Event ticketing software company Eventbrite, valued at $1.5 billion by private investors, on Thursday filed for a $200 million IPO.
Why it matters: Expect this to be one of many new IPO filings based on where we are on the calendar, as the post-filing waiting period to launch road-shows now brings us past Labor Day, when most institutional investors are back at work.
President Trump touted how crucial his presidency is to the markets' gains, in an interview today with Fox News:
"If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor."
History as guide: Stocks continued to rise during and after Bill Clinton's impeachment, which occurred a bit earlier in a long bull market than where we're at today. Stocks fell when Richard Nixon resigned, but markets were reacting to a confluence of other events like a global oil crisis.
Sears Holdings will close another 46 unprofitable Sears and Kmart stores in November, reports Bloomberg.
The big picture: Sears has closed hundreds of stores in the last two years as its sales get clobbered by the rise of e-commerce. While some competing retailers, like Walmart, Target, Macy's and Kohl's, bounced back in a strong economy and beat analysts' expectations in the second quarter, Sears and J.C. Penney have continued to decline.
Paula Duncan, a juror during Paul Manafort's trial, told Fox News that only one juror's doubt "kept the verdict from being guilty on all 18 counts."
The big picture: President Trump touted the 10 counts that were declared a mistrial on Twitter on Wednesday, and commended him for refusing to "break." Duncan, who described herself as an avid Trump supporter, told Fox that finding Manafort guilty "was hard for me. I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn't."
Saudi Aramco's troubled IPO plan is increasingly looking dead, or at least in a deep freeze, but the Saudis pushed back against those reports late last night.
Driving the news: Reuters, citing "four senior industry sources," reported yesterday that Saudi Arabia had called off the plan to sell about 5% of the company. And a source familiar with the company's work with outside advisers and banks told me roughly the same thing after their story hit.
"The U.S. stock market has been on the upswing for nine and a half years, during which a cohort of younger investors has never dealt with a 20 percent drop in the S&P 500 — the classic definition of a bear market," AP's Stan Choe writes.
Why it matters: "How they respond will be crucial because this generation bears a heavier responsibility for paying for their own retirement, as pensions go extinct and Social Security’s finances weaken."
Lowe's will begin slashing its in-store inventory and is shutting down its 99 Orchard Supply Hardware locations across the country in hopes of boosting its sales in other areas to compete with Home Depot, CNN Money reports.
Why it matters: The move shows the company's new CEO Marvin Ellison, hired away from JC Penny, is unafraid to make cuts and reduce inventory to focus on other areas he feels the company needs to improve in. The company's second quarter sales increased 5.3% according to CNN, but it still leaves it behind Home Depot at 8%.
Target is the latest retailer to report strong quarterly results — sales growth at stores open for at least one year increased the most in 13 years — thanks to the booming economy.
"There's no doubt that, like others, we're currently benefiting from a very strong consumer environment — perhaps the strongest I've seen in my career."
— Target CEO Brian Cornell on the analyst call
The big picture: Walmart, Home Depot, Kohl's, Macy's and Nordstrom have also recently posted strong results thanks to a hot job market that is leading to higher wages and consumer confidence approaching an 18-year high.
The fight to get severance for thousands of fired Toys "R" Us workers has moved on to a new phase: Attacking the creditors.
Talks continue with buyout firms Bain Capital and KKR, which owned Toys "R" Us prior to its bankruptcy. Expectations remain that they'll contribute substantially to what could ultimately be a $75 million pot, although what I had been told would be an August announcement is now being referred to as a September announcement.
Newspapers around the world reacted Wednesday to the bombshell news that two of President Trump's former associates — former personal attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — are guilty of committing felonies.
The big picture: It was one of the most newsworthy days of 2018, and the worldwide media did not hold back in their efforts to encapsulate the threat that these men pose to Trump.
Authorities in Iowa filed charges against an undocumented immigrant in connection with a recovered body believed to be that of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, who disappeared from her home a month ago.
The state of play: Former Speaker Newt Gingrich emailed Axios' Mike Allen to make sure that we'd be covering this story, which Fox News led with on air and online Tuesday evening, ahead of the Cohen-Manafort news. His take: "If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly."
U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt sat down with Axios on his first visit to Washington since replacing Boris Johnson last month, and said his early interactions with President Trump lead him to believe Trump "is actually trying to do something quite different from what a lot of people think."
What he's saying: "I think he absolutely understands the importance of the international order as we know it. You don’t have to persuade him that Russia is up to nefarious activity which is not acceptable and breaches international norms. But his view is that if this international order is going to work, it’s got to be reformed. It’s got to change."
