US stock futures climb, as Trump Media and Tesla surge in early trading
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(WASHINGTON) — As former President Donald Trump declared victory in the U.S. presidential election early Wednesday, shares of his media company, Trump Media & Technology, surged about 34% to about $45.49 in pre-market trading.
With U.S. markets yet to open, early indicators appeared to show Wall Street’s bullish view of a second term for Trump. As votes were still being, Dow futures were up, the U.S. dollar was strengthening and international markets were mixed.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures had surged about 2.9% by 6 a.m. in New York, having risen briskly from the 1.7% gain they had logged when former President Donald Trump took the stage in Florida at about 2 a.m.
S&P 500 futures traded up about 2.2% early Wednesday, while futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq market were up about 1.7%. Shares of Tesla, the electric-vehicle company headed by Trump ally Elon Musk, spiked about 14.5% in pre-market trades.
Trump owns a 57% stake in the Trump Media, which trades under the DJT ticker and is the parent of social media startup Truth Social. The company late Tuesday reported its third quarterly loss since going public in March.
Markets in the U.S. had surged on Tuesday, led by the Nasdaq’s 1.4% rise.
As Trump walked onto the stage in Florida early Wednesday, the dollar was strengthening. The U.S. Dollar Index traded up about 1.4% at 104.75, touching a level it hadn’t seen since early August. Yields on 10-year and 2-year Treasury bonds had also climbed overnight.
Trading in Asia was mixed Wednesday as international markets digested the election results. Japan’s Nikkei closed up 2.61% for the day, while Shanghai closed nearly flat, slipping just 0.09%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell, dropping 2.23% by the close after opening below Tuesday’s close.
The United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 Index climbed early Wednesday, rising about 1.43% moments after open. Germany’s DAX saw a similar rise, climbing about 1.3% in morning trading.
(TAMPA, Fla.) — Hurricane Milton left widespread gasoline shortages across Florida after it made landfall on Wednesday night and cut across the state. The damage exacerbated fuel outages that began before the storm arrived, as millions fled from its path.
Nearly a quarter of the roughly 7,900 gas stations in the state have run dry, petroleum data firm GasBuddy reported Thursday. Oil Price Information Service, or OPIS, another company that tracks the sector, found as much as half of the state’s gas stations lack fuel, Denton Cinquegrana, chief oil analyst at OPIS, told ABC News.
Across Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, almost two thirds of gas stations are without fuel, according to GasBuddy.
Experts said they expect the gas shortages to persist for days, hamstringing businesses and everyday people as Florida begins to recover from Hurricane Milton.
The delayed return of gasoline in the region owes to disruption at Port Tampa Bay, which says it handles more than 43% of the state’s petroleum imports. Far-reaching power outages will also impede gas service, since gas stations depend on power to pump fuel from storage tanks and deliver it into vehicles, experts said.
“This kind of situation isn’t solved overnight,” Jon Davis, chief meteorologist at Everstream Analytics, told ABC News. “It’s going to take many days to work itself out and get the situation back to normal.”
Port Tampa Bay, which remains closed, appears to have averted serious damage from the storm, the port said in a statement on Thursday morning. However, the port also noted that it continues to face road closures and flood concerns in the surrounding area.
“Some damage was observed to buildings but there has been no significant damage to docks, so far,” said the statement. “We are working with our fuel terminal operators to assess their facilities and learn when they will be able to return to service.”
Port Tampa Bay did not respond to an ABC News request for comment about the extent of damage from the storm.
While the port escaped a disaster that could have hampered fuel supplies in the state for weeks, the ongoing disruption still poses significant challenges for gas delivery in the short term, Jason Miller, a professor of supply-chain management at Michigan State University, told ABC News.
“It does seem we’ve avoided a worst-case scenario,” Miller said.
Depending on the extent of damage at the port, gas stations may come to rely on truck deliveries for the transport of fuel, Miller said. In that case, it would take some time to build up the capacity necessary to overcome the state’s gas outages, he added.
