Dockworkers strike at the Bayport Container Terminal in Seabrook, Texas, on October 1, 2024.
Mark Felix | Afp | Getty Images
This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
Widespread effect of port strike Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association started striking Tuesday, halting activity at U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast ports, which stretch from Maine to Texas. If the strike drags on, global supply chains and the economy could take a beating. That runs the risk of causing inflation to flare up again.
Risk-off on crypto Amid this cautious atmosphere, investors pulled back from cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is currently trading at $61,407.21, down from nearly $66,000 on Sunday. Crypto-related companies also struggled on Tuesday. Coinbase tumbled 7.4% and fell around 1% in extended trading.
[PRO] Fund manager’s worst-performing stock Ranmore Global Equity Fund managed to beat the S&P the past two years. But there have been slip-ups as well. Its fund manager shares with CNBC the worst-performing stock he’s picked: why he bought it, what went wrong and the lessons he learned.
The bottom line
Just when the coast appeared clear, geopolitical tensions and potential supply chain snarl-ups threaten to turn the soft-landing trajectory into a bumpy one.
Port workers along the U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast started striking Tuesday. At a port in the New York-New Jersey area, around 100,000 shipping containers “are literally in limbo in the port,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
“A disruption of a week or two will create some backlogs but the broader consequences will be minimal,” said Adam Kamins, economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Should the work stoppage go on for longer, however, “you’re running into businesses that have real shortages and, yeah, they’ll absolutely have to raise those prices,” said Christopher Ball, economics professor at Quinnipiac University.
(Fans of Rao’s pasta sauce need not fear, for now. Piper Sandler wrote that Campbell Soup, which bought Rao’s earlier this year, “has healthy levels of inventory on hand.”)
Meanwhile, oil prices spiked as markets feared Iran, a member of OPEC, would be dragged into a larger conflict in the Middle East. Higher oil prices pose a risk to inflation resurging, or at least slowing less than everyone is hoping for.
With those fears and uncertainties swirling, the Cboe Volatility Index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, climbed to 19.3 on Tuesday. It closed at 15.4 a week ago. Major U.S. indexes fell, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq suffering the most as megacaps like Tesla, Nvidia and Apple dropped.
It’s just the first days of the port strike and flare-up in Middle East tensions, however. The classic safe-haven trades, like bonds, gold and the U.S. dollar, aren’t showing up in the prices of those assets yet, noted CNBC’s Steve Liesman.
The best-case scenario would be that recent events are just minor turbulence on the way to a soft landing.
– CNBC’s Jeff Cox, Fred Imbert, Lori Ann LaRocco, Sean Conlon, Alex Harring and Brian Evans contributed to this story.
Germany’s largest offshore wind farm under construction, EnBW’s He Dreiht, just hit a big milestone: The first enormous turbine is now up in the North Sea.
He Dreiht – which means “it spins” in Low German – is using Vestas’s massive 15 megawatt (MW) turbines, the first project in the world to install them. Just one spin of one of the rotors can generate enough electricity to power four households for an entire day.
When it’s finished, He Dreiht will have 64 mega turbines cranking out 960 megawatts (MW) of clean power – enough to supply around 1.1 million homes. And it’s being built without any government subsidies.
EnBW, one of Germany’s major energy companies, has been working in offshore wind for more than 15 years, but He Dreiht is their biggest project yet. “It will play a key role in helping us to significantly grow our renewable energy output from 6.6 GW to over 10 GW by 2030,” said Michael Class, who heads up EnBW’s generation portfolio development.
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The project is a win for Vestas, too. “With the installation of the first V236-15.0 MW, we have reached an important milestone for both the He Dreiht project and our offshore ramp-up, which helps Germany build a more secure, affordable, and sustainable energy system,” said Nils de Baar, president of Vestas Northern & Central Europe.
He Dreiht is located about 85 kilometers (53 miles) northwest of Borkum and 110 kilometers (68 miles) west of Helgoland. At peak times, more than 500 workers will be out at sea building the farm, using a fleet of more than 60 ships. EnBW’s offshore team in Hamburg is running the show.
The installation process is a major operation. The 64 foundations were already set in the seabed last year. Parts for the turbines are loaded onto the installation vessel Wind Orca in Esbjerg, Denmark, and shipped out in a 12-hour journey to the construction site. From there, the turbines are lifted into place. Meanwhile, crews are also working on internal wind farm cabling.
A partner consortium made up of Allianz Capital Partners, AIP, and Norges Bank Investment Management owns 49.9% of the shares in He Dreiht.
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Tesla has released a quick update about its Tesla Semi factory in Nevada. It says that it is on track for volume production of the electric semi truck in 2026.
The Tesla Semi was first scheduled to go into production in 2019, but it has faced numerous delays.
Now, it appears that there is finally some momentum to bring it to volume production.
For the last two years, Tesla has been working to build a new factory next to Gigafactory Nevada, where it builds the battery packs and drive units for most of its electric vehicles built in North America.
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Today, Tesla released a “progress update on the factory, confirming that it finished building and it’s now working on deploying the production lines:
Tesla had previously mentioned aiming for volume production by 2025, but it is now only talking about starting production toward the end of the year and ramping up next year.
The automaker reiterated its planned production capacity of 50,000 units.
They now expect to take deliveries of their first trucks later in 2026 and said that the price has increased “dramatically,” leading them to scale back their pilot program from 42 to 18 Tesla Semi trucks.
When originally unveiling the Tesla Semi in 2017, the automaker mentioned prices of $150,000 for a 300-mile range truck and $180,000 for the 500-mile version. Tesla also took orders for a “Founder’s Series Semi” at $200,000.
However, Tesla didn’t update the prices when launching the “production version” of the truck in late 2022. Price increases have been speculated, but the company has never confirmed them.
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Vietnamese solar panel maker Boviet Solar just opened the doors to its first US factory — a huge new PV module plant in Greenville, North Carolina.
The company dropped $294 million into the state-of-the-art facility, which will pump out Boviet’s Gamma Series monofacial and Vega Series bifacial solar panels. They’re using advanced PERC and N-Type solar cell tech, which basically means these panels are built to deliver higher efficiency and better performance across residential, commercial, industrial, and utility-scale projects.
The Greenville factory’s first phase is now online with an annual PV module output capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW). For Phase 2, which is scheduled to come online in the second half of 2026, Boviet will invest another $100 million to add 600,000 square feet and ramp up to another 2 GW. It will make high-efficiency solar cells.
Once both phases are complete, Boviet’s campus will cover more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing and R&D space. It’s one of the biggest clean energy manufacturing projects North Carolina has ever seen.
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The jobs impact is significant, too. The first phase will create 460 skilled local jobs. Phase 2 is expected to add another 908, bringing the total to over 1,300 direct jobs, plus nearly 2,000 more indirect jobs across the region. That’s good news for Pitt County’s economy, real estate market, and workforce training programs.
“This facility is not just creating jobs, but creating opportunity, innovation, and a stronger foundation for eastern North Carolina,” said Senator Kandie Smith. Governor Josh Stein added that Boviet Solar’s move shows how North Carolina is leading the way in clean energy growth.
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