Kotor Baju

Rabu, 29 Mei 2019

Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: Dick's Sporting Goods, Boeing, Uber, Workday & more - CNBC

Check out the companies making headlines before the bell:

Dick's Sporting Goods — The sporting goods retailer beat estimates by 4 cents a share, with adjusted quarterly profit of 62 cents per share. Revenue beat forecasts as well. Comparable-store sales were flat, better than the forecast of a 1.3% decline by analysts polled by Refinitiv. Dick's also raised its full-year outlook.

Abercrombie & Fitch — The apparel seller lost 29 cents per share for its latest quarter, smaller than the 43 cents a share loss that analysts were anticipating. Revenue topped estimates as well, although a comparable-store sales increase of 1% fell slightly short of the 1.3% consensus estimate.

Capri Holdings — The company formerly known as Michael Kors reported adjusted quarterly profit of 63 cents per share, beating estimates by 2 cents a share. The luxury goods retailer's revenue also came in above forecasts, helped by strength at its Versace and Jimmy Choo brands. Capri gave a weaker-than-expected current-quarter forecast, however, as it spends more on marketing and new store openings.

Canada Goose — The outerwear maker reported adjusted quarterly profit of 9 cents per share (Canadian), beating the consensus estimate of 5 cents a share. Revenue was below estimates, however, and Canada Goose also gave a weaker-than-expected outlook.

Workday — Workday earned an adjusted 43 cents per share for its latest quarter, beating estimates by 2 cents a share. The maker of human resources software's revenue come in above forecasts, as it signed up more business subscribers.

Boeing — The 737 Max jet may not return to service until August, according to the head of the International Air Transport Association. Alexandre de Juniac told reports that the group plans to organize a summit of regulators and airlines in five to seven weeks to discuss what may be needed to allow the 737 Max to fly again.

T-Mobile, Sprint — The two wireless carriers could sell the prepaid wireless brand Boost Mobile for up to $3 billion, according to interested bidders who spoke to Reuters. The sale of Boost is among the concessions offered to win Federal Communications Commission approval of the deal. Boost Mobile founder Peter Adderton, who is interested in buying back boost, will be a guest on CNBC's Squawk Alley today at 11 a.m. ET.

Bed Bath & Beyond — The housewares retailer has added four new independent directors to its board, in a settlement with an investor group consisting of Legion Partners Asset Management, Macellum Advisors, and Ancora Advisors. The group said it was pleased with the move.

Morningstar — The financial information company announced the acquisition of credit ratings agency DBRS for $669 million.

Devon Energy — The energy producer announced the sale of its Canada business to Canadian Natural Resources for $2.8 billion. Devon plans to use the proceeds to reduce debt.

Uber Technologies — Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told the German newspaper Handelsblatt that the ride-hailing company will not achieve profitability in the next year or two, but that it will come.

Toyota — The automaker is considering an investment of about $550 million in China-based ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, according to Japan's Nikkei business daily.

Heico — Heico reported quarterly profit of 60 cents per share, 11 cents a share above estimates. Revenue came in well above forecasts and the aircraft parts maker raised its financial forecast for the year.

General Mills — The food producer's stock was downgraded to "sell" from "neutral" at Goldman Sachs, which said that its December prediction that short term strength might be followed mounting deceleration is now playing out.

Amazon, Facebook, Trade Desk, Twitter — In a report on internet advertising, Pivotal Research said that it would pay to be selective in this area, and issued "buy" ratings on these four stocks because of their leadership positions, among other factors. It rates Alphabet, Snap, and Pinterest at "hold."

