STOCK MARKET NEWS: Southwest woes continue, Nasdaq jumps 2.6%, McDonald’s menu update

LIFESTYLE

McDonald's, Beyond Meat introduce the Double McPlant

McDonald's will expand its plant-based sandwich offerings in the U.K. and Ireland next week with the Double McPlant, the fast-food chain announced on Thursday.

McDonald’s and Beyond Meat are rolling out the Double McPlant burger in all restaurants across the U.K. and Ireland beginning Wed., Jan. 4, the companies announced.

The McPlant took over three years to develop. The burger features a patty co-created with Beyond Meat. McDonald’s says the Double McPlant has already proved wildly successful with customers since its launch in September 2021.

Double McPlant is vegan certified and cooked separately from other McDonald’s burgers and sandwiches, using dedicated utensils.

Southwest Airlines said it expects to return to normal operations Friday after slashing about two-thirds of its schedule in recent days, including canceling more than 2,350 flights Thursday.

Airline executives told employees that crew scheduling this week— a major cause of the meltdown — has been fixed.

Southwest is struggling to recover after being overwhelmed by a winter storm that left hundreds of pilots and flight attendants stranded out of position to operate flights.

It is likely that far more than 1 million passengers have been affected. Southwest has canceled more than 13,000 flights since its meltdown began on Dec. 22. Its planes have 143 to 175 seats and were likely nearly fully booked around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

MARKETS

Tech stock bounce part of ‘seasonal pattern’, investors pin hopes on January

Tech stocks like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft are lifting the Nasdaq 100 higher on Thursday after a jobs report spurred investors.

The tech-weighted Nasdaq Composite is outpacing the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 as investors search for bargains to close out 2022. Investors are also mulling over Thursday's initial jobless claims number.

An uptick in jobless claims in the United States, and a sharp decline in euro zone business lending offered evidence that the hawkish monetary policies of the Fed and the European Central Bank are succeeding in curtailing demand in order to cool inflation.

Reuters contributed to this report.

MARKETS

Goldman Sachs CEO says layoffs coming in January: report

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon reportedly warned employees that job cuts will begin at the firm in the first few weeks of the year, pointing to the economic slowdown.

Goldman Sachs may trim its workforce by as many as 4,000 employees, FOX Business has learned.

Bloomberg reported earlier that CEO David Solomon told staffers to expect job cuts in the first few weeks of January.

REAL-ESTATE

Mortgage rates stop their decline

Mortgage rates rose for the first time in seven weeks despite optimism about the Federal Reserve easing its pace of interest rate hikes after initial jobless claims rose today.

Mortgage rates edged up in the last week of 2022, according to Freddie Mac.

The mortgage packager said the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.42% as of Dec. 29, 2022, up from last week when it averaged 6.27%. A year ago at this time, the 30-year FRM averaged 3.11%.

15-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 5.68%, down from last week when it averaged 5.69%. A year ago at this time, the 15-year FRM averaged 2.33%.

“The housing market remains in the doldrums with declining sales, inventory and prices,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s Chief Economist. 

Lordstown Motors Endurance electric pick-up truck at Foxconn's electric vehicle production facility in Lordstown, Ohio, Nov. 30, 2022. (Reuters/Quinn Glabicki)

The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday that electric vehicles leased by consumers starting Jan. 1 can qualify for up to $7,500 in commercial clean vehicle tax credits, a decision that makes those assembled outside North America eligible.

The announcement is a win for South Korea and some automakers that earlier this month sought approval to use the commercial electric vehicle tax credit to boost consumer EV access. Automakers said the credit could be used to reduce leasing prices.

The $430 billion U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in August ended $7,500 consumer tax credits for purchases of electric vehicles assembled outside North America, angering South Korea, the European Union, Japan and others. The new Treasury guidance does not change the definition of what constitutes North American assembly to make more vehicles eligible for EV purchases.

That law lifts the 200,000-vehicle per manufacturer cap that had made Tesla and General Motors ineligible for EV tax credits starting Jan. 1. Treasury will release an initial list of eligible 2023 EVs Thursday and expects a more comprehensive list by Saturday.

On Dec. 19, Treasury said it would delay until March releasing proposed guidance on required sourcing of EV batteries, which means some EVs that do not meet the new requirements may have a brief window of eligibility in 2023 before battery rules take effect.

TECHNOLOGY

Twitter global outage affects thousands of users

Thousands of Twitter users reported outages involving the social media site and some of its features on Wednesday evening.

Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

The incident is the social media site's first apparent widespread service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO in late October.

Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Musk tweeted later on Wednesday that "Significant backend server architecture changes" had been rolled out and that "Twitter should feel faster", but his post did not make any reference to the downtime reported by users.

GE logo on a digital anesthesia carestation in Madison, Wisc., April 21, 2020. (Reuters/Daniel Acker)

GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. will be added to the S&P 500 effective prior to the open of trading on Wed., Jan. 4, 2023, S&P Dow Jones Indices said.

The company will trader under the ticker ‘GEHE’ and replaces Vornado Realty Trust, which will move to the S&P MidCap 400.

General Electric is spinning off GE HealthCare Technologies in a transaction expected to be completed post close on January 3.

General Electric in November last year announced it would split into three publicly traded units focused on healthcare, aviation and energy as it aimed to simplify business and pare down debt.GE Healthcare will operate imaging and ultrasound devices, patient care solutions and pharmaceutical diagnostics businesses.

The healthcare company had revenue of around $18 billion last year, with about half of it from recurring sources, GE Healthcare said in a presentation.

Reuters contributed to this report.

TG Therapeutics Inc said Wednesday that the U.S. health regulator had approved its monoclonal antibody for treating patients with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis.

The approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) widens the number of such drugs available for treating the disorder to three and may help soften the blow to the company's finances from the withdrawal of its lymphatic cancer drug earlier this year.

TG Therapeutics said it was expecting to launch the drug, branded as Briumvi, in the first quarter of 2023, but did not give details on its pricing.

Multiple sclerosis is a neurological disease in which the immune system attacks the brain cells causing motor disabilities. It affects about 400,000 people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Unlike other MS drugs that target T cells, Briumvi belongs to a class of drugs that tackles B cells' role in driving the inflammation that is central to the neurological disease.

The approval, which comes with a warning of infusion reactions from the drug, was based on a late-stage study that showed the drug was effective in reducing the annualized relapse rates in patients.

Black Hawk helicopters attend Silver Arrow 2020 military exercise in Adazi, Latvia Oct. 2, 2020. (Reuters/Ints Kalnins)

Lockheed Martin Corp's Sikorsky unit on Wednesday sought a review of the U.S. Army's decision to award a contract for its next-generation helicopter to Textron Inc's Bell unit.

The company, which filed its protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), said it had partner Boeing Co's support.

Earlier this month, the Army ended a years-long competition aimed at finding a replacement for the Black Hawk utility helicopter after it assigned the contract to Textron's unit.

The contract is potentially worth around $70 billion—over decades—depending on how many are ordered, according to the Army, which is looking to retire more than 2,000 medium-class UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters built by Sikorsky since the 1970s.

The filing of a protest by Lockheed and Boeing triggers a formal legal review from the GAO and requires a decision within 100 days, the agency said.

Hiring sign displayed at a restaurant in Rolling Meadows, Ill., Dec. 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits rose only slightly last week with the labor market remaining strong despite the Federal Reserve's efforts to cool the economy and hiring.

Applications for unemployment aid for the week ending Dec. 24 climbed 9,000 to 225,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The four-week moving average of applications, which smooths out some of the week-to-week swings, slipped just 250 to 221,000.

Unemployment benefit applications are a proxy for layoffs, and are being closely monitored by economists as the Fed has rapidly raised interest rates in an effort to cool job growth and inflation. Should the Fed's rate hikes cause a recession, as many economists fear, a jump in layoffs and unemployment claims would be an early sign.

So far, the level of jobless claims remains quite low, evidence that Americans are enjoying a high degree of job security. In the coming weeks, thousands of workers with temporary jobs during the winter holidays will lose work and apply for jobless aid. The government seeks to seasonally adjust the data to account for those job losses, but the adjustments are not always perfect and the layoff of temporary workers could distort the data.

Wall Street trader

U.S. stock futures are up ahead of the opening bell on Thursday as commodities like oil and gold slip beneath the redline.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures is up roughly 79 points, or 0.24%, while the S&P and Nasdaq futures are up approximately 0.43% and 0.59%, respectively.

Over the last five days, the Dow remains off around 0.23%, the S&P remains off nearly 0.62% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is still roughly 1.88% lower as tech stocks struggle to hold gains.

Pre-market, shares of Meta are approximately 0.56% higher, Apple is up roughly 0.94%, as Microsoft and Nvidia rise 0.33% and 1.13%, respectively.

In commodities, West Texas Intermediate crude futures slipped 1.49% to $77.78 a barrel, as gold dropped 0.17% to $1,812.70 an ounce.

