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NEW YORK:

Investment bank Morgan Stanley is reporting a record profit in the first quarter, helped by a lower tax bill and a boost in revenue from last quarter’s volatile markets.

The New York firm reported a profit Wednesday of $2.67 billion, or $1.45 per share, compared with a profit of $1.93 billion, or $1.00 a share, in the same period a year earlier. Analysts forecasted Morgan Stanley to earn $1.26 per share, according to FactSet.

Morgan Stanley’s traders and investment bankers had a very strong quarter. The bank’s institutional securities division had net revenues of $6.1 billion compared with $5.2 billion a year earlier. Most of that gain came from stock sales and trading. (AP)

OMAHA:

CSX’s first-quarter profit nearly doubled thanks to further cost cuts at the railroad and a restructuring that weighed on its earnings a year ago.

The Jacksonville, Florida-based company on Tuesday posted net income of $695 million, or 78 cents per share. That’s up from last year’s $362 million, or 39 cents per share.

CSX Corp. is continuing the overhaul of its operations that began last year before CEO Hunter Harrison’s death in December. His successor, Jim Foote, said CSX is drastically changing the way it operates by reducing the number of locomotives it uses and running trains on a tighter schedule. (AP)

LOS ANGELES:

The Netflix juggernaut continues to rage on: The company’s shares popped to a new all-time high Tuesday, a day after Netflix reported better-than-forecast first quarter subscriber additions.

The streamer’s shares jumped 9.2% on Tuesday, closing at $336.06 per share. Netflix reported 7.4 million net streaming subscriber additions in Q1, to stand at 125 million worldwide.

With a current market cap of around $146 billion, Netflix is nearly as valuable as both the Walt Disney Co. and Comcast, which each have market capitalizations of about $154 billion. (RTRS)

NEW YORK:

The end is near for department store operator The Bon-Ton Stores.

Two liquidation firms are the victors of an auction for the bankrupt company’s assets, after the retailer failed to find a bidder willing to continue operating the business. A bankruptcy court hearing is scheduled for Wednesday to approve the sale and liquidation details.

The Bon-Ton Stores Inc was operating 260 stores in 24 states, largely in the Northeast and Midwest, when it filed for bankruptcy in January. Liquidation firms Great American Group and Tiger Capital Group are the winners of the auction. (AP)

NEW YORK:

Starbucks will close stores and corporate offices across the United States on May 29 to conduct “racial-bias education,” the company announced Tuesday, following outrage over the arrest of two black men in one of its cafes. It was the latest bid by the behemoth coffee chain to recover from last Thursday’s incident in Philadelphia, which was captured on video and went viral, viewed millions of times.

The video posted on Twitter by a Starbucks client shows uniformed police questioning and then handcuffing the two men, who offer no resistance, as a white client repeatedly asks an officer, “What’d they do? What’d they do?” (AFP)

PAWTUCKET:

Toy manufacturer Hasbro is launching a pilot toy recycling program.

WLNE-TV reports that the Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based company is partnering with the recycling company TerraCycle.

Donated toys will be transformed into materials used to make playgrounds, park benches and flower pots, among other things.

People can participate by creating an online account with TerraCycle. The company will send a free shipping label to attach to boxes of toys to be recycled. (AP)

DETROIT:

General Motors has replaced the head of its Cadillac luxury brand, which has struggled for years to compete against German and Japanese luxury automakers in the US.

The company says Steve Carlisle will replace Johan de Nysschen, who is leaving to pursue other opportunities.

Carlisle had been managing director of GM’s Canadian operations.

De Nysschen was hired away from Nissan’s Infiniti luxury brand with much promise and named president of Cadillac in August of 2014. (AP)

NEW YORK:

Amazon has cut a deal to sell voice-controlled TVs at Best Buy, the latest attempt by the online retailer to get its burgeoning suite of tech products out where people can see and touch them.

Best Buy already sells the Amazon Kindle and other gadgets, but the deal announced Wednesday makes the electronics retailer the only other place where you can walk in and buy a TV powered by Amazon’s Fire TV software. Investors seemed to like the partnership: Best Buy’s stock rose 4 percent Wednesday. (AP)

LONDON:

British retail property giant Hammerson on Wednesday scrapped a planned takeover of rival Intu that would have created a pan-European shopping mall giant, citing a weak UK consumer market.

Intu expressed its disappointment, saying it “regards as unsatisfactory the explanations given” by Hammerson.

The announcement comes less than one week after French rival Klepierre gave up on trying to buy Hammerson after two rejected informal bids.

Explaining its decision to pull out of the Intu deal, Hammerson said in a statement on Wednesday: “Over the last five months, the financial strength of retailers and other tenants in the UK has softened... while consumer confidence has also remained subdued.”(AFP)

LONDON:

De La Rue abandoned its challenge to Britain’s decision to award the contract for new blue post-Brexit passports to a foreign firm and issued a profit warning on Wednesday.

Its shares fell 9 percent to a year low of 446 pence in early trading and were down 4 percent at 0851 GMT after De La Rue said it would write-off about 4 million pounds ($5.7 million) of costs associated with the failed bid.

Together with delays in some contracts in the last week of its financial year, this would result in it missing profit expectations, De La Rue said in a statement. (RTRS)