Finance

Retail sales jumped 6.4% from a year earlier in May, sharply beating analysts’ estimates for a 5% growth and accelerating from the 5.1% growth in the previous month.
Growth in industrial output slowed to 5.8% year-on-year in May, slightly weaker than analysts’ expectations for a 5.9% rise.
Fixed-asset investment, reported on a year-to-date basis, expanded 3.7% this year as of May from a year earlier.
The urban survey-based unemployment rate in May came in at 5.0%, the lowest level since November last year.

Huge waiting lines are seen in front of jewelry retailer stores at Yu Garden in Shanghai, China, on May 17, 2025, as the city offers consumption vouchers to stimulate consumer spending.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

China’s retail sales in May grew at their fastest rate since late 2023, as government subsidies helped boost consumption, with analysts calling for stronger policy support to sustain the recovery.
Retail sales last month jumped 6.4% from a year earlier, data from National Bureau of Statistics showed Monday, sharply beating analysts’ estimates for a 5% growth in a Reuters poll and accelerating from the 5.1% growth in the previous month.

The spike in sales growth comes as a welcome respite for the world’s second-largest economy that has been struggling with persistent deflation.
Linghui Fu, NBS spokesperson, attributed the improving consumption in May to the ongoing consumer goods trade-in program, a surge in online shopping ahead of the “618” e-commerce event and a rise in foreign tourists as the country expanded its visa-free entry list to include more countries.
However, he added that it has been “particularly challenging” for China’s economy to maintain stable growth since the second quarter, naming heightened uncertainty in trade policies among factors dragging growth. Fu made the comments at a press conference following the data release.
The country’s industrial output slowed to 5.8% year on year in May from 6.1% in the prior month. The latest reading came in slightly weaker than analysts’ expectations for a 5.9% rise.
Fixed-asset investment, reported on a year-to-date basis, expanded 3.7% this year as of May from a year earlier, undershooting Reuters’ forecast for a 3.9% growth and slowing from a 4% growth in the first four months. Within the fixed-asset investment, the contraction in property investment deepened, falling 10.7% in the first five months, government data showed.

“The rise of retail sales came as a surprise,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint asset management, while cautioning that the falling property prices could dampen consumer sentiment.
A separate release Monday by the NBS showed prices of new homes in the more affluent tier 1 cities continued to decline, falling 1.7% in May from a year ago, while those in tier 2 and tier 3 cities dropped 3.5% and 4.9%, respectively.
The NBS official noted that more work was needed to stop the slump in real estate market.
A tariff deal reached by Beijing and Washington in mid-May gave temporary relief to the country’s exports, prompting some businesses to frontload shipment while doubling down on alternative markets. Both sides struck a 90-day truce to roll back most of the triple-digit levies added on each other’s goods in early April.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC last week that U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will stay at their current level of 55%.

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China’s exports grew less than expected in May, though surging shipments to Southeast Asian nations, European Union countries and Africa helped offset the sharp decline in U.S.-bound goods. China’s exports to the U.S. plunged over 34% from a year ago, their sharpest drop since February 2020.
The past two months’ trade data indicated resilience in China’s exports, according to Goldman Sachs, signaling “the difficulty for bilateral tariffs to meaningfully reduce total Chinese exports.”
Separately, China’s urban survey-based unemployment rate in May came in at 5.0%, easing from 5.1% in April to the lowest level since November last year.

Spurring consumption

Sluggish domestic demand has been a pressing issue for Chinese policymakers. Consumer prices have seen an year-on-year decline for four consecutive months, slumping 0.1% in May. Deflation in the factory-gate or producer prices has also deepened, falling 3.3% from a year ago.
However, Beijing may feel less urgency in rolling out additional easing steps as exports appear more resilient than expected and the GDP growth is on track to exceed 5% in the first half-year, according to Goldman Sachs.

That said, there are still reasons to stay cautious, said Tianchen Xu, senior economist at Economist Intelligence Unit, anticipating private consumption to see a “triple whammy” — tightening dining curbs on officials, the end of a frontloaded 618 shopping festival and the suspension of government consumer subsidies. 
Local governments in several cities across the country recently paused the consumer goods trade-in program, as the first two batches of central government subsidies have been exhausted with additional funding yet to arrive, Goldman Sachs pointed out.
Any additional stimulus will likely only come when the economy starts to show sign of weakening, economists said.
“Absent further demand-side stimulus, we expect that the consumption recovery will be short-lived,” Jianwei Xu, senior economist at Natixis, told CNBC via email.
Beijing is likely to expand modestly its annual fiscal quota to fund the subsidy program toward the end of the third quarter or start of the fourth quarter, said Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, if the economic growth falters to below 4.5%. More

China’s consumer spending shows little sign of picking up soon.
Analysts point to one main factor: stagnant income.
Chinese consumers are also turning to lower-priced products, or moving away from big cities to places where the cost of living is lower.