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/stocks-making-the-biggest-moves-premarket-dicks-sporting-goods-boeing-uber-workday-more.html

2019-05-29 11:51:18Z
52780304783643

China has no good options for retaliating against Trump’s Huawei ban - The Verge

US president Donald Trump has made Huawei the biggest story in tech right now by banning it from doing business with US companies. Huawei, China’s tech champion, has lost access to Google’s Android and Intel’s chips, and it’s even seen other international partners like ARM and Panasonic bowing to American influence and discontinuing trade. Having previously been on track to becoming the world’s biggest smartphone maker, Huawei is now in such dire straits that the best metaphor its founder could come up with to allay fears is that the company is like a plane with a hole in its side: not doing great, but still up in the air.

Bludgeoning Huawei with the ban hammer is, by Trump’s own admission, a negotiating tactic to focus China’s attention on American discontent with the existing trade relationship between the two countries. It lands atop a pile of punitive 25 percent tariffs he’s imposed on many Chinese imports to the US, and a promised further round of such tariffs on practically every Chinese export imaginable.

Two expert China observers tell The Verge that China very much cares about these restrictions on its most important overseas market, and it has every incentive to respond, whether to alleviate the sanctions or as a show of its own economic strength. But both agree that China has few, if any, good options available.

Veteran diplomat Hosuk Lee-Makiyama asks pointedly, “What does China have left to retaliate with?” It’s already imposed tariffs on the few classes of goods for which it wants to protect its internal market, and it’s excluded American internet giants like Google and Facebook, so what can China realistically threaten to do as a counter measure? Some observers, such as Ben Thompson in Stratechery, note that “China took the first shots” in the present trade war when it threw out many US tech firms, and it is now the US who is finally responding.

I'm of two minds.
On one hand, I am quite concerned about the direction the US-China tech not-so-cold war is headed.
On the other hand, after having to deal with the Great Firewall for a decade.....
Part of me just wants to say...
Cry me a fucking river, China. pic.twitter.com/CeQ0PZz6jn
— Elliott Zaagman (@ElliottZaagman) May 22, 2019

Lowy Institute’s Elliott Zaagman has spent the past 10 years living in and observing China, and he argues that the country’s economic prosperity is more brittle than it first appears. China’s “already at a point where growth rate is not an output, it’s an input,” meaning the government sets the goal it wants to hit each quarter and banks lend to hit that number. Beijing has done more monetary expansion, he says, than the US Fed, the Bank of Japan, and the EU combined. This has spawned a number of toxic asset bubbles — such as in housing, which has had trickle-down consequences of people taking on debt backed by overpriced real estate. Talking to him and Lee-Makiyama, you get the sense that China’s economy is closer to a pyramid scheme than a truly thriving and flourishing giant.

Retaliation is particularly risky because China’s economy relies on ever increasing trade with the world, as evidenced by the massive Belt and Road Initiative to develop land and sea routes for faster transport of goods. And Huawei, though a privately held entity, has been very helpful in procuring high-value overseas business with its lead in network infrastructure, 5G equipment, and, most recently, premium smartphones. Lee-Makiyama notes that because the country lacks a social safety net, it cannot afford to ever take its foot off the gas, which is what the Huawei setback inevitably represents. Economists, he says, have long held 6.5 percent economic growth as the threshold below which China can’t dip if it’s to sustain its growing debt, and China reported 6.4 percent growth in the first quarter of 2019, before Trump’s harshest tariffs had taken effect.

It’s in this context that we must look at China’s apparently formidable arsenal of weapons it could deploy against the US.

There are also more sophisticated kinds of financial warfare. China holds a trillion dollars of US debt, which it could dump on global markets and thus trigger an interest rate spike for the US economy. The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson explains the mechanics of this succinctly, however he argues that China would be doing almost as much harm to itself in the process. A slowdown in the US economy would lead to even less appetite for Chinese exports, the US dollar might also go down in value and make Chinese goods less appealing, and whatever US treasuries China is left with would also be worth less. This illustrates the inherent symbiosis between Chinese production and American consumption, which have together formed the backbone of the global economy over the past 20 years.

