Weekly News Summary for May 05 to May 11
Friday: May 05: Oil Prices Jump but still Suffers from Three-Week Fall
On Friday, oil prices rose but suffered a three-week consecutive loss after an aggressive drop earlier in the week before the benchmark interest rate accelerated. At the same time, issues about the US banking crisis would slow down the economy and sap fuel demand.
The Brent benchmark closed the week with a 5.30% drop, while West Texas Intermediate had a 7.10% plunge despite having a rebound on Friday. Both were down for three consecutive weeks for the first time since November. According to analysts, crude is attempting to reverse the recent decrease in prices amid higher interest rates and fears about recession in the banking sector.
Monday: May 08: Binance Halt Bitcoin Withdrawals
For several hours, Binance paused its bitcoin withdrawals amid heavy volumes and rising processing fees, which caused the shares of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related companies to fall in the early trading hours.
On Monday, Binance shut down Bitcoin withdrawals for three hours. The world’s largest crypto exchange said there was a glut of pending transactions since it has not provided so-called miners a high enough reward for logging trades into the blockchain. Also, it said that its fixed fees did not expect a recent jump in bitcoin-network gas fees.
Tuesday: May 09: Japan Economy Pressured amid Spending Downturn and Wage Drop
Japanese consumer spending unexpectedly dropped at the fastest year in a year as real wages marked their twelfth-month decline on strong inflation, emphasizing the economic challenges on top of a robust post-COVID revival. In addition, government data from Tuesday reinforced the uncertainties about the Bank of Japan’s outlook due to weaker global growth and issues regarding the financial sector.
Based on an economist, higher prices, which are somehow being moderated by the government’s energy subsidy programs, are weighing on consumption by diminishing households’ real purchasing power.
Wednesday: May 10: Nordstrom Assigns Cathy Smith as CFO
On Wednesday, Nordstrom mentioned that they positioned former Target Corp CFO Cath Smith as their new finance chief. On May 29, Smith will replace Nordstrom CFO, Michael Maher. Besides, she gained experience from being the finance chief at Target for five years.
The US retailer will have its first permanent finance chief since Anne Bramman exited in December, a month after it adopted a poison pill to avoid investors from amassing over 10.00% of its shares.
Thursday: May 11: Google to Rollout Generative Artificial Intelligence
This came after Microsoft included GPT-4 into its Bing search engine at the start of the year. Search Generative Experience will be a part of Google, which will craft responses to open-ended queries, according to the company. Meanwhile, the system will only be accessible to a limited number of users since it is still experimental.
In addition, it announced a new feature on Google’s Android system that would warn users about unknown AirTags, which are tiny devices designed to track personal items such as keys and wallets.
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