American Eagle on Wednesday said it’s making gains in boosting profitability as it works to improve its product assortment and tweak operations. Still, its fiscal first-quarter sales came in weaker than Wall Street expected.  While revenue came in slightly below estimates, it was 6% higher than the year ago period and marked a new record for the company, it said in ...

After a brief pullback during much of May, mortgage rates began rising again last week. That had an immediate impact on what had been several weeks of strengthening mortgage demand. The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($766,550 or less) increased to 7.05% from 7.01%, with points rising to 0.63 from 0.60 (including the ...

The business world is increasingly banking on artificial intelligence to be the next big thing, and has found itself turning to one maker of computer chips in particular — Nvidia — to power the revolution. On Tuesday, Nvidia shares were up another 5%, leading the Nasdaq stock index, which represents technology firms, to a new all-time high. Over the past ...

Ryan Salame, a former top lieutenant of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has been sentenced to 90 months, or seven and a half years, in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Salame has also been ordered to pay more than $6 million in forfeiture and more than $5 million in restitution. The sentence is a heavier penalty than the five to ...

Nearly six months since McDonald’s opened its first CosMc’s location, the hours-long drive-thru lines have died down, but the chain is just getting started. The burger giant created the spinoff using one of its lesser-known McDonaldland mascots, CosMc, an alien who loves McDonald’s cheeseburgers. While unveiling CosMc’s at an investor event in December, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said the company set out to create ...

The world is mired in $315 trillion of debt, according to a report from the Institute of International Finance. This global debt wave has been the biggest, fastest and most wide-ranging rise in debt since World War II, coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. “This increase marks the second consecutive quarterly rise and was primarily driven by emerging markets, where debt surged to an ...

Stellantis plans to offer a $25,000 all-electric Jeep vehicle in the U.S. “very soon” to better attract mainstream consumers amid slower-than-expected electric vehicle adoption, CEO Carlos Tavares said Wednesday. Tavares disclosed few details about the upcoming vehicle, saying it will be priced around $25,000 in the U.S. to emulate Stellantis’ pricing of the Citroen e-C3 SUV, a low-cost model starting at 23,300 ...

In George Miller’s new Mad Max film “Furiosa,” a red paint flare explodes and casts the theater screen in a saturated crimson cloud. Feet away, among the rows of gyroscopic 4DX chairs, plumes of fog roll in, catching the red hue from the screen as if the flare somehow transcended the fourth wall and infiltrated the cinema. The fog parts, Chris ...

­­­Lots of people will be getting their sea legs this summer. Ports have been packed with cruise ships over the last few years, as vacationers flock to ever larger vessels and operators race to accommodate a surge in post-pandemic bookings — many of them from first-time passengers. The industry expects even more this year. Benjamin Xiang, a San Francisco-based flight ...

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI raised $6 billion in series B funding, reaching a post-money valuation of $24 billion as investors bet big on challengers to companies like OpenAI in the intensifying AI race. The funding round was backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, the company said in a blog post on Sunday. The company’s pre-money valuation ...