6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:35PM EDT · Published May 31, 5:00AM EDT

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The United States is about to hit the European Union with large tariffs. According to Reuters:

Washington will announce plans to slap tariffs on EU steel and aluminum imports as early as Thursday morning, sources said, while the U.S. commerce secretary said any escalation of their trade dispute would depend on the bloc’s reaction.

The two sources briefed on the matter said the decision would land before a Friday expiration deadline for exemptions to the planned tariffs.

Famous bond investor Bill Gross made investments that cost his firm huge losses. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Bill Gross’s flagship fund dropped more than 3% Tuesday, an unusually big decline for a bond fund in just one day, and a sign of how the shockwaves from this week’s sudden moves in European markets are reverberating.

The Janus Henderson Global Unconstrained Bond Fund may have been wrong-footed by a bet that German bond prices would fall relative to their Italian counterparts, analysts said.

Instead, German prices jumped, sending yields plummeting, following the apparent collapse of a prospective Italian coalition government over the weekend.

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According to new research, the Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) brand has been hurt by recent controversy. MarketWatch reports:

Starbucks has some work to do if it wants to recapture the trust of customers. On Tuesday afternoon, it closed 8,000 stores for anti-bias training.

The coffee giant dropped to its lowest reputation metric in 10 years, according to a YouGov BrandIndex score released Tuesday. “Starbucks’ workplace reputation score is at its lowest level in at least 10 years, a difficult blow for a company that has been well-known for its employee benefits and culture, including helping pay for college tuition,” YouGov BrandIndex said.

Uber may go public soon. According to CNBC:

Uber is on track to go public in 2019, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told CNBC on Wednesday.

“We’re in a good position in terms of the company’s profile, in terms of profitability and margins continue to get better,” Khosrowshahi told CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Khosrowshahi added that Uber has a “very strong balance sheet.”

Bitcoin will eventually disappear, according to a major economist. CNBC reports:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller is drawing parallels between the world’s leading cryptocurrency and the dinosaurs.

According to the Yale professor, bitcoin could go extinct within the next 100 years.

“Bitcoin won’t look anything like it is today. It will have a different name, if it exists,” Shiller said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation.” “There will have been many hard forks changing it and changing it. And, it’ll be a matter of dispute whether it exists or not.”

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) has passed Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) in market cap and could move into second place behind Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). According to CNNMoney:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella can brag to Bill Gates that the company’s stock price has never been higher during Microsoft’s 32-year history as a public company than it is now.

And Microsoft’s market value just passed rival Google’s too.

Shares of Microsoft rose nearly 1% Wednesday and are now up more than 15% this year. The company is worth $760 billion, more than Google owner Alphabet’s market cap of $745 billion.

Microsoft now trails fellow Washington state native Amazon by about $30 billion for second place in the market value race.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.