President Donald Trump was heading to Florida on Friday, watching Fox News, when he saw the network run a story on how Christians were being targeted by Islamic groups in Nigeria, two sources familiar with the…
Stocks @ Night is a daily newsletter delivered after hours, giving you a first look at tomorrow and last look at today. Sign up for free to receive it directly in your inbox. Here’s what CNBC TV’s producers were watching on Monday and what’s on the radar for Tuesday’s session. Pfizer reports in the morning The pharmaceutical giant releases quarterly numbers Tuesday morning live on “Squawk Box” with Becky Quick, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joe Kernen. The team will have the numbers and stock reaction. Shares of Pfizer are up 5% in the three months since the company’s last earnings release. The stock is down 10% in the last month. Amgen reports after the bell Amgen will have numbers on “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Tuesday with Morgan Brennan and Jon Fortt. Shares are almost exactly flat in the last three months. So far this year, the stock is up nearly 14%. AMGN 6M mountain Amgen shares over the past six months. Palantir We’ll follow the Palantir story on Tuesday starting on “Worldwide Exchange” with Frank Holland at 5 a.m. ET. The security tech company beat on revenue and earnings in Monday’s report. Shares shot up as much as 4% after hours, but were recently down more than 2%. The stock hit another new record high in Monday’s session. Shares are up about 20% in the last month. As we start the last sixth of 2025… The Nasdaq 100 is up 23.6% year to date. The Nasdaq Composite is up 23.4% year to date. The S & P 500 is up 16.5% year to date The NYSE Composite is up 12.2% year to date The Dow 30 is up 11.3% year to date. The Russell 2000 is up 10.8% year to date. Sector Check Tech is the top performing sector so far in 2025. It is up 29.8%. Communication services is up 25.4%. S & P Utilities is up 17.5%. Consumer staples is the only negative sector so far in 2025, down 1%. The top S & P stocks in 2025 Robinhood is the top performing stock so far this year, it is up 295%. Western Digital is up 251%. Seagate Technology is up 207%. Micron Technology is up 178%. Palantir is up 174%. HOOD YTD mountain Robinhood shares year to date. Tomorrow’s tariff news from CNBC’s Tom Rotunno What we learned today: Wolfe Research updated its tariff tracker over the weekend and its most recent analysis finds that “roughly 62% of current (and expected) 232 tariffs are being absorbed across key channels, disproportionately felt by the consumer.” Among the sectors Wolfe cites as appearing to take a significant hit to margins are furniture and auto retailers. Analyst Stephanie Roth said the firm expects “some of those costs to be passed through to consumers in the coming months.” What we might learn tomorrow: We’ll get earnings from Capri Holdings , the parent company of brands such as Versace, Jimmy Choo, and Michael Kors. In August, the company raised its estimate for its unmitigated tariff impact to about $85 million in fiscal 2026, up from a prior estimate of $60 million. Capri is up 65% since April 9, including a 22% gain over the last three months. It’s down almost 2% year to date. Some analysts turned more positive on the stock in October. Raymond James upgraded it to outperform from market perform, saying they like the current setup as their channel checks “show sequential improvement.” Wells Fargo named it as one of its “Top 6 Long Ideas” in the retail space. CPRI YTD mountain Capri Holdings stock year to date.
Nintendo recently raised the price of the new Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller from $85 to $90, but here’s an opportunity to get one for less than either price. AliExpress is currently offering an official Switch 2 Pro controller for just $77.03…
Experts have found weaknesses, some serious, in hundreds of tests used to check the safety and effectiveness of new artificial intelligence models being released into the world.
Computer scientists from the British government’s AI Security Institute, and experts at universities including Stanford, Berkeley and Oxford, examined more than 440 benchmarks that provide an important safety net.
They found flaws that “undermine the validity of the resulting claims”, that “almost all … have weaknesses in at least one area”, and resulting scores might be “irrelevant or even misleading”.
Many of the benchmarks are used to evaluate the latest AI models released by the big technology companies, said the study’s lead author, Andrew Bean, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
In the absence of nationwide AI regulation in the UK and US, benchmarks are used to check if new AIs are safe, align to human interests and achieve their claimed capabilities in reasoning, maths and coding.
The investigation into the tests comes amid rising concern over the safety and effectiveness of AIs, which are being released at a high pace by competing technology companies. Some have recently been forced to withdraw or tighten restrictions on AIs after they contributed to harms ranging from character defamation to suicide.
“Benchmarks underpin nearly all claims about advances in AI,” Bean said. “But without shared definitions and sound measurement, it becomes hard to know whether models are genuinely improving or just appearing to.”
Google this weekend withdrew one of its latest AIs, Gemma, after it made up unfounded allegations about a US senator having a non-consensual sexual relationship with a state trooper including fake links to news stories.
