MARKET WRAPS
STOCKS: Stocks finished mixed as Nvidia slid in the wake of its earnings report.
TREASURYS: Treasury yields fell after comments from Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran.
FOREX: The U.S. dollar ticked up against rivals as traders awaited updates from U.S.-Iranian negotiations.
COMMODITIES: Oil futures fell ahead of the results from U.S.-Iranian negotiations in Geneva.
HEADLINES
Fed's Miran Says Four Cuts Are Appropriate This Year
Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran said he thinks the Fed needs to cut interest rates by about a percentage point this year in a Fox Business interview Thursday.
"Four cuts I think are appropriate," he said. "I'd rather get them sooner than later," he added.
With regard to private credit, Miran said he hasn't seen anything yet that would make him worried from a macroeconomic perspective. He added a lot of the growth in private credit ties back to overregulation in banks.
Block plans to lay off nearly half its staff in 'deliberate and bold' embrace of AI
Block, the parent company of Square and the Cash App, is conducting a major reorganization in the age of artificial intelligence.
The payment-technology company plans to cut almost half of its workforce, it announced Thursday. The restructuring will bring Block's XYZ employee count below 6,000 versus more than 10,000 today.
The layoffs at Block come just days after Citrini Research rattled markets with the publication of a blog post detailing a fictional scenario in which AI productivity tools were so powerful that they forced widespread shifts in the U.S. labor market. These particularly impacted knowledge workers.
Warner Bros. Discovery Revenue Declines as Netflix, Paramount Vie for Deal
Warner Bros. Discovery logged lower revenue in its latest quarter, driven by declines across each of its segments, as it remains in the middle of a high-stakes bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance.
The media and entertainment company on Thursday posted a fourth-quarter loss of $252 million, or 10 cents a share, compared with a loss of $494 million, or 20 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by FactSet expected a loss of three cents a share.
Revenue fell 6%, to $9.46 billion, compared with analyst estimates of $9.35 billion.
Mortgage Rates Fall Below 6% for the First Time Since 2022
Mortgage rates fell below 6% this week for the first time in more than three years, welcome news for waves of house hunters heading into the busy spring home-buying season.
The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 5.98% this week, the lowest level since September 2022 and a slight decline from last week, Freddie Mac said Thursday.
Mortgage rates briefly topped 7% in January last year, but they have fallen steadily over the past several months. Cooling inflation and economic uncertainty have helped bring them down, and the Federal Reserve's three interest-rate cuts in the second half of 2025 also added to the momentum.
Dell's Sales Jump 39% With Further Growth Forecasted Ahead
Dell Technologies recorded a 39% jump in sales, driven in part by growth in its AI server business, and anticipates growth will continue into the new fiscal year.
The Round Rock, Texas, technology company on Thursday posted a profit of $2.26 billion, or $3.37 a share, compared with $1.53 billion, or $2.15 a share, a year earlier.
Stripping out certain one-time items, adjusted per-share earnings were $3.89, ahead of the $3.53 anticipated by analysts, according to FactSet.
Instagram to Alert Teens' Parents of Repeated Self-Harm Searches
Instagram said it would alert parents if their teens repeatedly search for terms related to self-harm or suicide, stepping up efforts to protect minors as several governments weigh social-media bans for younger users.
The Meta Platforms-owned app wrote in a blog post Thursday that parents who have adopted Instagram's supervision tools to monitor their children's profile activity would start receiving alerts next week.
Alerts will be triggered only when teens search repeatedly within a short period for terms like "self-harm," "suicide" or phrases suggesting they want to harm themselves.
EBay to Cut 800 Jobs in Strategic Restructuring
EBay will lay off about 6.5% of its global workforce, or roughly 800 employees, as part of an effort to cut costs and restructure the business.
"We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce," a company spokesperson said Thursday.
The online auction site didn't say when the layoffs are expected to occur, or whether the company expects to record any charges as a result of the restructuring.
Walmart Agrees to $100 Million FTC Settlement Over Driver Pay
Walmart has agreed to pay $100 million to settle Federal Trade Commission claims that the retailer misled delivery drivers about the pay and tips they could earn.
The FTC alleged Walmart caused drivers with its delivery service, Spark, to lose tens of millions of dollars worth of earnings by showing them inflated figures for what they could expect to earn from pre-tips selected by customers at checkout, base pay and special incentive earnings opportunities.
