jili golden empire
2025-01-09
NEW YORK — What a wonderful year 2024 has been for investors. U.S. stocks ripped higher and carried the S&P 500 to records as the economy kept growing and the Federal Reserve began cutting interest rates. The year featured many familiar winners, such as Big Tech, which got even bigger as their stock prices kept growing . But it wasn't just Apple, Nvidia and the like. Bitcoin , gold and other investments also drove higher. Here's a look at some of the numbers that defined the year. All are as of Dec. 20. 1998 Remember when President Bill Clinton got impeached or when baseball's Mark McGwire hit his 70th home run against the Montreal Expos? That was the last time the U.S. stock market closed out a second straight year with a leap of at least 20%, something the S&P 500 is on track to do again this year. The index has climbed 24.3% so far this year, not including dividends, following last year's spurt of 24.2%. 57 The number of all-time highs the S&P 500 has set so far this year. The first came early, on Jan. 19, when the index capped a two-year comeback from the swoon caused by high inflation and worries that high interest rates instituted by the Federal Reserve to combat it would create a recession. But the index was methodical through the rest of the year, setting a record in every month outside of April and August, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. The latest came on Dec. 6. 3 The number of times the Federal Reserve has cut its main interest rate this year from a two-decade high, offering some relief to the economy. Expectations for those cuts, along with hopes for more in 2025, were a big reason the U.S. stock market has been so successful this year. The 1 percentage point of cuts, though, is still short of the 1.5 percentage points that many traders were forecasting for 2024 at the start of the year. The Fed disappointed investors in December when it said it may cut rates just two more times in 2025, fewer than it had earlier expected. 1,508 That’s how many points the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by the day after Election Day, as investors made bets on what Donald Trump’s return to the White House will mean for the economy and the world . The more widely followed S&P 500 soared 2.5% for its best day in nearly two years. Aside from bitcoin, stocks of banks and smaller winners were also perceived to be big winners. The bump has since diminished amid worries that Trump’s policies could also send inflation higher. $100,000 The level that bitcoin topped to set a record above $108,000 this past month. It's been climbing as interest rates come down, and it got a particularly big boost following Trump's election. He's turned around and become a fan of crypto, and he's named a former regulator who’s seen as friendly to digital currencies as the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, replacing someone who critics said was overly aggressive in his oversight. Bitcoin was below $17,000 just two years ago following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. 26.7% Gold's rise for the year, as it also hit records and had as strong a run as U.S. stocks. Wars around the world have helped drive demand for investments seen as safe, such as gold. It's also benefited from the Fed's cut to interest rates. When bonds are paying less in interest, they pull away fewer potential buyers from gold, which pays investors nothing. $420 It's a favorite number of Elon Musk, and it's also a threshold that Tesla's stock price passed in December as it set a record. The number has a long history among marijuana devotees, and Musk famously said in 2018 that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share . Tesla soared this year, up from less than $250 at the start, in part because of expectations that Musk's close relationship with Trump could benefit the company. $91.2 billion That's how much revenue Nvidia made in the nine months through Oct. 27, showing how the artificial-intelligence frenzy is creating mountains of cash. Nvidia's chips are driving much of the move into AI, and its revenue through the last nine months catapulted from less than $39 billion the year before. Such growth has boosted Nvidia's worth to more than $3 trillion in total. 74% GameStop’s gain on May 13 after Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” appeared online for the first time in three years to support the video game retailer’s stock, which he helped rocket to unimaginable heights during the “ meme stock craze ” in 2021. Several other meme stocks also jumped following his post in May on the social platform X, including AMC Entertainment. Gill later disclosed a sizeable stake in the online pet products retailer Chewy, but he sold all of his holdings by late October . 1.6%, 3.0% and 3.1% That's how much the U.S. economy grew, at annualized seasonally adjusted rates, in each of the three first quarters of this year. Such growth blew past what many pessimists were expecting when inflation was topping 9% in the summer of 2022. The fear was that the medicine prescribed by the Fed to beat high inflation — high interest rates — would create a recession. Households at the lower end of the income spectrum in particular are feeling pain now, as they contend with still-high prices. But the overall economy has remained remarkably resilient. 20.1% This is the vacancy rate for U.S. office buildings — an all-time high — through the first three quarters of 2024, according to data from Moody's. The fact the rate held steady for most of the year was something of a win for office building owners, given that it had marched up steadily from 16.8% in the fourth quarter of 2019. Demand for office space weakened as the pandemic led to the popularization of remote work. 3.73 million That's the total number of previously occupied homes sold nationally through the first 11 months of 2024. Sales would have to surge 20% year-over-year in December for 2024's home sales to match the 4.09 million existing homes sold in 2023, a nearly 30-year low. The U.S. housing market has been in a sales slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows. A shortage of homes for sale and elevated mortgage rates have discouraged many would-be homebuyers.jili golden empire
