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The FIFA World Cup has yet to provide a meaningful boost to U.S. economic activity, with business surveys, card spending data, and airline passenger traffic showing little evidence that the tournament is supporting demand, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics.
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Alphabet (GOOGL) will join the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing Verizon Communications (VZ), effective Monday, June 29, 2026, further expanding mega-cap tech presence in the blue-chip average.
Dow Jones Industrial Average constituent Honeywell International (HON) is expected to complete
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The Mortgage Bankers’ Association compiles various mortgage loan indexes. The purchase applications index measures applications at mortgage lenders.
The current account, on a quarterly basis, measures the U.S. international balance in goods and services
Earnings Call Insights: KB Home (KBH) Q2 2026
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Former Pfizer executive David Denton steps into the CFO role amid a bruising stock decline.
Nike Inc. said Tuesday it has hired David Denton as its next chief financial officer, tapping the former Pfizer Inc. finance chief to help stabilize a company navigating one of the most difficult stretches in its history.
Denton will join the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear giant as Executive Vice President and CFO effective Aug. 17. Matthew Friend, who has held the role since April 2020, will step down on that date and remain in the role through Sept. 4.
The announcement did little to reassure investors. Nike shares fell 4.5% to close at $42.38 Tuesday, leaving the stock down 33% year to date. The company has been grappling with slowing sales and eroding market share to nimbler rivals such as On Running and Hoka.
CEO Elliott Hill, who took the helm in late 2024, has been working to arrest the slide, but a full recovery has proven elusive.
Whether Denton’s expertise can generate a turnaround remains to be seen. He previously served as CFO and Executive Vice President at Pfizer since May 2022. Before that, he held the same title at Lowe’s Cos. from 2018 to 2022. He also spent two decades at CVS Health Corp., including as CFO during the company’s evolution into a diversified health. In all, he brings more than 30 years of finance and operating leadership across large, complex public companies.
Denton, in a prepared statement, called Nike “one of the world’s great brands.”
“I’m excited to partner with Elliott and the leadership team to support the company’s priorities, invest with discipline, and help deliver sustainable long-term value,” he said.
Hill framed the transition as a strategic inflection point. “This is a natural moment for a leadership transition as we move from foundational actions to sustained growth through our Sport Offense operating model,” he said.
Friend joined Nike in 2009 and rose through roles including CFO of the Nike Brand and VP of Investor Relations before assuming the top finance post. Nike expanded his responsibilities in late 2025 to include Global Sales and Direct-to-Consumer functions.
Prior to Nike, he worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Nike expects to report fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2026 results on June 30. Analysts anticipate earnings of $0.12 per share on revenue of $10.85 billion, compared with 14 cents per share and $11.1 billion in the prior-year period — a stark illustration of how far the company still has to go. Results will include a one-time benefit from tariff refunds that were not previously factored into the guidance.
Contact the author: anoto@gfmag.com
Earnings Call Insights: FedEx (FDX) Q4 2026
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Cerebras Systems tumbles as margin worries outweigh OpenAI deal
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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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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