Defense Startup Anduril Clinches Funding at $30.5 Billion Valuation
Anduril Industries Inc. has closed a new funding round of $2.5 billion, a deal that more than doubles the defense startup's valuation to $30.5 billion, its executive chairman Trae Stephens said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
The latest capital injection and increased valuation — up from $14 billion last year — underscores how quickly the company is establishing itself as a major player in the corporate landscape of American national security.
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14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Is Energy Transfer the All-American Dividend Stock for You? Consider This High-Yielder Instead.
Energy Transfer has a lofty 7.4% yield backed by an inherently domestic business. The midstream giant has made some decisions that should leave conservative investors with trust issues. Enterprise Products Partners' 6.9% yield will likely be a better fit for most investors. 10 stocks we like better than Energy Transfer › Dividend investors are always trying to maximize yield, but that requires extra consideration on the risk front. A high yield that isn't backed by a reliable company could leave you in the lurch and, likely, at the worst possible time. This is why investors looking at Energy Transfer (NYSE: ET) and its lofty 7.5% distribution yield will probably be better off taking a little less yield and choosing Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD) instead. Here's why. Energy Transfer and Enterprise are two of the largest midstream companies in North America. They both hail from the United States and generate most of their business from the country. The truth is, owning energy infrastructure assets like pipelines essentially forces these two businesses to be American at heart. After all, you can't move oil around the United States on a pipeline that gets built in Europe. That pipeline has to get built on U.S. soil. The midstream is actually the most boring segment of the overall energy sector. That's because businesses like Energy Transfer and Enterprise charge fees for the use of their assets. Although the oil, natural gas, and other products that flow through the system may have volatile prices, midstream companies don't really care about the price of what they move. They just care about the volume of product they move. The higher the volume, the higher the toll-like revenues they generate. Given the importance of energy to the global economy, demand for oil and natural gas tends to remain fairly robust even when commodity prices are weak. Even recessions don't materially diminish demand, since the world would, literally, stop in its tracks without oil and natural gas. From this perspective, Energy Transfer and Enterprise Products Partners are on equal footing. Here's the thing: Energy Transfer doesn't have the same history of treating its investors well as Enterprise does. That difference is why conservative income investors should be happy to trade down to Enterprise's 6.9% yield. The first big issue happened in 2016, during a time when oil prices were weak. At that point, Energy Transfer agreed to buy peer Williams. It got cold feet, warning that completing the deal would require taking on too much debt and could also force a dividend cut. It was the right decision to scuttle the deal. The problem was the way in which it achieved that end. The company sold convertible securities, with a huge portion going to the then-CEO. It appears that the convertible securities would have protected the CEO from the effect of a dividend cut, had a dividend cut been needed. In the end, Energy Transfer got out of the Williams deal, but that convertible decision should leave a bad taste in investors' mouths. Then, in 2020, when the energy industry was hit hard by demand declines around the coronavirus pandemic, Energy Transfer cut its distribution. Again, the decision was probably the right one for the business, which used the freed-up cash to strengthen its balance sheet. But income investors took it on the chin, and that's the key takeaway here. During the last two big energy industry downturns, when income investors were likely hoping for consistency, they had to worry about, and actually experience, income declines if they owned Energy Transfer. Enterprise Products Partners didn't cut its distribution in 2016 or in 2020. It didn't put out any warnings that such an event was possible. It just operated its reliable cash flow generating business. Along the way, it delivered distribution increases. At this point, the U.S. midstream giant has increased its distribution for 26 consecutive years. While trust might be a troubling issue with Energy Transfer, it isn't with Enterprise Products Partners. The long streak of putting unitholders first is a core reason to like Enterprise Products Partners, but it isn't the only reason. Other good reasons to like this midstream giant are its investment grade rated balance sheet, and the 1.7x over that its distributable cash flow covered its distribution in 2024. These are both signs of management's commitment, since they mean there's a lot of leeway before a distribution cut would be in the cards at Enterprise Products Partners. Put it all together, and most investors will probably be better off with all-American Enterprise over all-American Energy Transfer. Before you buy stock in Energy Transfer, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Energy Transfer wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $868,615!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025 Reuben Gregg Brewer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Enterprise Products Partners. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Is Energy Transfer the All-American Dividend Stock for You? Consider This High-Yielder Instead. was originally published by The Motley Fool
18 minutes ago
