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Here are the major earnings after the close Wednesday
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Investors turned to defensive stocks on Tuesday as a sell-off in the tech sector accelerated. The selling in stocks seen as AI beneficiaries led some investors to take shelter in consumer staples names. Household prodicts giant Procter & Gamble (
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Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH) urged Congress to boost the payroll tax cap to save Social Security benefits, according to an op-ed piece published by the New York Times on Tuesday.
As the law currently stands, the payroll
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SpaceX shares closed at $154.63 on Monday, down around 16% on the day. That leaves them within touching distance of the $150 at which the shares first changed hands when public trading opened, the level set once underwriters finished building the order book, though still some way above the $135 price at which the IPO itself was struck.
The slide has erased more than $600 billion (€524.2bn) in market value over three trading days, dragging the company down from a peak that had lifted it past Amazon and, fleetingly, Microsoft, in terms of market capitalisation.
Its valuation now sits just above $2 trillion (€1.74tn), below Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), making it the seventh most valuable company in the world.
The retreat unwinds a remarkable opening run.
After the open at around $150 on 12 June, shares climbed to almost $226 by 16 June, a gain of roughly two-thirds before the company had published a single set of results as a public firm.
Currently, SpaceX is trading over 30% lower than the intraday high of around $226 and only 3% higher than the opening price.
That rally always rested on a thin pool of freely traded shares and lofty expectations for its AI ambitions, leaving it exposed to a sharp reversal once sentiment turned.
The latest leg down on Monday coincided with SpaceX’s first move into the corporate debt market.
The company announced an inaugural offering of senior unsecured notes, with people familiar with the plans reportedly putting the target at around $20 billion (€17.4bn).
The proceeds are earmarked chiefly to repay a bridge loan taken on during its merger with Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI earlier this year, with the remainder going to general corporate purposes.
The debut bond sale follows the investment-grade credit ratings awarded last Friday by all three major agencies, Moody’s at Baa1, Fitch at BBB+ and S&P Global at BBB, which open the door to cheaper borrowing and a wider pool of institutional lenders.
In documents tied to the offering, SpaceX also disclosed a cash position of roughly $100.8 billion (€88bn) as of 19 June, much of it raised in the IPO, alongside $29.1 billion (€25.4bn) of long-term debt.
That mix of vast cash reserves and fresh borrowing so soon after a record flotation has unsettled some investors, who see the rapid fundraising as a sign of heavy spending ahead as SpaceX scales its AI and data centre plans.
Opting for debt rather than new shares does, however, spare existing shareholders further dilution, preserving their economic stake while the company funds its expansion.
The bank names former Dream Sports executive and investment banker Raj Rathi to lead M&A business in India.
Citigroup Inc. has appointed veteran investment banker Raj Rathi as its new head of mergers and acquisitions in India, effective this month. The appointment comes as Citi deepens its advisory capabilities to capture opportunities in the Asian market.
Rathi’s hiring follows several high-profile additions to the bank’s regional investment banking team. Citi recently lured Bhavin Shukla from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to serve as managing director and head of Infrastructure Investment Banking for Japan, North and South Asia, and Australia. Last year, Citi hired Vikram Chavali from Goldman Sachs Group as its Asia-Pacific head of Global Asset Managers.
Rathi was hired from Dream Sports, the multibillion-dollar parent company of fantasy gaming giant Dream11, where he served as head of Strategy and Corporate Development and oversaw the deployment of about $150 million across multiple strategic transactions.
Citi’s moves underscore a trend in which global banks are recruiting seasoned corporate executives to navigate complex digital infrastructure, the energy transition, and cross-border capital flows. Its recent high-profile transactions in the region include advising United Spirits Ltd. on the sale of its 100% stake in the Royal Challengers Bengaluru cricket team and steering Chinese appliance giant Haier Group through the sale of its 49% stake in Haier India to a consortium backed by Bharti Enterprises and Warburg Pincus.
Before his corporate development role at Dream Sports, Rathi spent five years as an executive director at J.P. Morgan, focusing on technology investment banking. He covered the technology, fintech, and consumer internet sectors, executing deals totaling about $35 billion in transaction value.
