Disney Asks FCC To Declare 'The View' A News Show, Exempt From Equal Time Rule

UBS Checks With Major Restaurant Franchisees Reveal Troubling Consumer Trends In a continuation of our note on the health of America's restaurant industry, we cite UBS analyst Dennis Geiger for a second straight week, as his coverage of the consumer and restaurant sectors has been spot on. Sentiment toward chain eateries remains "generally cautious," with macro pressures, elevated gas prices, and weak demand among lower-income consumers continuing to weigh on traffic and sales trends. Last week, Geiger warned, "Challenged traffic and sales trends likely reflect depressed consumer sentiment across several cohorts,...

China's DeepSeek Debuts Flagship AI Model As Compute Race Intensifies Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched a preview version of its long-awaited V4 model, ending months of silence from one of China's most closely watched AI labs and arriving a year after its R1 release sparked U.S. market turmoil and concerns across Silicon Valley AI firms. The rollout signals that DeepSeek is full steam ahead in the frontier-model race: DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length. DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance...

US Retail Sales Jumped Most In 8 Months In February Bank of America's omniscient analysts forecast a very strong month for Retail Sales in February data (released today)... The actual print was +0.6% MoM (better than the 0.5% consensus, but less than BofA's forecast) comes after a revised higher 0.1% MoM decline in January (and December's nothingburger)... Source: Bloomberg That is the highest MoM rise since June 2025, and sales rose 3.7% YoY... Core Retail Sales (Ex Autos) rose 0.5% MoM (much better than expected) and Ex Autos and Gas also rose more than...