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U.S. stocks are hanging near their all-time high on Wednesday as financial markets catch a breath following two big days bolstered by hopes that the Israel-Iran war will not disrupt the global flow of crude oil. The S&P 500 was mostly unchanged in afternoon trading and sitting just 0.9% below its all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 121 points, or 0.3%, as of 12:52 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% higher. In the oil market, which has been the center of much of this weeks action, crude prices stabilized after plunging by roughly $10 per barrel in the last two days. Benchmark U.S. crude rose 2.2% to $65.79 per barrel, though it still remains below where it was before the fighting between Israel and Iran broke out nearly two weeks ago. A fragile ceasefire between the two countries appears to be holding, at least for the moment. On Wall Street, companies involved in the cryptocurrency industry rose as the price of bitcoin continued to steam ahead with investors willing to take on more risk. Coinbase Global, the crypto exchange, climbed 1.2%, and Robinhood Markets gained 0.4% as bitcoin topped $107,000. QuantumScape jumped 31.5% after announcing a breakthrough in its process for making solid-state batteries. Solid state battery technology promises to improve electric vehicle range, decrease charging times and minimize the risk of battery fires. But they are expensive to research and difficult to manufacture at a large scale, giving them a reputation for being a Holy Grail for battery engineers all over the world. They helped offset a 2% drop for FedEx. It reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected, but it gave a forecast for profit in the current quarter that fell short of expectations. General Mills, the company behind Pillsbury and Progresso soups, fell 4.1% after reporting weaker revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected, though its profit topped forecasts. It also said an underlying measure of profits could fall by 10% to 15% this upcoming fiscal year. In the bond market, Treasury yields were holding relatively steady, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.31% from 4.30% late Tuesday. Yields had dropped a day before after the chair of the Federal Reserve said it is waiting for the right moment to resume cutting interest rates. By lowering rates, the Fed could help give the economy a boost, but it could also offer additional fuel for inflation. Fed Chair Jerome Powell told a House of Representatives committee on Tuesday that he wants to wait and see how President Donald Trumps tariffs affect the economy and inflation before committing to its next move. Powell echoed many of the same statements in testimony before a Senate committee on Wednesday and said, For the time being, we are well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance. In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly in Europe after rising across much of Asia. Stocks jumped 1.2% in Hong Kong and 1% in Shanghai for two of the larger moves. The world can now move on to face other difficult choices like tariffs and things like that, said Frances Lun, CEO of GEO Securities in Hong Kong. So I think the market is well on its way to rebound and could again reach new levels. Stan Choe, AP business writer AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bumble is cutting a third of its workforce, the latest sign that all is not well in the business of online dating. The company informed its staff of the layoffs in a letter from founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd on Wednesday, describing the company and the dating industry as reaching an inflection point. In recent months, weve been rebuildingreturning to what makes us trusted, unique, and deeply human, Wolfe Herd wrote. But intentional rebuilding requires hard decisions. Bumbles workforce reduction will affect 240 positions, reducing the companys head count by 30%. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Bumble said that it expects the layoffs to save $40 million annuallycash that it plans to reinvest into product and technology development. The company expects to pay between $13 and $18 million in costs related to the layoffs in the third and fourth quarters of the year. On Wednesday, Bumbles shares rose more than 20% on news of the layoffs and were trading around $6.26 at the time of writing. The reality is, we need to take decisive action to restructure to build a company thats resilient, intentional, and ready for the next decade, Wolfe Herd wrote. We have reset our strategy and are going back to a startup mentalityrooted in an ownership mindset and team structures designed for faster, more meaningful execution. Wolfe Herd left her role as Bumbles CEO at the beginning of 2024, with former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones stepping in to lead the company. In March of this year, Jones resigned for personal reasons, and Wolfe Herd again took the helm of the company she founded in 2014 after cofounding Tindernow Bumbles main rival. Dating app decline Bumble, which has historically put women in the drivers seat of the online dating experience, has struggled to find its footing in a post-pandemic online dating world where many former users feel burned out by the churn of dating