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United Airlines (UAL) was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 on Wednesday after the carrier's executives said the airline industry had reached a long-awaited "inflection point," supporting the company's rosy business outlook.

Wednesday’s 12% advance put United shares at their highest level since February 2020, when the spread of Covid-19 first began to rattle travel stocks. The last few years have been a rollercoaster ride for airlines and their shareholders, who've weathered a global pandemic, soaring inflation, and the highest oil prices in nearly a decade.

United executives say the tide is turning in their favor, vindicating the bulls who have bid up airline stocks in recent months. The U.S. Global Jets ETF (JETS), composed of airlines, jet makers, and other travel stocks, has risen more than 30% since slumping amid a broad stock market sell-off in early August.

Delta Air Lines (DAL) shares rose nearly 7% on Wednesday, putting them, like United, at their highest level since February 2020.  

Airfare pricing trends improved throughout the third quarter as the air travel industry reached the "inflection point" United executives had forecast.

"We're seeing unprofitable capacity begin to exit the market, leading to the expected domestic yield improvement," CEO Scott Kirby told analysts Wednesday morning on the company's earnings call, a transcript of which obtained from AlphaSense.

Tough competition between America's largest carriers and budget airlines has put pressure on airfares, which have declined nearly 5% this year according to official inflation data.

United executives are optimistic that the worst of the industry's oversupply problem is behind them. Domestic passenger revenue per average seat mile (PRASM), a key performance measure for airlines, was positive in August and September after declining by more than 4% in July, according to chief commercial officer Andrew Nocella.

Nocella attributed much of the company's third-quarter revenue challenges to "weak yields" on domestic leisure travel. "As we look into Q1, we're selling these very same tickets at yields that are much higher," he said.

Travel demand has slowed from the heyday of post-pandemic "revenge travel" in 2022, but remains robust. U.S. airports have seen record-high traffic this year, according to TSA throughput data.

Healthy leisure travel has been supplemented by a pick-up in business travel as companies have either implemented return-to-office mandates or embraced hybrid work and encouraged remote employees to make occasional trips to offices. Contracted corporate revenue increased 13% in September, putting sales to corporate clients on track to fall just short of their 2019 level.

Improving corporate travel demand, which executives said was strongest at coastal hubs serving the tech, finance, and professional services industries, were "creating a great setup for 2025," said Nocella.

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The former deputy national chair (South) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Bode George, has disclosed that he would have left Nigeria if President Bola Tinubu had not sent Femi Gbajabiamila to appeal to him.

Recall that in January 2022, after Tinubu announced his presidential bid, George vowed to flee Nigeria, stating that: “I will move away from Nigeria. I’ll leave because he will be your representative in the international plane. Which investment will he bring here?

This is not the kind of person we can hand over this massive country to manage. He will be the greatest jok£ on the international plane. We should bother who should lead us.

If by whatever chance he gets to the villa, I won’t be part of this country. And I am not joking. I can go to Ghana and be watching with binoculars from afar. You will see what will happen.”

However, speaking in an interview with Arise TV on Wednesday, October 16, George said: “During the campaign period I stated it and I meant it; that if by whatever measure Bola Tinubu wins this election, I was going to get out.

Once they heard that, Tinubu sent his chief of staff, who is my little brother from Lagos state, Femi Gbajabiamila, to appeal to me.

“He came to say: ‘my boss said I should tell you, please be calm’. They knew they had wronged me. They said they were sorry.”

#Instablog9jaNews #TrendingStory #Awareness #StayUpdated

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Shares of Lithium Americas (LAC) skyrocketed Wednesday after the mining company announced the creation of a joint venture with General Motors (GM) to extract lithium, the element used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries, from a key Nevada mine.

Lithium Americas said that GM would put up $625 million and acquire a 38% stake in the Thacker Pass site. It added that $430 million of the money would be in a direct cash payment to support the construction of Phase 1 of the Thacker Pass lithium mine site, with the remaining in the form of credit that can be used as collateral to support reserve account requirements for a Department of Energy conditional $2.3 billion loan to develop Thacker Pass announced in March.

Lithium Americas would invest $211 million initially into the project and own the remaining 62% of the project

The company added that this new deal with GM “replaces the $330 million Tranche 2 common equity investment commitment from GM under its original investment agreement” made in January 2023. 

Jeff Morrison, chief procurement and supply chain officer at GM, noted that the carmaker is “pleased with the significant progress Lithium Americas is making to help GM achieve our goal to develop a resilient EV material supply chain,“ and that getting critical raw materials, such as lithium, for EVs from domestic suppliers will “help us manage battery cell costs, deliver value to our customers and investors, and create jobs.”

Even with Wednesday’s 26% jump, shares of Lithium Americas are down more than a third for the year. GM shares were up about 2% Wednesday, and have added almost 37% of their value this year.

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After more than 16,000 complaints from the public, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is implementing a “click-to-cancel” rule, which will require sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up.

The FTC's 3-2 decision came after the agency said it had received increasing complaints over the last five years about subscription services' practices. The commission said it recieved an average of nearly 70 such complaints daily in 2024.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said Wednesday. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money."

The regulatory agency’s latest rule applies to almost all negative option marketing, which the FTC describes as any action by a company to interpret a customer's lack of action as agreeing to be charged for goods and services. For example, subscription services will continue to charge customers a monthly rate until the customer cancels the subscription.

this new rule is part of the FTC’s continuing review and modernization of its 1973 Negative Option Rule. 

Negative option marketing includes prenotification and continuity plans, which offer additional goods or services to consumers and charge them unless they explicitly reject the offer. The rule also applies to free trials, which automatically charge the consumer at the end of the trial unless action is taken, and automatic renewal policies.

Most of the final rule’s provisions will become effective 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register. Once effective, sellers are prohibited from:

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With the holiday shopping season coming soon, consumers may be surprised to see something they haven’t experienced in a while: lower prices.

In laying out projections for the 2024 holiday season, National Retail Federation (NRF) President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Matthew Shay said prices have moved lower this year for many items and categories, giving consumers a reprieve after facing sky-high inflation for the past several years.

“There's been real deflation in the cost of goods, and so many retailers have cut prices on thousands of items,” Shay said.  “You can think of a couple of big retailers with national, if not global, footprints, who have literally cut their prices on thousands and thousands of items and SKUs (stock-keeping units) across the whole store.”

The NRF thinks the lower-price environment will help store owners with sales. The organization representing retailers projects an increase in holiday spending of between 2.5% and 3.5% compared with 2023 totals.

Inflation has slowed across the economy in a process economists call “disinflation." That means prices are still moving higher at a slower rate.

However, prices have retreated for individual items, potentially offering shoppers lower prices than they paid last year, Shay said. 

Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) monthly Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report on inflation shows this trend. While prices for food and services continue to rise at an elevated pace, prices for goods have either been less or par with prices from last year for each month in 2024. In August, prices for goods were almost 1% lower than the same month in the prior year.

Shay said retailers will likely offer more targeted promotions during the holiday season, driving prices lower.

“I think it will be more targeted and personalized to individual consumers based on needs and interests, and I think it will be broader, across more brands and across more categories than we experienced a year ago,” Shay said.

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