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An End to TikTok in the U.S.? Plus DLTR's Miss & More

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Wednesday, March 13th, 2024

Even though there are no major economic reports out ahead of today’s opening bell, this does appear to be a day of some consequence: lawmakers on Capitol Hill are taking a vote on whether to ban TikTok, a Chinese-based video sharing social media platform extremely popular, especially among the American youth. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-founded visual media conglomerate reportedly worth around $85 billion, with reportedly over 150 million users in the U.S. alone.

A vote two weeks ago in a House committee regarding this ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 50-0. In this day and age, with political polarization at current levels not seen in generations, this is an amazing statistic. The ban would effectively force app stores like Apple (AAPL - Free Report) to remove TikTok from their offerings unless the company is sold to a company provably not affiliated with the Chinese government. And at 50-0 in the House, it would stand to reason this ban has a very real chance of passing today.

Funneling personal information from a plurality, if not a majority, of American schoolchildren directly to China, along with socio-political campaigns manipulating how Americans view issues like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, are among the biggest concerns. Yet pulling the plug on such a vastly popular site — in an election year, no less — may be rife with complications, and will no doubt show both presidential campaigns jockeying for position to capitalize on this issue. And this goes for whether the bill passes or not.

Discount retailer Dollar Tree (DLTR - Free Report) reported Q4 results ahead of today’s opening bell, missing on its bottom line for the third quarter of the past four. Earnings of $2.55 per share came in beneath the $2.67 in the Zacks consensus, though above the $2.04 per share reported in the year-ago quarter. Revenues came in at $8.64 billion, a smidge below analysts’ projections. Shares had been +5.4% thus far year to date, but they are -8% in today’s pre-market. For more on DLTR’s earnings, click here.

Tomorrow, we pick back up with economic data, as Weekly Jobless Claims, Retail Sales, Business Inventories and the sister report to Tuesday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Producer Price Index (PPI). Last month, PPI data — think of it as the wholesale side of goods and services pricing — came in at +2.6% on core PPI year over year. This is the closest print to the Fed’s optimum 2% we’ve yet seen. In fact, on headline PPI year over year, the January read was +0.9%. We look forward to seeing where those figures go from there.

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