CNBC.com’s Pippa Stevens brings you the day’s top business news headlines. On today’s show, Kate Rooney wraps up the watershed moment when Coinbase became a publicly traded company. Plus, Robert Frank explains how the red-hot Florida real estate market ay be overheating.
Coinbase stock closes down day after landmark Nasdaq debut
Coinbase shares whipsawed Thursday, a day after the cryptocurrency exchange went public in a blockbuster direct listing.
The firm’s stock closed down 1.68%, though had climbed as high as 6.4% in the morning.
The company said that it temporarily disabled withdrawals of ether tokens due to an issue with a recent upgrade to that currency’s network. The so-called “Berlin hard fork” is part of a broader effort to make the Ethereum blockchain faster and more secure.
Retail sales explode in March as consumers use stimulus checks to spend heavily
A fresh batch of stimulus checks sent consumer purchases surging in March as the U.S. economy continued to get juice from aggressive congressional spending.
Advance retail sales rose 9.8% for the month, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That compared to the Dow Jones estimate of a 6.1% gain and a decline of 2.7% in February.
Sporting goods, clothing and food and beverage led the gains in spending and contributed to the best month for retail since the May 2020 gain of 18.3%, which came after the first round of stimulus checks.
Citigroup beats estimates on reserve release, says it is exiting 13 retail markets outside the U.S.
Citigroup on Thursday posted results that beat analysts’ estimates for first-quarter profit with strong investment banking revenue and a bigger-than-expected release of loan-loss reserves.
The firm also said it was shuttering retail banking operations in 13 countries across Asia and parts of Europe to focus more on wealth management outside the U.S., one of the first big strategic moves made by CEO Jane Fraser, who took over in February.