close video Bet on Elon Musk to land on Mars before NASA: Al Root
Barrons senior writer Al Root discusses how Elon Musk has revitalized the space industry and weighs in on his Mars ambitions on Barrons Roundtable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned on Tuesday that the economy is in for a challenging year ahead and said the Federal Reserve will be too slow to lower interest rates as economic conditions worsen.
Musk was interviewed by CNBC's David Faber following Tesla’s annual meeting and asked Musk about how the Fed’s policy will make it a tough year for Tesla. Musk responded that it will be a tough year "for everyone, not just Tesla" and attributed it to the Fed’s recent rate hikes to tamp down stubbornly high inflation.
"You can think of raising the Fed rate as somewhat of a brake pedal on the economy, frankly. It makes a lot of things more expensive – certainly things that are bought with credit," Musk said. "But then it has downstream effects even on things that aren’t bought with credit."
ELON MUSK TELLS TESLA EXECUTIVES HE MUST PERSONALLY APPROVE ALL HIRING IN NEW MEMO: REPORT
Billionaire Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, warned that the Federal Reserve will be too slow to lower interest rates, just as it was slow to raise rates as inflation spiked. ((AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) / AP Newsroom)
Musk explained that "if the car payments or your home mortgage payment is absorbing more of your monthly budget, then you have less money to buy other things. So actually, it affects everything, even those that aren’t bought on a line of credit."
"My concern with the way the Federal Reserve is making decisions is they’re just operating with too much latency," Musk continued. "Basically, the data is somewhat stale. The Federal Reserve was slow to raise interest rates, and now I think they’re going be slow to lower them."
INVESTORS ARE THE MOST PESSIMISTIC THIS YEAR AMID CREDIT CRUNCH, RECESSION FEARS
Musk said that economic conditions will be challenging “for everyone, not just Tesla” this year. ((Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) / Getty Images)
Earlier this month, the Fed raised interest rates for the 10th consecutive time and the benchmark federal funds rate is now at the highest levels in 16 years.
But the central bank signaled that may pause further rate hikes and future monetary policy moves will hinge on "incoming information."
INFLATION JUMPED 0.4% IN APRIL AS PRICES REMAIN STUBBORNLY HIGH
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has signaled the Fed may pause interest rate hikes as early as the Fed’s next meeting depending on economic data. (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The Fed’s post-meeting statement noted, "In determining the extent to which additional policy firming may be appropriate to return inflation to 2% over time, the Committee will take into account the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments."
The statement omitted a phrase that had been included in the prior statement announcing a rate hike, in which the central bank indicated that "some additional policy firming may be appropriate" to bring inflation to the 2% target. Ticker Security Last Change Change % TSLA TESLA INC. 166.52 +0.17 +0.10%
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said in a post-meeting press conference that, "A decision on a pause was not made today," but emphasized that, "We’re no longer saying that we ‘anticipate,’" and reiterated that the Fed’s future policy decisions will "be driven by incoming data, meeting to meeting."
FOX Business’ Megan Henney contributed to this report.
Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, once said recreating a virtual global gold standard like Bitcoin “would be a criminal act of monetary amnesia.”
AVONDALE, Ariz. — Christopher Bell became the first NASCAR Cup Series driver to win three straight races in the NextGen car, holding off Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin by 0.049 seconds to win the second-closest race in Phoenix Raceway history Sunday.
Bell started 11th in the 312-mile race after winning at Atlanta and Circuit of America the previous two weeks. The JGR driver took the lead out of the pits on a caution and stayed out front on two late restarts to become the first driver to win three straight races since Kyle Larson in 2021.
The second restart led to some tense moments between Bell and Hamlin — enough to make their team owner feel a bit queasy.
“I was ready to upchuck,” JGR Racing owner Joe Gibbs said.
Bell became the fourth driver in Cup Series history to win three times in the first four races — and the first since Kevin Harvick in 2018. The last Cup Series driver to win four straight races was Jimmie Johnson in 2007.
