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This week on the Capitol Gains podcast, it’s all about the “exemption season” for tariffs. President Trump first scaled back tariffs on auto imports on Wednesday by granting the Big Three automakers a one-month reprieve. Then on Thursday, days after 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada went into effect, Trump issued a one-month pause for goods compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “Trump went forward with these tariffs on Tuesday. In the immediate days, the economic cost of them became very evident,” Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul said. “The CEOs and business leaders were getting to anyone…

Gap (GAP) looks to be defying conventional wisdom on tariffs. The company on Thursday bucked the trend of ugly retailer earnings this week, beating profit estimates and signaling a respectable year ahead. Gap’s full-year outlook was generally in line with consensus forecasts despite tariff impacts in the key sourcing region of China. “We’re all dealing with tariffs,” Gap CEO Richard Dickson told me on Yahoo Finance (video above). “We’re monitoring the developments of tariffs on an hourly basis. We source less than 10% of our product from China and less than 1% of our product comes from Canada and Mexico…

Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schafer reports: The February jobs report is expected to show hiring picked up in February, while the unemployment rate held steady. This comes at a crucial moment for markets as stocks have recently been floundering amid fears about economic growth weakening in the US. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report is slated for release at 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday. Economists expect nonfarm payrolls to have risen by 160,000 in February, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4%, according to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg. With markets in a slump — amid a string…

President Donald Trump on Thursday night authorized the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate US stockpile of other digital assets, fulfilling a campaign promise he made to an industry that is gathering at the White House Friday for a “crypto summit.” The bitcoin reserve will be seeded with bitcoin already owned by the federal government taken as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks said in a post on the social media platform X. “This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime,” Sacks said. Trump in the Oval Office asked…

Nearly every major US tech giant is defending against government-led antitrust claims, and they are all hoping for a reprieve from their new opponent: the Trump administration. One recent plea came from Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL). Last week it asked Trump’s newly staffed Justice Department to rescind a Biden-era request that a judge force Google to divest its Chrome web browser and essentially break itself up. Google’s new request to DOJ, reported earlier by Bloomberg, is based on national security concerns. Google’s cybersecurity protections for sensitive data like passwords and digital wallets are integrated across its widely used consumer and…

If outspoken Palantir (PLTR) co-founder and CEO Alex Karp is uber-bullish about his secretive software company, he isn’t showing it in his trades. Karp has dumped $45 million worth of stock in the past two weeks after unloading about $2 billion in 2024, new research from Jefferies analyst Brent Thill reveals. Karp has sold 21% of his overall stake in Palantir. The latest sale barrage comes after Karp recently adopted a 10b5-1 trading plan for the maximum sale of 9.975 million shares of Class A common stock. The trading arrangement will last until Sept. 12, 2025. A plan of this…

America’s farmers are once again at the center of global trade tensions after Donald Trump’s implementation of new tariffs was met with countermoves from China and Canada that could raise food prices and impact rural economies. The potential economic pain ahead has led to exception requests from the agriculture sector, with some signs Thursday that the Trump administration could be weighing exemptions for certain agricultural products from new tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Bloomberg News this week that “everything is on the table” and she is “hopeful” that the administration could decide on providing relief…

This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with: After sampling an economic cocktail of inflation and slowing growth stirred up first by tariff uncertainty and now by actual tariffs, hints of another unsavory concept are wafting through: stagflation. The Wall Street Journal is talking about it. Bloomberg is talking about it. And so is CNBC. Even bringing up the word is an indicator in and of itself, feeding a cycle of expectations and altered behavior. Fresh data flashing weakness has reinforced the souring perception of the…

Add Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) to the growing list of American retailers getting pounded by investors for warning about the looming effect of Trump tariffs. Talk about Wall Street being asleep at the wheel in pricing this one into retail stocks! Abercrombie & Fitch stock crashed more than 16% in early trading on Wednesday as the company’s holiday quarter sales results at its namesake division came in a little light versus estimates. What likely unsettled investors more, though, is the company’s 2025 guidance, which called for marked slowdowns in sales growth and operating margin expansion. NYSE – Delayed Quote •…

Novo Nordisk (NVO) announced a new cash-pay option for its blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy, offering a monthly dose at $499 and home delivery. The move follows competitor Eli Lilly (LLY), which similarly announced a $499 cash program for its weight-loss drug Zepbound. The two GLP-1 market leaders see the need to launch more access points to meet ongoing demand for the drugs. Especially after the FDA determined that their products, also known by their active ingredients — semaglutide for Wegovy and tirzepatide for Zepbound — are no longer in shortage, starting a countdown clock to unbranded knockoffs sold by compounding…