Customers look at clothes advertising discounts of 80% or 70% in a supermarket in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, on June 9, 2025.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

BEIJING — China’s consumer spending shows little sign of picking up soon, given uncertainty about future wealth, changing preferences and lack of a social safety net.
It’s been four straight months of declining consumer prices, consumer confidence is hovering near historic lows, and the real estate market is struggling to turn around. Analysts repeatedly point to one main factor: stagnant income.

Disposable income in China has halved its pace of growth since the pandemic hit in 2020, now growing only by an average of 5% a year, Jeremy Stevens, Beijing-based Asia economist at Standard Bank, said in a report Wednesday.
Most jobs aren’t giving much of a raise. Out of 16 sectors, only three — mining, utilities and information technology services — have seen wage growth exceed that of gross domestic product since 2020, he said.
Monthly business surveys for May showed contraction in the labor market across the board, especially as factories navigate U.S. tariffs. The unemployment rate among young people aged 16 to 24 and not in school remained high in April at 15.8%. The official jobless rate in cities has hovered around 5%.

A record high of 64% Chinese households said in the third quarter of 2024 that they would rather save money rather than spend or invest it, according to a quarterly survey by the People’s Bank of China.
While that moderated to 61.4% in the fourth quarter, according to the latest survey released in March, it reflected a trend of more than 60% of respondents preferring to save that’s been recorded since late 2023.

And for the respondents who planned to increase spending, education was the top category, followed by health care and tourism, according to the PBOC’s fourth-quarter survey released in March.
More than half of respondents viewed the job market as becoming more difficult or hard to tell.
People in China have been culturally inclined to save, especially since limited insurance coverage means individuals must often bear most of the cost of a hospital treatment, higher education and retirement. The real estate slump of the last few years has also weighed on spending since property accounts for most of household wealth in China.
One way to make people more willing to spend is to more than double pension payouts, by increasing the share of state assets paid to the Ministry of Finance, Luo Zhiheng, chief economist at Yuekai Securities, said in a note.
He added that increasing public holidays and offering services sector consumption vouchers could also help.

In the last few weeks, Chinese authorities have stepped up plans to further support employment and improve social welfare. But policymakers have avoided the mass cash handouts that the U.S. and Hong Kong gave residents to stimulate spending after the pandemic.
Coming out of the pandemic, analysts cautioned that retail sales in China would recover very slowly as major uncertainties for consumers remained unresolved.
In the decade before the pandemic, “Chinese consumers were willing and able to buy any innovation, even innovations that were not that really innovations,” said Bruno Lannes, Shanghai-based senior partner with Bain & Company’s consumer products and retail practices.
“In today’s world they are more rational. They know what they want,” he said on a webinar Thursday.
China is scheduled to report retail sales for May on Monday. Analysts polled by Reuters predict a slowdown to 4.9% year-on-year growth, down from 5.1% in April.

A shift out of big cities

Another factor behind negative CPI reads is that Chinese consumers are turning to lower-priced products, either partly benefiting from the overproduction of relatively high-quality goods, or moving away from big cities to places where the cost of living is lower.
Shanghai lost 72,000 permanent residents last year, while Beijing saw a 26,000 drop, Worldpanel and Bain & Company pointed out in a report Thursday. The two cities are typically categorized as “tier 1” cities in China.
As a result of the population shift, smaller cities categorized as “tier 3” and “tier 4” experienced far higher growth in the volume and value of daily necessities sold last year — helping offset a decline in the tier 1 cities, the report said. The study covered packaged food, beverages, personal care and home care.
It found that while the overall volume of such goods sold in China rose by 4.4% last year, average selling prices fell by 3.4%, as consumers preferred lower-priced products and businesses increased promotions.
The trend is even influencing flower sales.
The Kunming International Flora Auction Trading Center in Yunnan province, Asia’s largest flower market, said in May that more demand is coming from less affluent lower-tier cities, resulting in higher volumes but lower average selling prices.
Business has quieted down after the busy May holiday season, Li Shenghuan, a flower seller near the trading center, said Friday. She said flower prices have come down slightly, partly because more people have been growing flowers. She expects demand to pick up around the National Day holiday in early October.
For a sense of the disparity, rural per capita disposable income has been less than half that of cities for years, according to official data. Per capita disposable income in urban areas last year was 54,188 yuan ($7,553). That’s far less than the $64,474 reported for the U.S. as of December.

