JetBlue Airways launches hostile takeover bid for Spirit Airlines
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average is on an eight-week losing streak and the S&P 500 is teetering on the brink of a bear market after another down week for stocks.
The persistent market weakness has been driven by investor fears over inflation and aggressive Federal Reserve monetary policy tightening. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank "won't hesitate" to continue to raise interest rates to whatever level is necessary to get inflation under control.
Billionaire Wall Street icon Warren Buffett has been taking advantage of market weakness so far in 2022 and buying the dip in a number of stocks. The new Berkshire Hathaway quarterly 13F filing released on Monday disclosed Buffett was aggressively buying shares of Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Citigroup and other value stocks in the first quarter.
On Monday, JetBlue Airways launched a hostile takeover bid for Spirit Airlines at $30 per share but said a previous offer priced at $33 per share is still on the table if the Spirit board is willing to negotiate. Earlier this month, Spirit rejected JetBlue's original $3.6-billion takeover offer in favor of a $2.9 billion takeover deal with Frontier Airlines announced in February, citing regulatory concerns with the JetBlue offer.
On Thursday, Business Insider reported that SpaceX paid $250,000 in severance to a flight attendant who accused SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk of sexual misconduct. In a tweet on Thursday, Musk said "those wild accusations are utterly untrue."
Off Target
After reporting first-quarter earnings that fell well short of analysts' forecasts, Target shares dropped 25% on Tuesday, its largest single-day decline since 1987.
Investors will get more quarterly earnings reports from Nvidia and Snowflake on Wednesday and Alibaba and Macy's on Thursday.
So far this earnings season, 85% of S&P 500 companies have mentioned "inflation" on their earnings calls, according to FactSet.
Economic numbers
In the week ahead, investors will get key economic updates on Wednesday when the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee releases the minutes from its latest meeting and on Thursday when the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its updated first-quarter U.S. GDP growth estimate.
Benzinga is a financial news and data company headquartered in Detroit.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: JetBlue Airways launches hostile takeover bid for Spirit Airlines
