Raphael Stevens

Monday – Friday, 6:00 – 7:00 PM ET

It’s that time again! “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer rings the lightning round bell, which means he’s giving his answers to callers’ stock questions at rapid speed.

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Fisker Inc: “I will not recommend this stock. It is going to lose money hand over fist.”

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Monday – Friday, 6:00 – 7:00 PM ET

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday said that investors should keep an eye on retailer earnings and Covid news from China as indicators for how Wednesday’s trading session will go.
If we get more good news from China tonight “along with fine quarters from Target and Lowe’s …  we’re going to have another one of these great days tomorrow,” the “Mad Money” host said.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday said that investors should keep an eye on retailer earnings and Covid news from China as indicators for how Wednesday’s trading session will go.
If we get more good news from China tonight “along with fine quarters from Target and Lowe’s …  we’re going to have another one of these great days tomorrow. But if we don’t get that good news, we’re going to end up with a miserable, horrible, Walmart-style view of the world,” the “Mad Money” host said, referring to the retail behemoth’s quarterly earnings miss.

Cramer’s comments come after Shanghai reached “zero Covid status” on Tuesday, which means it saw three consecutive days of no new cases outside of quarantine zones.
“When you get a positive out of China … you get a run in many stocks that we’ve had way, way too much fear for: Tesla, Nike and Apple,” he said.
Cramer also pointed to other retailers and companies in the travel industry that reported upbeat quarters, suggesting healthy consumer spending and boosting related stocks.
Home Depot saw better-than-expected profit and revenue in the first quarter while United Airlines raised its current-quarter revenue forecast. Both companies’ stocks closed up on Tuesday. Shares of Delta and American Airlines saw gains piggybacking off of United’s rosy revenue guidance.
More broadly, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.34% while the S&P 500 increased 2.02%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained 2.76%.

“There were a lot of just run-of-the-mill winners, too, like the Nasdaq names that were under so much pressure yesterday. I felt that on Friday and yesterday. … The close was simply horrible yesterday. I couldn’t believe the amount of” damage done to new companies, Cramer said.
“Now they’re bouncing. What’s happening here? I think there is a bifurcation — a subtle one — that’s happening right now. The haves, and the haves are Airbnb, DoorDash and Block, formerly Square, and then there’s everything else,” he added.
Disclosure: Cramer’s Charitable Trust owns shares of Walmart.

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A quarter of Britons have resorted to skipping meals amid worsening inflationary pressures and food scarcity concerns, according to one survey.
More than four in five people in the U.K. are worried about rising living costs and their ability to afford basics necessities over the next six months.
The findings come after Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey pointed to a forthcoming “apocalyptic” food crisis.

More than four in five people in the U.K. are worried about rising living costs and their ability to afford basics necessities like food and energy over the coming months, according to a new survey.
Tolga Akmen | Afp | Getty Images

LONDON — A quarter of Britons have resorted to skipping meals as inflationary pressures and a worsening food crisis conflate in what the Bank of England recently dubbed an “apocalyptic” outlook for consumers.
More than four in five people in the U.K. are worried about rising living costs and their ability to afford basics necessities like food and energy over the coming months, according to a new survey released Tuesday.

In a survey of 2,000 Britons conducted by Ipsos and Sky News, 89% said they were concerned about how the cost-of-living crisis would affect the country as a whole over the next six months, while 83% were concerned about their personal circumstances.
While the picture was broadly similar nationwide, those on lower wages were more acutely worried, with more than half of those earning under £20,000 ($25,000) describing themselves as “very concerned” about how they would make ends meet this year. That compares to two in five of those earning £55,000 or more.
A major British caterer said separately Tuesday that schools were now facing “difficult decisions” as to whether to reduce meal sizes or use lower quality ingredients amid surging prices.

‘Apocalyptic’ price hikes

The findings come after Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said Monday that rising prices and food scarcity issues from the war in Ukraine were a real worry for Britain and many other parts of the world.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty around this situation,” Bailey told the Treasury Committee at the House of Commons.

“Sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that is a major concern,” he said.
Bailey added that such external factors would have a greater impact on price increases than any recent or forthcoming interest rate hikes. The central bank chief, who has spearheaded four consecutive interest rate hikes since December, dismissed suggestions that policymakers should have acted sooner to quell inflation.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see food price inflation over the course of the year running towards 8-10%.

Archie Norman
chairman, Marks & Spencer

British grocery inflation hit 5.9% in April, its highest level since December 2011, according to market researcher Kantar. That as wider U.K. inflation hit a 30-year-high of 7% last month amid rising energy costs.
British retailer Marks & Spencer warned on Tuesday that food price inflation could soar further to 10% by the end of this year.
“It wouldn’t be surprising to see food price inflation over the course of the year running towards 8-10%,” Archie Norman, chairman of the high-end food brand, told BBC radio Tuesday. “Some has gone through now but still quite a lot’s to come.”
Norman added, however, that Bailey’s use of the word “apocalyptic” was heavy-handed given wider economic factors, like wage increases. “I wouldn’t use the word apocalyptic, certainly not for our customers,” he said.