The most threatening retort since Huawei was turned into a trade pawn by Trump has been a visit by president Xi Jinping to a rare earths facility. This was a wordless reminder of China’s dominance in collecting and processing the rare earth minerals essential to every smartphone, laptop, hybrid car, and practically anything more advanced than a gas oven. The CEOs of two US headphone manufacturers tell The Verge that China is the only place to buy the neodymium magnets required for their products: one said China is the sole source, the other said it controls 95 percent of the market. If you struggled to wait a few weeks for those sweet new Powerbeats Pro to go on sale, try waiting months and months for an alternative source of magnets.

And yet, as my colleague James Vincent has already set out, rare earths are not the secret weapon China imagines them to be. They’re not all that rare, the response to Beijing hoarding its supply would be production becoming economically viable and ramping up elsewhere, and the ultimate outcome would be fewer jobs and fewer exports for China. Lee-Makiyama sees this as an untenable scenario and points to China’s ill-fated attempts to use rare earths as a trade cudgel in its dealings with Japan and the US in the past.

Finally, and most obviously, the Chinese government could just do the tit-for-tat response of imposing sanctions on American businesses operating within its borders. Even with some older-model iPhone assembly in India, the vast majority of Apple’s smartphone business is built on Chinese land. Chipmakers are even more dependent, as an analysis from HSBC finds that Apple compatriot Qualcomm has 65 percent of its revenue vulnerable to disruption in trade with China. Other US tech firms with similar exposure include Broadcom at 54 percent, Micron at 51 percent, and AMD, Intel, and Texas Instruments all pinning at least a quarter of their revenues on continuing trade with China.

US consumers can also be hit through impositions on brick-and-mortar retailers. Chinese imports account for 26 percent of Walmart’s merchandise, which is on the low end compared to a more typical number like Target’s 34 percent, according to UBS. Additional research by UBS says the Trump administration’s tariffs imposed on Chinese imports “could put $40 billion of sales and 12,000 stores at risk.” The American Apparel & Footwear Association calls the next round of tariffs “a self-inflicted wound that will be catastrophic for the nation’s economy.” If tariffs are catastrophic, what would a total ban from China look like? This is arguably the most effective weapon Beijing could wield in its negotiations with Washington, but the corresponding hit on Chinese trade would be every bit as disastrous.

In Lee-Makiyama’s estimation, no scenario that involves China cutting off or constricting business with the outside world will be palatable to the country economically. Even with its rapidly growing national consumer market, China is still in need of more consumers for its goods and services. And with Apple and its compatriots like Nike, General Motors, and Walmart employing millions of Chinese workers, Trump has the leverage he needs to play hardball. That situation won’t last long, the diplomat warns, and now might prove to be the last good chance for the US to lean on the mutual dependency it has with China. If the trade relationship remains as it is, China will eventually grow its way to be colossal both as producer and consumer, and then American influence would be null.

For the US, what’s at risk are company revenues and profits. The country’s broader economy may suffer, but Lee-Makiyama says few people would notice if the GDP growth rate dipped from 3 to 2 percent. The same contraction for China’s economy, he contends and Zaagman agrees, would be disastrous. This asymmetry is at the heart of why the Trump administration can afford to be self-destructive in its tariff regime while China cannot indulge in similar costs to score trade negotiation points.

The Chinese government was “definitely caught off guard” by the brusqueness of Trump’s actions, says Zaagman, which was “not anticipated at all.” That might explain why Beijing didn’t make fuller or better contingency plans for a situation like today. Then again, Xi might find consolation in the fact that the same surprise must also be reverberating inside the offices of US tech giants, as Asia economic observer Tony Nash, formerly of the Economist Intelligence Group, questions why American companies hadn’t diversified their manufacturing sooner. Their lack of preparedness may give China some reassurance that hostilities won’t escalate much beyond their current point without China firing back.

