Wall Street Suffers Worst Week in 3 Months
Pricey tech stocks and other blue chips on Wall Street suffered their worst weekly loss in three months as investors in US equities sought value by rotating into shares of industries that indicated longer-term returns.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index, which comprises stocks such as Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, closed at 17,732 for a loss of 0.8% on the day.
For the week, Nasdaq fell 3.6% – the most for a week since late April.The S&P 500 Index, which tracks stocks of the top 500 US companies, settled at 5,508 for a decline of 0.7% on the day. For the week, the S&P lost 2%, also the most for a week since late April.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the broadest indicator for US equity markets, finished at 40,288 for a deficit of almost 1%. The Dow was the outlier of the week, rising 0.7%, after back-to-back gains of 1.6% and 0.7% in the prior two weeks.
“Through the first half of this year, large caps carried the market,” Alan Wynne, investment product specialist at JPMorgan Wealth Management, said in reference to large-capitalized stocks. “Since the midpoint, however, the tables have turned.”
Wynne said the S&P and Nasdaq outperformed small-cap stocks by more than 16% and 18%, respectively, in the first half of the year.
In the second half, small-cap shares have rallied over 9%, compared to just over 2% for the S&P and less than 1% for the Nasdaq.
Revival Pastor: Trump Must Lift Up Jesus Christ to Save the United States
Americans Betting Against Biden
The odds of Joe Biden dropping out of the US presidential race reached as high as 84% on Friday, according to the predictive betting site Polymarket.
The 81-year-old incumbent president has been quarantined at his Delaware home since Wednesday, after testing positive for Covid-19. Calls for him to make way for another Democrat have grown louder since last Saturday’s attempted assassination of his Republican rival Donald Trump.
“His soul-searching is actually happening, I know that for a fact,” Reuters reported on Friday, citing a source within the Biden campaign. “He’s thinking about this very seriously.”
Polymarket had Biden’s odds of dropping out at 19% ahead of the June 27 debate. They have since spiked to 84%, but leveled out at around 70% as of Friday afternoon.
The betting site also put Trump’s chances of winning the November election at 66%. Vice President Kamala Harris, the most likely Democrat to replace Biden at the top of the ticket, was at only 18%.
Democrats have pushed back the virtual vote to anoint Biden as the nominee, originally planned to take place before the convention. A long train of lawmakers, donors and party power-brokers have been pressuring Biden to suspend his re-election bid in recent weeks.
Former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all reportedly urged Biden to let someone else face Trump in November – while serving out the remainder of his presidential term.
“It feels like it’s a matter of… when, not if,” one campaign aide told Reuters. “Yes, it’s over. Just a matter of time,” said another. According to NBC, however, Biden has felt “personally hurt” and “betrayed” by the Democrats’ apparent lack of faith in his abilities.
“Can we all just remember for a minute that these same people who are trying to push Joe Biden out are the same people who literally gave us all Donald Trump? In 2015, Obama, Pelosi, [and] Schumer pushed Biden aside in favor of Hillary [Clinton]; they were wrong then, and they are wrong now,” the outlet reported citing an anonymous source. Hillary Clinton was given a 90% chance to win in 2016 but lost to Trump.
Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, acknowledged that the president has “seen some slippage in support” since the debate, but insisted that it was just a “small movement” in the polls, and that a “significant national organization” would endorse him next week.
“Joe Biden has said he is running for president of the United States. Our campaign is moving forward,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks insisted.
Revival Pastor: Trump Must Lift Up Jesus Christ to Save the United States
‘We Just Deleted CrowdStrike From All Our Systems’ – Musk
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that his companies stopped using web/cloud-based antivirus platform CrowdStrike in the wake of Friday’s global Windows 10 outage. The cyber-security firm has admitted that the massive failures were caused by a recent update that conflicted with Microsoft systems.
The IT meltdown affected Windows 10 users around the world, including airports, banks, and broadcasters. According to aviation analytics firm Cirium, at least 4,295 flights were grounded globally due to the outage. The worldwide glitch also hit a number of media outlets, including the UK-based Sky News – which went off the air for a while – as well as the Australian-based ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9, and News Corp Australia.
Responding to a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday, Musk wrote: “We just deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems.”
Satya Nadella, the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, confirmed on X that a CrowdStrike update was to blame for Friday’s outage, adding that Microsoft was providing “customers [with] technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
Musk replied to the statement, saying: “This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain.”
Commenting on a Financial Times report on the global Windows 10 outage, the US-based billionaire said in a separate post that this was the “biggest IT fail ever.”
The tech tycoon also concurred with Christopher Stanley, the head of security engineering at X and a principal security engineer at SpaceX, who described Friday’s events as a “wake up reminder that you shouldn’t have an internet connected privileged binary running on your production systems.”
“What was a bad update could have easily been a massive adversary backdoor. A third party vendor will always be the weakest link,” he warned.
Speaking to NBC on Friday, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said his company is “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected” by the outage.