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Standard Bank’s Stevens pointed out that the ratio of consumption to income in rural areas has “substantially increased” and surpassed pre-pandemic levels, while that of urban households has declined. But he noted that lower-income households don’t have the scale of wealth that higher-income groups do in order to meaningfully increase consumption in the near term.
The top 20% accounts for half of total income and consumption in China, and 60% of total savings, he said. “Policy support for low-income groups, while well-meaning, is insufficient without structural wage reform.”
In addition, China’s “common prosperity” rhetoric “has introduced institutional realignments and policy shifts that, while well-intentioned, have added to the uncertainty,” Stevens said, noting the changes have “yet to fully find a new equilibrium.” More

One after another, blockbuster Chinese listings are coming to Hong Kong. In May Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, a drug manufacturer, and CATL, a battery-maker, sold $5.3bn-worth of shares between them. Seres, which makes electric vehicles, hopes to raise $2bn in the coming weeks. Shein, a fast-fashion firm, may abandon plans for an offering in London for one in Hong Kong. All told, in April more than 130 applications were under consideration by the local exchange, up from fewer than 60 at the start of 2024. On current trends, the city will be the world’s largest venue for stock debuts this year. More

Private markets will hold 10% of investor money in the years ahead, predicts Jan Van Eck, CEO of ETF and mutual fund manager VanEck, up from roughly 2% currently.
VanEck has launched an ETF providing exposure to private investments through the shares of publicly traded alternative asset managers, but there are unique risks.

The S&P 500 is less than 3% from an all-time high. Six of its 11 sectors are within 5% of an all-time high. But even as the U.S. stock market index proves its resilience during a volatile stretch for investors, more money from within portfolios is expected to shift in to privately traded companies.
Jan Van Eck, CEO of ETF and mutual fund manager VanEck, says the trend of companies staying private for longer rather than seeking an initial public offering is here to stay and it offers new opportunities.

High-profile examples include Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Sam Altman’s OpenAI and fintech Stripe.
According to Van Eck, allocations to private assets will jump from a current average portfolio holding level of approximately 2% to 10% in the years ahead.
Some ETFs have begun to invest small portions of their assets in privately held company shares, including SpaceX, such as the ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF (XOVR). VanEck has launched an ETF tackling the private opportunity in a different way: taking big positions in the publicly traded shares of the investment giants, including private equity firms and other alternative asset managers, that own many private companies.
The VanEck Alternative Asset Manager ETF (GPZ), which launched this month, has a portfolio holdings list that includes Brookfield, Blackstone, KKR, Brookfield Asset Management and Apollo, which combined make up almost 50% of the fund. TPG, Ares and Carlyle are also big positions, in the 5% range each.
The new ETF extends an existing focus on private markets for VanEck. For over a decade, it has offered investors access to private credit, through the VanEck BDC Income ETF (BIZD), which invests in the business development companies that lend to small- and mid-sized private companies. That ETF has a high level of exposure to Ares, Blue Owl, Blackstone, Main Street and Golub Capital, which make up about half of the fund. It pays a hefty dividend of 11%. 

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Investing private through a publicly traded ETF

“You have to believe this is a secular trend and growth will be higher than that for normal money managers, including ETF and mutual fund managers,” said Van Eck.
He cautions, however, there is more volatility in these funds compared to the public equity market overall.  “You have to size it appropriately,” he added. More