Without having a clear and coherent plan for its reaction, which neither Lee-Mikayama nor Zaagman believe Beijing is even close to right now, the best strategy for China is to do nothing material and maintain a “strong and silent” posture — which is exactly what the country is doing, commenting only to say that it “won’t flinch.”

The damage, “the stuff that saps one percent off GDP growth every year,” says Zaagman, has already been done. Silicon Valley investors are now looking for startups with reduced China exposure; big US tech manufacturers are exploring Vietnam, Mexico, and other potential production outlets; and China has found its prejudices that it can’t trust the US confirmed. Now that Trump has pulled the big red Huawei lever, China is wise to avoid hurriedly mirroring the move. Then again, it’s not like it has much choice.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18637291/huawei-ban-trump-trade-war-china-united-states-tariffs

2019-05-29 12:00:00Z
52780305137219

Opinion | Trump Hands China an Easy Win in the Trade War - The New York Times

When President Trump tweeted on May 5 that the China trade deal was off, the historical echoes in Beijing were loud and clear. Almost exactly 100 years earlier, China’s “May Fourth Movement” of 1919 was a direct response to the actions of President Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. Wilson had promised China, an American ally, that German colonies in Shandong would be returned to Chinese sovereignty, but instead handed them to Japan. China exploded with anti-American, nationalist sentiment. One of the eventual consequences was the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, which for the last 70 years has ruled the country.

Thus, Mr. Trump has handed Xi Jinping a remarkably effective nationalist card to play at a time when he has been under pressure at home because of a slowing economy. The Chinese media is now full of accounts of the country’s economic resilience and appeals to patriotism, even invoking the spirit of the Korean War, when, according to the official narrative, China was able to stare down the vastly superior American military.

And just in case people didn’t get the point, Mr. Xi recently visited Jiangxi, the starting point of the Long March in 1934, in which the Communist Party endured many hardships but ultimately emerged victorious.

I can almost hear members of the Trump administration groaning. Why on earth would they need to take into consideration events in China’s ancient past?

The answer depends on what Mr. Trump’s primary objective is. If it’s to sound tough to American voters, he may well have a winning formula. But if it’s to bring about a substantive change in China’s negotiating posture toward a bilateral trade agreement, one that might usher in changes in China’s trade policy, addressing questions of forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, currency manipulation and a phalanx of other non-tariff barriers, I’m not so sure.

Days after the president’s tweets, China listed three “red lines,” positions the United States had taken in the trade talks that were unacceptable: First, that it would keep tariffs in place for a period after the proposed trade agreement was signed. Second, that it could impose punitive tariffs if it judged China to be in violation of the agreement, and that China would be forbidden from retaliating with its own tariffs. Third, the ever-inflating expectations of the terms under which Beijing would buy American goods under a proposed bilateral purchasing agreement.

These “red lines” were new. Before that, China’s negotiating team had a fully flexible remit from the leadership. But not anymore. Now that these three lines are in the public domain, there is no way Chinese leaders can yield on them. The leaks of large parts of the negotiating text to the American news media has added a new level of toxicity, making it virtually impossible to return to the existing text as a basis of negotiations. Together with recent moves against the Chinese telecom company Huawei presumably intended to pressure Beijing further, the possibility of negotiating a revised agreement that is more accommodating to American interests is now very slim.

Instead, what I have seen in Beijing over the last few weeks is a country moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Opinion | Trump Hands China an Easy Win in the Trade War - The New York Times

I can almost hear members of the Trump administration groaning. Why on earth would they need to take into consideration events in China’s ancient past?

Instead, what I have seen in Beijing over the last few weeks is a country moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Selasa, 28 Mei 2019

The Sports Illustrated Sale Details Are Pretty Bizarre - The Big Lead

By: Ryan Glasspiegel | 2 hours ago

Sports Illustrated was sold from Meredith to Authentic Brands for $110 million. The first instinct is that the number seems very low for a brand that has the historical cachet of SI and remains a force digitally both in reporting — they recently broke the big stories on misconduct from Jerry Richardson and members of the Mavs front office — and in distribution. The sale also dragged on forever; last June, Meredith officials were saying bids had been received in the $200 million range.

