Dow closes at record high, defying fears of panic sparked by Trump’s tariff threat
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(NEW YORK) — The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high on Tuesday, achieving the milestone less than 24 hours after a tariff pledge from President-elect Donald Trump sparked fears of a panic in the stock market.
The S&P 500 also closed at a record high, surging about 0.55% on Tuesday to end the day at 6,021.63. The Dow ticked up about 0.25% during the day’s trading, closing at 44,860.31.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq advanced about 0.60%, ending the trading session at 19,174.30.
Trading began on Tuesday hours after Trump announced plans to slap tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico by executive order on the first day of his administration.
Trump late Monday said he would charge Mexico and Canada with a 25% tariff on all products coming into the United States until action is taken by those countries to stem illegal immigration and the overflow of drugs across the border.
For China, Trump said that he’d impose an additional 10% tariff on products coming to the U.S.
Economists widely forecast that tariffs of this magnitude would increase prices paid by U.S. shoppers, since importers typically pass along a share of the cost of those higher taxes to consumers.
Trump’s tariffs would cost the average U.S. household about $2,600 per year, according to an estimate from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The major indexes were bolstered by steady performance among some major firms.
Apple — which assembles many of its products in China but enjoyed key tariff exemptions during Trump’s first term — ticked up 0.12% on Tuesday. While Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that imports most of its semiconductors from Taiwan, rose 0.66% during the trading session.
Tesla, the electric vehicle company led by Trump-ally Elon Musk, has a manufacturing plant in Shanghai, China. Shares of the EV maker ticked down 0.11% on Tuesday.
ABC News’ Lalee Ibssa , Kelsey Walsh, and Soo Rin Kim contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk has kept busy since Election Day, advising President-elect Donald Trump and receiving an appointment to co-lead a new government efficiency commission.
Musk has also found time to promote Trump in scores of posts on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which he owns. But such advocacy appears to have driven some X users to seek alternatives.
One such app, Bluesky, has drawn attention as a possible X rival and has amassed a total of 20 million users to date. Its growth accelerated in the aftermath of the election, when Bluesky added one million users in a single week.
Launched by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky has attracted some prominent users in recent days, including comedian Ben Stiller, author Stephen King, and pop star Lizzo.
Here’s what to know about Bluesky, and how to join:
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a text-oriented social media platform on which users can post messages as long as 300 characters. Like X, the messages posted on Bluesky appear on a newsfeed displayed to users. The app is available on iOS and Android.
The platform operates on an open framework, meaning that users can post their messages to a server tailored for specific interests or communities. The system design resembles that which is used on another text-first app, Mastodon, as well as the decentralized platform Discord.
Bluesky began in 2019 as a venture at Twitter overseen by Dorsey, and was launched as an independent company in 2022, the year after he left Twitter.
Development of the site started after a 2020 tweet from Dorsey announcing Twitter’s plans to fund a decentralized social media platform, Bluesky said in a blog post. The eventual leaders at Bluesky were among those who sent direct messages to Dorsey in response to his post, the blog added.
Who owns Bluesky?
The board of directors at Bluesky features Dorsey as well as Jeremie Miller, the founder in the late 1990s of a free instant messaging service called Jabber.
Bluesky’s CEO is Jay Graber, who formerly founded an events-oriented social media site called Happening and worked as a software engineer on a cryptocurrency called Zcash, according to LinkedIn. She also serves on the Bluesky board.
The company is owned by Graber as well as “the Bluesky team,” the Bluesky website says.
While Bluesky has retained a traditional corporate structure featuring a board and chief executive, the company said it aspires to take control of content away from a top-down entity and return it to creators.
“Traditional social networks are often closed platforms with a central authority,” the website says. “There’s a small group of people who control those companies, and they have total control over how users can use the platform and what developers can build.”
Dorsey criticized Musk’s leadership at Twitter on Bluesky last year, saying that things “all went south” at the platform after Musk’s acquisition, CNBC reported.
Is Bluesky a viable alternative to X?
The steady growth of Bluesky has made it a destination for an increasing number of celebrities, elected officials and government entities. But the platform remains much smaller than X or the Meta-owned competitor, Threads.