What was shaping up to be a relatively calm week quickly got volatile on Friday, following Israel’s overnight strike on Iran. Here is a closer look at the three biggest themes that defined the market this week. 1. Geopolitics: The attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure rippled through financial markets on Friday. U.S. stocks sold off on the increased tensions overseas. The S & P 500 and Nasdaq Composite tumbled 1.13% and 1.3% on Friday, respectively. Meanwhile, Brent crude futures and West Texas Intermediate crude futures added around 7% and 7.5%, respectively. Gold rose to a two-month high, as well, as investors see it as a safe haven from all the volatility. Prior to the attack, stock benchmark were on track to close the week in the positive. Instead, the S & P 500 and Nasdaq lost 0.4% and 0.6% over that stretch, snapping back-to-back weekly wining streaks. Despite a modest gain Friday, part of the safe-haven trade, the U.S. dollar index had a tough week. On Thursday, we wrote about how long-term fundamental investors should view the weaker dollar. Another big geopolitical event for investors was an announcement by U.S. and Chinese delegations that the two sides agreed on a trade-deal framework, particularly focused on rare-earth minerals. 2. Economic data: Investors received good news on the inflation front on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, the c onsumer price index, a measure of goods and services inflation across the U.S. economy, showed that core prices rose less that expected last month. The May producer price index , a gauge of wholesale inflation in the country, came in lower than expected Thursday, too. The labor market continued to show it was softening but not breaking. Weekly jobless claims for the week ending June 7 were unchanged, while continuing claims were still at multiyear highs. On the whole, the batch of economic data was encouraging as the rate of inflation subsides and unemployment remains low, providing the consumer with more buying power. 3. AI updates: It was also a week chock full of company specific news and events within the generative artificial intelligence race. AI remains one of the most important, if not the most important, drivers for financial markets. On Monday, we heard from Apple, when the company hosted its annual worldwide developer conference. Though expectations were about as muted as we’ve ever seen, the event still managed to disappoint due to the lack of AI updates. Meta Platforms, on the other hand, got investors excited this week when news broke that the company took a large investment in Scale AI and will bring the startup’s CEO on board to help start a new “superintelligence” unit within the company with the goal of achieving artificial general intelligence. Early Wednesday morning, we heard from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who spoke at the company’s GTC event in Paris. While there weren’t many new updates, Huang reaffirmed that there is still a lot more accelerated compute capacity that needs to be built out, highlighting demand from hyperscale customers and sovereign entities alike. Europe, he argued, is likely to 10 times its compute capacity over the next two years. Outside the portfolio, Oracle and Advanced Micro Devices made news on AI, too. Oracle stock jumped Thursday after reporting better-than-expected quarterly results the prior evening. Impressively, the stock soared again Friday, despite the broader market sell-off, en route to its best week since 2021 . BMO Capital also upgraded Oracle to a buy rating. Oracle CEO Safra Catz’s comments on its cloud infrastructure business confirmed that there’s growing demand for AI computing power. Indeed, Oracle said revenues from that business should surge 70% year over year in its fiscal 2026. Elsewhere, Advanced Micro Devices unveiled its new AI server chip for 2026 at a company event Thursday, part of its attempt to rival Nvidia’s market-leading offering. AMD also announced that it’s landed a new high-profile customer OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT and Club holding Microsoft’s AI partner. The chip isn’t expected to launch until 2026, though. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AAPL, META, NVDA. 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

The uranium trade’s shelf life may last years.
According to Sprott Asset Management CEO John Ciampaglia, a “real shift” upward is underway due to increasing global energy demand — particularly as major tech companies look to power artificial intelligence data centers.

“We’ve been talking about uranium and nuclear energy non-stop for four years at Sprott, and we’ve been incredibly bullish on the segment,” he told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.
Ciampaglia’s firm runs the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SRUUF), which Morningstar ranks as the world’s largest physical uranium fund. It’s up 22% over the past two months.
The firm is also behind the Sprott Uranium Miners ETF (URNM), which is up almost 38% over the past two months. The Sprott website lists Cameco and NAC Kazatomprom JSC as the top two holdings in the fund as of June 12. 
“It’s [uranium] a reliable form of energy. It has zero greenhouse gases. It has a very good long-term track record,” Ciampaglia said. “It provides a lot of electricity on a large scale, and that’s right now what the grid is calling for.”
Ciampaglia finds attitudes are changing toward nuclear energy because it offers energy security with a low carbon footprint. Uranium is “incredibly energy-dense” compared to most fossil fuels, he said, which makes it a promising option to ensure energy security. 

He cited the 2022 energy crisis in Europe after Russia cut its oil supply to the region and April’s grid failure in Spain and Portugal as cases for more secure energy sources.
“We think this trend is long term and secular and durable,” Ciampaglia said. “With the exception of Germany, I think every country around the world has flipped back to nuclear power, which is a very powerful signal.”

‘You need reliable power’

VanEck CEO Jan van Eck is also heavily involved in the uranium space.  
“You need reliable power,” he said. “These data centers can’t go down for a fraction of a second. They need to be running all the time.”
His firm is behind the VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NLR), which is up about 42% over the past two months. According to VanEck’s website as of June 12, its top three holdings are Oklo, Nuscale Power and Constellation Energy.
But he contends there’s a potential downside to the uranium trade: Building new nuclear power plants can take years.
“What’s going to happen in the meantime?” Van Eck said. “Investors are not patient, as we know.”
Van Eck also thinks it’s possible the Trump administration’s positive attitude toward nuclear power could fast track development.
He highlighted nuclear technology company Oklo during the interview. Its shares soared on Wednesday after the company announced it was anticipating a deal with the Air Force to supply nuclear power to a base in Alaska.
The agreement came not long after President Donald Trump in May signed a series of executive orders to rework the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, expedite new reactor construction and expand the domestic uranium industry. 
“Trump controls federal land, so that’s not a NIMBY [not in my backyard] kind of potential risk,” said Van Eck. “They’re going to leverage that hard to start to show the safety of these newer, smaller technologies.”