The weirdest part, though, is not the purchase price, but the fact that Meredith is paying Authentic Brands an undisclosed amount to license the Sports Illustrated brand name and continue to publish the magazine and website. What this means is that Authentic is not buying the actual core SI product; they are buying the brand, the intellectual property, and the photo library.

What does this mean? Variety explained:

In a wide-ranging discussion, Salter envisioned possibilities ranging from Sports Illustrated medical clinics and sports-skills training classes to a gambling business and better use of the magazine’s vast photo library. “We always stay close to the DNA and the heritage of the brand,” he says. “Granted, we will go beyond, but we will always remember sort of how we go there.”

While Meredith has what Salter described to Ben Strauss of the Washington Post as “obligations” to continue to invest in the people who write for SI, Salter sidestepped Strauss’s direct question about whether investigative journalism — which drives relevance, but also costs a lot and potentially alienates branding partners — would continue to be a priority. The CEO said:

“Sports Illustrated will continue to be a resource for its readers, providing up-to-the-minute sports news and coverage, thoughtful analysis, and entertaining stories. Our partnership with Meredith is key in continuing to re-build Sports Illustrated into a global platform while disseminating information with integrity and respect.”

It’s also instructive to realize how these two companies got to these respective positions. Meredith is an Iowa-based magazine company backed by the Koch Brothers described in a recent Wall Street Journal story as being particularly “unsentimental.” They operate women’s lifestyle publications like Better Homes & Gardens and Allrecipes, and bought Time Inc. for $1.85 billion with the express intention of selling off legacy titles like Time, Fortune, and SI, while seeing an opportunity to capitalize on People.

As the Washington Post story on the SI acquisition describes, Authentic Brands “holds the licensing and trademark rights to celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali. The company also has licensing deals with former golfer Greg Norman and retired NBA star Shaquille O’Neal.” They also have licensing rights for fashion brands like Nautica and Juicy Couture.

The weirdness of this whole transaction makes it feel like a shotgun wedding. In it, Meredith does not get an attractive sale price nor a clean break from the publication they sought to sell for over a year. Their stock price fell over 4% on Monday on the news. Authentic Brands probably gets a bargain, but the nature of the deal itself reveals that they don’t have enough interest in operating the core assets to figure it out themselves.

SI still produces a lot of relevant work. The annual swimsuit issue remains a major revenue driver. We’ll have to see if this arrangement is crazy enough to work.

Featured, Media

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://thebiglead.com/2019/05/28/the-sports-illustrated-sale-details-are-pretty-bizarre/

2019-05-28 20:35:15Z
52780304683692

Fake Meat Smackdown: Impossible Burger vs. Beyond Burger - Lifehacker

Illustration for article titled Fake Meat Smackdown: Impossible Burger vs. Beyond Burger — Photo: Nicole Dieker

I have eaten a lot of veggie burgers in my day.

I was a vegetarian for five years before I decided that it would be a lot easier to be the kind of person who eats meat “occasionally”—which, these days, tends to include meat served in someone else’s home or meat ordered at a restaurant when the only vegetarian option is either a pile of carbs or a slice of mushroom. (I also make exceptions for hand-dipped corn dogs, because I grew up in the Midwest, although last year I had a hand-dipped, cornmeal-covered cheese stick that was a highly preferable option.)

The last time I ate a for-real hamburger, just because I wanted to remember what they tasted like, I spent all night stomach-cramping my way to the toilet and back.

So I get why products like the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger need to exist. We’re living in a world where we’re eating more meat than can be sustainably produced. A good meat substitute might help us cut back on our animal meat consumption and, by doing so, mitigate some of the damage the meat industry is currently doing to our planet.

