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Wall Street index S&P 500 rises above 7,000 for the first time
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index has gone through the 7,000 mark for the first time, driven by optimism around artificial intelligence and expectations of strong results from big technology companies.
The index is now up 29 points just below the 7,000 level. The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 150 points, or 0.6%, to 23,967 at the open.
It took about three years for the S&P 500 to rise to 5,000 points from 4,000, but only about nine months to jump from 5,000 to 6,000, in November 2024.
Technology stocks account for nearly half of the S&P 500.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, Microsoft and Tesla are due to report earnings later today.
The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at it the end of its two-day meeting, at 7pm GMT.
Key events
Closing summary
Wall Street stocks are higher, with the S&P 500 crossing through the 7,000 mark for the first time.
Over here, the FTSE 100 index has slipped 0.35% to 10,172 while the French and Spanish stock markets have tumbled more than 1%.
The US dollar has stabilised somewhat, but is hovering at a four-year low against a basket of major currencies.
Spot gold broke through $5,300 an ounce at one stage, and is now 1.7% higher at $5,275 an ounce.
Our other main stories:
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care! – JK
Wall Street index S&P 500 rises above 7,000 for the first time
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index has gone through the 7,000 mark for the first time, driven by optimism around artificial intelligence and expectations of strong results from big technology companies.
The index is now up 29 points just below the 7,000 level. The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 150 points, or 0.6%, to 23,967 at the open.
It took about three years for the S&P 500 to rise to 5,000 points from 4,000, but only about nine months to jump from 5,000 to 6,000, in November 2024.
Technology stocks account for nearly half of the S&P 500.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, Microsoft and Tesla are due to report earnings later today.
The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at it the end of its two-day meeting, at 7pm GMT.
Luca Bindelli, head of investment strategy, and Kiran Kowshik, currency strategist at the Swiss private bank Lombard Odier, have looked at the recent dollar weakness.
Purported coordinated intervention signals from the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan to counter previous excessive Japanese yen weakness have reinforced market perceptions that US authorities may be increasingly willing to tolerate a softer dollar.
Against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, US trade policy, and the upcoming Federal Reserve chair nomination, where concerns about institutional independence linger, dollar downside risks have risen alongside a pick-up in currency volatility. The dollar’s decline broadened and accelerated after President Trump stated he was comfortable with the currency’s year‑to‑date softness. These developments also fuelled fears of monetary debasement, helping explain the concurrent rise in gold prices. Thus far, the impact on US bond markets has been limited, while equities have continued to hold their ground, with the earnings season remaining the dominant market driver.
A weaker US dollar generally reflects improved global liquidity conditions and tends to support broader risk markets, particularly emerging markets. While we do not view a disorderly dollar move as our base case given the still‑elevated US real interest rate premium relative to G10 currency peers and the country’s strong earnings‑growth leadership within developed markets, a sharper downside scenario would likely see gold continue to outperform, even potentially accelerate despite its already-stretched momentum. We maintain our overweight stance in emerging market assets and gold.
Marston’s shares plunged 16%, even though the British pub chain reported strong festive sales.
Investors were spooked by flat like-for-like sales over the 17 weeks to 24 January and questioned whether the company can sustain momentum. The share price is now down 12%.
The owner of more than 1,300 pubs across Britain said like-for-like sales rose 4% over the festive period between 21 December and 3 January.
The lacklustre performance beyond the holiday season raises concerns about underlying consumer demand, as the hospitality sector is facing rising costs.
JPMorgan analysts noted that the flat sales lagged those of its closest rival, Mitchells & Butlers, which reported 4.5% like-for-like sales growth in the first quarter.
Last week, JD Wetherspoon warned 2026 profit could fall as it grapples with mounting costs from energy bills, repairs, and property taxes.
Marston’s has kept a tight lid on costs and upgraded its sites to attract more punters, and is confident it will meet full-year underlying pretax profit forecasts of £78.7.
It hopes events including the 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring more people into its pubs.
Yesterday, the government announced a support package for pubs and live music venues in England, providing some relief from the property tax rises announced in the November budget, which left the hospitality industry reeling and hit pubs particularly hard.
The GMB union has responded to the latest wave of job cuts at the US retail technology giant Amazon, which will also affect the UK, although we don’t know how many.