“There has never been such an accusation, there is no such individual, and there are no such new stories,” Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, told Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, in a letter.
“This is not a harmless hallucination. It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model. A publicly accessible tool that invents false criminal allegations about a sitting US senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.”
Google said its Gemma models were built for AI developers and researchers, not for factual assistance or for consumers. It withdrew them from its AI Studio platform after what it described as “reports of non-developers trying to use them”.
“Hallucinations – where models simply make things up about all types of things – and sycophancy – where models tell users what they want to hear – are challenges across the AI industry, particularly smaller open models like Gemma,” it said. “We remain committed to minimising hallucinations and continually improving all our models.”
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Last week, Character.ai, the popular chatbot startup, banned teenagers from engaging in open-ended conversations with its AI chatbots. It followed a series of controversies, including a 14-year-old killing himself in Florida after becoming obsessed with an AI-powered chatbot that his mother claimed had manipulated him into taking his own life, and a US lawsuit from the family of a teenager who claimed a chatbot manipulated him to self-harm and encouraged him to murder his parents.
The research examined widely available benchmarks but leading AI companies also have their own internal benchmarks that were not examined.
It concluded there was a “pressing need for shared standards and best practices”.
Bean said a “shocking” finding was that only a small minority (16%) of the benchmarks used uncertainty estimates or statistical tests to show how likely a benchmark was to be accurate. In other cases where benchmarks set out to evaluate an AI’s characteristics – for example its “harmlessness” – the definition of the concept being examined was contested or ill-defined, rendering the benchmark less useful.
In recent years, much attention has been paid to household finances in the Netherlands. With the large bouts of inflation in 2022 and 2023, there are increasing concerns about whether households are still able to bear the increased costs of living. A recent study shows that one in eight households in the Netherlands do not have sufficient liquidity buffers to absorb financial shocks (Ciurila et al. 2024). Other studies using survey data give even higher estimates, with a quarter to half of Dutch households having low liquidity buffers (Deloitte 2024, Nationale Monitor Geldzaken 2024).
The level of fixed and necessary expenditures may help explain why households find it difficult to absorb financial shocks. When these expenditures are high, households cannot fully adjust their consumption, and additional costs or a drop in income could lead to financial distress. There is, however, little empirical research using real, household-level data that studies the fixed and necessary expenditures of households. This is not unique to the Netherlands. In many countries, policymakers lack detailed information to effectively assess household expenditures, making it difficult to design targeted and effective policies.
In a recent paper (Van der Plaat et al. 2025), we present new data on the fixed and necessary expenditures of middle-income Dutch households. We use detailed administrative data between 2019 and 2023 on all households with a standardised household income between €21,000 and €70,000, which is about 83% of all households in the Netherlands. Fixed expenditures are expenses that are fixed for a period of time and are therefore difficult to adjust. They include rent and mortgage payments, for example. Necessary expenditures, on the other hand, can be adjusted but only to a limited extent, because households need to incur these costs in order to live and participate in society. Examples are food expenditures and expenditures for personal care. We focus on the household expenditure ratio, which is equal to the sum of fixed and necessary expenditures divided by the disposable household income.
Incomes increase faster than fixed and necessary expenditures
On average, the level of fixed and necessary expenditures for middle-income households remained stable between 2019 and 2022. Between 2019 and 2022, the average household incurred around €21,000 in such expenditures (Figure 1, left). In 2023, however, there was an increase of about €2,000 in fixed and necessary expenditures. Most of this increase was the result of higher energy costs, directly via higher gas and electricity expenditures (+€300), but also indirectly via higher food expenditures (+€900).
Figure 1 Fixed and necessary expenditures grew, but the household expenditure ratio decreased between 2019 and 2023
Sources: Microdata from Statistics Netherlands, Nibud, and authors’ calculations.
Yet, the average household expenditure ratio decreased slightly between 2019 and 2023, falling from 50% in 2019 to 46% in 2023 (Figure 1, right). This decline was largely due to an increase in disposable income. Average disposable incomes grew by around 23% between 2019 and 2023, while expenditures rose by 11%. Notably, despite the energy crisis, the average expenditure ratio in 2023 was only slightly higher than in 2022. Allowances such as the energy allowance and other benefits that Dutch households received during that period appear to have played a role. For example, in 2022, all households in the Netherlands received €380 in compensation for increased energy costs. Without these allowances, the expense ratio would have increased more sharply.
Housing costs are the largest component of the household expenditure ratio, with rent or mortgage payments, but also property taxes, accounting for around 40%. Together with other expenditures such as energy and water expenses, housing expenditures are roughly half of all fixed and necessary expenditures. In terms of income, this amounts to about a quarter spent on housing. However, households are spending an increasingly smaller portion of their income on housing as housing costs remained fairly stable at around €9,000 annually between 2019 and 2023 while their income increased.