“It’s not a solution that you could implement tomorrow,” Miller said.
The potential return of port operations or the supplemental fuel from trucks would both rely on the state’s roads, some of which were damaged by the storm, experts noted. Such infrastructure may require repairs before gasoline carriers can safely deliver fuel to stations.
“The road issue can get taken care of in the next day or two,” Davis said.
Even if Port Tampa Bay comes back online and trucks join in to aid the recovery, a significant additional problem must first be addressed: power shortages. Gas stations require power to pump fuel from storage tanks into customers’ vehicles, and more than 3.4 million customers are currently without power in Florida, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
Port Tampa Bay said on Thursday that it remains without power, which it needs to operate oil terminals that make up a critical step in the supply chain.
More than 50,000 linemen have been pre-staged across Florida to restore power, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday.
“In a perfect world, power comes back quickly,” OPIS’ Cinquegrana said. “I think by early next week we might still see some stations out but for the most part you’ll get pretty close to normal.”
(NEW YORK) — Inflation bedeviled the U.S. economy for years, but a cooldown in price increases has shifted concern toward a different foe: Unemployment.
Hiring remains solid but has slowed dramatically from a peak achieved during the nation’s rebound from the pandemic. The unemployment rate still hovers near historic lows but has climbed markedly this year.
A jumbo-sized interest rate cut at the Federal Reserve last week was viewed by some economists as an effort to fend off rising joblessness, even as Fed Chair Jerome Powell offered up reassurance.
“The U.S. economy is in good shape,” Powell said.
Mixed signals sent by the nation’s labor market pose a high-stakes question for tens of millions of jobholders as well as millions of people seeking work: Where are conditions headed from here?
Economists who spoke to ABC News disagreed sharply about the outlook.
Some acknowledged a slowdown in recent months but dismissed worries about its implications, pointing to resilient job growth and other healthy metrics that suggest the economy continues to hum. Others, however, emphasized their concerns about the trajectory of labor conditions and what it indicates about potential layoffs.
“The job market is cooling but it has not frozen up,” Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, told ABC News. “This is a situation that’s seen as relatively stable but results may vary.”
Economists widely acknowledge that the labor market has slowed. That trend doesn’t come as a surprise after a years-long period of high interest rates, which typically weigh on economic activity and company hiring, some economists told ABC News.
In 2022, the pandemic rebound triggered a blazing-hot job market that saw employers add an average of nearly 400,000 jobs per month. Over a three-month period ending in August, employers added an average of about 116,000 jobs per month.
The unemployment rate has climbed this year from 3.7% to 4.2%, though it remains relatively low by historical standards.
The sky-high job growth was bound to slow, in part because the economy lacked room for expansion after employers had hired the workers they needed and a dwindling number of unemployed people remained on the sidelines, according to Valerie Wilson, a labor economist who runs the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“We expected job growth at some point to slow down,” Wilson said. “To me, that alone isn’t cause for concern.”
The uptick in unemployment isn’t cause for concern yet either, Wilson said, highlighting data that demonstrate strength in the labor market and across the wider economy.
The share of job holders between the ages of 25 to 54 — known as the “prime age” for workers — stands at a 23-year high. U.S. gross domestic product grew at a solid pace over three months ending in June, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data showed. A relatively low number of people has claimed unemployment benefits in recent weeks, suggesting few layoffs.
“I don’t think there’s an immediate cause for concern,” Wilson said.
Some economists disagreed. They pointed to a recession indicator known as the “Sahm Rule,” which says that a rise of 0.5 percentage points in the unemployment rate within a 12-month period typically precedes a recession.
“When it comes to the Sahm Rule, what you see in the data is when the unemployment rate starts rising, it usually has a lot of momentum and takes a while to stop,” Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at Indeed Hiring Lab, told ABC News. “That’s the concern.”
The rule’s originator, former Fed economist Claudia Sahm, has questioned whether it applies in this case, in part because unemployment remains low.
