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Fourth quarter comparable sales increased 4.6% for Walmart’s US operations. Slowdown expected for next year due to ‘Trump factor’


For the fiscal year 2025, Walmart's sales were $681.0 billion, up 5.1%. Operating income increased by $2.3 billion, or 8.6%, growing faster than sales. The company increased its dividend by 13% to 94 cents per share, its largest increase in more than a decade.. Great e-commerce progression. But Trump's policies sow uncertainty about the future and a possible slowdown in sales: "Uncertainty about the economic impact of President Donald Trump's trade policies is dampening expectations for how consumer spending will hold up this year. Just look at Walmart, which today projected that its revenue growth this fiscal year would slow to between 3% and 4%, compared with 5% for the year that ended Jan. 31, 2025" Theo Wayt Compiled 20 February, updated 21 February 2025

E-CommerceWalmart
 

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Grand Tour Italia, five months after opening the new flop is already around the corner


He inaugurated in September in Bologna Grand Tour Italia, the new course of Fico, Oscar Farinetti's creature that, to the patron of Eataly, came out badly, as he himself admitted. And in fact he has put his face and money into taking over 100% of its management and relaunching it. Too bad things are still not working out. Today six of the 20 regional restaurants that are supposed to tell the story of Italian biodiversity are already closed, and the outlook is not good. Under the Fico sign

Eataly
 

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USA: Thousands of tonnes of eggs will be imported from Turkey due to bird flu


According to the Department of Agriculture, about 18 million birds will be culled in December 2024 and 23 million in January 2025. In three years, the spread of the H5N1 virus has forced American farms to cull 158 million turkeys, chickens and, above all, laying hens (from FT: some retailers, including Walmart, are rationing egg sales to the public). This disease will affect inflation in the US

AgricultureInflationWalmart
 

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Trump’s Achilles’ heel


What is Trump's Achilles' heel? It is produced by theenormous and growing public deficit, which obliges the US to find buyers of Treasury bonds for at least two trillion dollars more each year - compared to the previous year - in the hope of not having to increase the interest offered in order to attract investment. If Trump failed in this mission, if he failed to contain the burden of the national debt and to ensure its smooth financing, then he would also be doomed to fail in his most important promise to the voters: to confirm in 2026 the tax cuts for corporations already enacted in his first term (from 35% to 21%) and to strengthen them to 15%. This is where we Europeans come in, in two ways. First, because waving the threat of punitive tariffs for Trump and his team is a scheme to force other countries to buy and hold more US government bonds; in this way, the US could finance its growing public deficit while keeping interest rates on debt under control. In essence, Trump is trying to put Europe in front of a brutal alternative: buy more US debt as it is issued - and buy it despite low yields - or risk losing access to the US consumer market and what remains of the Pentagon's security umbrella. Read this article.