We’re also living in a world where many people are vegetarian for ethical or cultural reasons, or—in my case—because they read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals and stopped eating meat for five years. (I am deliberately avoiding Pollan’s new stuff because I don’t want to be tempted to microdose.)

But, and most importantly, we’re living in a world where hamburgers are delicious. This is why I tried that real burger last year instead of settling for another dry beige patty where you can see, like, a carrot strip clinging to a chunk of pinto bean.

It’s also why I tried both the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger. If I could enjoy a non-meat product that tasted as good as meat, I’d never eat another hamburger again.

In order to keep the experiment as standardized as possible, I ordered both my Impossible and Beyond Burgers from local (non-chain) restaurants, photographed them side-by-side, and ate half of each burger at the same meal. (I also got a side of hand-dipped mozzarella sticks, but I don’t think they had any affect on the experiment.)

Here’s how they compared.

Impossible Burger

I ordered my Impossible Burger with no onions, because I’m one of those people for whom the crunch of a raw onion is the oral equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, but I think the person taking my order misunderstood because my burger came with no anything—no lettuce, no tomatoes, no pickle, no mayo/mustard/ketchup. I did get a slice of cheese.

The patty itself was thin and gray and gave off the impression of having been recently dislodged from a plastic wrapper; you weren’t going to mistake this for anything shaped by human hands.

(The bun had also clearly been shaken from a plastic sack, although that wasn’t the burger’s fault.)

Sliced in half, the Impossible Burger interior looked a lot more like a hamburger than I was expecting—a mass-produced burger, to be sure, but you wouldn’t be able to identify this as a non-meat product by its appearance.

Nor by its taste.

Dear readers, this thing tasted like meat.

Or, as Impossible Burger puts it: “meat from cows.”

It didn’t just taste like meat (from cows). It felt like meat in my mouth. Not the kind of hand-pounded hamburger with the grill-blackened exterior and enough heft to leave a lump in your stomach, but the kind of fast-food hamburger that disappears as you chew it, leaving nothing but the satisfaction of having eaten a burger behind.

I would absolutely eat this again. In fact, I already want another one.

Beyond Burger

My Beyond Burger looked like a veggie burger. It was clearly a veggie burger that was trying very hard, plated and served by a restaurant that cared very much about #aesthetics (the oats dotting the bun, the teeny-weeny arugula leaves instead of the slab of iceberg), but... well, this burger was red. Like the Impossible Burger, this puck-shaped patty had been pushed out of a plastic compartment; unlike the Impossible Burger, you could tell at a glance that no cows had been involved.

Sliced in half, the Beyond Burger looked even more unnerving; the inner granules could imply meat, if you were willing to squint, but the color suggested the meat was still raw. According to Beyond Burger, this “red-meat appearance” comes from beets; according to other reviewers, some patties literally bleed. (Mine did not.)

Still, I was expecting to enjoy the Beyond Burger more than I enjoyed the Impossible Burger simply because the overall presentation made it look like the superior product. The patty was thicker. The bun included multiple grains. They left off the onions but didn’t forget to include the other vegetables.

I did enjoy my Beyond Burger.

I’d eat it again.

But it didn’t taste like meat.

At best, the Beyond Burger tastes like a veggie burger wearing a meat costume. This isn’t one of those veggie burgers where you can identify bean halves or mushroom fragments; its texture and mouthfeel are comparable to the kind of real-meat hamburger you might get at the kind of brewpub that cares about using arugula instead of iceberg.

It’s trying really, really hard.

But something’s missing.

On the plus side, the Beyond Burger provided a more complex eating experience than the Impossible Burger did. This isn’t the type of burger that melts in your mouth, giving you enough room to cram in the handful of fries that you’ve just dipped in your milkshake. The Beyond Burger is the kind of burger that demands to be chewed. Savored. Lingered over, maybe, as you and your friends enjoy a beer or three on the patio.