Economists who are worried also pointed to data suggesting that the employment situation may not be as strong as some contend.
Despite low unemployment, more than 10% of Americans can’t find enough work, meaning for instance that they are working part-time but want full-time jobs or have fallen out of the labor force because they’ve stopped looking for work, Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told ABC News.
“Rising unemployment is not just a blip,” Pollak said.
The exact path forward for the job market is difficult to predict, some economists said. Last week’s interest rate cut could help jumpstart economic activity, some noted; while others said such policy typically takes effect on a lag that will render it irrelevant in the near term.
“The future is uncertain,” Bunker said. “I wouldn’t say we’re moving in this great direction where everything will be completely fine. But I wouldn’t fall into the trap of saying there’s a rising unemployment rate so we’re certain to be in a recession soon.”
(NEW YORK) — Tens of thousands of U.S. dockworkers are set to walk off the job early Tuesday morning, clogging dozens of ports along the East and Gulf coasts and potentially raising consumer prices ahead of the holiday season.
The ports account for more than half of the nation’s container imports, facilitating the transport of everything from toys to fresh fruit to nuclear reactors, JPMorgan senior equity analyst Brian Ossenbeck said in a report shared with ABC News.
A prolonged work stoppage of several weeks or months could rekindle inflation for some goods and trigger layoffs at manufacturers as raw materials dry up, experts said.
“A strike would be very, very disruptive,” said Jason Miller, a professor of supply-chain management at Michigan State University who closely tracks imports, told ABC News.
“You can’t take all this freight and either send it to other ports or put it on airplanes,” Miller added. “There is no plan B.”
The International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA), the union representing East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, is seeking higher wages and a ban on the use of some automated equipment.
“ILA longshore workers deserve to be compensated for the important work they do keeping American commerce moving and growing,” the ILA told ABC News in a statement on Monday. “Meanwhile, ILA dedicated longshore workers continue to be crippled by inflation due to USMX’s unfair wage packages.”
The U.S. Maritime Alliance, or USMX, an organization bargaining on behalf of the dockworkers’ employers, declined to respond to an ABC News request for comment.
President Joe Biden retains the power to prevent or halt a strike under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to Biden on Monday urging the White House to intervene, which it has previously said it will not do. The White House told ABC News in a statement that it has been in contact with both the union and management in recent days.
“This weekend, senior officials have been in touch with USMX representatives urging them to come to a fair agreement fairly and quickly – one that reflects the success of the companies. Senior officials have also been in touch with the ILA to deliver the same message,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said.
A prolonged East Coast and Gulf Coast port strike could moderately increase prices for a range of goods, experts told ABC News. That upward pressure on prices would result from a shortage of products caught up in the supply chain blockage, leaving too many dollars chasing after too few items, they added.
Food products are especially vulnerable to an uptick in prices, since food could spoil if suppliers sent the products ahead of time to minimize the strike impact, as they have done for some other goods, Adam Kamins, a senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
Additionally, a significant share of the nation’s imported auto parts pass through the ports impacted by a potential strike, which could cause an increase in vehicle prices if the strike persists.
Price increases have slowed dramatically from a peak in 2022, but inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%. A strike could prevent further progress, according to Kamins.
“We’re not talking about prices skyrocketing by any means, but I think it halts the momentum we’ve had over the last year or so getting inflation back in the bottle,” he said.
In 2002, a strike among workers at West Coast ports lasted 11 days before then-President George W. Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act and ended the standoff. However, the last time East Coast and Gulf Coast workers went on strike, in 1977, the work stoppage lasted seven weeks.
Tuesday’s potential work stoppage follows high-profile strikes undertaken last year by auto workers as well as Hollywood writers and actors. Most recently, 33,000 Boeing workers walked off the job in early September, demanding better pay and retirement benefits.
“Trade unions all over the country have been going out on strike,” Sriram Narayanan, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, told ABC News. “We’re seeing that happen now at the ports.”
ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze contributed this report.
