9 Business News Stories We Are Following Today 5-7-25

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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. These are nine of the stories that we're following this morning, and thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. First, the markets are fairly flat this morning as they sort of wait for the Fed to meet later today and get a sense of where interest rates are going.

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I will tell you, second, that one of my closest colleagues plans his entire week around the Fed press conference. So again, even the market's relatively flat right now, depending on what Chairman Powell says later today, we either will have a very volatile market or not. We'll see how it goes.

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And people are waiting to hear what his thoughts are on lowering interest rates, whether he believes that the tariff situation is likely to lead to relatively stagnant inflation or continued inflation. The third concept today, the first two were around the Fed, really, and what's going on with the market. The third one is this.

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If a close friend runs a business, runs a business of any sort, and you want to be a good supportive friend, either buy from the friend or encourage the friend, but don't ask for the friend for free stuff or for discounts from the friend. As a side note, the concept of earned media is applies largely to great clients and customers that support the media business.

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It doesn't apply to every Dick, Jane, and Harry PR person that wants to get their client mentioned. But those are some concepts on earned media and doing business with brands. Fourth, the door-to-death spiral. This is overstated, but it's always a big concern to me when a company sees declining revenues and announces huge acquisitions to offset its slowing revenues.

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Door to Dash has got declining revenues and doing a ton of acquisitions to try and make up for it. And that's always a problem from what I could tell. Fifth, Disney is up more than 6% today. It reported improved earnings. It beat revenues and earnings for the quarter. And it also saw improved results at its parks. So we'll see how that goes. It's still down 6%, still down 16% year to date.

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One of my best colleagues took her five children to the park in the first quarter, and that may have been the difference in the first quarter. Second, if one of my other colleagues who has eight kids goes this quarter, then Disney will have succeeded for this first half of the year. Sixth, there's been a shakeup at the top of the market cap rankings. Microsoft is number one at $3.22 trillion.