(NEW YORK) — U.S. stocks were little changed in early trading on Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump signaled a willingness to ease some tariffs but also impose new ones.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 52 points, or 0.1%. The S&P 500 climbed 0.2%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq increased 0.05%.
Trump’s administration said on Friday that many consumer electronics would be exempt from his wide-ranging reciprocal tariffs, an announcement that sent global markets higher on Monday.
Trump on Monday also signaled a willingness to further ease tariffs, saying he is looking to “help some of the car companies” in the aftermath of 25% auto levies.
The White House also took steps on Monday that may result in new tariffs on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, posting notices online about national security investigations into those products.
Markets in Europe also traded higher midday on Tuesday, after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 90-day pause on planned tariff countermeasures went into effect.
Germany’s DAX climbed about 1.21% midday and Britain’s FTSE 100 traded up about 0.90% midday.
South Korea’s KOSPI index closed up 0.88% on Tuesday, posting its second day of gains. And Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 climbed 0.84%.
Markets in China, where Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are still in place, showed less enthusiasm. Shanghai’s Composite Index rose just 0.15% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index climbed 0.23%.
ABC News’ David Brennan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — U.S. stocks climbed in early trading on Thursday, advancing amid signs the federal government may avert a shutdown and recovering some of the losses suffered during an escalating trade war.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 230 points, or 0.6%, while the S&P 500 increased 0.9%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq climbed 1.3%.
The market upswing comes after Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday night that he plans to vote to keep the government open, signaling that there will almost certainly be enough Democratic votes to advance a House GOP funding bill before a shutdown deadline at the end of the day Friday.
The gains offered relief for investors reeling from a market decline set off last week by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
On Thursday, the S&P 500 closed down more than 10% since a peak attained last month, meaning the decline officially qualified as a market correction. It marked the index’s first correction since October 2023.
Trump on Thursday stood firm on his tariff policy, despite the losses on Wall Street.
“I’m not going to bend at all,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. When asked whether he would reconsider a fresh round of tariffs set to go into effect on April 2, Trump offered a one-word reply: “No.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 each closed down more than 1% on Thursday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq declined nearly 2%.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ John Parkinson, Lauren Peller, Allison Pecorin and Rachel Scott contributed to this report.
(MADISON, WI) — Just hours after the state Supreme Court rejected Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s effort to block Elon Musk from handing out $1 million checks on Sunday night, the billionaire took the stage at a town hall in Green Bay and gave away two $1 million checks to attendees in his latest effort to support conservative candidate Brad Schimel.
Urging the crowd to back Schimel, Musk cast Tuesday as “a vote for which party controls the House of Representatives” and implied “the future of civilization” is at stake.
One of the recipients of a large, showy check, Nicholas Jacobs, is the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order came just minutes before the event was set to start.
Notably, the court also rejected a bid from Musk’s lawyers to ask two justices, who had campaigned for Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford, to recuse themselves.
The ruling came after an appeals court on Saturday denied Kaul’s emergency motion to stop the giveaway from taking place.
Kaul wrote in his initial filing on Friday that he was asking for emergency relief to stop Musk and America PAC “from further promoting a million-dollar giveaway to attendees of a planned event on Sunday, March 30, 2025, and prohibiting Respondents from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote.”
However, the judge assigned to the case, the Honorable Columbia County Circuit Court Judge W. Andrew Voigt, refused to hear the lawsuit before Sunday’s Green Bay rally with Musk — prompting Kaul’s emergency motion asking a Court of Appeals to take action.
After that emergency motion was rejected, Kaul appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to step in on Sunday.
Lawyers for Elon Musk and America PAC then filed motions for the recusal of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices Rebecca Frank Dallet and Jill J. Karofsky.
They argued that because Dallet and Karofsky campaigned for Crawford, and Crawford has been critical of Musk, “to avoid any potential perceptions of bias and manifestations of possible bias, Justices Dallet and Karofsky should decline to participate in consideration of this matter.”
The lawyers also framed the planned Sunday night giveaways as “spokesperson agreements” for spokespeople for the PAC.
In the initial lawsuit, shared by Kaul’s office, Kaul argued that “Musk’s announcement of his intention to pay $1 million to two Wisconsin electors who attend his event on Sunday night, specifically conditioned on their having voted in the upcoming April 3, 2025, Wisconsin Supreme Court election, is a blatant attempt to violate” state law, which “forbids anyone from offering or promising to give anything of value to an elector in order to induce the elector to go to the polls, vote or refrain from voting, or vote for a particular person.”
The suit asked for a restraining order “prohibiting Defendants from any further promotion of the million-dollar gifts to attendees of the planned Sunday March 30, 2025,” as well as a temporary restraining order “prohibiting Defendants from making any payments to Wisconsin electors to vote,” and injunctive relief to “restrain and prohibit all actions by Defendants taken in furtherance of a planned violation” of the state law.