His career also included positions at Guggenheim Partners and Guggenheim Securities’ investment banking division, as well as at Ernst & Young, where he focused on financial due diligence and transaction advisory services for institutional clients, following early corporate development experience at Sutherland.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
As the European Union tries to fight its record-high €1 billion deficit per day with China, the bloc’s leaders are increasingly pointing to the problem of currency manipulation, which they say Beijing is using to make products even cheaper on the EU market – which is already flooded with Chinese imports.
“An artificially low currency is an advantage for those who want to improve their economic competition positions,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after the European Council summit on 19 June.
The matter of the Chinese currency and its management was also high on the agenda of last week’s G7 summit in France.
The signs are that this is a new front in Europe’s trade battle against Beijing. To understand why the devaluation of the yuan (or renminbi) matters, here are three things to know.
According to a report by the Haut Commissariat à la Stratégie au Plan, a French government advisory body, the undervaluation of the yuan is estimated at around 20-25 percent.
“While there is no universally recognised method for determining unequivocally whether a currency is significantly overvalued or undervalued, the assessment that the renminbi (RMB) is significantly undervalued is now widely shared, including among international institutions,” the report said.
In theory, China’s trade surpluses should naturally create demand for the yuan, leading to an appreciation of the currency, but it is not the case.
However, the devaluation of the yuan might not be the direct result of central bank intervention. Alicia Ferro Herrera, an expert at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told Euronews that China prevents its currency from appreciating faster by not bringing all of its export revenues back to the mainland.
“They stay in Hong Kong and they are not converted into RMB,” she said.
The EU deficit with China hit a record-high €359.9 billion in 2025. That same year marked the first time that all EU member states had a trade deficit with Beijing, including Germany, the EU’s largest economy.
“This is simply not sustainable,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last Friday.
According to the Haut Commissariat au Plan report, the undervaluation of the yuan plays a large part in keeping Chinese products competitive; as things stand, they are assessed by EU industry to be around 30-40 percent cheaper than European equivalents.
However, Ferro Herrera pointed out that the inflation differential also plays a great part.
“My estimate is that the inflation differential and its accumulation in Europe since the invasion of Ukraine explains about three quarters of the loss in external competitiveness,” she said.
In his remarks last Friday, Merz suggested the EU begin dialogue with China on the currency issue.
“We have to talk about this topic with each other,” he said. “It is in the interest of both sides.”
The German chancellor cited the 1985 Plaza Agreement, which saw the US, Japan, West Germany, the UK and France agree to depreciate the US dollar against the Japanese yen and the Deutsche Mark. The goal was to head off a protectionist turn from the US as its trade deficit deepened.
Merz also referred to the European Monetary System, which before the adoption of the euro relied on exchange-rate bands to limit currency fluctuations.
“That was a system where countries could coordinate through exchange-rate corridors,” he said.
Conversely, Ferro Herrera points out that the US did not push for any such negotiation when economic imbalances were discussed during the G7 last week.
In her view, Europe should monitor China’s export prices for major sector-by-sector deviations, since this is an important sign of overcapacity, as negative price growth occurs when goods cannot be sold.
As the financial world remembers the former Fed chair, economists weigh his massive macroeconomic legacy.
Alan Greenspan, the second-longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, has died just months after his 100th birthday.
Known as “The Maestro,” Greenspan helmed the Fed under five U.S. presidents, from August 1987 until January 2006. He managed the central bank through two market crashes, two recessions, and various financial crises. Through it all, the U.S. economy experienced significant macroeconomic expansion, rising asset prices, and a dramatic shift in corporate finance.
Early in his tenure, Greenspan intervened to mitigate the impact of the 1987 stock market crash, a move known as the “Greenspan put.” The monetary policy lowered interest rates and injected liquidity, stabilizing the economy, restoring investor confidence, and mitigating financial shocks. However, Fed intervention also incentivized investors to take excessive risks, fueled speculative bubbles such as the 1990s dot-com bubble, and led to market expectations of future interventions.
