Marketplace Morning Report

It’s Big Tech week on Wall Street. Quarterly results from Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon all beat expectations. And shocker: They’re all still spending a lot on AI. One of the biggest expenses is chips. That’s made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world. Now, other Big Tech companies want to get in on that action. Then, the Trump administration has wound down funding for mRNA vaccine development. We’ll explore the impacts.

Five of the Magnificent Seven — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Apple — are reporting earnings this week. These tech titans have kind of been single-handedly holding up the market for a while now. Can the good times last? Then, China is the largest manufacturer of solar energy parts in the world, and it's considering restricting exports of solar panel manufacturing equipment to the United States. And, we look at the highly personal legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Every five years or so, Congress considers and passes a new version of the farm bill. It is a massive law covering not just agriculture, but also food assistance programs. And it comes at a particularly tough time for farmers, who are being pinched by drought, tariffs, and rising fuel and fertilizer costs. Then, what's the UAE's departure from OPEC mean for oil prices? And later, from "Marketplace Tech," we hear how Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act opens the "backdoor" for warrantless searches.

The Trump administration has reportedly been in talks to bail out Spirit Airlines, either with a big loan or by buying it. The budget airline had already been struggling, and now faces even tougher times with higher fuel costs. But does that justify bailing it out? Plus, an upstate New York toy and doll shop owner reflects on the stop-start jolts of U.S. trade policy and the challenges of the tariff refund process.

We've talked a lot about the rollercoaster of tariffs. But behind every economic story is a human one, too. This morning, we check in with Joann Cartiglia, who runs a toy and doll shop in upstate New York. She's looking at around $15,000 in tariff refunds. Still, uncertainty, precarity, and debt have put her in "the scariest financial situation" of her life and mean that retirement has “been kind of taken off the table.” But before that conversation: a Federal Reserve meeting and a royal visit with the president.