Rachel Fagan, GMB Organiser, said:
Amazon is showing itself for what it is; a company that cannot be trusted to do the right thing by working people in the UK.
Bosses are overseeing thousands of job losses which will cause huge damage in towns and cities across the country.
Now is the time for decision makers to recognise Amazon as a company fixated on eye-watering profits at the expense of workers and local people.
SpaceX mulls $1.5tn IPO timed to ‘align with Musk’s birthday and the planets’
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering a flotation valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn (£1.1tn) that will reportedly be timed for early summer to coincide with a planetary alignment and the multibillionaire’s birthday.
The world’s richest person is targeting a symbolic date of mid-June for the initial public offering, according to the Financial Times. This would be around the same time as Jupiter and Venus appear in close proximity to each other and shortly before Musk turns 55 on 28 June.
The FT also reported that SpaceX is seeking to raise $50bn – valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn – compared with previous reports that it was looking for $25bn at an $800bn valuation. Last week, it was reported that the rocket company was considering Bank of America, JP MorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for leading roles in the share sale.
Musk, whose $680bn fortune would be turbo-boosted by a SpaceX flotation, said last year the company’s annual revenue would be $15.5bn, with $1.1bn of that coming from contracts with Nasa. The billionaire owns about 42% of SpaceX, as well as nearly 17% of the electric carmaker Tesla, where he is chief executive. He also owns more than three-quarters of the social media platform X.
ONS moves to supermarket checkout scanner data, which means inflation is slightly lower
Tom Knowles
The way UK inflation is calculated will now include collecting price data from supermarket checkout scanners, the Office for National Statistics said, after years of delays. This means that the inflation rate will be slightly lower when applied to past data.
In a bid to modernise how consumer prices are measured, the ONS said that from March, the prices shoppers pay at supermarket checkouts or online will be incorporated into its inflation data.
Until now, the ONS has measured inflation by sending out price checkers at the same time every month to shops around the UK to record the prices of specific items. Prices were also collected from websites, telephone calls, catalogues and brochures.
The switch to taking data straight from supermarket tills comes five years after the ONS first announced plans to do so, due to the unexpected size and complexity of the switch.
The ONS said the process has involved
replacing 25,000 monthly price points… with 300m price points derived from sales of over a billion units of products per month taken directly from checkouts.
The statistics body said the data will also enable it to better capture the impact of a wider range of promotions, such as store discount cards, on average price inflation. This is because it will be the price charged at the till, not the price shown on the shelf, that will feed into the inflation statistics.
If the new supermarket scanner data had been used between January 2019 and June 2025, it would have lowered the average inflation rate by 0.03 percentage points, and led to a 0.1 percentage point difference in the published rate in 39 out of 66 months, the ONS said.
It said it would also collect an additional day of prices for hotel stays in its inflation data each month to iron out the volatility that can come during a major event such as a big sports match or music concert.
Amazon tells staff it plans 16,000 job cuts after email leak
Amazon has now officially told staff it plans to cut around 16,000 jobs globally as part of efforts to streamline its operations, after it sent an email to its employees in error.
It is the latest major round of job cuts at the retail technology giant, coming only three months after it axed 14,000 jobs.
It is understood the bulk of jobs impacted by the latest cuts will be in the US but there will also be some job losses in the UK. The company did not disclose how many UK workers will be affected.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, told staff in a blog post:
As I shared in October, we’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy.
Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.
US dollar sinks to its lowest level in four years; Swiss franc at decade high
Here’s our full story on the dollar:
The US dollar has fallen to its lowest level in four years after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc.
The dollar dropped by 1.3% against a basket of currencies after the president’s comments on Tuesday, marking its fourth day of declines, then slipped by a further 0.2% on Wednesday morning.
“No, I think it’s great,” Trump said of the weaker dollar, during a visit to Iowa to promote his record on the economy. Asked whether he was concerned about the currency’s slide, he told reporters: “I think the value of the dollar – look at the business we’re doing. The dollar’s doing great.”
The greenback has tumbled by 10% over the past year, while Tuesday’s fall was the largest one-day drop since last April, when Trump announced his sweeping tariff plans, marking a global market sell-off.
The dollar has now touched its lowest level since February 2022, after unpredictable US policymaking, including Trump’s recent threats to take over Greenland and impose further tariffs on European allies, unleashed fresh geopolitical shocks.
