Wall Street Week Ahead: US stocks edge toward records with inflation data, policy progress in focus
The U.S. stock rebound has driven key indexes to the cusp of record levels, with fresh economic data and trade and fiscal policy developments set to test whether equities will get an extra push higher in the near term.
A monthly U.S. inflation report headlines the events for markets in the coming week. Equities have bounced back from a steep fall in April, sparked by concerns about the economic fallout from President Donald Trump's tariff plans.
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Stocks hit a speed bump on Thursday as a public rift between Trump and Tesla chief Elon Musk sent shares of the electric vehicle maker down 14%.
The benchmark S&P 500 ended on Thursday just over 3% off its record closing high from February. It closed down 0.5% on the day as Tesla's tumble offset news of progress in tariff talks between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. "I'd still say it's a cautious tone" in the market, said Jim Baird, chief investment officer with Plante Moran Financial Advisors. Despite a "recovery off the lows, I still think it's a market that is looking for greater clarity."
Some uncertainty stems from how the U.S. economy is weathering the shifting trade backdrop. Trump has eased back on some of the harshest tariffs since his April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement sent stocks tumbling, but investors are waiting to see how other levies may be rippling through the economy.
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The consumer price index report for May, due on Wednesday, could give insight into the
tariff impact
at a time investors are wary of any flare-ups in inflation.
"Consumers are feeling the impact of higher prices and if there are indications that near-term inflation could re-accelerate, that is going to put further pressure on discretionary spending and ultimately could lead to a more pronounced slowdown in growth," Baird said. The
CPI report
will be one of the last key pieces of data before the
Federal Reserve
's June 17-18 meeting.
The U.S. central bank is widely expected to hold interest rates steady at that meeting, but traders are pricing in about two 25-basis point cuts by the end of the year.
"If we see inflationary data that defies what people are concerned about based on this tariff talk and it comes in cooler, then that could also be a catalyst to at least test those old highs," said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. For the year, the S&P 500 is up about 1%. But the index has stormed back over 19% since April 8, at the depth of the stock market's plunge on concerns over the tariff fallout.
Investors also are grappling with uncertainty over a sweeping tax-cut and spending bill under review in the U.S. Senate.
Wall Street
is monitoring how much the legislation could stimulate
economic growth
, but also inflate the country's debt burden as widening fiscal deficits have become a central concern for markets in recent weeks.
"As debt increases, it has a greater negative impact on growth," said Kristina Hooper, chief market strategist at Man Group. The legislation also appeared to be the source of a severe rift between Trump and Musk, who had been his strong ally. Musk called the bill at the heart of Trump's agenda a "disgusting abomination," while Trump said he was "disappointed" by the billionaire's public opposition.
Trade talks also remain at the forefront of markets, with a 90-day pause on a wide array of Trump's tariffs set to end on July 8. "When it comes to policy from Washington, D.C., there are still big question marks," said Bob Doll, chief investment office at Crossmark Global Investments.
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Time of India
36 minutes ago
- Time of India
Welcome to campus, here's your ChatGPT
OpenAI , the maker of ChatGPT , has a plan to overhaul college education -- by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company's strategy succeeds, universities would give students AI assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized AI study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot's voice mode to be quizzed aloud before a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch "AI-native universities." 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SmartAsset Learn More Undo "Our vision is that, over time, AI would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education," Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said in an interview. In the same way that colleges give students school email accounts, she said, soon "every student who comes to campus would have access to their personalized AI account." To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium AI services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT. Live Events Some universities, including the University of Maryland and California State University, are already working to make AI tools part of students' everyday experiences. In early June, Duke University began offering unlimited ChatGPT access to students, faculty and staff. The school also introduced a university platform, called DukeGPT, with AI tools developed by Duke. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories OpenAI's campaign is part of an escalating AI arms race among tech giants to win over universities and students with their chatbots. The company is following in the footsteps of rivals like Google and Microsoft that have for years pushed to get their computers and software into schools, and court students as future customers. The competition is so heated that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and Elon Musk, who founded the rival xAI, posted dueling announcements on social media this spring offering free premium AI services for college students during exam period. Then Google upped the ante, announcing free student access to its premium chatbot service "through finals 2026." OpenAI ignited the recent AI education trend. In late 2022, the company's rollout of ChatGPT, which can produce human-sounding essays and term papers, helped set off a wave of chatbot-fueled cheating. