CNBC Business News Update - Market Midday: Stocks Higher, Fed Rate Announcement At 2pm ET, More Apartments Being Built 6/18/25

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

From Wall Street to Main Street, the latest on the markets and what it means for your money. Updated regularly on weekdays, featuring CNBC expert analysis and sound from top business newsmakers. Anchored by CNBC's Jessica Ettinger.

I'm Jessica Edinger CNBC Wall Street on hold for the Fed to announce a decision on interest rates. Major averages all higher this afternoon. The Dow up 180 points, four tenths of. That's up four tenths of 1%. And the NASDAQ is up 106 points. That's a half percent. Nvidia shares are up eight tenths of a percent this afternoon. Companies who shares have hit fresh all time highs today include Take Two Interactive, Raytheon, RTX, and IBM. This is a market that just has pure momentum.

It's got momentum in basically every sector. We're seeing the appetite for IPOs and I think remains strong until we get to second quarter earnings report and I think that's going to be the talent on the market will continue to be resilient or is going to get back some of the gains. That's Short Hills Capital Steve Weiss on CNBC. More people applied for unemployment benefits last week than the pre-pandemic average at 245,000. This would be the one, two, third week in a row it's been somewhat elevated in just a not below 250,000 big psychological area. CNBC's Rick Santelli and more people are continuing to have to collect those unemployment checks, suggesting it's taking people longer to find their next

job. Here's Rick again. On continuing claims, once again, above 1.9 million, 1 million 945 thousand, that now becomes the fourth consecutive read over 1.9 million. These are comping to November of 2021. Investors got a fresh read today on the new construction home business, and it's all about building new apartment buildings, not single-family homes. Here's CNBC's Diana Olek. Building permits, which is of course an indication of future construction. Single-family is down sharply both month to month, year over year.

Multi-family though taking a slight bump up and that's interesting because we have started to see rents move a little bit higher in multi-family. All that new supply coming in, but there's such strong demand for rental apartments right now. Why? Because people are not buying homes.

They're also staying in their apartments longer. And that's why you're starting to see developers say, hey, wait a minute. Yes, we put all this into the pipeline. It was all delivered, but we're still under supplied and we need to start building again. So multifamily permits were up pretty strongly up 13% year over year. The Fed will announce a decision on interest rates this afternoon. It's expected to leave them right where they are as inflation is not yet back at the 2% target. Inflation sitting around 2.4% now. Some forecast tariff price increases have yet to kick in which would push inflation higher. They're saying we do have a higher than normal or even a higher than needed funds rate. We'd like to bring it down but we can't

right now because the prevailing uncertainty over you know which tariffs are there, which tariffs remain. What happens on July 9th? That's CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Leesman. The TikTok ban deadline it's extended for a third time. The Chinese-owned app sits on the phones of half the adult US population. By law it needs to be sold or banned in the US as a security and propaganda threat. General Mills has joined Kraft Heinz in saying dyes will be removed from foods by 2027. Toymaker Hasbro blaming the Trump tariffs for forcing it to cut jobs saying it's facing higher costs and now

has to fire 3% of its workforce. Tomorrow is Juneteenth. The financial markets will be closed. Jessica Ettinger, CNBC. You come to my show and you learn how to do stocks. Mad Money, weeknight 6 Eastern, CNBC.