#7 Ford goes big

On Tuesday, Ford Motor Group announced its plans to spend no less than $4 billion to build out an autonomous vehicles business. According to TechCrunch, the American carmaker has created Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC to house the company’s self driving systems integration, autonomous-vehicle research, advanced engineering, and other activities related to the autonomous vehicle business.

TechCrunch also reports that Ford’s new LLC will mainly be based at Ford’s Corktown campus in Detroit.


#6 Pinterest valued at $13 billion

Also on Tuesday, online idea discovery and image saving platform Pinterest hit a valuation between $13 and $15 billion. According to Yahoo Finance, the company is reportedly preparing an initial public offering. Pinterest has 200 million monthly users globally and generated $500 million in sales last year.


#5 Oil prices jump again

On Wednesday, it turned out the US oil reserves fell more than expected. According to CNBC, government data anticipated a decrease of 2.3 million barrels while in reality, the inventories fell by 6.1 million barrels. As a result, the oil prices rose on Wednesday: the Brent was up 70 cents (1%) and the US light crude prices increased 78 cents (1.1%).


#4 Millennials avoid the stock market

We’ve said this before, millennials - the generation born somewhere between the early 80’s and the late 90’s - aren’t very keen on investing in shares. On Wednesday, a research conducted by GfK SE confirmed this once again.

In an article about the results of this research, Bloomberg reports that almost 1 in 3 millennials says the best places to invest money are savings accounts and certificates of deposits. Unsurprisingly, most millennials aren’t generating very good returns and their financial outlook doesn’t look great.

Related: What you should know about Millennial investors. 


#3 Facebook’s nosedive

The biggest headline on Thursday probably was for Facebook (once again). The company’s stock fell 19% after it announced that its sales would continue to grow slowly during the rest of the year.

Facebook shares traded at $175.75 on Thursday afternoon. The company lost around $120 billion in market value - potentially the largest stock-market wipeout for a US company ever, according to Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by the way, lost $16.8 billion in one day, pushing him out of the top 5 billionaires of the world. 


#2 Turkey’s turbulent times

Earlier this week, the Turkish Central Bank decided to keep its main interest rate at 17.75%. A decision that shocked investors and economists who expected an interest increase to fight the inflation which reached 15% in June.

After Argentina - which needed a $50 billion bailout from the IMF in June - Turkey may now be the next emerging economy heading for a currency crisis - and eventually a bailout, CNN Money reports.


#1 Life on Mars?

In other big (albeit non-financial) news this week there was the discovery of a lake under ice on Mars. The number one question this raises is, of course, one of the biggest mysteries of science: is there life possible on any planet other than mother earth? Scientists say it will take another mission to try and take samples of the lake and look for evidence of any kind of life.



And that’s the last round-up of July all done. Of course, we’ll keep on top of the latest Tweets and we’ll continue to bring you the most trending financial micro-messages from the web. See you back here next week.


Source: www.scoopnest.com.