Business News

Starbucks CEO is replaced by Brian Niccol, who stepped in at Chipotle when the chain was in distress

Starbucks, struggling with weak demand and disgruntled investors, said Tuesday that CEO Laxman Narasimhan is stepping down after a little more than a year in the job. The Seattle coffee giant said Brian Niccol, the chairman and CEO of Chipotle, will become Starbucks’ chairman and CEO on Sept. 9. Starbucks shares jumped more than 13% before the market opened. Narasimhan, a longtime PepsiCo executive, became Starbucks’ CEO in March 2023. He succeeded Howard Schultz, the longtime Starbucks leader and chairman emeritus who came out of retirement in 2022 to serve as the company’s interim CEO. Niccol has been CEO of Chipotle since 2018.

US wholesale inflation cooled in July in sign that price pressures are continuing to ease

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale price increases in the United States eased in July, suggesting that inflation pressures are further cooling as the Federal Reserve moves closer to cutting interest rates, likely beginning next month. The producer price index — which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers — rose 0.1% from June to July. That was down from a 0.2% rise a month earlier. And compared with a year earlier, prices were up 2.2%. That was the smallest such rise since March. The July wholesale figures reflect a broad and steady slowdown in price increases, which peaked at a four-decade high in mid-2022 but are now moving toward the Fed’s 2% inflation target.

Stock market today: Wall Street up after passing the week’s first test, as wholesale inflation slows

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are rising, and Wall Street is relaxing a bit after the first of several highly anticipated reports on the economy this week came in better than expected. The S&P 500 rose 0.8% in Tuesday morning trading after the government reported inflation at the wholesale level slowed last month by more than anticipated. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 171 points, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.2%. Starbucks soared after naming Brian Niccol, the head of Chipotle, as its new CEO. Treasury yields eased in the bond market ahead of more reports this week on inflation and retail sales.

Home Depot, sensing uneasy economic vibe from homeowners and contractors, trims outlook for 2024

Home Depot’s second quarter sales rose slightly as the nation’s biggest home improvement retailer booked gains from a recent acquisition, but customers reined in spending because of broadly higher costs and elevated interest rates. Sales edged up to $43.18 billion, from $42.92 billion. However, the company is now expecting fiscal 2024 sales at stores open at least a year to decline between 3% and 4%. Its previous outlook was for a decline of approximately 1%. Home Depot expects full-year earnings per share to fall between 2% and 4%. Previously, the company predicted earnings per share growth of about 1%.

Why Trump’s and Harris’ proposals to end federal taxes on tips would be difficult to enact

If nothing else, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris agree on one thing, at least: Both say they want to eliminate federal taxes on workers’ tips. But experts say there’s a reason Congress hasn’t made that change already. It would be complicated, not to mention enormously costly to the federal government, to enact. It would encourage many highly paid workers to restructure their compensation to classify some of it as “tips” and thereby avoid taxes. And, in the end, it likely wouldn’t help millions of low-income workers. Both candidates unveiled their plans in Nevada, a state with one of the highest concentrations of tipped service workers in the country.

Ford, Mazda warn owners to stop driving older vehicles with dangerous Takata air bag inflators

DETROIT (AP) — Ford and Mazda are warning the owners of more than 475,000 older vehicles in the U.S. not to drive them because they have dangerous Takata air bag inflators that have not been replaced. The warning issued Tuesday covers more than 374,000 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles from the 2004 through 2014 model years and nearly 83,000 Mazdas from the 2003 through 2015 model years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the inflators can explode with too much force in a crash, blowing apart a metal canister and shooting fragments that can severely injure or kill people. All were recalled previously but repairs have not been completed. The government says 27 people have been killed in the U.S. by the inflators.

Musk’s interview with Trump marred by technical glitches

Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform. The interview, which was supposed to start at 8 p.m. EDT. Eighteen minutes in, Musk posted on X that the platform was under a “massive” DDOS, or denial-of-service attack, which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline. Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users but it could not be immediately verified whether this was due to a malicious attack.

Indians wanting their money back for undelivered Teslas shows how drastically the EV market changed

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter in 2016 inviting Indians to preorder Tesla Model 3s. Many rushed to do so, but never got their cars. Now some who paid a $1,000 deposit with their orders have lost faith and want their money back. Tesla’s travails in India reflect a global EV market that is fast changing. The company faces stiff competition from both traditional automakers and Chinese EV makers that are expanding worldwide. India has reduced import duties for EV makers that build a factory in India. For Tesla though, with slowing sales and too much capacity, building a factory only makes sense if it wants to diversify away from its vast operations in China.

A ship in the Red Sea is attacked 3 times by suspected Yemeni rebels, including with a drone boat

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Liberian-flagged oil tanker in the Red Sea has been targeted in a third attack by suspected Yemeni rebels in their campaign of assaults over the Israel-Hamas war. The attacks come as the Houthi rebels’ main sponsor — Iran — weighs possible retaliation against Israel over the assassination of Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh last month, which has renewed fears of a wider regional war in the Middle East. The ship was first attacked south of the Houthi-held port city of Hodeida. British officials say a second blast followed and a third happened hours later, northwest of Hodeida. A private security firm said the same ship was targeted in all three attacks.

Vance backs Trump’s support for a presidential ‘say’ on Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy

WASHINGTON (AP) — JD Vance has endorsed former President Donald Trump’s call for the White House to have “a say” over the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies — a view that runs counter to decades of economic research suggesting that politically independent central banks are essential to controlling inflation and maintaining confidence in the global financial system. Economists have long cautioned that a Fed that is legally independent from elected officials is vital because politicians would almost always prefer for the central bank to keep interest rates low to juice the economy — even at risk of igniting inflation.