Food scarcity fears mount

Food scarcity concerns have been mounting over recent months as the war in Ukraine has exacerbated existing food supply chain issues.
Ukraine, seen as a “breadbasket of Europe,” has been unable to export grains, fertilizers and vegetable oil amid the conflict, while ongoing fighting has destroyed crop fields and disrupted regular harvests.
MHP, the largest producer and exporter of chicken in Ukraine and a major supplier of grain and sunflower oil, said Tuesday that the current situation amounted to an agricultural crisis.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” John Rich, MHP executive chairman and an industry veteran, told CNBC.

“We have Covid, we’ve got a war, we’ve got the China Covid-zero policy — which has made freight just about impossible — and we’ve got climate change. All of this has compounded, frankly, into a non-functional global supply chain system,” he said.
The United States and the European Union said over the weekend that they are looking at how to improve food supply chains and navigate export restrictions.
It comes after India on Saturday announced a ban on wheat exports to “manage the overall food security of the country.” Indonesia, meanwhile, earlier implemented restrictions on exports of palm oil — a key component in many food products — in a bid to curb food shortages at home.

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Netflix is laying off around 150 employees across the company.
The eliminated positions represent less than 2% of the streamer’s 11,000 staffers, with most of the cuts happening in the U.S.
The staff reductions come less than a month after Netflix reported its first subscriber loss in a decade and forecast future losses in the next quarter.

Netflix is laying off around 150 employees across the company, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
The eliminated positions represent less than 2% of the streamer’s 11,000 staffers, with most of the cuts happening in the U.S.

“As we explained on earnings, our slowing revenue growth means we are also having to slow our cost growth as a company,” a representative from the company told CNBC. “So sadly, we are letting around 150 employees go today, mostly US-based. These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues. We’re working hard to support them through this very difficult transition”.

Netflix’s revelation that it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter put further pressure on an already beleaguered tech sector, but top tech analyst Mark Mahaney believes the current weakness in the sector presents several opportunities for investors.
Aaronp/bauer-griffin | Gc Images | Getty Images

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The audit rate for Americans earning more than $5 million a year plunged from to just over 2% in 2019 from over 16% in 2010, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
The main reason for the decline, according to the report, is a lack of IRS funding.
The IRS also has seen its staffing levels fall to the same levels as 1973, despite having millions more returns to process and additional mandates to perform.

The Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The wealthiest Americans are getting their taxes audited at a far lower rate than they were over a decade ago, due in large part to staff and funding shortages at the Internal Revenue Service, according to a new report.
The audit rate for Americans earning more than $5 million a year plunged to just over 2% in 2019 from over 16% in 2010, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. That means only about 1 in 50 high earners were audited in 2019, compared with about 1 in 6 in 2010.

The decline in audits, especially among the wealthy, has become a heated political issue in Washington. The report estimated that taxpayers underreported their income tax by a combined $245 billion a year between 2011 and 2013, and said that “taxpayers are more likely to voluntarily comply with the tax laws if they believe their return may be audited.”
The main reason for the decline, according to the report, is a lack of IRS funding. In fiscal year 2021, the agency’s budget was $11.9 billion — $200 million less than its 2010 budget.
The IRS also has seen its staffing levels fall to the same levels as 1973, despite having millions more returns to process and additional mandates to perform. In March, the IRS said it planned to hire 10,000 workers to tackle a backlog of 20 million unprocessed tax returns.
President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have proposed investing $80 billion in new technology and more auditors at the IRS to increase tax collections by $700 billion over 10 years. Republicans say the agency hasn’t provided adequate proof of the size of the “tax gap” — or amount of uncollected taxes — and has been prone to data leaks and inefficiency.
The decline in funding and auditors means that taxpayers, and especially the top earners, are far less likely to get caught underpaying their taxes than a decade ago. Overall audit rates for American taxpayers fell to 0.2% in 2019 from 0.9% in 2010.

The wealthy are still audited at a higher rate than the general taxpayer population. Yet their audit rates have declined at a much higher rate. The audit rate for taxpayers earning between $5 million and $10 million fell to 1.4% from 13.5%.
Those earning more than $10 million saw their audit rate fall to 3.9% in 2019 from 21.2% in 2010, while audit rates for $10 million-plus earners ticked up slightly for the 2017 and 2018 tax years due to a Treasury Department mandate to impose audit rates of at least 8% on those making $10 million or more.
“This is yet more evidence of the consequences of two decades of IRS budget cuts,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. He added that given the staffing shortages and IRS backlogs during the pandemic, “I suspect 2020 was far worse.”