apps. The company isnt alone in that struggledating giant Match Group announced its own major layoffs last monthbut Bumble has resorted to altering its own DNA to adapt to a changing landscape for users looking for love. Last year, Bumble announced that men on its app would be allowed to message women first, a huge change for a dating system thats prided itself on letting women make the initial move. The feature, called Opening Moves, let women set prompts on their profiles that men could choose to respond to. The gamble doesnt appear to have made a lasting impact on Bumbles bottom line, and the companys stock continued to slide into 2025. Bumble first went public in 2021 with its buzzy stock debuting at more than $70 a sharea distant memory from the stocks recent single digit values. Bumbles woes are shared by Match Group, its biggest rival, which owns Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, and a deep roster of other niche and general interest dating apps. The two competitors, which together account for nearly all of the online dating market share, lost more than $40 billion combined between 2021 and 2024. Online dating is a strange business in some ways. While hookup apps like Grindr might beg to differ, a successful dating app interaction could result in both users leaving the app for a long stretch, or even forever. That intrinsic paradox is a tricky business to begin with, but the more dire existential threat might be that neither Match Group nor Bumble can seem to crack the code of Gen Zs dating habits. So far, that emerging cohort of eligible singles isnt very interested in paying for a subscription on a dating app and, worse yet, might be looking for love IRL, of all places.
Category:
E-Commerce
A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday vowed to keep Chinese artificial intelligence systems out of federal agencies while pledging to ensure the U.S. will prevail against China in the global AI competition. We are in a new Cold War, and AI is the strategic technology at the center, said Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, as he opened a hearing on the matter. The future balance of power may very well be determined by who leads in AI. The hearing on Capitol Hill comes about five months after a Chinese technology startup called DeepSeek introduced an AI model that rivaled platforms from OpenAI and Google in performance, but cost only a fraction to build. This raised concerns that China was catching up to the U.S. despite restrictions on chips and other key technologies used to develop AI. The ever-tighter race is now a central part of the U.S.-China rivalry. And so much is at stake that the U.S. must win, witnesses told the congressional panel. The two countries are in a long-term techno-security competition that will determine the shape of the global political order for the coming years, said Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Jack Clark, cofounder and head of policy at Anthropic, told the committee that AI has built-in values. I know that AI systems are a reflection of the societies they are built from. AI built in democracies will lead to better technology for all of humanity. AI built in authoritarian nations will . . . be inescapably intertwined and imbued with authoritarianism, Clark said. We must take decisive action to ensure America prevails. Earlier this year, Chris Lehane, OpenAIs head of global affairs, told reporters in Paris that the U.S. and China were the only two countries in the world that could build AI at scale. The competition, which he described as one between democratic AI and autocratic AI, is very real and very serious, and the stakes are enormous, he said, for the global rails of AI will be built by one of those two countries. The 2025 AI Index Report by Stanford Universitys Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center has the U.S. in the lead in producing top AI models. But the report notes China is rapidly closing the performance gap, reaching near parity in 2024 on several major benchmarks. It also shows that China leads in AI publications and patents. At the hearing, Clark urged the lawmakers to maintain and strengthen export controls of advanced chips to China. This competition fundamentally runs on compute, he said. The U.S. must control the flow of powerful chips to China, Clark said, or else you’re giving them the tools they will need to build powerful AI to harm American interests. Mark Beall Jr., president of government affairs at The AI Policy Network, said there are a number of very glaring gaps in the U.S. export controls that have allowed China to obtain controlled chips. Lawmakers earlier this year introduced a bill to track such chips to ensure they would not be diverted to the wrong hands. In another legislative step, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate on Wednesday introduced a bill to ban Chinese AI systems in the federal government. The U.S. must draw a hard line: Hostile AI systems have no business operating inside our government, Moolenaar said. The No Adversarial AI Act, as proposed, seeks to identify AI systems developed by foreign adversaries and ban their use in the U.S. government, with exceptions for use in research and counter-terrorism. By Didi Tang, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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