It was a notably ugly April for the major averages, with the Dow losing 5% for its worst monthly performance since September 2022. The S&P 500 slid about 4.2% this month, and the Nasdaq lost 4.4%. The three major averages snapped five-month winning streaks.
The number of high-paying remote jobs commanding a salary of $100,000 or more dropped 33% across the first quarter of the year compared to the final three months of 2023, with more companies now demanding that workers with higher salaries report to the office.
Investors have pulled a net $2.2 billion from ARK’s active funds this year, topping outflows from all of 2023.
Blackstone Inc.’s Strategic Partners unit sold a $1.1 billion portfolio of private equity fund interests to Ares Management Corp.
Analysts estimate that pensions will unload $325 billion in stocks this year, up from $191 billion in 2023.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy has not seen inflation come back to the central bank’s goal, pointing to the further unlikelihood that interest rate cuts are in the offing anytime soon.
Blackstone led a roughly $2 billion financing package to Park Place Technologies to refinance the company’s debt and to fund a payout to its private equity owners. The proceeds will be used to refinance a $845 million first-lien loan that was initially provided by banks and syndicated to institutional investors, as well as a privately placed $230 million second-lien loan.
Fueled in large part by the stock market’s surge and soaring salaries during the post-pandemic labor shortage, the number of Americans with an adjusted gross income of at least $1 million per year jumped 44% between 2020 and 2021 according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service.
Treasury yields jumped and stock prices gyrated following the jobs report. Investors are torn between wanting a strong economy to support further corporate earnings growth and wanting a weaker jobs market that will give the Federal Reserve the green light to begin cutting interest rates.
