SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – On today’s edition of Rob Black’s Winners and Losers, our financial expert Rob Black and KRON 4’s Mark Danon talk about oil prices, Apple, and Facebook.
Oil prices surged to three-month highs on Monday, as improving sentiment in financial markets helped support prices and data revealed investors have dramatically upped their bets on the price of oil rising.
“There is clearly room for the stabilization of the oil price at these levels and some marginal upside towards the end of the year,” he told CNBC. But most analysts remain distinctly cautious on the outlook from here, despite the recent rally.
Apple customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware. Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data.
Facebook is to award bonuses of £280 million ($396 million) to its U.K.-based staff over the next three years in a bid to offset the amount of tax it has to pay to the U.K. Treasury. Each employee will receive an average of £775,000 ($1.1 million), which Facebook will list as a taxable expense.