Business

Every weekday the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer holds a “Morning Meeting” livestream at 10:20 a.m. ET. Here’s a recap of Thursday’s key moments. DIS buying opportunity CRM downgrade Costco earnings 1. Disney buying opportunity Shares of Club holding Walt Disney (DIS) saw an uptick following the return of CEO Bob Iger to the top job last month, climbing to around $99 a share at the start of December. But those gains have since been erased, providing a buying opportunity for investors on Thursday. The stock was trading up slightly in midmorning trading, by 0.38%, at $92.50 a share. Thursday also marks the day that the company’s streaming service, Disney Plus, implements a price increase for its ad-free membership tier . We are disappointed that the company has yet to acknowledge its dismal balance sheet. However, we know that Iger is capable of running the streaming side of Disney, while theme parks continue to do well on the back of a travel boom. “I don’t have a bear case down here,” Jim Cramer said Thursday. 2. Salesforce downgrade Baird on Thursday downgraded Salesforce (CRM) to neutral from outperform and cut its price target to $150 from $200, citing execution risk in an uncertain macroeconomic environment. The downgrade comes on the heels of the company announcing the departures of co-CEO Bret Taylor and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. We are sticking with the stock for now, since we believe Salesforce is a well-run company with tangible products. Salesforce was trading down 0.18%, at $130.24 a share, in midmorning trading. 3. Costco earnings Costco Wholesale (COST) is set to report fiscal first-quarter earnings on Thursday after the closing bell. We’ll be watching for an improvement to its gross margin, along with potential mentions of membership fee increases and special dividends. “They remain the most formidable company in the food and staple and hard goods business in this country,” Jim said. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long COST, CRM, DIS. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED. More

Your Health, Your Money

FA Hub
Personal Finance

On top of the toll it takes on their health, long Covid patients report a devastating impact on finances, including massive medical expenses and job losses.
“We’re barely making ends meet,” said Teresa Harding, who hasn’t recovered from her bout of Covid in the summer of 2021.

Teresa Harding
Source: Teresa Harding

It took three months for Teresa Harding to open her termination letter.
“I couldn’t look at it,” Harding, 47, said. For seven years, she’d worked at a pain management center in Lexington, Kentucky. “I enjoyed my co-workers and our patients.

“It was a fun, exciting job,” she added.
But after a serious bout with Covid in July 2021 that landed her in the hospital, Harding never got better. Unable to work, she was laid off in January.

More from Your Health, Your Money

Here’s a look at more stories on the complexities and implications of long Covid:

“I just sit at home, watching movies that I’ve seen before but don’t remember,” Harding said. “I’ve lost my purpose.”
She and her husband, Roy, also need to pay around an extra $300 a month for treatments for her lingering symptoms of memory loss, severe fatigue and migraines.
“We’re barely making ends meet,” Harding said.

The side effects aren’t just physical

On top of the toll taken on their health, patients with long Covid — a chronic illness with symptoms that persist for months or years after infection — describe a devastating impact on their finances.
Nearly half of people with long Covid reported increased medical expenses, according to a recent survey conducted by the Patient Advocate Foundation. The nonprofit polled 64 people with the condition between 2020 and 2022. More than a third of respondents said their income had gone down as a result of long Covid.
“Long Covid is a prime example of a condition that will create big expenses because it has multiple symptoms, any of which could require distinct medications or treatments,” said Caitlin Donovan, a spokesperson for the National Patient Advocate Foundation, the PAF’s sister organization focused on educational resources.

“It also directly threatens patients’ ability to work consistently,” Donovan added.

Long Covid threatens financial stability

As many as 23 million Americans are struggling with the chronic condition, and “this number will only continue to grow as Covid-19 continues to circulate,” according to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The government agency warned that the illness may affect people’s financial stability, “leading to an increased chance of eviction or homelessness.”
Although the Biden administration is researching long Covid and gathering task forces to address it, patients still describe difficulties navigating the existing safety net and the absence of any specific new protections or aid to which they can turn. Earlier in the public health crisis, the government expanded unemployment benefits and sent direct payments to households.
“Long Covid is as much part of the pandemic as is the acute phase, during which the government went to great lengths to treat people and save lives,” said Oved Amitay, president of the Long Covid Alliance, an advocacy group. “We should have the same urgency and intentional effort to address this.”

