The European Central Bank is raising interest rates today for the first time in more than a decade “as it ramps up its fight against record high inflation across the countries that use the euro.” Like central bankers everywhere, ECB President Christine Lagarde is trying to walk a fine line between attacking rising prices via rate hikes without sending the fragile eurozone economy into a recession - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and MarketWatch and Marketplace
Tesla profits fell in Q2 nearly 1/3 as “deliveries slowed because of shutdowns and raw materials shortages at the carmaker’s factory in Shanghai.” Sales also fell in Q2, down $1.9 billion from Q1 to $16.9 billion. Still, like Netflix results a day earlier, even with the losses the EV giant outperformed expectations - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg and MarketWatch and TechCrunch
The U.S. Senate has pushed forward by a 63-34 procedural vote a “bill to bolster American competitiveness with China” by, in part, providing “more than $52 billion in subsidies and tax credits on companies that build semiconductors in the United States” - NYTimes and WSJ
Tech stocks bounced up on Wednesday, bringing the Nasdaq up 1.6% with them – WSJ
In non-Musk Twitter news (that the company is probably happy to push far to the side), a former Blue Birder is heading to trial this week in San Francisco on charges that from 2013-15, he acted “as an agent of a foreign power inside the United States, commit[ed] wire fraud and launder[ed] money” by musing “his access to Twitter user data, gathering the personal information of political dissidents and passing it to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a luxury watch and hundreds of thousands of dollars” - NYTimes
Ride-hailing company Lyft has fired 60 employees and abruptly stopped its business of renting cars to riders, though it said it would continue to work with big car-rental companies - WSJ and Bloomberg
Ford is also making cuts, laying plans to reduce up to 8,000 positions “in the coming weeks as the automaker tries to boost profits to fund its push into the electric-vehicle market” - Bloomberg and WSJ
U.S. home prices hit a new record high in June, even as sales “continued to slide.” The median sales price landed at $416k, “up 13.4% on the year and the highest since records began in 1999” - WSJ and MarketWatch
New CNN chair Chris Licht has chosen a new leadership team—largely composed of “insiders who worked for his predecessor,” Jeff Zucker—to head up the network’s news and business divisions - NYTimes
Regulars will know of my National Park love. So let’s keep that riding with this “hidden gems” feature from Acadia, the Grand Canyon, the Great Smokies, Yosemite, and Zion - NYTimes
Stay safe,
MDR
