6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:26PM EDT · Published Sep 27, 4:58AM EDT

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Carl Wycoff / Wikimedia Commons

Farmers claim money from the federal government will not offset losses of income due to the trade war. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The Trump administration has started compensating U.S. farmers for damage tariffs are doing to their business.

Many farmers say the payments won’t make up for lost sales to China and other foreign markets they were counting on to buy the huge amounts of crops and meat being produced across the Farm Belt.

Bumper corn and soybean harvests and record pork production have pushed down prices for agricultural commodities. U.S. farm income is expected to drop 13% this year to $66 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture, extending a yearslong slump in the agricultural economy.

Jeff Bezos’s rocket company will sell engines to commercial companies. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Blue Origin LLC, the space-transportation company run by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to provide engines for a potential rival’s next-generation rocket, according to people familiar with the matter, vaulting Mr. Bezos into the lucrative market for Pentagon satellite launches.

United Launch Alliance LLC—a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. that launches U.S. military and spy satellites into orbit—is set to announce Thursday it has picked Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine for its Vulcan rocket, these people said. United Launch declined to comment.

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McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) is taking artificial ingredients out of some of its products. According to The Wall Street Journal:

McDonald’s Corp. is stripping artificial ingredients from more food to win over customers who, the burger chain believes, don’t want to eat things with names like calcium propionate and sodium benzoate.

Those and other ingredients found in the buns, cheese and sauce on some of McDonald’s best-known burgers are gone from its U.S. restaurants, the chain said Wednesday. The Big Mac, Quarter Pounder with Cheese and burgers in Happy Meals are now among items free from artificial preservatives, flavors and coloring.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) will open a store in New York City. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday said it is opening a new bricks-and-mortar store that will feature a selection of goods curated partly by local consumers’ online shopping habits, part of its efforts to reshape the way people shop.

Amazon 4-star will open to the public on Thursday in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, the company said in a blog post. Items include those ranked four stars or above and will feature a variety of goods.

The euro dropped because of economic problems in Italy. According to CNBC:

The euro is under pressure on Thursday morning after media reports suggested that Italy’s coalition government is pushing for a deficit of 2.4 percent for 2019.

The euro fell 0.3 percent against the dollar to $1.17 at around 7.13 a.m. London time. Bond markets were also nervous about the spending plans in Italy, with the yield on the 10-year government bond moving higher to about 2.968 percent.

Facebook Inc. (NYSE: FB) is releasing a new virtual reality headset. According to CNNMoney:

Facebook is launching another virtual reality headset that doesn’t need a PC to work. This one might make serious gamers happy. The Oculus Quest will be released next Spring and retail for $399.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the new hardware at the Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, California, on Wednesday.

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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.