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Google could be forced to sell Chrome. Here's what you need to knowWILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Attorneys for Meta shareholders asked a Delaware judge Monday to sanction the company’s former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and fellow Facebook board member and current White House chief of staff Jeff Zients for deleting emails related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal , despite being told to preserve such records. The plaintiff attorneys contend that Sandberg and Zients used personal email accounts to communicate about key issues relating to their 2018 shareholder lawsuit that alleged Facebook officers and directors violated both the law and their fiduciary duties in failing for years to protect the privacy of user data. “Although Sandberg and Zients received a litigation hold requiring them to preserve documents from these accounts, they both knowingly and permanently destroyed electronically stored information from such sources,” attorneys said in a court filing. The plaintiffs say the former board members were either “reckless or intentional” in destroying documents, noting that Sandberg deleted communications to and from her Gmail account after only 30 days, even after being notified of the “litigation hold” to preserve documents. Zients never disabled an auto-delete function on his email account, even though he, too, received a litigation hold and consulted with lawyers, they said. RELATED COVERAGE Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO spotlights complex challenge companies face in protecting top brass Meta to build $10 billion AI data center in Louisiana as Elon Musk expands his Tennessee AI facility Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s with world-first law The plaintiffs argue that Sandberg and Zients should be prohibited from testifying about information they sent or received using their personal email accounts. They also say the burden of proof for any affirmative defense they present should be raised to a standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” instead of the lower standard of a “preponderance” of the evidence. Sandberg was deposed last week. Plaintiff attorney Max Huffman said Zients is “busy” and will be deposed in February “after there’s an effective transition in Washington.” Defense attorney Berton Ashman described the email deletions as “unfortunate” but argued that the plaintiffs have not shown that they were prejudiced in any way. “There’s no intent here to destroy relevant or responsive information,” Ashman told Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster, adding that there no “trove of missing emails.” “There’s no grand scheme or suggestion of bad behavior,” he added. Ashman said the vast majority of emails that Sandberg and Zients sent or received using their personal accounts were also received by other individuals at Facebook. He suggested that any emails that may have been deleted have been made available to the plaintiffs from other sources at Facebook. Huffman, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said Sandberg does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. “She unilaterally controlled what was kept and what was destroyed,” he told the judge. Laster, who is scheduled to preside over a non-jury trial in April, said he wanted to see a transcript of Sandberg’s deposition before ruling on the motion for sanctions. Last year, the judge rejected a defense motion arguing that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the plaintiffs did not first demand that Facebook’s board take legal action before filing litigation themselves. He agreed with the plaintiffs that such a demand would have been futile because of doubts that a majority of the relevant Facebook board members, many with close personal and business ties to Mark Zuckerberg, would be willing to confront the CEO and founder of the company over its privacy failures. Laster noted that, in deciding on a motion to dismiss, he was required to accept the allegations in the complaint as true. The complaint alleges that Facebook officials repeatedly and continually violated a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission under which Facebook agreed to stop collecting and sharing personal data on platform users and friends without their consent. Facebook later sold user data to commercial partners in direct violation of the consent order and removed disclosures from privacy settings that were required under consent order, the lawsuit alleges. The company’s conduct resulted in significant fines from regulators in Europe and culminated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. That case involved a British political consulting firm hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign that paid a Facebook app developer for the personal information of tens of millions Facebook users. The fallout led to Facebook agreeing to pay unprecedented $5 billion penalty to settle FTC charges that the company violated the 2012 consent order by deceiving users about their ability to protect their personal information.
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