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on large databases of texts, also make stuff up, which can mislead students. Less than three years later, millions of college students regularly use AI chatbots as research, writing, computer programming and idea-generating aides. Now OpenAI is capitalizing on ChatGPT's popularity to promote the company's AI services to universities as the new infrastructure for college education. OpenAI's service for universities, ChatGPT Edu, offers more features, including certain privacy protections, than the company's free chatbot. ChatGPT Edu also enables faculty and staff to create custom chatbots for university use. (OpenAI offers consumers premium versions of its chatbot for a monthly fee.) OpenAI's push to AI-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established. A few early studies have found that outsourcing tasks like research and writing to chatbots can diminish skills like critical thinking. And some critics argue that colleges going all-in on chatbots are glossing over issues like societal risks, AI labor exploitation and environmental costs. OpenAI's campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates -- particularly in fields like software engineering, where AI is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students' career prospects, some universities are racing to provide AI tools and training. California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for "California's future AI-driven economy." Cal State said the effort would help make the school "the nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system." Some universities say they are embracing the new AI tools in part because they want their schools to help guide, and develop guardrails for, the technologies. " You're worried about the ecological concerns. You're worried about misinformation and bias," Edmund Clark, the chief information officer of California State University, said at a recent education conference in San Diego. "Well, join in. Help us shape the future." Last spring, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Edu, its first product for universities, which offers access to the company's latest AI. Paying clients like universities also get more privacy: OpenAI says it does not use the information that students, faculty and administrators enter into ChatGPT Edu to train its AI. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.) Last fall, OpenAI hired Belsky to oversee its education efforts. An ed tech startup veteran, she previously worked at Coursera, which offers college and professional training courses. She is pursuing a two-pronged strategy: marketing OpenAI's premium services to universities for a fee while advertising free ChatGPT directly to students. OpenAI also convened a panel of college students recently to help get their peers to start using the tech. Among those students are power users like Delphine Tai-Beauchamp, a computer science major at the University of California, Irvine. She has used the chatbot to explain complicated course concepts, as well as help explain coding errors and make charts diagraming the connections between ideas. "I wouldn't recommend students use AI to avoid the hard parts of learning," Tai-Beauchamp said. She did recommend students try AI as a study aid. "Ask it to explain something five different ways." Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. "Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?" asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus," another said. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. "The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for AI in the university that are most impactful?" Belsky said during a December AI event at Cornell Tech in New York City. "And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?" Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT. Jared DeForest, the chair of environmental and plant biology at Ohio University, created his own tutoring bot, called SoilSage, which can answer students' questions based on his published research papers and science knowledge. Limiting the chatbot to trusted information sources has improved its accuracy, he said. "The curated chatbot allows me to control the information in there to get the product that I want at the college level," DeForest said. But even when trained on specific course materials, AI can make mistakes. In a new study -- "Can AI Hold Office Hours?" -- law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into AI models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three AI chatbots made "significant" legal errors that could be "harmful for learning." "This is a good way to lead students astray," said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. "So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down." OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the AI with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted. Belsky said a new "memory" feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the AI "more valuable as you grow and learn." Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their AI chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life. "It would be their gateway to learning -- and career life thereafter," Belsky said.
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First Post
an hour ago
- First Post
Trump asked aides whether Musk's ‘behaviour' was linked to his alleged drug use: Report
While Trump has publicly declined to comment on Musk's alleged drug use, he is learnt to have inquired about it privately as he tries to make sense of the tech billionaire's salvos read more Elon Musk speaks next to US President Donald Trump (not pictured) in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, February 11, 2025. File Image/Reuters US President Donald Trump reportedly asked the White House officials and his advisors whether they thought Elon Musk's 'behaviour' was linked to his alleged drug abuse. CNN has reported that while Trump may posture in public that he doesn't care about fallout with Musk, he is privately seeking to make sense of the tech billionaire's salvos at him. Trump inquired about Musk's alleged drug use While Trump has publicly declined to comment on Musk's alleged drug use, he is learnt to have inquired about it privately. 'I don't want to comment on his drug use. I don't know - I don't know what his status is,' he said Friday (June 6) on Air Force One. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Reports on Musk's drug use The New York Times earlier reported that Musk was 'using drugs far more intensely than previously known' as he stepped into politics during the 2024 presidential campaign of Trump. The paper reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the Tesla boss used 'ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs.' Last year, Musk acknowledged in an interview that he took 'a small amount' of ketamine to deal with negative moods. However, he clarified his heavy workload won't allow him to use too much. Trump now focusing on 'big beautiful bill' Since the Trump-Musk dispute started on social media, Trump's aides said he has been focused on pushing forward the 'big beautiful bill' that caused the conflict and has told his team to do the same. On Friday morning, his online posts were only about the economy, with no mention of Musk. He spent the morning on phone calls—not with Musk, but with South Korea's new president, inviting him to the US for talks. He also spoke with Poland's president about the upcoming NATO summit. Before heading to Bedminster, New Jersey, in the evening, he visited a golf course. Tipping point A turning point for Trump and his team, according to insiders, was Musk linking the president to Jeffrey Epstein. Musk claimed the administration was withholding information about the convicted pedophile because it involved Trump, offering no evidence or details on how he accessed any unreleased files. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Musk's remarks an 'unfortunate episode' in a statement Thursday evening. After this, any hope of mending ties seemed lost. For Trump, Musk's criticism of the major bill could encourage Republicans who, like Musk, worry it would greatly increase the US deficit.
