Stock Market News: Cava IPO, GameStop meeting, retail sales, SCOTUS on student loans

America’s CFO’s are a pessimistic bunch when it comes to the economy, according to a new survey from Deliotte.

GameStop investors will be listening for fresh updates at the video game maker’s annual meeting. The company recently fired its CEO Matt Furlong with Ryan Cohen taking over. The founder of Chewy is the largest single shareholder.

The UPS and the Teamsters continue to negotiate the next contract. The delivery giant is the largest employer for the union.

Mediterranean restaurant chain CAVA priced its IPO above the expected range, a sign of demand for restaurant stocks.

Consumers continue to spend on food, home improvement and general merchandise, even with inflation and a shaky economy.

The European Central Bank has pressed ahead with another interest rate hike and is pledging more are on the way.

The quarter-percentage point increase Thursday aims
to crush inflation that’s driving up the cost of groceries, utility bills and summer vacations.

It comes a day after the U.S. Federal Reserve took a break from its own string of increases. In Europe, it was the eighth straight rise since July 2022 as the bank seeks to bring down inflation from 6.1%.

ECB President Christine Lagarde says the bank “will continue to hike at our next meeting” in July and it’s “not thinking about pausing.”

A Starbucks manager was awarded millions after she claims she was fired for being White.

Canada’s finance minister says it is suspending activity with a Chinese-founded development bank while it investigates complaints by a Canadian who resigned from the lender that it is dominated by “Communist Party hacks” and his country shouldn’t be a member.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, seen by some as a Chinese rival to the World Bank
and Asian Development Bank, was founded in 2016 to finance railways and other infrastructure. It has 106 member governments including most Asian countries and Australia, Canada, Russia, France and Britain. Japan and the United States aren’t members.

“The government of Canada will immediately halt all government-led activity at the bank,” Chrystia Freeland, who also is deputy prime minister, told reporters in Ottawa. “I have instructed the Department of Finance to lead an immediate review of the allegations raised and of Canada’s involvement in the AIIB.”

“As the world’s democracies work to de-risk our economies by limiting our strategic vulnerabilities to authoritarian regimes, we must likewise be clear about the means through which these regimes exercise their influence around the world,” Freeland said.

Microsoft Corp.
co-founder Bill Gates says he is visiting Beijing. He joins a series of foreign business figures who have visited China as the ruling Communist Party tries to revive investor interest in the country.

Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft chairman in 2014, said on Twitter he would meet partners who have worked with his charitable foundation.

However, Gates is revered in China as an entrepreneur, giving Chinese leaders a chance to show their interest in foreign business by publicizing any meetings with him.

The ruling party is trying to revive foreign interest in China’s slowing economy and reassure companies that have been rattled by anti-monopoly and data-security crackdowns, raids on consulting firms and tension with Washington.

The union for thousands of West Coast dockworkers has reached a tentative agreement on a new contract after more than a year of negotiations and several work disruptions that snarled shipping traffic at some of the largest ports.

On Wednesday the dockworkers union announced a tentative deal for a new six-year contract with the Pacific Maritime Association, a trade group for cargo carriers and terminal operators. However, details weren’t released.

If ratified, the agreement will affect 22,000 dockworkers at 29 ports from Washington state through California. The dockworkers have been without a contract since last July.

They were demanding higher wages, noting that shippers and terminal operators made record profits during the COVID-19 pandemic.