Walmart deceived customers by falsely claiming 100% of customer tips would go to drivers, but the company charged customers for tips that drivers didn't receive, the FTC said in a complaint filed in federal court in California. Eleven states including North Carolina, Oklahoma and California joined the FTC on the complaint.
TD Bank Quarterly Earnings Lifted by Growth Across Operations
Toronto-Dominion Bank's earnings jumped in the first three months of its fiscal year as the big Canadian lender saw revenue growth across its operations, including record revenue in Canada on the back of a rise in loan and deposit volumes and strength in its wealth-management and markets-facing segments.
Net income climbed to 4.04 billion Canadian dollars (US$2.96 billion), or C$2.34 a share, from C$2.79 billion, or C$1.55, a year earlier.
Stripping out items that the bank doesn't believe reflect the underlying performance of its business, such as restructuring costs, first-quarter per-share earnings came in at C$2.44, well above the C$2.26 mean estimate of analysts polled by FactSet.
U.S. Jobless Claims Rose Last Week
The number of people who filed for unemployment benefits rose to 212,000 in the week through Feb. 21, up from 208,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal were expecting to see 215,000 new claims.
Continuing claims, which scale with the total size of the unemployed population, fell to 1.83 million in the week through Feb. 14, from 1.86 million a week earlier. The data on continuing claims lag the initial-claims data by a week.
A recent consumer confidence survey from The Conference Board Tuesday showed perceptions of employment conditions improving slightly. The labor market differential, which measures the share of consumers saying jobs are "plentiful" minus the share saying jobs are "hard to get" ticked up from the last reading. Economists watch this labor-market differential to gauge how tight labor conditions are for households.
TALKING POINT Wall Street Traders Are Pouncing on the Tariff Refund Chaos
Wall Street smells an opportunity in the chaos over President Trump's tariffs.
The Supreme Court's tossing of Trump's sweeping tariffs last week kicked off a scramble among business leaders to sort out what might come next-including how they might claw back the levies they have been paying to import goods from around the world.
Some businesses don't want to deal with the mess, and are opting to sell the rights to any refunds they might be due.
Investment firms-anticipating that the court wouldn't side in Trump's favor-had already been buying up rights to tariff refunds from businesses in recent months. Prices were around 20 cents on the dollar before the ruling, then jumped to about 40 cents afterward, according to brokers involved in the trades.
"The question is, do you sell at 40% or 45% now, or a little more if the market changes, or do you hold out for the 100% down the road?" said Neil Seiden, managing director of Asset Enhancement Solutions, a financial advisory firm.
Seiden said he has brokered a handful of tariff claims with a total face value of $20 million for companies selling items including Christmas decorations, pharmaceuticals and imported foods. Investors are generally looking for claims that are around $10 million or more, he said, meaning smaller businesses might have trouble unloading their refund rights.
The biggest companies, meanwhile, can foot the legal bills and will be more likely to wait for big payouts.
--Caitlin McCabe, Ben Glickman and Sarah Nassauer
Expected Major Events for Friday
00:01/UK: Feb UK Consumer Confidence Survey
00:01/UK: Jan UK monthly automotive manufacturing figures
01:00/JPN: Jan Steel Imports & Exports Statistics
04:30/JPN: Jan Preliminary Report on Petroleum Statistics
05:00/JPN: Jan Construction Orders
05:00/JPN: Jan Housing Starts
07:00/GER: Jan Foreign trade price indices
07:45/FRA: Jan PPI
07:45/FRA: Jan Household consumption expenditure in manufactured goods
07:45/FRA: Feb Provisional CPI
07:45/FRA: 4Q GDP - detailed figures
07:45/FRA: 4Q Job creation
08:55/GER: Feb Labour market statistics (incl unemployment)
09:00/ITA: Dec Industrial turnover
09:00/GER: Feb Bavaria CPI
09:00/GER: Feb North Rhine Westphalia CPI
09:00/GER: Feb Saxony CPI
09:00/GER: Feb Brandenburg CPI
09:00/GER: Feb Hesse CPI
09:00/GER: Feb Baden-Wuerttemberg CPI
10:00/ITA: Jan Foreign Trade non-EU
13:00/GER: Feb Provisional CPI
(MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires
February 26, 2026 16:46 ET (21:46 GMT)
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