“We’ve had four races this year, put ourselves in position in all four and managed to win three, which is a pretty remarkable batting average — something that will be hard to maintain, I believe,” Bell’s crew chief Adam Stevens said.
The Phoenix race was the first since Richmond last year to give teams two sets of option tires. The option red tires have much better grip, but start to fall off after about 35 laps, creating an added strategic element.
A handful of racers went to the red tires early — Joey Logano and Ryan Preece among them — and it paid off with runs to the lead before they fell back.
Bell was among those who had a set of red tires left for the final stretch and used it to his advantage, pulling away from Hamlin on a restart with 17 laps left.
Hamlin pulled alongside Bell over the final two laps after the last restart and the two bumped a couple of times before rounding into the final two turns. Bell barely stayed ahead of Hamlin, crossing the checkered flag with a wobble for his 12th career Cup Series win. He led 105 laps.
“It worked out about as opposite as I could have drawn it up in my head,” Bell said. “But the races that are contested like that, looking back, are the ones that mean the most to you.”
Said Hamlin: “I kind of had position on the 20, but I knew he was going to ship it in there. We just kind of ran out of race track there.”
Katherine Legge, who became the first woman to race on the Cup Series since Danica Patrick at the Daytona 500 seven years ago, didn’t get off to a great start and finished 30th.
Fighting a tight car, Legge got loose coming out of Turn 2 and spun her No. 78 Chevrolet, forcing her to make a pit stop. She dropped to the back of the field and had a hard time making up ground before bumping another car and spinning again on Lap 215, taking out Daniel Suarez with her.
“We made some changes to the car overnight and they were awful,” Legge said. “I was just hanging on to it.”
Logano, who started on the front row in his first race at Phoenix Raceway since capturing his third Cup Series at the track last fall, fell to the back of the field after a mistake on an early restart.
Trying to get a jump on Byron, Logano barely dipped his No. 22 Ford below the yellow line at the start/finish. NASCAR officials reviewed the restart and forced the Team Penske driver to take a pass through on pit road as the entire field passed him on the track.
“No way,” Logano said on his radio. “That’s freakin’ ridiculous.”
Logano twice surged to the lead after switching to the red tires, but started falling back on the primary tires following a restart. He finished 13th.
Preece took an early gamble by going to the red option tires and it paid off with a run from 33rd to third. The RFK Racing driver dropped back as the tires wore off, but went red again following a caution with about 90 laps left and surged into the lead.
Preece went back to the primary tires with 42 laps to go and started dropping back, finishing 15th.
The series heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway next weekend.
Bitcoin fell on Monday as volatility in the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency continues following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to create a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States.
Bitcoin was trading at $81,712, down over 5% but off earlier lows, at 9:42 a.m. Singapore time, according to Coin Metrics.
The reserve will be funded by coins that have been seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases and there are no plans for the U.S. government to buy more bitcoin. After the strategic reserve announcement last Thursday, crypto prices declined as investors were disappointed it wasn’t a more aggressive program.
Other cryptocurrency prices also dropped on Monday. Both ether and XRP were down about 7.5% at around 9:43 a.m. Singapore time.
Some investors, however, said the move to establish a reserve was bullish in the long-term.
“I absolutely think the market has this wrong,” Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. “The market is short-term disappointed” that the government didn’t say it was immediately going to start acquiring 100,000 or 200,000 bitcoin, he added.
Hougan pointed towards comments on X from White House Crypto and AI Czar David Sacks, who said the U.S. would look for “budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”
“I think the right question to ask is: did this executive order make it more likely that in the future, bitcoin will be a geopolitically important currency or asset? Will other governments look to follow the U.S.’s lead and build their own strategic reserve? And to me, the answer to that is emphatically yes,” Hougan said.
“The reason that questions matters is that’s the question that determines if bitcoin is $80,000 a coin or $1 million a coin.”
Hougan called the decline in crypto prices a “short-term setback.”
“I think the market will soon find its footing and realize that actually this is incredibly bullish long term for this asset and for crypto as a whole,” he said.