“A weaker dollar is a two-sided coin,” said Steve Sosnick, a market strategist at Interactive Brokers, adding that it was good for multinational companies.
If you have operations around the world and foreign currency revenue that will have a conversion advantage when you turn it into US dollars, that will be good. On the other, it makes imported goods more expensive and there might be some inflationary impact from that.
The dollar’s slide has also propelled some rival global currencies to multi-year highs.
The Swiss franc has soared to its highest level against the dollar in more than a decade, as traders have sought out a store of wealth traditionally viewed as a haven insulated from global volatility. The franc has already climbed 3% against the dollar so far this year, after a 14% rise in 2025.
The euro has also surged to $1.20 against the dollar, setting a new milestone, while the pound hit $1.38 for the first time since October 2021.
Here are the comments in full from Chuck Robbins, who runs Cisco Systems which produces IT infrastructure enabling use of AI.
There’s been a lot of discussion about: ‘Is this a bubble?’. And the answer is probably yes, but we had a bubble in 2000 with the internet. And look at where we are today.
So the winners emerge, and there’s carnage along the way, but it is going to be bigger than the internet.
It feels a lot like it (the dotcom crash), but what happens is you’ll have money that will be invested in companies that won’t make it, but the winners will emerge, the applications and use cases will begin to evolve.
Robbins compared AI to iPhones, with the constant development of new applications, saying new uses for the technology will develop over time.
He said it will make “lots of things better”, but also has “potential risks we all have to mitigate”.
British Land to buy Life Science REIT for £150m in lab push
British Land, one of the UK’s biggest property developers which owns the office complex Broadgate in the City of London, has struck a £150m deal to buy Life Science REIT (real estate investment trust).
British Land focuses on building office and shop clusters in London, and is one of the country’s largest owners and operators of out-of-town retail parks. It is also constructing lab buildings, for example in the Knowledge Quarter near King’s Cross station in north London.
The company said it “sees a compelling opportunity to grow its Science & Technology footprint” through the acquisition, adding five well-located assets.
The Life Science REIT portfolio is all located with the “golden triangle” of Cambridge, Oxford and London. It contains two central London buildings within the Knowledge quarter, a modern 24-acre technology park in Oxford, and a 13-acre campus and another building in Cambridge.
British Land acknowledged that demand for lab space was “more muted” in 2025.
It is paying 42.8p for every Life Science REIT share. That firm’s share price jumped by 19% to 42.2p on the news.
The budget hotel chain Travelodge has warned that recent government policies have made trading conditions “more challenging” after the sector missed out on fresh business rates relief.
Higher rates and a lack of bespoke support, together with wider regulatory cost increases sends the message that the government does not understand the economic value that our sector delivers.
Travelodge said its business rates bill is set to increase from £38m over the past year to £50m in 2026 due to changes taking effect in April, with “further significant rises” in the following years as transitional relief measures are phased out.
Its warning came as the 625-strong hotel business reported a 0.7% increase in revenues to £1.04bn last year.
Coinbase adverts banned in UK for suggesting crypto could ease cost of living crisis
A cryptocurrency company advised by George Osborne has been banned from showing a set of adverts that suggested using its services could be a solution to the cost of living crisis.
Coinbase, which appointed the former Conservative chancellor to chair its global advisory council last year, has been told by the UK’s advertising watchdog that its adverts were “irresponsible” and “trivialised the risks of cryptocurrency”.
The adverts from the US crypto exchange include a sarcastic two-minute video showing people singing “everything is just fine, everything is grand” as their home falls into a state of disrepair and suffers a power cut, while outside Britons cheerfully dance through streets littered with rats and piles of overflowing bin bags.
As the ad progresses, a shopper faces rising prices for fish fingers in a supermarket, white-collar workers lose their jobs, a sewage pipe bursts and rubbish falls from the sky.
The clip ends with large text saying: “If everything’s fine, don’t change anything”, before being replaced with the Coinbase logo. The company, which was founded in 2012, provides a platform for people to buy and sell various cryptocurrencies.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the advertising campaign, which launched in August, implied that using Coinbase could be an alternative to the financial concerns associated with the cost of living, and so trivialised the risks associated with investing in cryptocurrencies.
We considered that using humour to reference serious financial concerns, alongside a cue to ‘change’, risked presenting complex, high-risk financial products as an easy or obvious response to those concerns.
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