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The FDA determined that a third Pfizer shot can boost protection for children in this age group and the benefits outweigh the risks, said Dr. Peter Marks, who heads the drug regulator’s vaccine division.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said although Covid tends to be less severe in children, more kids have been getting sick and hospitalized with virus since the omicron variant became dominant.
The FDA did not convene its committee of independent experts before authorizing the booster dose.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized a third shot of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 at least five months after their two-dose primary series.
Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA division responsible for vaccines, said data increasingly shows that the protection provided by two shots wanes over time. The FDA determined that a third shot can help boost protection for children in this age group and the benefits outweigh the risks, Marks said.

The FDA decided to authorize a third shot after analyzing data from an ongoing Pfizer trial, in which a subset of 67 children in this age group had higher antibody levels one month after receiving a booster dose. The drug regulator did not identify any new safety concerns and found the children experienced the same mild side effects that other people do after receiving a booster. Those side effects include injection site swelling, fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain, chills and fever.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s committee of independent vaccine experts has a meeting scheduled for Thursday, in which they are expected to issue a recommendation for or against the boosters. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has the final say on whether health-care providers should start administering the shots. Walensky normally backs the committee’s recommendation.
The FDA did not convene its committee to discuss the data before authorizing the booster dose. Some committee members have grown frustrated that the drug regulator has repeatedly moved ahead with decisions on booster doses without holding open public discussions.
Only about 28% of children ages 5 to 11 had received their primary series of two doses as of April, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, in a statement Tuesday, encouraged parents to get their kids vaccinated to protect them against the virus. Califf said although Covid tends to be less severe in children, more kids have been getting sick and hospitalized with the virus since the omicron variant became dominant in the U.S. over the winter
Covid infections are rising again in the U.S. as more transmissible subvariants of omicron spread throughout the nation. The U.S. reported more than 90,000 new infections a day on average as of Sunday, a 30% increase over the week prior, according to CDC data. New hospital admissions of people with Covid have also increased 8% over the past week, according to the CDC.
Almost every age group in the U.S. can now receive at least three vaccine doses with the exception of children under age 5, who aren’t yet eligible for a primary vaccination series. The FDA’s advisory committee is scheduled to meet next month to review Moderna’s and Pfizer’s requests for the drug regulator to authorize their vaccines for kids under age 5.

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The World Health Organization called for an investigation into Russian attacks on health facilities in Ukraine.
The health agency has documented 226 attacks on such facilities since the Russian invasion in late February.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine has led to thousands of civilian deaths and injuries.

CHERNIHIV, UKRAINE – MAY 09: A healthcare professional searches for medicines and medical equipment in a destroyed hospital as Russian attacks continue in Chernihiv, Ukraine on May 09, 2022. Patients are treated in additional buildings as health services are disrupted due to the destroyed hospitals. (Photo by Abdullah Unver/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

The World Health Organization on Tuesday called for investigations into Russian attacks on health-care facilities and ambulances in Ukraine.
The global health agency has documented 226 attacks since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, according to Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe. At least 75 people died and 49 were injured in the attacks, he said. 

“These attacks are not justified and they are never OK. And they must be investigated,” Kluge said during a press briefing at the Ukraine Media Center in Kyiv. 
The WHO will contribute to any investigation that takes place in the future, Kluge added.
His remarks come on the 83rd day of Russia’s invasion, which has caused thousands of civilian deaths and injuries in Ukraine, including children. Unprovoked attacks on health-care facilities and ambulances have climbed as the war drags on.
The latest figure more than doubles the 100 attacks verified by the WHO over a month ago. 

CNBC Health & Science

Read CNBC’s latest global coverage of the Covid pandemic:

WHO representative in Ukraine, Dr. Jarno Habicht, said the health-care facilities and ambulances attacked had served a quarter of a million Ukrainians each month in 2021. 

“So that’s the impact of those attacks. And those attacks are continuing, which is unacceptable. There is no reason for that,” Habicht said.
He added that two-thirds of all attacks on health-care facilities worldwide in 2022 have taken place in Ukraine alone. 
Habicht said the WHO has taken steps to support Ukraine’s health system. He noted that the agency has delivered more than 500 metric tons of medical supplies to the hardest-hit areas of the country since February. 
More than 50% of the supplies, including medicines, ambulances and electric generators, will go toward trauma and injury care. The WHO also provides medical kits to treat those with chronic illnesses, and one kit can provide three months of treatment for thousands of people, according to Habicht. 
He added the WHO is “very glad” that some governments and partners are also delivering medical supplies to Ukraine. 
Kluge called the conditions of the health system in Ukraine both “heartbreaking and inspiring.” He condemned the “devastating” effect the Russian assault has had on people’s lives, but praised the health workers in Ukraine for their commitment to those in need.  
“I’d like to express my immense appreciation and admiration for the health workers of this country who have shown tremendous bravery and dedication since the war began,” Kluge said. “You have done the impossible. You stand firm and save lives.”

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