Stocks rise after week of losses
NEW YORK — Stocks rose broadly on Wall Street after taking big losses last week.
Technology companies recovered some of their recent losses on Monday. Microsoft, for example, climbed 3.3 percent.
Retailers and travel companies also climbed on the first full trading day of the holiday shopping season. Amazon jumped 5.3 percent.
General Motors surged 4.8 percent after saying it will lay off 14,000 workers in North America as it refocuses on autonomous and electric vehicles.
Banks rose as interest rates turned higher.
Campbell Soup Co. reached a settlement in its proxy battle with Dan Loeb, agreeing to give the activist investor two seats on the company’s board as well as a say in choosing a new chief executive officer.
The agreement allows Loeb’s Third Point to appoint independent directors Sarah Hofstetter and Kurt Schmidt to the board and expands the board’s size from 12 to 14. Third Point has agreed to a 12-month standstill and “certain support commitments” and to dismiss its litigation, Campbell said in a joint statement Monday.
A settlement, which comes before Campbell’s annual general meeting on Thursday, ends a months-long battle at the soup and snack maker. Loeb had originally called for an outright sale of the company, and aimed to replace its entire 12-member board before scaling back his demands and his slate of nominees to five.
Loeb faced an uphill battle with the descendants of the company’s founding family, who collectively own about 41 percent. They had said they planned to supported Campbell’s slate of directors, and the matter was headed toward a vote at the annual meeting.
Airbus will offer a modified version of its A330neo wide-body designed for shorter trips in an effort to undermine demand for a new middle-ofthe-market plane that Boeing is expected to launch next year.
The A330neo’s engines could be re-rated to a lower level of thrust, helping reduce the fuel load and cut its take-off weight, Crawford Hamilton, the plane’s marketing chief, said Monday.
That would make the model better-suited to the mid-range routes that Boeing would target with its jet, dubbed the 797.
Bitcoin miners hit hard by the cryptocurrency’s crash may be throwing in the towel.
The bitcoin network’s hash rate, one way of gauging the computing power dedicated to mining the digital currency, dropped about 24 percent from an all-time high at the end of August through Nov. 24, according to Blockchain.com. While the decline may have partially resulted from miners switching to other cryptocurrencies, JPMorgan Chase says some in the industry are losing money after bitcoin’s price tumbled.
Bitcoin miners, who perform the computations necessary to confirm transactions in the cryptocurrency, are rewarded for their efforts with bitcoins. If prices suffer a sustained drop below miners’ break-even costs, they may be forced to shut down.
The break-even cost to mine a single bitcoin using Bitmain’s Antminer S9 rig was estimated at $7,000 in a Nov. 16 report by Fundstrat Global Advisors, though the level is probably lower for some miners with access to cheap electricity and equipment.