00:00 Speaker A

Home Depot set to report its latest quarterly earnings before the bell on Tuesday. Yahoo! Finance’s Brooke Palmer here with what to expect from the home improvement retailer. So what do we got?

00:08 Brooke Palmer

Well, Wall Street expects it’s going to be a slow start to the year for Home Depot, most certainly, and that’s really as two key points really weigh on consumers. That uncertainty around tariffs, and also those elevated home prices, elevated mortgage rates have really continued to create challenges around the housing market, and that’s expected to have weighed on Home Depot’s first quarter, certainly as potential buyers were spooked off by those higher prices. If we take a closer look at what Wall Street expects here, they still do expect revenue to grow year-over-year roughly 8% to $39.29 billion. Adjusted earnings are expected to decline year-over-year to $3.59. Now, one key area here that all Wall Street has watching is that same-store sales growth number. For eight straight quarters, we saw negative sales growth for Home Depot, and in the Q4, that number turned around. Now, more bad news is expected on the same-store sales growth front. Wall Street does expect that it did fall during this quarter down 0.2%, but experts tell me that Home Depot should be a key winner in the long term here. They say that they have this pro business that makes up about half of their customer base. We know that they recently acquired SRS distribution, that’s professional business segment for roughly $18.25 billion last summer. So Wall Street optimistic that that pro business will certainly turn the tide here.

02:06 Speaker A

And what does Walmart’s recent warning, what does that mean for Home Depot, potentially?

02:12 Brooke Palmer

Right, well, two key things here is that they warned that tariffs would create higher prices. Some experts telling me that they that may have opened up the floodgates here in order for others to say, we too have to raise prices because of tariffs. In addition to that, we also know that Walmart loves to tout that they make a majority of their goods here in the U.S. Home Depot, a similar notion. They said a majority of their goods that we sell are produced in the U.S. Both Walmart and Home Depot, they both have some exposure to China here. And so really, you sort of relating those two. They might have to raise higher prices. We also know that Walmart reiterated their guidance. Could we hear similar for not just from Home Depot, but Lowe’s reporting the following day and, of course, Target after that. And so Walmart perhaps might have set a precedent here on what these next earnings will look like.

03:11 Speaker A

All right, we’ll wait and see. Brooke, thank you. Appreciate it.

Story Continues

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Online scams are big business. In the EU, according to the most recent figures, online scammers defrauded consumers out of €4.3bn in 2022. Increasingly, they use sophisticated adverts, including AI-generated “deepfakes” of figures ranging from Elon Musk to the UK personal finance expert Martin Lewis, to lure individuals into disclosing personal data or investing in fraudulent schemes. The vehicle is often social media platforms, which profit indirectly from carrying the ads. No business, least of all some of the world’s most powerful, should be able to profit from fraud on this scale.

Though mechanisms are improving for reimbursing victims, generally by the banking sector, the harm done by such frauds is huge. It includes not just the immediate losses and stress to victims and their banks, but also the erosion of trust in respectable sources of information and the financial industry.

Getting fraudulent material taken down, however, can be a game of “whack a mole” — as the Financial Times discovered when deepfake ads were found on Meta platforms apparently showing its columnist Martin Wolf promoting fraudulent investments. The FT has established that these fakes were seen by millions of users; many may have lost money as a result. As soon as one ad was removed, others popped up from different accounts, with Meta’s systems seemingly unable to keep up, though they do now seem to have been stopped.

Circulation of fraudulent, indeed criminal, material cannot be justified. Given how hard it is to stamp out advertising after the fact, though, this is a case where prevention is better than cure. Social media should have a legal duty not to provide ad space to fraudsters in the first place. They ought to be expected to “know their customers” and be held liable, with proper enforcement and tough penalties, if they fail to block dissemination of fraudulent ads.

The EU is considering legislation on those lines. Member states are discussing proposals from Brussels to introduce a right to automatic reimbursement from PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and banks for customers defrauded by scammers. But an amendment submitted by the Irish finance ministry, and gaining traction in other EU capitals, would go further — by legally requiring online platforms to check that an advertiser is authorised by a regulator to sell financial services, and block it if not.

Brussels frets that the amendment would conflict with a provision in the EU’s Digital Services Act that online platforms are not required to conduct broad-based monitoring of content. There may be squeamishness over antagonising Donald Trump, who wants to defang EU regulation of US tech firms.

Yet having to verify whether financial advertisers are authorised does not constitute large-scale monitoring, and would only be required of very large online platforms or search engines. Some already do it, or have committed to: Google has a financial services certification programme in 17 countries, while Meta agreed with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority in 2022 to ban financial ads by firms not registered with the regulator. And the EU should prioritise robust consumer protection over the protestations of the US president and his Big tech backers.

A legal obligation to verify financial advertisers would not address the wider problem of celebrity deepfakes being used in scams and promotions linked to products ranging from cookware sets to dental products. But the fact that sellers of financial products must usually be registered with regulators opens a route to blocking a particularly harmful online fraud. The EU, and the UK, should set an example to other jurisdictions and take action now.