In addition to presenting the checks on Sunday night, Musk said his PAC is launching a “Block Captain” program ahead of the election on Tuesday, where participants will make $20 for each picture they post of someone with a Schimel sign and a thumbs up outside of their home.
So far, two political groups aligned with Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — have poured nearly $20 million into supporting Schimel for the open seat.
The world’s richest man has used cash giveaways in the past, including a controversial $1 million sweepstakes offered to voters in swing states during last year’s election cycle as part of an effort to boost President Donald Trump’s chances of winning in those states.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election, on Tuesday, has generally become the center of a political firestorm, and has become the most expensive state supreme court race in American history, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
(WASHINGTON) — Lawyers for Meta told a federal judge on Monday that the social media company founded by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is not a monopoly, countering a landmark lawsuit brought against it by the Federal Trade Commission accusing the tech giant of gobbling up its competitors to corner the market.
“Meta has no Monopoly,” Mark Hansen, an attorney for the company argued in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., as the trial got underway.
The case marks the first significant opportunity for President Donald Trump’s administration to follow through on the president’s campaign promise to take on Big Tech.
In court filings, the FTC argued that Meta purposefully and illegally undercut smaller rivals to “neutralize perceived competitive threats.”
The FTC lawsuit, originally filed in 2020 when Meta went by Facebook, alleges that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to establish an illegal monopoly.
“Unable to maintain its monopoly by fairly competing, the company’s executives addressed the existential threat by buying up new innovators that were succeeding where Facebook failed,” the FTC’s attorneys wrote in the court documents.
FTC lawyers called Zuckerberg as their first witness on Monday. Zuckerberg faced questions about his company’s inner workings and how it has evolved in recent years to respond to competition from other social media platforms.
If Meta loses, the lawsuit could force a dismantling of the company by forcing it to break off the two apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, it purchased over a decade ago.
Meta’s legal team argued in court that the case centers on broader “industry issues” — not just issues concerning Meta. They claimed that many of Meta’s innovations and acquisitions were in response to moves by “peer” tech companies.
During Monday’s court proceedings, Meta’s lawyers said the company has been “pro-competitive,” arguing the government “doesn’t want to talk about” TikTok, a rival that they contend “rocked the world,” and sent Meta into “a crisis.”
In opening statements, Meta’s lawyers claimed that “consumer welfare” is not the central issue in the case.
The company said it had to adapt after TikTok’s explosive growth during the pandemic.
“Meta didn’t even have a short-form video feature” when TikTok was launched in 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, Meta’s lawyers argued.
Meta’s legal team added that many creators were initially skeptical of Instagram Reels, a product launched in response to TikTok, because short-form videos tended to monetize significantly less than longer traditional videos.
The social media company’s lawyers pointed to other platforms adapting short-form videos like YouTube shorts, Snapchat, X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn as examples of similar responses to TikTok’s success. Meta, they said, had to “move with the times or end up like MySpace,” the now-defunct social media site that dominated the industry two decades ago.
Meta’s lawyers also cited a 2021 Meta outage, during which users turned to other platforms. TikTok saw an 11% increase in users and YouTube gained 8%, Meta’s lawyers argued, presenting the figures as proof that competitors have substantial influence. They added that Meta accounts for less than 20% of total time spent on social media platforms.
Much of Zuckerberg’s early testimony Monday focused on the Facebook News Feed and how users interact with friends, something he said has shifted as people moved from desktop computers to mobile devices.
He acknowledged that the emphasis on friendship had declined as users began to share content differently. He noted that by 2018, there was growing discourse over whether time spent on social media was beneficial.
“The friend part has gone down quite a bit, it’s still something we care about,” Zuckerberg testified. However, he added that friendship is now “one part of what we do.”
Later Monday, the FTC lawyers questioned Zuckerberg about his company’s acquisition of Instagram. The deal occurred after Facebook’s own camera app, Snap, failed to compete, the government’s lawyers noted.
In emails from February 2012 read in court by the FTC lawyers, Zuckerburg wrote, “Snap might be a good first step but we’d be very behind in both functionality and brand core use cases of Facebook will develop in the mobile world, which is really scary and we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.”
When questioned about the 2012 Instagram purchase, Zuckerberg said his company had just gone public and had the capital. He characterized the email as an example of his desire to do a build-versus-buy analysis.
When asked about his “scary” remark, Zuckerberg testified that he “read this as trying to analyze, I think, where the value is with Instagram.”
“Some of the stuff is simply hypothetical, that this could potentially be scary. I’m not sure if I read this as I was really scared at the time,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said that when he wrote the email, he was thinking about whether it was the best approach to buy Instagram.
“By this point, I was leaning toward we should buy them if we could,” he testified.
Shortly after the conversation in February 2012, Meta bought Instagram in April for $1 billion.
In a statement released on Monday, Meta said, “The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others.”
The company added, “More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final. Regulators should be supporting American innovation, rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.”
Zuckerberg is expected to return to the witness stand on Tuesday.
