Business

➚ BUY: Walmart raised its full-year forecast and the stock is headed for its best year since 1999. It’s held onto grocery penny-pinchers and pulled in higher-income shoppers, too.

➘ SELL: Target posted its worst quarterly earnings in two years and said consumers are “shopping carefully.” Shares fell 22%, widening the gap between Target and its rivals.

DOGE wants to end remote work… Bill Hwang gets 18 years… Mali releases execs held in tax fight… UK homebuyers need mom and dad… E. coli recall highlights “OPEC of carrots”... Duct-taped banana sells for $6M at Sotheby’s…

Trump returns, bringing chaos to boardrooms and markets

THE SCENE

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted and one of America’s largest companies lost $4 billion in market value. He embraced a controversial billionaire, whose company soared in value as a result. He sent shares of foreign companies tumbling with tariff threats.

That was all in 2016.

The company was Lockheed Martin, whose military contracts Trump threatened to cancel. The billionaire was Carl Icahn, whose appointment as a special adviser to slash federal regulations boosted shares of Icahn’s oil-refining business by 12%. Toyota’s stock slumped when Trump demanded the company “build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax.”

Trump is back and so is the stock-market chaos that accompanied his first win. His nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., shaved $8 billion off the stocks of six vaccine makers including Pfizer and Moderna.

Shares of insurers UnitedHealth and Humana spiked after analysts resurfaced comments from Mehmet Oz, Trump’s nominee to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, about moving more low-income Americans from government-sponsored plans to private insurance.

Trump’s busy policy teams, swifter to action than in 2016, have added market volatility, too. A Washington Post story said that his government-efficiency czars, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, want to build a free tax-filing app sent shares of H&R Block and TurboTax owner Intuit down more than 6%. Tesla shares rose on a Bloomberg report that Trump wants to ease rules for self-driving cars.

LIZ’S VIEW

A word of warning to CEOs who white-knuckled their way through Trump’s tweets eight years ago: It’s going to be wilder this time.

For one thing, the president-elect is angrier now, with fringier and more deeply held ideas about the economy. He knows his way around government and is more sure-footed, with lieutenants eager to do his bidding. He got fewer endorsements and donations from corporate executives in 2024 than he did in 2016, and likes to hold a grudge.

Second, there are more Trumps. Elon Musk xeets more than Trump truths, has 24 times as many followers, and owns the algorithm that fills our feeds.

Third, the army of retail investors that can move stocks or add teeth to corporate boycotts didn’t exist in 2016. It was mostly a creation of the meme-stock craze in 2021, which channeled MAGA’s burn-it-all-down populist energy into the market, and it’s only been stoked since then by a right-wing chorus on X.

US prosecutors charged Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, founder of conglomerate Adani Group, and seven other executives with allegedly offering more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials to secure government solar-energy contracts.

The company, government officials, and projects are all Indian — but some of Adani’s investors are American, which gives the Justice Department jurisdiction. Foreign companies often complain about the long arm of US law enforcement, which uses US financial markets to police the world. Former executives of one of Canada’s biggest pension funds were also charged.

Adani Group’s shares fell 10% on the news, erasing $15 billion from the wealth of its founder, previously Asia’s second-richest person. The company’s stock was climbing back from a 2023 shortseller’s report that alleged stock manipulation and misuse of offshore shell entities, though it didn’t touch on Adani’s solar contracts.

• Meanwhile, here’s how the story is being covered on an Adani-owned Indian news site.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy gave their first roadmap to slash government spending. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they lay out plans to embed efficiency czars at federal agencies, use technology to replace workers, and challenge Congress’s spending authority.

But much of the federal budget is untouchable: Three-quarters of this year’s spending is on entitlement programs like Social Security and interest payments on the national debt, leaving only a small pool for the DOGE masters to trim. Of that elective spending, more than half goes to defense, which neither party has shown a willingness to cut. (Billions more go to Musk’s SpaceX.)

The list of potential candidates to lead financial regulatory agencies under Trump is growing, several people familiar with the names confirmed. Current Federal Reserve Gov. Michelle Bowman is being floated for the central bank’s vice chair of supervision role, now held by Michael Barr. Bowman turned heads for criticizing the board’s latest rate decisions. Meanwhile, Jonathan Gould, a partner at Jones Day — Trump’s go-to law firm — is in the mix to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, where he previously served as a senior official.

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Jaguar’s new ad featuring androgynous models and no cars has sparked backlash from conservatives. Sir Martin Sorrell is the executive chairman of S4 Capital and the founder of advertising giant WPP.

Nicantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, is creating an AI model that can navigate the real world, using the geospatial data it has collected from millions of Pokémon hunters, it said in a blog post last week, Semafor’s Rachyl Jones reported.

″The coming model — arguably a smart use of Niantic’s data reserves — is also a reminder that “free” is never free in tech,” she wrote.