors’ meeting July 14-18.

Developing countries owe almost 30% of the global public debt, of which 70% is represented by China, India and Brazil. Fifty-nine developing countries face a debt-to-GDP ratio above 60% – a threshold indicating high levels of debt.

Citigroup became the 10th Wall Street firm to raise its price target on Tesla in recent weeks, predicting shares can hit $278 vs. $215.

Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday that a China-based hacking group it identified as Storm-0558 breached email accounts from approximately 25 organizations, including government agencies. 

Inflation is slowing fast enough to allow the Federal Reserve to stop tightening U.S. monetary policy after what is still widely expected to be an interest-rate hike at its meeting in two weeks time, traders bet on Wednesday.

Implied yields on futures tied to the U.S. central bank’s policy rate fell after a government report showed consumer prices last month rose 3.0% from a year earlier, after climbing 4.0% in May.

Underlying inflation, whose persistence has been particularly worrying to Fed policymakers, eased more than expected to 4.8%.

The contract pricing still shows traders overwhelmingly expect the policy rate to rise a quarter point, to a 5.25%-5.5% range, at the Fed’s July 25-26 meeting, but now see about a 25% chance of another rate hike before year’s end, down from about 35% before the report.

Inflation rose by the lowest since March 2021 as consumer prices showed signs of easing. Thursday investors will get the producer price index.