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
India is the 5th largest economy, so it makes sense: Canada's Mark Carney backs PM Modi's G7 invite despite tensions
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has firmly defended his invitation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the upcoming G7 Summit in Kananaskis , Alberta, from 15–17 June. Carney said India's presence is essential for discussions on global priorities such as energy security, critical minerals, and infrastructure partnerships. 'India is the fifth largest economy in the world, effectively the most populous country in the world, central to a number of those supply chains at the heart of a number of those supply chains, so it makes sense,' Carney said in a media interaction on Friday. The G7 Summit will focus on pressing international concerns including artificial intelligence, climate action, digital development, and cooperation with emerging economies. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like War Thunder - Register now for free and play against over 75 Million real Players War Thunder Play Now Undo Strong push from G6 countries to include India Vina Nadjibulla, Vice President of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, added that the decision to include India wasn't solely Canada's. 'In terms of the G7, we are the outlier because the other six members of the G7 are interested in deepening their strategic partnerships with India, deepening their defence technology and economic ties. In fact, every day there is a new announcement about either France or UK or US doing more with India,' she told CBC News Network. Live Events She continued, 'So having India there also matters to everybody else. I think there was a strong push from other G6 to have India at the table. And I think in order for Canada also to be able to show relevance on the world stage, we can't just engage in diplomacy with those whom we like. I mean, this is not… diplomacy is not a gift to our friends. It's not a concession. It's a necessary tool to be able to advance our interests and defend our values, right?' PM Modi confirms participation Prime Minister Modi accepted the invitation, expressing appreciation in a post on X. 'Glad to receive a call from Prime Minister Mark J Carney of Canada. Congratulated him on his recent election victory and thanked him for the invitation to the G7 Summit in Kananaskis later this month. As vibrant democracies bound by deep people-to-people ties, India and Canada will work together with renewed vigour, guided by mutual respect and shared interests. Look forward to our meeting at the Summit.' A strained backdrop: Nijjar's killing and diplomatic rift This invitation comes at a time when India–Canada ties remain deeply strained. Tensions escalated after the June 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar , a Canadian citizen and vocal pro-Khalistan activist, outside a gurdwara in Vancouver. Canadian authorities accused Indian agents of involvement, a charge India categorically denied. The result was a diplomatic standoff, with both countries expelling senior envoys in a tit-for-tat move. When asked whether he believed PM Modi was linked to Nijjar's murder, Carney declined to speculate. 'There is a legal process that is literally underway and quite advanced in Canada… It's never appropriate to make comments with respect to those legal processes,' he said. Four Indian nationals have been arrested and charged in connection with the murder, and investigations continue. Sikh organisations oppose Modi's presence The World Sikh Organization has criticised the decision to invite Modi. Its president, Dinesh Singh, told The Guardian, 'This is a betrayal, not just of our community, but core Canadian values.' These reactions underscore a larger discontent among Sikh Canadians who have accused Ottawa of ignoring community concerns in favour of geopolitical strategy. Despite the rift, Carney said there had been some improvement in bilateral cooperation. 'In addition, bilaterally we have now agreed importantly to continued law enforcement to law enforcement dialogue so there's been some progress on that recognises issues of accountability. I extended the invitation to Prime Minister Modi in that context and he has accepted.' Carney also noted that inviting India to such global platforms helps Canada maintain relevance internationally. Other guest nations at G7 2025 India isn't the only non-G7 country invited to this year's summit. Canada has also extended invitations to: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum (pending confirmation) For Carney and his G7 counterparts, engaging with India appears to be a strategic necessity, regardless of domestic backlash. As the summit approaches, New Delhi's role in global supply chains and economic governance seems to outweigh diplomatic discomfort. Whether this G7 appearance eases bilateral tensions or deepens divisions at home remains to be seen. But for now, both sides appear to have chosen pragmatism over grievance.