Trump's tariffs could pay for his tax cuts -- but it likely wouldn't be much of a bargain
WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — The tax cuts in President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act would likely gouge a hole in the federal budget. The president has a patch handy, though: his sweeping import taxes — tariffs. The Congressional Budget Office, the government's nonpartisan arbiter of tax and spending matters, says the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed by the House last month and now under consideration in the Senate, would increase federal budget deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next decade. That is because its tax cuts would drain the government's coffers faster than its spending cuts would save money. By bringing in revenue for the Treasury, on the other hand, the tariffs that Trump announced through May 13 — including his so-called reciprocal levies of up to 50% on countries with which the United States has a trade deficit — would offset the budget impact of the tax-cut bill and reduce deficits over the next decade by $2.5 trillion. So it's basically a wash. That's the budget math anyway. The real answer is more complicated. Actually using tariffs to finance a big chunk of the federal government would be a painful and perilous undertaking, budget wonks say. 'It's a very dangerous way to try to raise revenue,' said Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model, who served in President George W. Bush's Treasury Department. Trump has long advocated tariffs as an economic elixir. He says they can protect American industries, bring factories back to the United States, give him leverage to win concessions over foreign governments — and raise a lot of money. He's even suggested that they could replace the federal income tax, which now brings in about half of federal revenue. 'It's possible we'll do a complete tax cut,'' he told reporters in April. 'I think the tariffs will be enough to cut all of the income tax.'' Economists and budget analysts do not share the president's enthusiasm for using tariffs to finance the government or to replace other taxes. 'It's a really bad trade,'' said Erica York, the Tax Foundation's vice president of federal tax policy. 'It's perhaps the dumbest tax reform you could design.'' For one thing, Trump's tariffs are an unstable source of revenue. He bypassed Congress and imposed his biggest import tax hikes through executive orders. That means a future president could simply reverse them. 'Or political whims in Congress could change, and they could decide, 'Hey, we're going revoke this authority because we don't think it's a good thing that the president can just unilaterally impose a $2 trillion tax hike,' '' York said. Or the courts could kill his tariffs before Congress or future presidents do. A federal court in New York has already struck down the centerpiece of his tariff program — the reciprocal and other levies he announced on what he called 'Liberation Day'' April 2 — saying he'd overstepped his authority. An appeals court has allowed the government to keep collecting the levies while the legal challenge winds its way through the court system. Economists also say that tariffs damage the economy. They are a tax on foreign products, paid by importers in the United States and usually passed along to their customers via higher prices. They raise costs for U.S. manufacturers that rely on imported raw materials, components and equipment, making them less competitive than foreign rivals that don't have to pay Trump's tariffs. Tariffs also invite retaliatory taxes on U.S. exports by foreign countries. Indeed, the European Union this week threatened 'countermeasures'' against Trump's unexpected move to raise his tariff on foreign steel and aluminum to 50%. 'You're not just getting the effect of a tax on the U.S. economy,' York said. 'You're also getting the effect of foreign taxes on U.S. exports.'' She said the tariffs will basically wipe out all economic benefits from the One Big Beautiful Bill's tax cuts. Smetters at the Penn Wharton Budget Model said that tariffs also isolate the United States and discourage foreigners from investing in its economy. Foreigners see U.S. Treasurys as a super-safe investment and now own about 30% of the federal government's debt. If they cut back, the federal government would have to pay higher interest rates on Treasury debt to attract a smaller number of potential investors domestically. Higher borrowing costs and reduced investment would wallop the economy, making tariffs the most economically destructive tax available, Smetters said — more than twice as costly in reduced economic growth and wages as what he sees as the next-most damaging: the tax on corporate earnings. Tariffs also hit the poor hardest. They end up being a tax on consumers, and the poor spend more of their income than wealthier people do. Even without the tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill slams the poorest because it makes deep cuts to federal food programs and to Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans. After the bill's tax and spending cuts, an analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found, the poorest fifth of American households earning less than $17,000 a year would see their incomes drop by $820 next year. The richest 0.1% earning more than $4.3 million a year would come out ahead by $390,070 in 2026. 'If you layer a regressive tax increase like tariffs on top of that, you make a lot of low- and middle-income households substantially worse off,'' said the Tax Foundation's York. Overall, she said, tariffs are 'a very unreliable source of revenue for the legal reasons, the political reasons as well as the economic reasons. They're a very, very inefficient way to raise revenue. If you raise a dollar of a revenue with tariffs, that's going to cause a lot more economic harm than raising revenue any other way.''
Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
4 TN cities among most ‘moved-in' areas in America: PODS
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Nashville, including three other cities in the Volunteer State, have once again been ranked among the cities with the highest move-in rates, according to a recent report. Moving and storage company PODS has released its annual moving trends report, which shows the cities that gained and lost the most residents between January 2024 and March 2025. Here's where normal people can still buy homes, according to real estate data According to the report, Tennessee continues to see an influx of new residents, becoming one of the most popular states to move to. PODS' data ranked Nashville at No. 9 on the list of cities with highest number of move-ins. However, Music City wasn't the only Tennessee city that found itself high in the rankings. The report stated that Knoxville, which ranked 8th, is becoming a popular city for young professionals. 'The Tennessee takeover continues this year as the Volunteer State adds Chattanooga to the list for a total of four cities, including returnees Johnson City, Nashville, and Knoxville,' PODS said. Myrtle Beach, SC/ Wilmington, NC (1st in 2024) Ocala, FL (2nd in 2024) Raleigh, NC (6th in 2024) Greenville-Spartanburg, SC (4th in 2024) Dallas-Fort Worth, TX (Not ranked in 2024) Charlotte, NC (5th in 2024) Boise, ID (11th in 2024) Knoxville, TN (8th in 2024) Nashville, TN (13th in 2024) Jacksonville, FL (9th in 2024) Chattanooga, TN (Not ranked in 2024) Huntsville, AL (16th in 2024) Portland, ME (12th in 2024) Johnson City, TN (15th in 2024) Spokane, WA (Not ranked in 2024) Atlanta, GA (14th in 2024) Greensboro, NC (20th in 2024) Asheville, NC (10th in 2024) San Antonio, TX (Not ranked in 2024) Dover, DE (17th in 2024) According to Rentcafe March 2025 estimates, Tennessee offers rentals about $200 below the average of $1,750 a month. PODS added that home values are currently sitting at $361,000 nationwide and the average home value in Tennessee is about $319,300. | → Meanwhile, the moving company found that people are leaving California in droves, with seven cities represented in PODS' Top 20 list of move-outs. Los Angeles, CA (1st in 2024) Northern California- San Francisco area (2nd in 2024) South Florida – Miami area (3rd in 2024) Long Island, NY (4th in 2024) San Diego, CA (8th in 2024) Central Jersey, NJ (6th in 2024) Chicago, IL (7th in 2024) Boston, MA (13th in 2024) Hudson Valley, NY (10th in 2024) Denver, CO (12th in 2024) Santa Barbara, CA (11th in 2024) Seattle, WA (Not ranked in 2024) Stockton-Modesto, CA (9th in 2024) Washington, DC (Not ranked in 2024) Hartford, CT (15th in 2024) Tampa Bay, FL (Not ranked in 2024) Fresno, CA (17th in 2024) Austin, TX (5th in 2024) Bakersfield, CA (18th in 2024) Philadelphia, PA (Not ranked in 2024) To see the full PODS' report, follow this link. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