I’m not the only person to note that, of the two leading players in the fake meat market, Impossible has created the slightly better substitute. As Chris Ip reports, in Engadget:

Beyond was first to the grocery stores, first to sell multiple meat products and first to the Nasdaq. But Impossible has arguably the greater soft power based on something simpler: It tastes more like animal meat.

However, I’d recommend you try them both and decide for yourself which one you prefer. After all, Beyond and Impossible share the same goal: to convince consumers to eat less meat overall.

So go ahead and order that fake-meat burger. I bet you’ll like it enough to want to eat another one.

Beyond vs. Impossible: Stats Breakdown

Calories

Beyond: 270

Impossible: 240

Grams of protein:

Beyond: 20

Impossible: 19

Primary protein source

Beyond: Pea

Impossible: Soy

Other ingredients of note:

Beyond: Beet juice extract

Impossible: Heme, which Impossible describes as “an iron-containing molecule that is essential for life.” It’s this soy-derived heme, “identical to the heme from animals,” that gives the burger its real-meat flavor.

Available at:

Beyond: major grocery chains, major restaurant chains including TGIFridays, Carl’s Jr, and Del Taco (full list here)

Impossible: over 5,000 restaurants worldwide (here’s how to find one near you), is scheduled to hit grocery stores later this year

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://skillet.lifehacker.com/fake-meat-smackdown-impossible-burger-vs-beyond-burge-1835060818

2019-05-28 15:30:00Z
52780305072310

Consumer Confidence Index posts big jump in May, defying trade war gloom - Yahoo Finance

In this Aug. 21, 2015 photo, people shop at the CityTarget store in Boston. Plummeting stock prices have taken a toll on U.S. consumer confidence, though there are signs the setback may be temporary. The University of Michigan says its consumer sentiment index fell to 91.9 Aug. 2014 from 93.1 in July. The index is still up 11.4 percent from a year ago. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Consumers remain optimistic in the face of a volatile market and a widening trade dispute between the U.S. and China, according to new data from The Conference Board, which rose unexpectedly in May.

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, a key metric of consumers’ willingness to keep spending, jumped to 134.1, up from April’s reading of 129.2. A consensus forecast of economists polled by Bloomberg saw the index rising to 130, up from the prior reading of 129.2.

“Consumer Confidence posted another gain in May and is now back to levels seen last Fall when the Index was hovering near 18-year highs,” said Lynn Franco, Senior Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board.

While a booming market for jobs helped bolster the outlook, “consumers’ sentiment regarding their income prospects was mixed,” according to Franco.

Earlier this month, a separate sentiment index from Reuters and the University of Michigan showed sentiment surged to a 15-year high, but much of that data was captured before the U.S. and China slapped a new round of tariffs on each other’s imports.

All told, it suggests shoppers are still inclined to keep opening their wallets in the face of mounting pressures on the economy.

The trade war has made for volatile trading on Wall Street and led to concerns that global growth could suffer. A number of businesses and economists also think the $200 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods—and the $60 billion Beijing is poised to slap on U.S. goods in retaliation—will begin trickling down to the consumer.

Walmart (WMT), the world’s largest retailer, said earlier this month that tariffs would result in higher prices for shoppers.

“We are going to continue to do everything we can to keep prices low. However, increased tariffs will lead to increased prices for our customers,” CFO Brett Biggs told reporters on a call.

The Conference Board’s data was also released in the shadow of April retail sales that were far weaker than Wall Street expected. Gas prices, which have fluctuated ahead of the summer driving season, may also be a wild card going forward.

“Consumers expect the economy to continue growing at a solid pace in the short-term, and despite weak retail sales in April, these high levels of confidence suggest no significant pullback in consumer spending in the months ahead,” Franco said.

Javier is an editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow Javier on Twitter: @TeflonGeek

Read more:

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-conference-board-releases-may-consumer-confidence-index-133825261.html

2019-05-28 14:13:00Z
52780304938186