Bluesky boasts roughly 20 million users, which amounts to less than 10% of the 229 million daily active users disclosed by Twitter in a June 2022 earnings report. X’s user data is no longer publicly available since Musk took the company private.
In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads had exceeded 175 million monthly active users.
How do you join Bluesky?
During Bluesky’s initial years, users could only join the platform if they received an invitation. The policy aimed to limit the app’s user base as it underwent testing.
In February, however, the platform made itself available to all users. Individuals or organizations can navigate to the platform and follow instructions to create an account.
(NEW YORK) — The price of bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, soaring to a fresh high as the world’s largest cryptocurrency extended a rally set off by the election of former President Donald Trump.
Bitcoin has climbed more than 40% since Election Day, when voters opted for a candidate viewed as friendly toward digital currency.
Those gains have far outpaced the stock market. The S&P 500 has increased about 2.4% over that period, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq has jumped 2.6%.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to bolster the cryptocurrency sector and ease regulations enforced by the Biden administration. Trump also promised to establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Trump said he would replace Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whom many crypto proponents dislike for what they perceive as a robust approach to crypto regulation.
Gensler announced that he plans to resign on Jan. 20, 2025, the date of Trump’s inauguration.
The post-election euphoria has lifted other parts of the crypto sector. Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has climbed 27%. Lesser-known dogecoin has skyrocketed about 140%, while litecoin has surged 35%.
Shares of Coinbase, a top crypto trading platform, have increased more than 70% since Trump’s reelection.
The growth in recent weeks extends a remarkable turnabout for the once-beleaguered crypto industry. The sector entered this year bruised after a series of high-profile collapses and company scandals.
FTX, a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in November 2022. The implosion set off a 17-month legal saga that resulted in the conviction of Bankman-Fried for fraud. In April, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison in April after pleading guilty to charges that his platform had enabled illicit financial activity.
The reelection of Trump marks the latest in a series of positive developments that have buoyed cryptocurrency this year.
Those gains have been propelled, in part, by U.S. approval in January of bitcoin ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin ETFs allow investors to buy into an asset that tracks the price movement of bitcoin, while avoiding the inconvenience and risk of purchasing the crypto coin itself.
Last month, options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) were made available for trading on the Nasdaq. The options, which provide a new avenue for bitcoin investors, allow individuals to commit to buy or sell the ETF at a given price by a specific date. While such investments typically come with additional risk, they can also make large payouts.
IBIT inched upward 1% on Friday, reaching a record high of about $56.
Bryan Armour, the director of passive strategies research at financial firm Morningstar, attributed the recent crypto surge to investors’ anticipation of friendly policy under Trump, as well as the newly available options trading for bitcoin ETFs.
Still, the performance of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, has proven volatile, Armour added. The price of bitcoin could fall, especially if Trump encounters difficulty following through on his campaign commitments, he said.
“As long as the narrative stays positive, there’s always room to grow,” Armour told ABC News before bitcoin reached $100,000. “I also think campaign promises don’t always come to fruition.”
“It’s still a highly volatile asset,” Armour added.
(NEW YORK) — People haven’t only been filling their plates this Thanksgiving weekend — it also seems they’ve been filling their online shopping carts.
Black Friday online shopping this year is on pace to break a record with between $10.7 billion and $11 billion in sales, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks U.S. e-commerce data.
As of Friday evening, spending on online shopping was up more than 8% compared to last year, according to Adobe.
The record pace of Black Friday buying follows record-setting online shopping on Thanksgiving itself, the analytics firm said. Consumers spent a record $6.1 billion online on Turkey Day — up nearly 9% compared to a year ago, according to Adobe.
What are people buying this Black Friday?
Adobe said deep discounts are likely fueling the online spending spree, including discounts on toys of more than 27% off the listed price. Toys have seen a 178% boost in online Black Friday sales so far, compared to an average day in October.
Other popular items on Black Friday include makeup and skin care sets, LEGO sets, “Wicked” toys, Bluetooth speakers, TVs, patio heaters and air fryers, according to Adobe.
Increasingly, online shopping is happening on smaller screens. More than half of all online sales on Black Friday — 57.6% — were on mobile screens, according to Adobe. That’s up from 55.5% last year.