‘A pretty dramatic effect’ on retirement planning

Sharon Sunders
Courtesy: Sharon Sunders

Nearly three years after Sharon Sunders got Covid, she’s still coughing.
In the spring of 2020, when months had passed since she’d first contracted the virus, Sunders tried to return to her job as a project manager at a marketing agency in Minneapolis.
Almost immediately, she realized she wasn’t up for it.
“There’s no way I could keep working,” said Sunders, 59. “My memory stinks.
“I’m short on breath when I talk or move around,” she added. “There’s severe exhaustion, too.”

Long Covid is as much part of the pandemic as is the acute phase, during which the government went to great lengths to treat people and save lives.

Oved Amitay
president of the Long Covid Alliance

Fortunately, Sunders had disability insurance through her job and has been able to live off those payments. However, they cover just about half of her prior earnings.
“It’s enough to meet our basic needs, but not anything else,” she said.
Sunders had planned to work for at least five more years to build up her nest egg. Those plans are now foiled, and she and her husband, Joel, are considering beginning to withdraw from their retirement savings years before they’d hoped.
“It’s had a pretty dramatic effect on my retirement planning,” she said. “It’s scary.”

She’s also been hit with a slew of additional costs related to her condition.
“They’ve done MRIs of my heart and lungs; I’ve been to cardiologists and pulmonologists,” Sunders said. “I’ve had more tests than I can remember.”
One Harvard University researcher estimated that long Covid could leave patients with an extra $9,000 a year in medical expenses.

Patients ‘may not have the resources’ to apply for aid

Over the last two years, Sunders has also been denied twice for Social Security Disability Insurance, the federal benefit meant to supplement the income of those physically unable to work.
The Biden administration announced in July 2021 that long Covid could be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but patients and experts say it’s incredibly difficult for those with the condition, which can be tricky to diagnose, to get approved.
“A lot of people with long Covid are being denied Social Security disability insurance,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Verduzco-Gutierrez works primarily with Covid patients through the clinic she established in 2020. She also spends a lot of her time on disability applications.
Of the long Covid patients she has seen, only 2 out of 50 who have applied for SSDI have been approved so far, she said.

It’s had a pretty dramatic effect on my retirement planning. It’s scary.

Sharon Sunders
long Covid patient

“They may not have the resources to go through the process,” Verduzco-Gutierrez said. “They’re having to hire attorneys. Some of them are just giving up.”
Sunders is adamant that she qualifies for the benefit, and refuses to give up. She’s currently involved in her third appeal of the government’s decision to reject her.
But the fight has worn her down even more.
“I usually have about a good hour a day,” she said. “It’s hard for me to respond to all these requests for medical records.”
To date, the Social Security Administration has flagged about 44,000 disability claims nationally that include Covid as one of the medical conditions, according to agency spokeswoman Nicole Tiggemann, making up just 1% of all disability applications the agency has received.
To be approved, “a person must have a medical condition or combination of conditions that prevents the individual from working and is expected to last at least one year or result in death,” Tiggemann said.

‘There’s a tidal wave of us coming’

Sunders wishes the Biden administration would do more to help those financially struggling with long Covid.
“Our government is abandoning us,” she said. “But I’m just the beginning; there’s a tidal wave of us coming.”
Harding feels the same.
“I read in my support groups daily how people are losing their jobs because they’re no longer physically able to perform them, but you can’t live on nothing,” Harding said. “If the government doesn’t acknowledge what’s going on, you’re going to have tons of people without homes, going hungry.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

When her paychecks stopped coming in, Harding had to cash out her 401(k) retirement savings. She had about $15,000 in the account.
In the following months, she and her husband have also racked up more than $8,000 in debt on their credit card.
“We put food, gas, medication and hospital bills on it to make sure we’re able to pay for our car and home,” she said.
Harding applied for SSDI in August, but hasn’t heard back yet. The wait is stressful. And a person in the Social Security office had been discouraging.
“They said that it’s usually a two- to four-year battle to get it,” she said.
— Jessica Dickler contributed reporting. More

