Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
13 Business News Stories We Are Following This Morning 2-3-25
03 Feb 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker covers 13 key stories, including the market’s reaction to newly imposed tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, insights from Goldman Sachs on potential economic impacts, and stock updates on NVIDIA, Tesla, and Apple.
No persons identified in this episode.
Chapter 1: What are the new tariffs imposed by President Trump?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. These are 13 stories we're following this morning, including the discussion of new tariffs. First, the markets are down this morning as President Trump imposes tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico.
Chapter 2: What is the market's reaction to the tariffs?
Second point, let's hope this is partially negotiation and partially making good on campaign promises versus permanently at these levels, at least not permanently at the 25% on Canada and Mexico and the 10% levels on China. And there's lots of back and forth, and the reasons for these, what goes on, why this might support American workers, but might also cause inflation.
Chapter 3: How could these tariffs affect American workers?
Early to tell on how this will all play out, but all of us are a little bit scared of a bit of a trade war. Third, interestingly enough, the markets were really down early this morning, and now have recovered to be down about 1%. Fourth, a story from Bloomberg, quoting Goldman,
Chapter 4: What insights does Goldman Sachs provide on the economic impact?
The announcement came as a shock to many investors who expected tariffs would only be imposed after trade negotiations failed. People think that Trump might have gotten in front of this a little bit. Goldman also says, or at least their chief strategist says, that if sustained, the tariffs would cause a reduction in the S&P 500 fair value by about 5% and hurt earnings by a few percent.
Chapter 5: What is the performance of key stocks like NVIDIA and Tesla?
Fifth question. taking us past tariffs. Nvidia is down about 10% year-to-date. Tesla is flat. We'll go through a few of our favorite stocks very quickly. Sixth, MicroStrategy up 15% year-to-date. Palantir up 9% year-to-date. We're an individual investor in Palantir. I think I should be an individual investor in Tesla, but we'll see.
Seventh, GM, Ford Motor, and Stellantis all getting hurt on the tariff news. Eighth, a couple of the big-ticket stocks. Apple down 6% year-to-date, still number one in market cap. Amazon up more than 8% year-to-date, and Microsoft down 1.5%. Ninth, we're super excited for the Becker's Healthcare Annual Meeting starting April 28th.
Magnificent lineup of health system speakers and celebrity speakers. Michael Phelps, Nick Saban, Venus Williams, and Kevin O'Leary should be a lot of fun. Tenth, This is a discussion we'll have in a separate podcast too, and it's also in preparation for a speech I'm giving Wednesday.
But if you want to build a great business, you have to be niche-centric, team-centric, customer-centric, and work to find product-market fit. It takes all those things. It's straightforward, but it's not easy. Eleventh. This is a reminder.
Most successful businesses hit singles and doubles first, and then they work to really find their customer base, really find their spot in the product-market fit, and then they accelerate. Twelfth. Aside from tech businesses, we're keeping a close eye this morning on various different businesses, the turnaround consulting business, the auction business.
Also, a quick shout out to Miriam Crawford and her incredible, successful 15 years of greatness at Crawford, the Crawford agency. Her spouse, William, is a tremendous leader as well. Between Miriam building a business, raising her family, and trying to improve William over all these years, she has done a yeoman's job. 13th, Moderna is now down 60% over the last year. Intel is down nearly 54%.
Those are some of the things that we're watching this morning. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Also thrilled to have just passed 22 million downloads between Becker's Healthcare and Becker Private Equity. Thank you so much for listening.
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