The most marked differences are between homeowners and tenants
There are large differences between homeowners and tenants. The average homeowner has a household expenditure ratio of around 42% (Figure 2). The expenditure ratio for tenants is almost 15 percentage points higher, at around 57%. Tenants in private rental accommodation spend roughly the same on fixed and necessary expenditures as homeowners, but spend a larger proportion of their income on housing. Given that their incomes are lower than those of homeowners, we observe higher household expenditure ratios for private tenants than for homeowners. Tenants in social housing spend less on average on fixed and necessary expenditures. However, their income is also lower, which means that their expenditure ratio is higher than that of homeowners.
Figure 2 Homeowners have on average the lowest expenditure ratios
Sources: Microdata from Statistics Netherlands, Nibud, and authors’ calculations.
When we stratify homeowners and tenants into three age groups, diverging patterns appear. For young homeowners, we observe much higher expenditure ratios than for young tenants, even after controlling for other household characteristics. For example, young tenants in social housing have, on average, a 3.4 percentage point lower expenditure ratio than young homeowners. For retired households, it is the other way around: retired tenants in private housing have, on average, 4 percentage point higher expenditure ratios than retired homeowners. The reason behind these diverging patterns is most likely that young homeowners often face mortgage repayments, while retired households have usually paid off most of their mortgage or benefit from interest-only loans. Housing rents do not decrease over time but are tied to wage developments and inflation, leaving older tenants worse off.
Large dispersion among household expenditure ratios
The household expenditure ratio varies widely across households. Figure 3 shows its distribution for 2019 and 2023. The share of households with high ratios has fallen: about 25% of households had a ratio of 60% or higher in 2019 (around 1.4 million), compared with 18% in 2023 (1.1 million). Households with such high ratios are particularly vulnerable to income shocks, as a large share of their income goes to fixed and necessary expenditures. Meanwhile, the number of households with low expenditure ratios has risen sharply – from about 2.3 million with ratios below 40% in 2019 to 3.3 million in 2023.
Figure 3 The spread of expenditure ratios is large, but ratios decrease for many households, 2019 vs 2023
Sources: Microdata from Statistics Netherlands, Nibud, and authors’ calculations.
Conclusion
Fixed and necessary expenditures for middle-income households rose between 2019 and 2023, mainly due to higher energy and food costs. Disposable incomes, however, grew faster than these expenditures, leading to a modest decline in the average expenditure ratio.
There are important differences between subgroups of households. Tenants – especially in the private sector – spend a much larger share of their income on essential costs than homeowners, making them more vulnerable to shocks. Overall, there are more households in 2023 with low expenditure ratios compared to 2019, which indicates that most households have become somewhat more resilient to financial shocks during this period.
Our study shows that more detailed information on household expenditures can help policymakers in several ways. First, it helps identifying vulnerable households and why these households are vulnerable. These data can also help policymakers assess policy effectiveness. In the case of the Netherlands, they can be used to assess the energy allowance of 2022 and 2023. Or they could, for example, be used to assess housing market policies and social support programmes. Moreover, these data allow policymakers to better understand household heterogeneity, as households could be split into a number of more specific groups, as we did by grouping households along age groups and homeownership.
References
Ciurila, N, A Huizinga, P Kastelein, and K Tranakieva (2024), Verschillen tussen hand-to-mouth-huishoudens in Nederland, Centraal Planbureau.
Deloitte (2024), Financiële gezondheid: Samen navigeren door onzekere tijden, Deloitte The Netherlands.
Nationale Monitor Geldzaken (2024), Nationale Monitor Geldzorgen (December 2024).
Van der Plaat, M, A Huizinga, and R Swierstra (2025), Vaste en noodzakelijke lasten van middeninkomens, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
Luka Dončic tallied a 29-point triple-double vs. Miami on Sunday.
The Los Angeles Lakers will be shorthanded for Monday’s matchup against the Portland Trail Blazers (10 ET, NBA TV) with Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves sidelined.
Samsung has just announced its exciting new dynamic HDR format, and while it’s not slated to launch until next year at the very earliest, I’ve had a sneak peek at what Samsung envisages the future of HDR10+ looks like.
Both traditional and heated tobacco exposure, whether active or passive, were linked to intestinal permeability, oxidative stress, and endothelial dysfunction, revealing that “smokeless” doesn’t mean harmless.
Not content with taking on Dolby Vision in the high dynamic range video sphere with its new HDR10+ Advanced format, Samsung has now just announced an expansion to the new Eclipsa Audio format it launched in collaboration with Google at the start…
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