When you enter an unfamiliar office for a meeting with someone who works there, you will almost certainly approach a person sitting behind a large desk. You might think you are about to speak to a receptionist. But in some buildings, you will be dealing with someone far grander: a lobby ambassador. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Is Elon Musk bored of the town square already? A month after completing his acquisition of Twitter, his iconoclastic gaze appears to be trained on the entire city. Mr Musk wants to build a super-app. Whether called “Twitter 2.0”, “The everything app” or “X”, his plans are still super-vague. A series of slides containing hardly any information tweeted on November 26th did little to shed light on his plans. Doting references to Tencent’s WeChat provide some clues—earlier this year Mr Musk described the Chinese super-app as “Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of other things, and all rolled into one with actually a great interface”. What is clear is that Mr Musk will face obstacles in his path.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

One morning your correspondent woke up to an email from his editor, asking for yet another article. “Chatgpt and other generative-ai services seem to be taking the world by storm,” it read. “Could you write an article explaining what they are and why they are not just hype?” As he was feeling lazy he asked Chatgpt, More

The harsher China’s zero-covid regime, the bigger its covid-industrial complex. The zero-covid mantra was to test as many people as possible and then to quarantine not only the infected but their contacts and even the contacts of those contacts. In many cases the occupants of entire residential buildings were carted away to isolation wards—called fangcang yiyuan in Chinese—after the discovery of a single case in an area. As leaders in Beijing fought to keep the virus from spreading across the country, many firms cashed in. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Sustainable Energy

Sustainable Energy
TV Shows

West Cumbria Mining says the Woodhouse Colliery, in the county of Cumbria, will supply “the critical steel industry with a high-quality metallurgical coal product.”
While it was crucial to the planet’s industrialization and remains an important source of electricity, coal has a substantial effect on the environment.
The decision to green light the development in Cumbria has been criticized by the Climate Change Committee, an independent body which advises the U.K. government.

This image, taken in March 2021, shows the site where the new facility would be developed.
Christopher Furlong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

LONDON — Plans for a deep coal mine in the northwest of England were given the green light by the U.K. government, a decision that’s been welcomed by its backers but slammed by critics.
In a statement reacting to the news, the firm behind the development said it was “delighted with the decision.”

West Cumbria Mining said the Woodhouse Colliery, in the county of Cumbria, would supply “the critical steel industry with a high-quality metallurgical coal product.” According to the business, the project will provide roughly 500 direct jobs.  
The U.K. has a long association with coal mining, but the industry’s decline hit many communities hard and is an emotive subject. The reasons for the government’s decisions were outlined in an extensive document published online on Wednesday.
Among other things, it said Michael Gove, the secretary of state for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, was “satisfied that there is currently a UK and European market for the coal … and that although there is no consensus on what future demand in the UK and Europe may be, it is highly likely that a global demand would remain.”
The approval for the Woodhouse Colliery was welcomed by Mike Starkie, the elected mayor of Copeland Borough Council in Cumbria. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s “The World Tonight” on Wednesday, Starkie, who is a member of the ruling Conservative Party, described himself as “absolutely thrilled.”
“I’ve been inundated with messages from across my community tonight, and we’ve got a community in celebration about one of the biggest positive economic impacts on our area in a generation,” he added. “This is fantastic news for West Cumbria and for our community.”

Read more about energy from CNBC Pro

Starkie’s enthusiasm was not shared by all. “Phasing out coal use is the clearest requirement of the global effort towards Net Zero,” Lord Deben, chairman of the Climate Change Committee, an independent body which advises the U.K. government, said.
“We condemn, therefore, the Secretary of State’s decision to consent a new deep coal mine in Cumbria, contrary to our previous advice,” Deben added.
He went on to state that the United Kingdom’s “hard-fought global influence on climate” had been “diminished by today’s decision.”
Alongside the CCC, other organizations were also critical of the development moving forward. “This is an appalling decision,” Tony Bosworth, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said.
“Approving this mine is a misguided and deeply damaging mistake that flies in the face of all the evidence,” he added. “The mine isn’t needed, will add to global climate emissions, and won’t replace Russian coal.”
Greenpeace UK’s Policy Director, Doug Parr, said the mine would “do absolutely nothing for the UK’s energy security since the coal it contains can only be used for steelmaking, not generating power, and more than 80% of it is earmarked for sale in Europe anyway.”
“There’s a technological revolution building in steel-making, but this approach could make the UK a backwater in the 21st-century clean tech race,” Parr said.
Elsewhere, Jen Carson, who is head of industry at the Climate Group, described the proposal to open the new coal mine as being “at odds with the steel sector, and the UK Government’s net zero pledge.”