The Greenspan put is a bit of an illusion, Kenneth Rogoff, professor of Economics at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote in an email exchange.
“When markets collapse, the interest rate required to maintain stable inflation will typically also temporarily collapse,” Rogoff wrote. “His biggest mistakes were in regulatory policy, where he had too much faith in financial market innovation and too hands-off an attitude towards regulation. We are now, in the second year of the [second] Trump administration, repeating that mistake.”
“He was a great central banker who helped lead his country through two decades of prosperity,” said Ben Bernanke, a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at Brookings Institution and Greenspan’s successor at the Fed, in a statement. “I always found him generous with his time and insights. We are still learning from him, even if he is no longer with us.”
Don Kohn, a senior fellow at Brookings and former Fed governor and vice chair, remembered Greenspan encouraging Fed staff and fellow policy makers to voice new ideas and analytical insights while asking them to find the weak points in the hypotheses he put forward.
“But those ideas, insights, and challenges need to be backed by evidence and solid reasoning,” he wrote in a post on Brookings’ website. “Once when he asked me what I thought we should be doing on policy, I started my response with, ‘My gut tells me…’ He quickly cut me off: ‘That’s not your gut, Don, that’s your experience and knowledge.’”
Greenspan’s willingness to experiment to lower the unemployment rate, which peaked at 7.4% in 1992, drew many admirers.
“He pushed it lower than the conventional wisdom had ever thought possible, and discovered that it was possible to have more Americans in work without sparking inflation,” Justin Wolfers, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email exchange. “Hundreds of thousands more people found work, and their families could afford a better life because he showed that there’s nothing natural about what many economists had called the natural rate of unemployment.”
Although Wolfers did not agree with all of Greenspan’s decisions, he noted that “his intellectual courage and devotion to the public good were never in doubt. He lived a big life and made a difference.”
Contact the author at rdaly@gfmag.com
NVE announces internal CEO transition as Daniel Baker nears retirement
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Disney's ABC runs ads accusing FCC of trying to control political content
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Earnings Call Insights: Outdoor Holding Company (POWW) Q4 fiscal 2026
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The German government announced on Monday that it intends to acquire 40% of the defence contractor KNDS, a move designed to bolster European arms production in partnership with its NATO and EU ally France.
The decision deepens state involvement in a company whose hardware has become central to Europe’s rearmament efforts.
KNDS was created in 2015 through the merger of Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and France’s Nexter. The French state holds a 50% stake, while the other half belongs to the German family behind Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, whose planned exit has opened the door for Berlin to step in.
Based in Amsterdam, the group reported revenue of €4.4 billion last year and employs more than 11,000 people.
The timing reflects a broader scramble across Europe to expand military spending and manufacturing capacity, as governments weigh the continued threat from Russia’s war in Ukraine against growing doubts about the reliability of the US as a security guarantor.
Berlin framed the investment in explicitly strategic terms, saying it would secure lasting influence over a business it considers vital to European security and defence.
The German government added that the stake would reinforce domestic industrial output, technological independence and the safeguarding of key national security interests and technologies.
In a joint statement, Germany and France said they had agreed on the future strategy and governance of KNDS, which they intend to co-own through arrangements aimed at giving both countries equal shareholdings.
Neither government specified a timeline or the final level at which their holdings would settle, but they stated the agreement opens the way for a possible flotation of KNDS in the near future.
According to people familiar with the matter cited by the Associated Press, the two states plan to trim their stakes to around 30% within two to three years of any listing, while retaining equal voting rights regardless of the size of each holding.
The two governments cast the deal as a joint commitment to building up Europe’s defence industry and armed forces, and to securing the continent’s strategic independence well into the future.
State participation in the firm was first floated by German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius in 2025 as a way to protect strategic expertise and jobs.
Beyond its tanks, KNDS also manufactures the Puma infantry fighting vehicle and the Boxer and Dingo armoured personnel carriers, equipment which is in growing demand as European armies replenish stocks depleted by years of underinvestment and donations to Ukraine’s defence.