Southwest Airlines planes (Getty Images)

The problems at Southwest Airlines continued on Thursday morning with the carrier canceling more flights.

Southwest has canceled another 2,356 flights, according to FlightAware.com.

The airline scrapped another 2,500 flights on Wednesday.

The president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association weighed in on the thousands of flights canceled by the airline in recent days during a Wednesday appearance on "Your World."

Capt. Casey Murray, the president of the union, started off by apologizing to Southwest customers for flight cancelations. 

Southwest has continued to experience issues this week following the Dallas, Texas-based airline and other major carriers having to delay or cancel flights while people attempted to travel for the Christmas holiday due to a massive winter storm affecting large portions of the country.

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NYSE traders (Reuters)

U.S. equity futures are trading higher Thursday, following a day when benchmarks fell.

The major futures indexes suggest a gain of 0.4% when the opening bell rings on Wall Street.

Oil prices declined as COVID-19 cases in China dimmed hopes of a recovery in fuel demand.

U.S. crude traded down more than 2% to around $77.00 per barrel.

Brent futures also traded around 2% lower at $81.00 a barrel.

Jobless claims will headline today's economic reports. Expectations are for a rise of 9,000 to 225,000. 

The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences mortgage rates, was at 3.86% on Thursday.

In Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index lost 0.9%, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong shed 0.8% and China's Shanghai Composite index was down 0.4%.

On Wednesday, the S&P 500 fell 1.2%, with technology, energy and industrial stocks among the biggest weights on the benchmark index. It finished at 3,783.22.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.1% to 32,875.71. The Nasdaq slid 1.4% to 10,213.29. 

Labor Department reports jobless claims on Thursdays. (FBN)

The Labor Department will release the number of new jobless claims filed last week.

Expectations are for a rise of 9,000 to 225,000 after a smaller-than-expected rise the prior week to 216,000.

Continuing claims, which track the total number of workers collecting unemployment benefits, are expected to climb to 1.686 million, the highest in more than 10 months.

The DOE’s Energy Information Administration will release its inventory report for last week.

Crude stockpiles are expected to fall by around 1.5 million barrels following a much steeper-than-expected draw of nearly 6 million barrels the previous week. 

Watch for a draw of about 2 million barrels in distillate supplies (heating oil, diesel fuel) and a build of just over half a million barrels in gasoline inventories.

Oil rigs pumping (Reuters)

Oil prices traded lower on Thursday as COVID-19 cases in China dimmed hopes of a recovery in fuel demand.

U.S. crude traded down more than 2% to around $77.00 per barrel.

Brent futures also traded around 2% lower at $81.00 a barrel.

U.S.crude oil inventories fell less than expected, by about 1.3 million barrels, in the past week, according to market sources citing American Petroleum Institute figures.

The U.S. government will release its weekly figures at 10:30 a.m. EST on Thursday.

Gas Prices (AAA)

The price of gasoline has ticked higher for nearly a week.

The nationwide price for a gallon of gasoline bumped up on Thursday to $3.159, according to AAA.

The average price of a gallon of gasoline on Wednesday was $3.133.

GasBuddy, an app that provides real-time gas price information, released 2023 projections on Wednesday that suggest Americans should expect some relief at the pump at the start of next year.

Gas is expected to hover around an average low of $3 per gallon in January and February, when demand is seasonally low. However, moving into the spring and summer, prices may rise as high as $4 when drivers hit the roads and enjoy the pleasant weather. 

A year ago, the price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.283.

One week ago, a gallon of gasoline cost $3.101. A month ago, that same gallon of gasoline cost $3.521.

Gas hit an all-time high of $5.016 on June 14.

Diesel has been rising, but remains below $5.00 per gallon to $4.677, but that is still a far cry from the $3.570 of a year ago.

FOX Business Illustration

Small businesses from coast to coast have closed up shop this year in response to rampant crimes that threaten the safety of their employees and customers, and oftentimes, left them with hefty bills to clean up break-ins and loss of merchandise.

The business owners' stories vary, but all have found a common theme: Crime and other issues like drug use need to be cleaned up in America's cities or businesses will continue to suffer. 

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Bitcoin was trading around $16,000, after trading lower over the last four days, falling nearly 2% in the process.

For the week, Bitcoin has lost 1.6%.

For the month, the cryptocurrency has lost more than 3% and down more than 64% year-to-date.

Ethereum was trading around $1,100, after dropping nearly 2% in the past week.

Dogecoin was trading at 7 cents, after falling more than 4% in the past week.