Stock picks and investing trends from CNBC Pro:

While it was crucial to the planet’s industrialization and remains a hugely important source of electricity, coal has a substantial effect on the environment.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration lists a range of emissions from coal combustion. These include carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates and nitrogen oxides.
Elsewhere, Greenpeace has described coal as “the dirtiest, most polluting way of producing energy.”
On the global stage, the U.K.’s plans to develop a new site linked to the mining of fossil fuels are at odds with high profile international voices such as Antonio Guterres, the U.N. secretary general.
“The only true path to energy security, stable power prices, prosperity and a livable planet lies in abandoning polluting fossil fuels — especially coal — and accelerating the renewables-based energy transition,” he said earlier this year.
In a statement sent to CNBC on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities said the secretary of state had “agreed to grant planning permission for a new metallurgical coal mine in Cumbria as recommended by the independent planning inspector.”
“This coal will be used for the production of steel and would otherwise need to be imported,” they added.
“It will not be used for power generation. The mine seeks to be net zero in its operations and is expected to contribute to local employment and the wider economy.”
“The reasons for the Secretary of State’s decision are set out in full in his published letter, alongside the report of the independent planning inspector who oversaw the inquiry into the proposal.”
CNBC also contacted West Cumbria Mining for comment, but had not received a response ahead of this story’s publication. More

Inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and fears of a recession have undermined financial confidence across the board, according to a new report by Edelman Financial Engines.
Only 12% of Americans consider themselves wealthy, including just 29% of millionaires.

Inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and fears of a recession have undermined financial confidence across the board, according to a new report by Edelman Financial Engines.
Less than one-quarter, or 23%, of more than 2,000 adults polled earlier this fall said they felt “very comfortable” about their finances. Fewer — just 12% — consider themselves wealthy, the report said.

related investing news

‘A gift to investors’: BlackRock says it’s time to rethink bonds

2 days ago

Even with their high net worth, less than half of all millionaires, or 44%, felt “very comfortable” about their finances and fewer than one-third, or 29%, felt wealthy, the report also found.
More from Personal Finance:35% of millionaires say they won’t have enough to retireCongress may make it easier to save for emergenciesInflation boosts U.S. household spending by $433 a month
“Becoming a millionaire was always the pinnacle of financial success,” said Jason Van de Loo, head of wealth planning and marketing at Edelman Financial Engines.
But at a time when inflation and stress levels are up, and markets and portfolios are down, “very few Americans actually feel wealthy.”

‘What would it take to feel wealthy?’

These days, fewer Americans, including millionaires, feel confident about their financial standing.

According to a separate report by Bank of America, 71% of workers feel their pay isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living, bringing the number of people who feel financially secure to a five-year low.
Most adults said they feel less financially secure than they hoped to be at this stage in their life, Edelman Financial Engines also found.

What would it take to feel wealthy? The short answer is more.

Jason Van de Loo
head of wealth planning and marketing at Edelman Financial Engines

To feel wealthy, most people said they would need $1 million in the bank, although high net worth individuals put the bar much higher: More than half said they would need more than $3 million, and one-third said it would take over $5 million.
“What would it take to feel wealthy?” Van de Loo said. “The short answer is more.”

Americans feel the sting of inflation

Regardless of how much money they have, Americans across the board are cutting back or making trade-offs due to inflation and higher prices, including buying fewer things, spending less on food and entertainment, and saving less for retirement or other long-term goals.
Already, credit card balances are up 15% in the most recent quarter, the largest annual jump in more than 20 years.

At the same time, the personal savings rate fell to 2.3% in October, a 17-year low.
“People are probably getting a lesson on frugality this year,” said Dave Goodsell, executive director of the Natixis Center for Investor Insight.
Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More