Between it being a short trading week, hyphenated by New Year’s Day, and it being the very start of a new year, there isn’t much market or economic data to report on. Rest assured, like the start of most years, analysts have unreasonably high corporate earnings expectations, while simultaneously predicting returns that somehow always hover around the historical average. Anyway, I think we’ve covered 2024 enough for now, and frankly it’s a bit too early to try and figure out 2025. Let’s look at some news this week that you may not have seen.
Before we start, let’s address a bit of housekeeping. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq, along with other major exchanges, will be closed Thursday, January 9th in honor of former President Jimmy Carter. It is customary for the NYSE to close trading to honor the passing of a president. The last such occasion was in December 2018 for the death of former President George W. Bush.
Reaching for the bottom of the barrel, we begin with the news today that President Biden, perhaps in his last official act in office, has blocked Nippon Steel’s $14.9B takeover of U.S. Steel. Nippon Steel had anticipated growing its global footprint in hopes of benefitting from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which is expected to boost U.S. steel demand. However, critics opposed the deal based on national security. Unsurprisingly, it seemed the deal was doomed from the start. In other news, Tesla’s annual sales fell for the first time in more than a decade. Tesla’s global sales last year fell 1.1%, the first decline since 2011. Meanwhile, BYD is coming for Tesla’s crown. The Chinese company posted record sales in December and continues to grow market share despite not being available in the U.S.
Now to the fun stuff. Feeling old yet? Well, get ready to feel older. It seems a new generation has been named beginning New Year’s Day 2025. Welcome Generation Beta, which will include children born this year through 2039. Their lives are expected to be shaped by AI and other rapid technological advances. In fact, they may never sit in the driver’s seat of a car that can’t drive itself. Let that sink in. It is expected that by 2035, Generation Beta will make up 16% of the global population.
Another annual tradition, which starts on the first day of the year, is that thousands of U.S. copyrighted works enter the public domain. Copyrights on works introduced 95 years prior expire, per U.S. intellectual property law. So, a few days ago, art from 1929 came up for grabs. Among the most popular include the first version of Popeye, the character Tintin, and legendary books including The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Earnest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. You may wonder what this means. Well, take for example Wicked, the box-office smash musical which is the prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz books. This year one of the hottest new books was James, by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I, for one, cannot wait to see what they do with Popeye. Let’s hope it’s not like the horror movies they made about Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse.
In closing, many make New Year’s resolutions. Among the most popular are exercising and eating healthier. For those looking for the healthiest food, I bring you watercress. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rated watercress with a nutrient density score of 100 out of 100. I know some of you are thinking, “but what about the hoax that was the food pyramid?” You know the one where carbs and dairy were incredibly important. Well, yeah, I don’t know what to say. We may learn in fifty years that Big Watercress paid the CDC, but until then I guess it pays to eat a little more of the green stuff. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to look for this nutritional fountain of youth the next time I go to the supermarket. Wishing you a healthy and happy 2025.