CNBC Business News Update - Market Open: Stocks Higher, Jobless Claims Remain Tame, Google Scraps Diversity 2/6/25

Episode Date: February 6, 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. The major average is all in the green this morning. The Dow up 50 points, being led higher by shares of McDonald's, which are up 2%. The S&P 500 index up 10 points. The Nasdaq is up 7 points. Checking NVIDIA shares, they are up 8 tenths of a percent this morning. More people than expected applied for unemployment benefits last week. Initial claims 219,000. It's remained very, very tame. The last time we were back above 250,000, kind of that psychological area, well that was in October of 23. This has really, really been an unbelievable long run under 250,000. CNBC's Rick Santelli, we get the government's big January jobs report tomorrow morning. The unemployment rate is sitting now at 4.1 percent. People who voted for Donald Trump are waiting for help, according to Democrats, while the president is focused overseas and as he aligns with tech giants in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was doing fine. It was booming before Donald Trump. Record profits, you had Apple doing really well, Google doing really well, Tesla doing really well. The problem in this

country that Trump correctly identified, you had a lot of people in the working and middle class who weren't doing well. You had a lot of factory towns hollowed out. And I guess my question is, what is he doing so far for them? I was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A woman said the reason she voted for him is he wasn't going to tax overtime and he wasn't going to tax tips. And so far, at least, we haven't heard that part of his agenda. California Congressman Democrat Ro Khanna on CNBC. Eli Lilly's shares are up two percent even as sales of weight loss drugs and diabetes drugs fell short in the last quarter. Ford reported quarterly results last night that beat estimates but it's forecasting a tougher year ahead. Its shares were struggling. Amazon poised to pass Walmart in revenue for the first time. The e-commerce

giant reports quarterly results today after the closing bell. Amazon makes a big chunk of its revenue from its cloud division, Amazon Web Services. Google scrapping its diversity targets following President Trump's executive order, even as high tech has struggled to try to diversify its workforce. This follows similar moves by Amazon and Meta. Over the past decades, the tech giants repeatedly shared their diversity goals and transparency around the gender and racial breakdown of their employee base. Progress to diversify, though, has stalled. A report issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year

found that the high tech workforce was less than 23 percent female in 2022. That number effectively unchanged over the prior two decades and that the high-tech workforce is far less racially and ethnically diverse than the total U.S. workforce. CNBC's Julia Borsten, Super Bowl tickets for Chiefs Eagles in New Orleans this Sunday are being found on resale websites for less than last year's resale tickets at this same time. This week, you could get into the game for under $4,000. It's the NBA trade deadline today, and it's round one of the Waste Management Phoenix Open in Scottsdale, Arizona. Jessica Ettinger, CNBC. The Investing Club. We're not about trading. We're about

investing. Get invested. Join the club today. Go to cndc.com slash Jim's Club.