Bank stocks reached highs not seen in close to 10 years on Tuesday, as investors piled into a financial services sector set to benefit from continued deregulation and rising corporate profits.
Data: S&P Dow Jones Indices; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
Of the 2000 points the Dow Industrials have risen so far this year, more than a quarter came from the surge of a single company — Boeing, whose shares are up 53% in 2017. That Boeing juggernaut has contributed about 580 points to the Dow's 2017 rise, per the WSJ's Justin Lahart.
The Dow pushed through the symbolic 22,000 barrier today, carried by a 6.9% rise in Apple's shares that added 60 points to the index of the biggest 30 industrial companies.
Apple — with a 35% overall share price increase so far in 2017 — is also responsible for about 350 of the Dow's approximately 2000-point rise.
McDonald's shares — up 29% this year — have contributed 227 points to the Dow surge.
Workers with skills in virtual reality were the hottest thing on the U.S. job market in the last quarter, even though the technology has yet to break into mainstream use, per Bloomberg's Isabel Gottlieb.
U.S. government data compiled by Upwork, the website matching free-lancers and employers, showed that company billings for VR projects surged 30 times over the second quarter last year. VR is starting from a small base — just 106 free-lancers listed it as a skill in the second quarter last year, compared with more than 2,500 in 2017 — but the growth in demand for VR workers suggests that companies see much potential ahead.
Artificial intelligence skills were big, too, holding three of the top 10 spots for the fastest-growing demanded skills. They were natural language processing at No. 2, neural networks at No. 5 and image processing at No. 8.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in New York by Rod Wheeler alleges that Fox News and Ed Butowsky, a wealthy GOP donor, worked together to fabricate a story claiming the FBI had evidence that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had passed documents to WikiLeaks.
Why the suit was filed: Wheeler, a Fox News commentator and private investigator hired by Butowsky for the Rich story, alleges that the author of the Fox News story, Malia Zimmerman, fabricated quotes from him regarding the Rich investigation in the report. Fox News retracted the story a week after its publication.
The big thing: The lawsuit, first obtained by NPR, claims that Butowsky boasted that President Trump himself had read drafts of the story before it was published by Fox News — and that Sean Spicer had taken a meeting in the White House a month before its publication to be briefed on its contents.
Athenahealth said Tuesday it is removing the president and board chairman titles from Jonathan Bush, the outspoken CEO of the cloud-based electronic health record vendor. Bush will still be CEO. The company also will find ways to strip out $100 million of costs to boost its profitability.
The back story: These decisions come less than two months after activist hedge fund Elliott Associates bought a 9% stake in Athenahealth and demanded changes to improve the company's profits.
The bottom line: It's still not clear if Elliott is pushing for a sale of Athenahealth (some have speculated big tech companies could be buyers), but it's clear the cousin of George W. Bush and Jeb Bush is relinquishing some control of the company he co-founded in 1997. An Athenahealth spokeswoman said the decisions were "influenced by feedback and guidance from all our shareholders, as well as from an external consulting firm."
The most convincing evidence promoted by automation doomsayers, who argue that we are about to enter an era of mass unemployment, are the roughly 4 million motor-vehicle operator jobs that are put at risk by self-driving car technology.
But Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbertargues in Quartz that even though her firm predicts that "autonomous vehicle fleets will begin being introduced in 2020," and start doing the jobs of human drivers by the middle of next decade, we shouldn't be overly concerned about the impact of the technology on labor markets.
Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, hosted a day-and-a-half long event called Off the Record for around 25 news leaders last week in Menlo Park, Axios has learned. A large part of the conversation centered around Facebook and the leverage that publishers have to negotiate with the platform.
"S&P 500 to exclude Snap after voting rights debate," by Reuters' Trevor Hunnicutt: "The S&P 500 will start excluding companies that issue multiple classes of shares, ... a move that effectively bars Snap after its decision to offer stock with no voting rights."
"Existing components of the S&P index with several share classes — such as Google parent Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway — will not be affected."
