Despite some tough talk from Janet Yellen during her first confirmation hearing to take over the Treasury Department, Wall Street appears eager to have her back. During more than three hours of testimony on Tuesday, Yellen pressed the case for the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus plan, but also defended the idea of a corporate tax hike and made it clear she would break with the Trump administration’s aim to weaken the US dollar. Such talk from the next Treasury chief would usually spook the finance sector, but stock markets popped during the hearing and stayed up, with investors calmed by the return of a steady and known quantity. “Say what you will about Janet Yellen, but she’s Janet Yellen,” one hedge fund manager told The Post. “She’s going to do what she says she’s going to do and she won’t surprise anyone.” Having served as Bill Clinton’s chief economic advisor and Barack Obama’s Federal Reserve Chair, the 74-year-old Yellen is a respected and trusted policymaker on both sides of the aisle and outside the Beltway. “The market likes her as she’s predictable and will work with the Fed to keep the game going,” offered Thomas Thornton of Hedge
For the first time in three years, there’s a new person sitting on the throne of the world’s richest man. Tesla CEO Elon Musk beat out his space rival Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for the crown on Thursday as the electric-car maker’s stock price continued its staggering rally. Both men are competing in space with Bezos at the head of rocket maker Blue Origin and Musk at the head of rocket company Space X. Musk’s fortune grew to $187.4 billion with Tesla’s shares climbing as much as 4.5 percent to a peak of $792.10 in early trading, according to The Post’s calculations. That put him slightly ahead of Bezos, whose net worth rose to nearly $186.8 billion with Amazon shares jumping as much as 1.6 percent to $3,189.06 apiece. Snatching the top spot from Bezos marked another major milestone in Musk’s meteoric rise. The South African-born entrepreneur started 2020 with a less than $30 billion fortune that grew more than fivefold as Tesla’s stock price exploded by more than 700 percent. Musk, 49, already owns about 20 percent of Tesla, and he could get even richer after unlocking multiple stock awards from his eye-popping $50 billion pay package which was
Etsy’s stock price soared early Tuesday after Elon Musk said he was a fan of the online craft marketplace. Shares in the Brooklyn-based company spiked within minutes of the billionaire Tesla chief’s early-morning Twitter post touting its quirky homemade goods. “I kinda love Etsy,” Musk told his nearly 43 million followers at 6:25 a.m. The stock had surged some 8.8 percent about an hour later to trade at $227.25 as of 7:27 a.m., putting it in a position to beat the all-time high of $225.74 it reached last week. Musk also indicated that he’d used Etsy to buy his dog a “hand knit wool Marvin the Martian helm,” referring to the Looney Tunes character. The Twitter endorsement from the world’s richest man added to a winning streak for Etsy, which more than doubled its revenues in the first nine months of last year as customers flocked to the site for face masks and other goods amid the COVID-19 crisis. Etsy even made it into the S&P 500 in September, three months before Musk’s Tesla was added to the benchmark stock-market index. Etsy’s massive spike was the latest example of how Musk’s tweets have the power to make or break a