“We’ve identified it very quickly… The systems come back online as they are rebooted,” he stated, adding that CrowdStrike is working with its customers to help them return to normal operations.
Revival Pastor: Trump Must Lift Up Jesus Christ to Save the United States
Hungarian PM May Adopt Trump’s Proposed Tax Cut on Tips
Just a week after his visit with former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told Kossuth Radio this morning that he may borrow some of Trump’s ideas on foreign policy and the economy, reports Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet.
“I also spoke to the president about economic issues, if only because we have a very good relationship with the team that works with him, which also writes his economic and foreign policy programs.”
Orbán noted that they have “been involved” with solidifying Trump’s agenda in terms of stopping migration and family policy, where, the Hungarian prime minister said, “We have quite a lot of authority.”
On the flip side, Orbán told the radio program that there were some points in Trump’s program he would be happy to bring to Hungary, namely economic measures, as early as next year. Without going into detail on what these may be, the Hungarian prime minister noted Trump’s focus on competitiveness and industry, areas in which he intimated Hungary could also improve.
However, on Trump’s proposal to no longer tax tips, Orbán seemed convinced this was a good idea for Hungary as well.
“If Trump wins the U.S. presidential election, he will implement this in the U.S. I think this is very remarkable, I don’t see the need to tax tipping in Hungary either,” he said.
Revival Pastor: Trump Must Lift Up Jesus Christ to Save the United States
Instagram Censors Team USA Rifle Shooter Ahead Of Paris Paralympics
Big tech’s crackdown on “gunfluencers” is nothing new, but policies at social media companies are becoming increasingly restrictive (read: here), leading to the demonetization of numerous channels. The latest victim of this aggressive censorship isn’t even the typical gun YouTuber but instead a competitive rifle shooter on Team USA for the Paralympics.
Just The News reports that McKenna Geer, a competitive rifle shooter, had her Instagram account censored before she heads to Paris for the Paralympic Games in late August. Next week, the Olympic Games are set to begin.
Geer’s Instagram account, “kennageer10.9,” was reportedly censored by the social media company because of photos she posted with firearms at a qualifying competition.
“I have always feared the day the media would censor my sport and speech just because I use firearms,” Geer wrote on Instagram, adding, “That day has finally come.”
She continued, “This sport is life-changing because of its ability to unite both able-bodied and disabled athletes, young and old, foreign and domestic. Me and my fellow athletes rely on our social media accounts to spread the word about our sport, firearm safety, build our personal brand, and connect with potential sponsors. Many of us (myself included) are either not paid or paid very little for our involvement in this sport. Our social media presence can often be the avenue that pays for us to continue competing.”
Geer posted a screenshot of an image that shows her account has been censored.
“Your account and content won’t appear in places like Explore, Search, Suggested Users, Reels, and Feed Recommendations,” the Instagram notification reads.
On Thursday, she told Just the News that Instagram flagged three of her four latest posts.
When she informed the USA Shooting public relations team about the matter, they reached out to Instagram and received this response:
“On Facebook and Instagram’s Help Center websites, we indicate that while some content may be allowable, it may not be eligible for recommendation, including certain regulatory goods that ‘impedes our ability to foster a safe community.’ Help Center entries do not explicitly reference firearms as a regulated good; however, it does include a link to the Community Standards, which identifies firearms as a regulated good.”
For Geer and gunfluencers who have been censored or demonetized by social media platforms with ‘trust & safety’ teams aligned with the censorship blob, try X. You might find some relief on Musk’s ‘free speech’ platform.
Revival Pastor: Trump Must Lift Up Jesus Christ to Save the United States
Blinken: Iran Is Weeks Away from a Nuclear Weapon
Iran is probably only “one or two weeks” away from having enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, according to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
“They haven’t produced a weapon itself, but that’s something of course that we track very, very carefully,” Blinken said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
Blinken blamed the Trump administration from withdrawing from a 2015 deal with Iran that halted uranium enrichment and imposing harsh economic sanctions on Teheran.
“Iran, because the nuclear agreement was thrown out, instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that,” Blinken said.
“One of the biggest mistakes that we’ve made in recent years, was throwing out that agreement and allowing Iran to get out of the box that we put it in.”
Iran has repeatedly denied that it is producing nuclear weapons. Its new President, Masoud Pezshkian, stated in The Teheran Times that “Iran’s defence doctrine does not include nuclear weapons.”
Teheran has also been accused of seeking to kill former president Trump, in the aftermath of the attempt on his life last Saturday.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Biden administration had informed the Secret Service of an unspecified threat from Teheran against the former president. However, officials added that they do not believe Iran was responsible in any way for Thomas Matthew Crooks’ attempt on Trump’s life.
Iran issued a statement saying that the country “strongly rejects any involvement in the recent armed attack on Trump or claims about Iran’s intention for such an action, considering such allegations to have malicious political motives and objectives.”
We Are In The Most Dangerous Times, Warns Stock Market Expert Edward Dowd