Additional sources • AP
Kathrin Ziegler
Stock index futures were down on Monday as traders awaited updates from U.S.-Iran negotiations, with the Middle Eastern country describing the talks as showing “progress.”
Now, here are 4 news stories that broke overnight to watch out for:
U.K. Leadership Shake-Up:
Banks are testing products on fake customers. It’s faster, cheaper, and ethically murky.
Financial institutions are quietly substituting real customers with algorithmic clones to bypass stringent data privacy laws and speed up time-to-market.
Testing a new credit card or AI investment app traditionally takes months of vetting. For bank product developers, the synthetic consumer, who never sleeps or complains to regulators, and costs fractions of a penny to interview, represents a faster, highly attractive alternative, prompting adoption across the industry.
U.S. Bank deploys synthetic audiences to model consumer segments, such as high-net-worth households, and test messaging and refine campaigns before launch. Regulatory sandboxes encourage this practice to keep pace with AI-driven fintech. Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, and UBS are part of the UK FCA’s AI Live Testing initiative, utilizing advanced AI systems to test products and simulate market stressors.
NatWest, Monzo, and Santander, meanwhile, explore synthetic data ecosystems to train AI models, while JPMorgan Chase generates synthetic financial data to simulate market behaviors for risk management and product design.
Industry experts warn that the true challenge is balancing the speed of agentic AI with the need for strong governance.
“Most banking leaders believe agentic AI can move faster if governance weren’t perceived as a constraint. But in practice, governance is what makes these systems deployable at scale. A critical part of that is robust testing against representative ground truth, and synthetic data provides a powerful proxy that enables banks to stress-test products against rare scenarios and edge cases,” said Mudit Gupta, EY Americas Financial Services Consulting AI Practice Leader.
“The trade-off,” he added, “is privacy: synthetic data is often treated as inherently safe when it can still leak sensitive signals through inference and linkage risks. It can also replicate and scale historical biases, embedding them behind a layer of abstraction that makes them harder to detect, audit, and challenge—turning a governance shortcut into a long-term ethical exposure.”
Ultimately, the rush to deploy synthetic consumers offers undeniable speed, but the industry must quickly confront whether these powerful proxies—if not rigorously governed—will fulfill their purpose as a testing shortcut or simply institutionalize Wall Street’s next major ethical crisis.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
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At the time of writing, Brent crude was down 0.91% at $79.12 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude had fallen 0.70% to $75.32 a barrel.
Lower crude prices reflected broader investor sentiment in early trading after Qatari and Pakistani mediators said the first round of negotiations between the US and Iran aimed at securing a final agreement to end the conflict had concluded with “encouraging progress”.
A memorandum of understanding signed last week includes a commitment to reach a final agreement within 60 days, an end to fighting on “all fronts” – including in Lebanon – and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Asian stocks were mixed on Monday, with markets in Japan and South Korea trading higher, while US futures traded lower.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6% to 72,364.82 after reaching a new all-time high of 72,831.73 during intraday trading, helped by technology stocks fuelled by enthusiasm over the global artificial intelligence boom.
Japan’s SoftBank Group, the multinational investment holding company with a strong AI focus, rose 2.4%, while chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron gained 2.3%.
South Korea’s Kospi added 0.4% to 9,084.37 and was trading near record highs, led by AI-related shares. Memory chip maker SK Hynix surged 4.7%.
“We’re seeing another strong market today,” Neil Newman, managing director and head of strategy at Astris Advisory Japan, said. He cautioned that the Japanese market was “probably getting a little stretched” from an investor’s point of view, “especially with what’s going on in the Middle East”.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 1% to 23,690.86, while the Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.2% higher to 4,098.01.
Additional sources • AP
Several senior executives sold shares in American Express, Dell, Lowe’s, Take-Two Interactive, and Broadcom, while directors and executives at Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, SoFi Technologies, Abbott Laboratories, and MercadoLibre made purchases, potentially signaling varied insider sentiment across these companies.
The Playboy brand lives on long after the magazine died
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