Disclaimer More

“Credit cycling” is potentially risky behavior with credit cards, but isn’t widely known, experts said.
It involves repeatedly maxing out cards and paying down the balance, effectively letting cardholders spend beyond their allotted credit limit.
Card companies could close users’ accounts and cancel their rewards, among other risks, experts said.

Olga Rolenko | Moment | Getty Images

There are all sorts of ways for consumers to misuse credit cards, from failing to pay monthly bills in full to running up your balance. But here’s one risky behavior that experts say you likely haven’t heard of: “credit cycling.”
Credit cards come with a spending limit. Cardholders are usually aware of this limit, which represents the overall cap to how much they can borrow. The limit resets with each billing statement when users pay their bill in full and on time.

Users who credit-cycle will reach that limit and quickly pay down their balance; this frees up more headroom so consumers can effectively charge beyond their typical allowance.
Doing this occasionally is usually not a big deal, experts said. It’s akin to driving a few miles per hour over the speed limit — something less likely to get a driver pulled over for speeding, said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com.
But consistently “churning” through available credit comes with risks, Rossman said.

For example, card issuers may cancel a user’s card and take away their reward points, experts said. This might negatively impact a user’s credit score, they said.
“If there’s even the slightest chance credit cycling can go sideways, it’s best not to do it and look for alternatives,” said Bruce McClary, senior vice president at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. “You have to be very careful.”

Card companies see credit cycling as a risk

The average American’s credit card limit was about $34,000 at the end of the second quarter of 2024, according to Experian, one the three major credit bureaus. (This was the limit across all their cards.)
The amount varies across generations, and according to factors like income and credit usage, according to Experian.
It’s understandable why some consumers would want to credit cycle, experts said.
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Certain consumers may have a relatively low credit limit, and credit cycling might help them pay for a big-ticket purchase like a home repair, wedding or a costly vacation, experts said. Others may do it to accelerate the rewards and points they get for making purchases, they said.
But card issuers would likely see repeat offenders as a red flag, Rossman said.

Maxing out a card frequently may run afoul of certain terms and conditions, or signal that a user is experiencing financial difficulty and struggling to stay within their budget, he said.
Issuers may also view it as a potential sign of illegal activity like money laundering, he said.
“You could be putting yourself at risk by appearing to be a risk in that way,” McClary said.

Credit cycling consequences

If a card issuer penalizes a credit-cycling customer by closing their account, it could have negative repercussions for their credit score, experts said.
Credit utilization is the share of one’s outstanding debt relative to their credit limit. Keeping utilization relatively low generally helps boost one’s credit score, while a high rate generally hurts it, McClary said.
Experts generally recommend keeping credit utilization below 30%, and below 10% if you really want to improve your credit score.
A canceled card would reduce one’s overall credit limit, raising the odds that a user’s credit utilization rate would increase if they have outstanding debt on other credit cards, McClary said.

Further, a card company could flag misuse as a reason for the account closure, potentially making the user look like more of a risk to future creditors, he added.
Consistently butting up against one’s credit limit also increases the chances of accidentally breaching that threshold, McClary said. Doing so could lead creditors to charge over-limit fees or raise a user’s interest rate, he said.
Consumers who credit-cycle should be cognizant of any recurring monthly subscriptions or other charges that might inadvertently push them over the limit, he said.

What to do instead

Instead of credit cycling, consumers may be better served by asking their card issuer for a higher credit limit, opening a new credit card account or spreading payments over more than one card, Rossman said.
As a general practice, Rossman is a “big fan” of paying down one’s credit card bill early, such as in the middle of the billing cycle instead of waiting for the end. (To be clear, this isn’t the same as credit cycling, since consumers wouldn’t be paying down their balance early in order to spend beyond their allotted credit.)
This can reduce a consumer’s credit utilization rate — and boost one’s credit score — since card balances are generally only reported to the credit bureaus at the end of the monthly billing cycle, he said.
“It can be a good way to improve your score, especially if you use your card a lot,” he said. More

For the past two years, the Middle East has been a tense place. Houthis have bombed commercial ships; Israel has begun full-blown military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon; it and Iran have exchanged rockets. Yet oil markets remained calm, since the worst-case scenario—a full-blown war between Israel and Iran—had been avoided. More